Metallic Rouge: Who Is Malik & What Happened to Him?

Directed by Motonobu Hori from scripts written by Yutaka Izubuchi and Toshizo Nemoto, Metallic Rouge is an original anime series that premiered on January 11, 2024, and is currently ongoing. Metallic Rouge is set in a future in which people have colonized Mars and have established a civilization there. It follows a young girl called Rouge Redstar and her friend Naomi Orthmann, who are working together against a group of foes known as the Immortal Nine. The series is a refreshing addition to the anime world, and in this article, we are going to discuss it. The focus of this article will be a character called Malik, as you will find out what happened to him.

Malik is only known as the guy whom Giallon killed – nothing else is known about this character

The first season of Metallic Rouge was truly a handful. While it did introduce us to the lore of the series, it also provided us with a lot of concepts, as well as characters; we have to be honest, at times, it was quite difficult to follow all the new information that the series presented. One of these “additions” is Malik, the character we are going to talk about in this article.

Malik was first mentioned when Giallon met the smugglers. They asked him where Malik was, to which Giallon replied that he was sick and that he could not come; he said Malik had a simple cold but that it stopped him from coming. It seemed shady, but the smugglers initially believed him. Initially, one of the smugglers soon discovered a dead body near them, and all of them pointed their guns toward Giallon.

They then asked him whether the dead body was actually Malik, to which Giallon looked at it and then – in an overly dramatic act – seemingly showed extreme sadness over Malik’s death from a common cold. Of course, Malik was murdered by Giallon; that much was obvious, and Giallon – despite the little show – didn’t even try to hide that fact. It seems that he was simply hoping that the smugglers would not find Malik’s body too soon, i.e., that he could get away with the Nectar before they discovered the body.

Well, that did not happen, and Malik’s story was thus over before it even began. But what happened to Giallon? Well, he was surrounded by a group of angry smugglers who directed their guns toward him, but he simply smiled, and while we did not see what happened there, the fact that Giallon appeared later unharmed indicates that the smugglers were taken care of.

Knowing Giallon’s sadistic personality, we assume that he simply activated his robotic armor and killed all of them with ease; this was later confirmed by a news broadcast, which showed the location of Giallon’s massacre, although Rouge was falsely blamed for it. Before we finish, let us answer one additional question.

Why did Giallon kill Malik?

This is a question that was left unanswered in the first episode, and since we believe that Malik is a truly secondary character who will not play a major role later in the series, we don’t think that we will find out the true reason; in fact, it seems that Malik won’t even be addressed in the future and that he was just one of many Giallon’s victims in the series.

We can speculate as to why, but knowing Giallon’s underhanded personality, as well as the fact that he doesn’t seem to care about those who are outside his group and that the two of them were smuggling Nectar, we assume that Malik was a hindrance to him and that he did not want to share the loot with him. So he simply got rid of him, as Malik was in the way. This way, he would get all the Nectar for himself, and he would also get rid of a potential witness, i.e., a potential problem.

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