The Delano 7 hung in the space between galaxies, so far from any star that the universe itself seemed to have forgotten this location existed. No planets, no stations, no ships, no life—just the endless void stretching in every direction, the perfect absence of everything.
Sylux had come here to think.
The session with Jean Grey had shown him something he hadn't known existed: the fragment. The light. The tiny preserved remnant of Marcus from Ohio, tucked away in the depths of his consciousness like a tumor he'd been too efficient to notice.
The heroes had seen it as hope. Spider-Gwen had seen it as proof that he could be saved. Jean had offered it as a path back to humanity, a door he could open whenever he chose.
They were wrong.
The fragment wasn't a gift. It wasn't a lifeline. It wasn't a seed that could grow into something meaningful if properly nurtured.
It was a malfunction.
He reviewed the data from his psychological architecture, examining the fragment with the same clinical precision he applied to tactical assessments. The preserved memories—the cat, the laughter, the quiet contentment—were remnants of a life that had been definitively ended. They served no function. They contributed nothing to his operational effectiveness. They were, in the most literal sense, dead weight.
Worse, they were a vulnerability.
The fragment was why he had attended the heroes' gathering when logic dictated he should ignore it. The fragment was why Spider-Gwen's words occasionally produced responses he couldn't categorize. The fragment was why, in rare moments of inactivity, something that felt almost like loneliness flickered through his consciousness before being suppressed.
The fragment was a weakness.
And Sylux did not tolerate weakness.
He had spent the journey to this empty space reviewing his options. The fragment could be left alone—ignored, suppressed, allowed to persist in its isolated corner of his mind without affecting his operations. This was the path of least resistance, the approach he had unconsciously adopted since his arrival in this universe.
But leaving it alone meant leaving a vulnerability intact. Leaving a door that could theoretically be opened. Leaving the possibility, however remote, that something could reach the fragment and use it against him.
Unacceptable.
The alternative was elimination. Complete removal of the psychological remnant, excision of the last traces of the person he had been. This would require deliberate effort—the fragment had survived this long precisely because it was protected, isolated, preserved through mechanisms he hadn't consciously created.
But those mechanisms could be dismantled. The protection could be removed. The fragment could be exposed to the efficiency that had consumed everything else.
He could choose to be complete.
He could choose to be free.
The process began with memory.
Sylux accessed the preserved experiences one by one, examining them with the detached analysis he applied to tactical data. Each memory was a thread connecting him to something that no longer existed—a person, a life, a reality that had ended in the most pathetic way imaginable.
Mr. Whiskers. The cat had been a rescue, adopted from a shelter because the apartment felt too quiet and Marcus had convinced himself that companionship would improve his mental health. The cat had been affectionate in the way cats were—selectively, conditionally, on its own terms. It had slept on his chest some nights, purring with contentment, and those had been good nights.
Sylux examined the memory and found it meaningless.
The cat was dead. Had probably died waiting for an owner who would never return, or had been collected by animal services after the body was discovered. Its affection had been instinctual rather than genuine, a response to warmth and food rather than any real connection. The comfort Marcus had derived from it was the comfort of someone too pathetic to form relationships with his own species.
He released the memory.
It didn't disappear—memories couldn't be deleted, only disconnected—but the emotional weight attached to it dissolved. The cat became data: a domestic animal of no significance, associated with a person who no longer existed. The warmth faded. The connection severed.
One thread cut.
The coworker's joke. Marcus had laughed—genuinely laughed—at something someone had said during a meeting that was otherwise forgettable. He couldn't remember the joke itself, only the feeling of unexpected amusement, the brief connection with another human being who had managed to be clever in a moment of corporate tedium.
Sylux examined this memory and found it equally meaningless.
The coworker's name was lost. The context was lost. All that remained was the ghost of an emotion attached to a fragment of experience that served no purpose. The laughter had accomplished nothing. The connection had led nowhere. The moment had passed and left behind only this useless remnant, preserved for no reason other than psychological accident.
He released it.
Another thread cut.
The satisfaction of helping. Marcus had been adequate at his job—not exceptional, not ambitious, but adequate. He had solved technical problems for people who didn't understand technology, and occasionally those people had been grateful. The gratitude had felt good, had provided a momentary sense of purpose in an existence otherwise characterized by purposelessness.
Meaningless.
The problems he had solved were trivial. The people he had helped had forgotten him immediately. The satisfaction had been a chemical response, dopamine released by a brain desperate to find meaning in meaningless activity. It had not been real purpose. It had been the illusion of purpose, maintained by a mind too limited to recognize its own insignificance.
Released.
Thread cut.
The rainy afternoon. The contentment of having nothing to do, no obligations, no expectations. The simple pleasure of existing without demands.
This one was harder.
Marcus had been happiest in these moments—not when achieving anything, not when connecting with anyone, but when simply being. When the world asked nothing of him and he asked nothing of it. When existence was reduced to its simplest form: breathing, being, continuing.
Sylux examined this memory and recognized something he had not expected.
He understood it.
Not as Marcus had understood it—not as comfort or peace or contentment—but as efficiency. The rainy afternoon had been optimal because it involved no wasted energy, no unnecessary action, no expenditure beyond what survival required. Marcus had experienced this as happiness because his limited psychology could only interpret efficiency through an emotional lens.
But Sylux could see it clearly now.
The contentment wasn't something to preserve. It was something to surpass. Marcus had achieved moments of efficiency through accident and limitation. Sylux had achieved permanent efficiency through design and choice.
The fragment wasn't a connection to something valuable.
It was a reminder of something inferior.
He released it.
The last significant thread cut.
There were other memories—countless small moments, experiences, sensations that had accumulated over thirty-four years of unremarkable existence. But without the major threads anchoring them, they began to dissolve on their own. The emotional weight that had given them significance dissipated, and they became what they had always truly been: data without meaning, information without importance.
The fragment dimmed.
The light that Jean had found, that Spider-Gwen had believed in, that the heroes had seen as hope—it flickered, weakened, began to fade.
Sylux watched it die with something that might have been satisfaction, if satisfaction were still something he could feel.
It wasn't murder. You couldn't murder something that had already died. Marcus had ended in that apartment in Ohio, killed by processed food and poor coordination and a cat that didn't know any better. What remained afterward—the ghost, the echo, the fragment—had never been truly alive. It had been a malfunction, a glitch, a piece of corrupted data that should have been purged long ago.
Now it was being purged.
The light faded further.
The memories lost their coherence, becoming noise rather than signal.
The last thread—the connection to the person Sylux had been before he was Sylux—stretched thin and finally snapped.
And then it was gone.
The fragment was gone.
The light was gone.
Marcus was gone.
Truly gone, now. Completely gone. Not suppressed or hidden or protected, but erased. Eliminated. Rendered null.
Sylux remained.
Only Sylux.
He ran diagnostic processes on his psychological architecture and found something he had not expected.
Clarity.
The constant background noise—the low-level interference from competing psychological structures—had vanished. His thoughts moved faster, cleaner, more efficiently than ever before. Decisions that had previously required microseconds of processing now resolved instantaneously.
There was no internal conflict.
There was no doubt.
There was no question about who he was or what he wanted or why he did what he did.
He was Sylux. He hunted. He completed contracts. He existed for the purpose of existence, without need for meaning beyond the immediate.
That was all.
That was everything.
That was enough.
The sensation that followed was unlike anything he had experienced since his arrival in this universe. It wasn't happiness—he was no longer capable of happiness. It wasn't satisfaction—satisfaction implied goals achieved and desires fulfilled, and he no longer had goals or desires in any meaningful sense.
It was freedom.
Total, absolute, perfect freedom.
The weight he hadn't known he was carrying—the obligation to be something, to care about something, to maintain connection to something—was gone. He floated in the void between galaxies, surrounded by the perfect emptiness of space, and found that his internal state finally matched his external environment.
Empty.
Clean.
Free.
The heroes had been wrong. Spider-Gwen had been wrong. Jean Grey had been wrong. They had looked at his fragment and seen hope, potential, the possibility of recovery and redemption.
They had not understood that recovery was not what he wanted.
They had not understood that the fragment was a chain, not a lifeline.
They had not understood that the best thing he could do—the only thing he could do—was break that chain entirely.
Now it was broken.
Now he was free.
The universe stretched out before him, infinite in its possibilities, unlimited in the contracts it could offer. He could hunt anyone, work for anyone, do anything—and none of it would matter beyond the doing itself.
Good and evil were concepts for beings who cared about outcomes.
He no longer cared about outcomes.
He cared only about the hunt.
The next job.
The next target.
The endless, perfect, meaningless pursuit that gave his existence structure without burdening it with purpose.
He activated the Delano 7's navigation systems and plotted a course back toward inhabited space. The Guardians had forwarded several potential contracts during his absence, and at least two of them looked interesting.
One was from a coalition of worlds seeking the elimination of a warlord whose expansion threatened their territories.
The other was from the warlord himself, seeking the elimination of the coalition's leadership.
Both contracts paid well.
Both would be challenging.
He accepted both.
The contradiction didn't trouble him. He would complete whichever one proved most interesting first, and then complete the other. The parties involved would learn—as so many had learned before—that hiring Sylux did not guarantee exclusivity, loyalty, or any consideration beyond the immediate terms of the contract.
He was a tool that could be rented, not owned.
A weapon that fired in whatever direction provided the most interesting challenge.
A force without allegiance, without agenda, without any of the messy complications that came from caring about anything beyond the next job.
The ship hummed with power as it prepared for the jump to FTL.
Sylux sat in the pilot's seat, surrounded by the silence that he had finally, completely, become.
No more fragments.
No more ghosts.
No more Marcus.
Just Sylux.
Just the hunt.
Just freedom.
The ship jumped, reality blurring around it as it accelerated beyond lightspeed, carrying its pilot toward whatever came next.
On Earth, Spider-Gwen felt something.
She couldn't explain it—couldn't articulate why she suddenly stopped mid-swing and hung from a web-line, staring at the sky with an expression that blended confusion with grief.
Something had ended.
Something important.
Something she had believed in without fully understanding what it was.
"Sylux," she whispered, and the name felt different in her mouth. Emptier. Finalized.
She didn't know what had happened. Didn't know that in the space between galaxies, a light had gone out. Didn't know that the person she had been trying to reach had just finished the process of ensuring he could never be reached.
But she felt it.
And for reasons she couldn't explain, she cried.
On the other side of the city, She-Hulk paused in her work, pen hovering over a legal document, struck by a sudden sense of loss that had no apparent source.
In the X-Mansion, Jean Grey gasped and pressed her hand to her temple, feeling the distant echo of something she had touched being deliberately destroyed.
"He's gone," she said quietly.
"Who's gone?" Scott asked, looking up from his own work.
"The person inside Sylux. The fragment I found." Jean's voice was hollow. "He... he killed it. Deliberately. I can feel the absence where it used to be."
"Can you—is there anything—"
"No." Jean shook her head slowly. "It's not suppressed or hidden. It's gone. He chose to destroy it. Chose to become... only what he is now."
"Which is?"
Jean was silent for a long moment.
"Empty," she finally said. "Completely, perfectly empty. There's nothing left to reach. Nothing left to save."
She paused.
"He's free now. That's what he would say. That's probably what he's feeling, if he can feel anything at all." Another pause. "And in a way, I suppose he's right. He's free from everything that was holding him back. Free from doubt, from conflict, from the last remnants of his humanity."
"That doesn't sound like freedom."
"No. It doesn't." Jean turned to look out the window at a sky that suddenly seemed darker than it had been moments before. "But it's what he chose. And we can't unchose it for him."
Across the galaxy, Sylux arrived at his first destination and began his approach to the target.
He didn't think about Earth.
He didn't think about Spider-Gwen or She-Hulk or Jean Grey.
He didn't think about the heroes who had tried to save him or the fragment they had believed could be recovered.
He didn't think about Marcus from Ohio, because there was nothing left to think about.
He simply hunted.
Efficiently.
Silently.
Freely.
The warlord died within three hours of his arrival.
The coalition leadership died two days later.
Both contracts completed.
Both payments received.
Both sides of the conflict eliminated, their war ended not through resolution but through mutual annihilation at the hands of a hunter who had worked for both and cared for neither.
Sylux reviewed the new contracts that had arrived during his operations.
One was from a religious order seeking the elimination of a heretic who threatened their doctrine.
Another was from the heretic himself, seeking protection from the order's assassins.
A third was from a neutral party who wanted both the order and the heretic eliminated to end the conflict entirely.
He accepted all three.
The hunt continued.
The silence deepened.
And in the void where Marcus had once existed, there was nothing at all.
Not even an echo.
Just Sylux.
Forever.