The world above Section 14 was dead.
Zayn stood ankle-deep in a field of ash, cold wind curling around his bare arms. The gray landscape stretched for miles, interrupted only by scorched stumps, blackened roots, and decayed towers in the far distance. No birds. No sound. The ground didn't crackle, it breathed... as if the earth remembered the experiments done beneath it and was trying to forget.
The sky was a faded bruise, the sun hidden behind thin layers of chemical haze. Occasionally, the clouds flickered with strange light... distant pulse storms, remnants of past Core implosions, still echoing through the atmosphere like phantom thunder.
Zayn exhaled.
The air tasted... wrong.
Metal. Static. Blood.
The ruins of Section 14 lay behind him, the entrance sealed by a rockfall, though he knew better. The facility hadn't just been broken. It had rejected itself. The Null Core, his Core now, had rewritten the laws holding it together. Metal, matter, and memory had folded in on themselves. And somehow, he had survived that implosion untouched.
His hands still glowed faintly with residual Null energy, barely visible unless you looked closely... unless you were Aether-sensitive. Then you would see a human-shaped void where power could not exist.
Zayn turned his head slightly, and a drone high in the sky short-circuited, spiraling in a graceful death dance.
He hadn't even tried.
What am I now... he wondered, as the drone crashed into the dirt behind him.
In the upper strata of Earth's exosphere, floating above the gravity well of the fractured planet, was a fortress disguised as a cloud.
Aetherian Watchtower, Omen Spire.
Inside the crystalline war room, six figures stood around a levitating projection. Holographic strands of data streamed around a central figure... Zayn.
Except he looked... wrong.
Faceless. Coreless. Undefined.
"This is the one Velon warned us about," said the tallest, a woman with antlers carved from obsidian. "He has stepped out of the veil."
A shorter man, shrouded in gravity armor, snarled. "I thought Nullborns were a myth."
"They were," another replied softly, "until now."
The data readout scrolled faster.
Subject: ZC-Null
Name: Zayn Cael
Status: Coreless (Revised: Undefined)
Threat Level: Ascendant-Class, Void-Type, Unquantifiable
A seventh seat remained empty... its occupant watching from somewhere else. Far below.
Each step Zayn took rippled through the surroundings.
The air warped behind him. Trees leaned away. Birds remained absent.
He didn't notice at first... but the wind had stopped.
He paused.
Silence.
Too still.
His heartbeat slowed. Muscles tensed.
He looked behind him...
And saw the footprints he'd left... fade.
Not covered. Not erased. Undone.
As if they were never made.
Zayn's breath caught. The effect was growing. He needed to gain control.
He closed his eyes, reaching inward...
Back into that moment... the Core Lab, the shard, the Null Zone.
And it opened.
He floated again. In darkness. Or maybe it was a shape beyond darkness.
Something watched him.
Voices without tongues. Words without sound.
You carry a fracture. You are not the beginning. You are the crack in the cage.
They will try to seal you. Not because of what you do. But because of what you allow.
A mirror formed before him.
In it... his mother.
Bleeding, holding him as a child.
She looked up at the mirror, her eyes glowing faintly violet.
They put it in you... not knowing what it would wake.
Zayn opened his eyes.
He was still standing. But the world looked thinner. Less... firm.
And something was moving toward him.
A man in cloaked armor sprinted across the wasteland, Core blades humming at his side.
No facial features. No scent. No emotions.
Just a directive.
Retrieve the anomaly.
Test for Core-layer suppression.
Terminate if resonance exceeds 6.3 thresholds.
No witnesses.
He was a hunter. Not the first to chase an Ascendant. But the first sent after a Nullborn.
His Core shimmered violet, gravity and fold-class. He could move between frames of space. Compress distance. Accelerate time in localized spheres.
He vanished from one point and appeared thirty meters closer.
Then again. And again.
He stopped 50 feet from Zayn.
Zayn turned, as if he'd been expecting him.
The hunter drew his blade.
Zayn raised a hand...
And space cracked.
ETH-9 hurled forward, blinking through spatial folds, arriving behind Zayn mid-slash.
Zayn didn't dodge.
Instead... the blade unfolded.
The energy around it collapsed. The weapon disassembled itself mid-air, falling as harmless dust.
ETH-9 blinked.
Zayn stepped in... and ETH-9 folded again, reappearing above, trying a dive slash.
This time, the air shimmered.
And the Null Zone bled into the world.
A sphere of void blinked around Zayn, freezing the hunter mid-strike.
For 0.6 seconds, reality stopped functioning within that bubble.
ETH-9's Core glitched. His bones vibrated. His vision failed.
Zayn stepped forward slowly.
"You blink fast," he said quietly, "but I erase the frames in between."
He touched ETH-9's chest.
A low hum...
And the hunter's Core... vanished.
No explosion. No drama. It was simply gone.
ETH-9 dropped to his knees, staring at his shaking hands.
Zayn stared down at him.
"I don't kill," he said softly, "not unless I have to."
ETH-9's body began to dissolve, a failsafe encoded in his flesh.
Zayn didn't stop it.
Henna watched it unfold through stolen satellite feed.
Zayn standing over the dissolving assassin.
Her heart pounded.
"This isn't just CoreTech anymore," she whispered.
"This is a paradigm shift."
Behind her, General Rho stepped into the room.
"We've activated the Echo Protocol," he said. "Every Watchtower is on alert. Every hidden lab is spinning up defensive anomalies."
Henna turned.
"You'll fail."
General Rho stiffened. "Why?"
"Because he isn't destroying the world," she said. "He's rewriting what it means to have power."
The wasteland stretched ahead.
Zayn walked now with purpose.
He didn't know where he was going.
But his steps left no footprints.
And behind him, the clouds shifted... just slightly.
A faint echo in his ears, like the Null Zone whispering between dimensions.
Then...
A voice in his mind.
Mechanical. Not human.
We see you, Silence-Born. And now... so does everything else.
Zayn looked up.
A satellite blinked overhead.
He smiled.
Not from joy.
But because it meant... he was finally being seen.
And maybe, just maybe...
That was the first step toward breaking them all.