Hours earlier
The silence in Zayn's chamber wasn't natural.
It was manufactured, an acoustic void engineered to keep his mind disoriented and his senses dulled. Every wall of the observation room was coated with micro-layered anti-resonant plating, designed to absorb sound, vibration, even stray pulses of Core energy. To most subjects, it would feel like isolation. To Zayn, it felt like suffocation.
He sat in the center of the white room, cross-legged, hands on his knees. Pale light rained down from the grid above, humming just low enough to tease the edge of his hearing. Cameras blinked red from the corners. The oxygen smelled recycled. The food tasted like plastic. The guards never spoke. Even the scientists only visited behind armor-glass.
But something in him had changed since the arena.
Something fundamental.
He felt... dense. Not physically. But inside. Like the space around him had begun to curve inward, warping with his breath.
The energy that surged in the moment of Lira's strike, the way it collapsed mid-air, that wasn't an accident. And it wasn't reflex.
It was him.
And the nightmares were getting worse.
The Dream Again
He was back in the Slums. The sky was that strange post-dusk gray, with static crackling along the rooftops like it did before a Core storm.
He stood in front of the old clinic, barely eight years old. The red cross above the door was flickering. His mother was outside, pulling her scarf tighter against her shoulders. She smiled at him and handed him a tin.
"You don't need to be powerful to matter, Zay," she said gently. "You just need to survive."
And then the sky lit up.
Aether lightning cracked the horizon. The scream of an air raid. The ground trembled as the first shockwave hit.
The building disintegrated into ash and bone.
He woke in a cold sweat, gasping.
The dream was always the same. And always right before something in him shifted.
---
Today, he wasn't alone.
Dr. Henna entered first, flanked by two Omega-Grade guards with face-concealing visors. They moved with clinical precision. The doctor carried a black cube in both gloved hands, its surface etched with glyphs that pulsed in soft magenta.
She set it on the floor.
"Core Pressure Test: Phase II," she said, not even looking at him.
Zayn's heart skipped. "You're using another cube? After last time?"
Her face twitched, but she didn't reply.
The black cube floated upward and began to hum. The light in the chamber dimmed slightly as it began to draw power from the air.
Zayn stepped back. He felt the charge in his teeth. It wasn't fear he felt.
It was resonance.
He was resonating with it, somehow... not in harmony, but as a contradiction. The Aether around the cube began to spin in violent concentric circles.
The first spark arced toward him.
He did nothing.
It vanished six inches from his chest.
The cube glowed brighter, pulsing. It was reacting to him. No longer a passive scan, now a challenge.
A test to break him or activate him.
Then it detonated.
No sound.
No light.
Only compression, a collapsing sphere of force, like a black hole born in miniature. The glass outside cracked. Henna stumbled back.
Zayn stood at the center, unmoving.
Every light in the room died. The walls flickered as the nullification zone expanded. The cube fell inert, its internal matrices dissolved into dust.
Zayn's body began to tremble. Not from pain, but from overflow.
Something had clicked inside him.
He fell to one knee, gasping, and the floor sank beneath his touch. Not melted. Not shattered.
Erased.
The white tile became black glass. Fractured veins of obsidian stretched from his palm outward in jagged roots. His fingers twitched. The skin on his arms pulsed with webbed streaks of darkness.
He could hear his own blood humming.
Then the glass shattered.
Henna screamed as a pulsewave burst from his body.
Zayn collapsed.
---
He awoke strapped to a vertical gurney in a new room... colder, larger, surrounded by five levels of glass and alloy observation decks.
Level Zero.
The sign above the entry door flashed red: BIO-HAZARD: NULL CLASS ENTITY DETECTED
Dr. Velon stood behind the first pane, arms crossed.
"Congratulations," he said. "You survived an implosion. That makes you the first ever to absorb a Class-4 Core compression without external shielding."
Zayn coughed. "You're going to kill me testing limits like that."
"We're not testing your limits," Velon said, eyes glinting. "We're discovering them."
Zayn looked down. His arm, his right arm... was no longer human.
The skin had been replaced with a lattice of violet-black crystal. Filaments of energy pulsed under its surface. He flexed his fingers. The arm responded instantly. Perfectly. As if it had always been there.
He didn't feel pain.
He felt awake.
"What have you done to me?" he asked.
Velon shook his head. "You did this to yourself. You're not a failed Core candidate. You're something else. Something I've theorized for twenty years. A living Aether Void."
Zayn's jaw clenched. "I'm not your science project."
"No," Velon said, smiling faintly. "You're a paradigm shift."
---
At the Ascendant Academy, Rhys watched the combat logs on loop.
He watched the moment Lira's flame vanished. Frame by frame. It didn't deflect. It didn't bounce. It simply ceased to exist.
His military instincts churned.
No defense system could do that. Not even elite Core suppressors.
"Get me the Nullborn's full genome scan," he told the analyst.
The man hesitated. "Sir… that file's been sealed. Military-grade lockout. Omega level."
Rhys's eyes narrowed.
He stood.
And for the first time in his life, he felt like the battlefield was slipping beyond his understanding.
---
Back at Level Zero
The next morning, Zayn was still bound when a siren began to wail.
The red floodlights bathed the corridor in emergency pulses.
"Containment breach," a voice crackled over the comms. "Repeat: containment breach on Level Three. Unknown intruders. Heavy casualties reported."
Zayn's eyes widened.
Guards sprinted past his observation deck. One of them dropped a weapon.
Bad idea.
A shadow flickered past the glass.
And then, power outage.
Everything shut down.
Zayn looked at the ceiling.
He could feel them coming.
Not just the intruders.
The Aether.
Like a storm on the horizon, rushing in toward him, but parting at his presence. Repelled.
He exhaled. It was time.
He pulled his arms forward and the restraints disintegrated into powder.
He walked to the glass.
It peeled away in vertical strips, like silk being unraveled.
Zayn stepped out into chaos.
Flashing lights. Alarms. Broken bodies. Screaming systems.
And in his reflection, as he passed a darkened steel panel.
His eyes were no longer the dull brown of his birth.
They glowed violet-black, radiant with power drawn from the opposite of creation.
He was no longer just Zayn Calder.
He was the start of something else.
Something the world had no language for yet.