While Malik's power is beyond impressive, his fighting style.. not so much. The attacks he showcased are great against slow / low mobility targets, but they are very unwieldy against faster enemies.
His defenses too are great against physical attackers, but what against mental attacks?
The way I see it, Malik is an extremely strong "initiator". If the enemy needs to stick to formations, Malik can just destroy them with overwhelming power. His 1v1 doesn't seem that amazing though. A lot of avoidable attacks and intensity seems to be inverse to the radius of the attack, which is really bad against a high mobility target.
I think MC has a good matchup against Malik. According to the text, he blinks and has moved several hundred meters. That makes him probably hypersonic so the ground attacks like Core Heat and Burning Tower won't work easily against him. The Ceaseless Fire attack is low intensity so it's quite probable that it can be resisted through armor, and MC has the capability for mental attacks which bypass Malik's protection (although he still hasn't shown mental combat aptitude, the potential is there).
Lastly Malik has a fairly weak whack-a-mole game. Ella performed much better than it seemed against him. Both Nico and Malik fell for the same trick, her hiding her true body and fighting with "proxies". His seekers can be countered by hiding and while he is probably powerful enough to turn into a sun and scorch everything in the vicinity, it's an unwieldy attack with high friendly fire potential and a burrower can probably survive it.
