Marcus-Optimus had a problem.
It wasn't the Decepticons. The Decepticons were, paradoxically, the easiest part of his new existence. Decepticons were simple. Decepticons showed up, Decepticons threatened things, Decepticons got dismantled with whatever weapon had most recently manifested in his increasingly ridiculous frame. There was a clarity to fighting Decepticons that was almost meditative—a purity of purpose that allowed him to bypass the complicated emotional landscape of being a dead barista from Portland trapped in the body of a thirty-foot alien robot and just do the thing he was built to do.
No, his problem was much worse than Decepticons.
His problem was his own team.
His problem was that his Autobots—his brave, loyal, beloved Autobots—fought like absolute garbage.
Not individually. Individually, they were fine. Good, even. Arcee was fast and precise. Bumblebee was agile and clever. Bulkhead was a Wrecker with the raw power to level buildings. Cliffjumper was aggressive and fearless (or had been, before the recent... events had introduced him to a new and exciting relationship with the concept of PTSD).
But as a unit? As a coordinated fighting force engaged in an active, ongoing, four-million-year war against an enemy that outnumbered them a hundred to one and had a warship in orbit?
They were terrible.
Marcus-Optimus had suspected this. He had watched the show. He had seen the fights. He had noted, with the critical eye of a fan who had consumed every piece of Transformers media ever produced, that the TFP Autobots fought like they were in the middle of a skirmish, not a war. They fought like every engagement was a self-contained episode with a beginning, a middle, and an end, after which everyone went home and nobody thought about it until the next episode.
They didn't finish enemies. They didn't press advantages. They didn't fight with the desperate, relentless, grinding efficiency of soldiers who understood that every Decepticon left standing today was a Decepticon shooting at you tomorrow.
They fought like they were on a TV show.
Which, technically, they were. Or had been. Before Marcus had arrived and brought the Bayverse's commitment to conclusive violence with him like a heavily armed carry-on bag.
The realization had been building for days, percolating in his processor like a pot of coffee made from frustration and tactical analysis, but it hadn't fully crystallized until he decided to run formal combat drills.
The training area was a natural cavern system adjacent to the main base, large enough to accommodate full-sized Cybertronian combat maneuvers and deep enough underground to avoid detection by human satellites. Ratchet had, at Marcus-Optimus's insistence, installed a holographic projection system capable of generating solid-light Vehicon simulations that could fight back, take damage, and—most importantly—demonstrate whether or not the Autobots were actually finishing their fights.
The first drill was simple: Five holographic Vehicons. Standard armament. Basic combat AI. Engage and eliminate.
"Engage and eliminate," Marcus-Optimus repeated, standing at the observation point with his arms crossed and his optics narrowed. "That means they stop functioning. That means they are no longer a threat. That means when you are done, there are zero operational hostiles remaining. Is that understood?"
"Understood," the team chorused.
Miko, who was sitting on Marcus-Optimus's right shoulder—she had gotten up there approximately four hours ago through a method that defied physics, biology, and several fundamental assumptions about what a human teenager could accomplish with determination, upper body strength, and what she described as "parkour, but vertically"—pulled out her phone and hit record.
"This is gonna be so good," she whispered.
It was not good.
It was, in fact, the most frustrating thing Marcus-Optimus had ever witnessed, and he had once watched the entirety of Transformers: The Last Knight in a single sitting.
Bulkhead: Drill One
Bulkhead charged the first Vehicon hologram with his wrecking ball raised and a war cry that shook dust from the ceiling. The impact was devastating—the holographic drone flew backward in a spray of simulated sparks and slammed into the cavern wall hard enough to leave an impact crater.
Then Bulkhead turned away.
He turned away.
The Vehicon hologram, sparking and damaged but still functional, slid down the wall, raised its arm blaster, and fired three shots into Bulkhead's back before the simulation's safety protocols kicked in and flagged the hits as "potentially lethal."
Marcus-Optimus's left optic twitched.
It was a small twitch. A barely perceptible flicker of the optical mechanism that controlled his left eye, a micro-spasm so subtle that only someone standing very close to his face—or, say, sitting on his shoulder—would notice it.
Miko noticed it.
"Uh oh," she said, very quietly, and started recording with renewed intensity.
"Bulkhead," Marcus-Optimus said.
"Yeah, boss?" Bulkhead turned around, saw the still-active hologram, and blinked. "Oh. I thought he was down."
"He was not down."
"He looked down."
"He was shooting you in the back, Bulkhead."
"Well... yeah, but... I hit him pretty hard. Usually they stay down after I hit them that hard."
"'Usually' is not 'always.' 'Usually' is a statistical probability, not a tactical guarantee. The difference between 'usually' and 'always' is you getting shot in the back." Marcus-Optimus's optic twitched again. "Finish the drill. And this time, confirm your kill."
Bulkhead turned back to the hologram, raised his wrecking ball, and—
Paused.
"I... uh..." He lowered the wrecking ball slightly. "Do I really need to... I mean, he's already down. Mostly. I could just... leave him. He's not going anywhere."
"He is pointing a weapon at you right now, Bulkhead."
"Yeah, but it's just a—"
"Finish. The. Drill."
Bulkhead finished the drill. Reluctantly. With the enthusiasm of someone being asked to kick a puppy. He brought the wrecking ball down on the hologram with just enough force to deactivate it, and even then he winced at the impact, as if the simulation of a faceless factory-produced drone being shut down by a soldier in an active war zone was somehow uncomfortable for him.
Marcus-Optimus's optic twitched a third time. On his shoulder, Miko had zoomed in on the twitch and was filming it with the dedication of a nature documentarian capturing a rare behavioral display.
"That's his mad eye," she whispered into her phone's microphone. "His left optic twitches when he's frustrated. I've been tracking it. Current twitch count today: three. Record is fourteen, set yesterday when Ratchet told him the grenade launcher in his shin might 'self-calibrate during recharge,' which apparently means his leg could fire grenades in his sleep. He didn't think that was a problem. Ratchet disagreed. Loudly."
Arcee: Drill One
Arcee was better. Arcee was faster. Arcee hit her holographic opponent with a combination of kicks, blade strikes, and acrobatic maneuvers that looked like a martial arts demonstration set to the soundtrack of someone being very efficiently dismantled.
She was beautiful to watch. Precise. Economical. Every movement served a purpose, every strike landed with calculated effect, and within twelve seconds she had her Vehicon hologram on the ground, sparking, its combat systems compromised, its threat level reduced to approximately zero.
And then she walked away.
Not dramatically. Not with a quip or a one-liner or any of the other things that action heroes did when they left an enemy behind. She just... turned around and walked back to the starting position, as if the fight was a task on a checklist that she had completed and could now move on from.
The hologram was still active.
It was damaged. It was compromised. It was not a threat in any immediate tactical sense. But it was still active. Its systems were still running. Its optical sensors were still tracking. And in a real combat scenario, a "not immediately threatening" enemy was an enemy that could recover, could call for reinforcements, could provide intelligence, could become a problem five minutes from now or five hours from now or five days from now.
Marcus-Optimus's optic twitched.
"Arcee."
She turned. Cool, composed, one eyebrow raised. "What?"
"You left it alive."
"I left it neutralized. There's a difference."
"In a real engagement, 'neutralized' is temporary. 'Eliminated' is permanent. Which would you prefer?"
"I prefer efficiency. That drone is not getting up. Its motor functions are—"
"Its motor functions are compromised but not destroyed. Its communications array is intact. Its optical sensors are active. In a real scenario, that drone is currently transmitting your position, your fighting style, and your tactical approach to every Decepticon within signal range." He paused. Let that sink in. "Is that what you would prefer?"
Arcee's expression shifted. Not a lot—she was too controlled for dramatic reactions—but enough. Enough to show that the point had landed. Enough to show that she was hearing something she hadn't considered, or had considered and dismissed, or had known on some level but never been confronted with because nobody had ever confronted her with it before.
"Finish the drill, Arcee."
She finished the drill. One clean blade strike, directly through the hologram's processor. Quick. Surgical. Final.
But Marcus-Optimus saw the hesitation before the strike. The fractional pause, the almost imperceptible tightening of her jaw, the micro-expression that said this feels wrong even as her body executed the motion with perfect efficiency.
He understood the hesitation. He respected the hesitation. In another context, in another war, in another universe, that hesitation would be the thing that separated soldiers from monsters. The reluctance to kill was not weakness—it was humanity, or the Cybertronian equivalent thereof, and it was precious and valuable and worth protecting.
But it was also going to get her killed.
And Marcus-Optimus had not dragged Starscream's face off and terrified Megatron into insomnia and discovered flamethrowers in his forearms and a grenade launcher in his shin and whatever was in his other shin (Ratchet was still running diagnostics, and the current betting pool among the Autobots ranged from "another grenade launcher" to "a small thermonuclear device" to Miko's guess of "a waffle iron, because that would be hilarious") just to watch his team die because they couldn't bring themselves to finish a fight.
Twitch count: five.
Bumblebee: Drill One
Bumblebee was the worst.
Not the worst fighter—Bumblebee was actually quite good, quick and clever and capable of creative solutions to combat problems that the other Autobots would solve with brute force. His problem was not skill. His problem was not courage. His problem was not even hesitation, exactly.
His problem was that he had his blaster set to the lowest possible energy output.
Marcus-Optimus noticed it immediately. The shots were landing—Bumblebee's aim was excellent—but the impacts were wrong. Too soft. Too gentle. The holographic Vehicons were staggering but not falling, sparking but not deactivating, inconvenienced but not stopped.
Bumblebee was shooting to wound.
In a war.
Against enemies that would not extend him the same courtesy.
Marcus-Optimus's optic did not twitch. His optic spasmed. It was a full-body optical convulsion that started in his left optic, spread to his right optic, traveled down his facial plating, and manifested as a full-frame shudder that Miko captured on video and would later describe as "the moment Optimus Prime's soul left his body, looked at what Bumblebee was doing, and came back angry."
"Bumblebee."
Bwee?
"What power setting is your blaster on?"
Bwee bwoo bwee. (Approximately: "Setting two. Out of ten. Why?")
"Why is your blaster on setting two?"
Bwee bwoo bwee bwee bwoo. (Approximately: "Because setting two is enough to disable a Vehicon without causing permanent structural damage, allowing for potential post-conflict recovery and—")
"Post-conflict recovery?"
Bwee?
"You are concerned about the post-conflict recovery of Decepticon soldiers who are actively trying to kill you?"
Bwee bwoo. (Approximately: "Well... yeah? They're still people. Kind of. Aren't they?")
Marcus-Optimus stared at Bumblebee. Bumblebee stared back, his doorwings hiked up in the defensive position of a bot who knew he was about to get lectured but stood by his choices. And Marcus-Optimus felt a surge of something so complicated that his emotional processing subroutines nearly crashed trying to categorize it.
Because Bumblebee was right. On a fundamental, philosophical, moral level, Bumblebee was absolutely right. Vehicons were people. Kind of. They were sentient beings, factory-produced or not, and the casual dismissal of their lives was exactly the kind of thinking that had allowed the war to grind on for four million years without anyone stopping to ask whether the cost was worth the cause.
And also, Bumblebee was going to get his spark torn out if he walked into a real fight with his blaster on setting two, and Marcus-Optimus would rather eat his own grenade launcher than let that happen.
"Bumblebee," he said, and he made a conscious effort to soften his voice, to pull back the Bayverse edge, to be the mentor that this young scout deserved rather than the drill sergeant that his frustration wanted to be. "Your compassion is one of your greatest strengths. I mean that. Never lose it. But compassion for your enemies cannot come at the cost of survival for your friends. When you walk into a fight with your blaster on setting two, you are not being merciful to the Decepticons. You are being reckless with the lives of everyone standing beside you. Because the Vehicon you wound today is the Vehicon that gets back up and shoots Arcee in the back tomorrow. Do you understand?"
Bumblebee's doorwings dropped. His optics dimmed. He looked at his blaster—at the power setting indicator that was glowing a cheerful green at the bottom of its range—and then back at Optimus.
Bwee bwoo bwee. (Approximately: "...What setting should I use?")
"Setting seven. Minimum."
Seven?!
"Minimum, Bumblebee."
Bwee bwoo bwee bwoo bwee. (Approximately: "But seven will... I mean, they won't... they'll be really, really dead, Optimus.")
"Yes. They will."
Bwee. (Approximately: "Oh.")
"Run the drill again. Setting seven."
Bumblebee ran the drill again. Setting seven. The holographic Vehicon didn't stagger. It didn't spark. It detonated. The difference between setting two and setting seven was the difference between poking someone with a finger and hitting them with a freight train, and Bumblebee's optics went wide as the hologram simply ceased to exist in a flash of simulated energon fire.
BWEE. (Approximately: "Oh.")
"Better," Marcus-Optimus said.
On his shoulder, Miko leaned down to whisper in his audio receptor. "Twitch count is at eight. You're on pace to beat yesterday's record."
"I am not twitching."
"You are absolutely twitching. I have video evidence. It's on the fan page."
"There should not be a fan page, Miko."
"There are TWO fan pages now. The second one is specifically about the twitch. It has forty-seven followers."
"...Forty-seven people are following a page about my optic twitching?"
"Forty-eight. Raf just joined."
Marcus-Optimus resolved to have a conversation with Rafael about appropriate internet usage. Later. After he finished trying to teach his team how to fight a war that they had apparently been treating as a hobby for the last several hundred years.
Cliffjumper: Drill One
Cliffjumper's drill was... different.
Cliffjumper did not have a problem with finishing enemies. Cliffjumper's pre-Optimus-trauma personality had been defined by aggression, recklessness, and an enthusiasm for combat that bordered on the pathological. In theory, Cliffjumper should have been the one Autobot who didn't need to be told to hit harder.
In practice, Cliffjumper walked into the training area, took one look at the holographic Vehicon, and froze.
He just... stopped. Mid-stride. His optics locked on the hologram's face—the blank, featureless visor of a standard Vehicon drone—and something behind those optics shattered.
Marcus-Optimus saw it happen in real time. Saw the moment when Cliffjumper's processor connected "Vehicon face" to "Optimus's hand crushing a Vehicon's face" to "the sound" and produced a trauma response so immediate and so total that the red warrior's entire body locked up like a seized engine.
"Cliff?" Arcee took a step toward him.
"I'm fine." His voice was flat. Mechanical. The verbal equivalent of a dial tone. "I'm fine. I can do this. It's just a hologram. It's not real. The face isn't—the face is just—it's a hologram, it doesn't have a—it's not going to—"
The hologram raised its arm blaster. Standard combat AI behavior—target detected, threat assessment complete, engage.
Cliffjumper flinched.
Cliffjumper, who had charged headfirst into Decepticon formations that outnumbered him ten to one without blinking, who had once headbutted a Vehicon so hard its head came off and he laughed about it, who had been the single most fearless Autobot on the team for four million years—flinched. At a hologram.
Marcus-Optimus felt something crack inside his chest, and it wasn't the Matrix.
It was guilt.
He had done this. Not intentionally. Not maliciously. But the violence he had unleashed—the face-crushing, the ground-bridge-dragging, the sheer, savage brutality of his new combat style—had traumatized his own soldier. Had taken one of the bravest mechs he had ever known and turned him into someone who flinched at holograms.
"End simulation," Marcus-Optimus said quietly.
The hologram vanished. Cliffjumper stood in the empty training area, his hands shaking—actually shaking, the micro-tremors visible even from across the room—and stared at the space where the hologram had been.
"Cliff," Marcus-Optimus said, and his voice was gentle now, all the Bayverse edge filed down to nothing, just warmth and concern and the kind of quiet that a scared person needed. "You're done for today."
"I can do this—"
"I know you can. And you will. But not today." He paused. Considered his next words carefully, because words mattered, especially to someone whose processor was currently replaying the soundtrack of a face being crushed on a loop. "Cliffjumper, look at me."
Cliffjumper looked up.
"What I did to those Vehicons—what I have been doing since this began—I did it to protect this team. To protect the humans. To send a message to the Decepticons that the rules have changed." He paused. "But I never intended for that message to hurt you. And I am sorry that it did."
Cliffjumper's optics flickered. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "It's not your fault, boss. I just—I keep hearing—" He stopped. His jaw tightened. "I keep hearing the sounds."
"I know."
"The crunching. When you—when the visor—"
"I know, Cliff."
"How do you not hear them?"
Marcus-Optimus considered this question for a long time. How did he not hear them? How did the sounds of violence not haunt him the way they haunted Cliffjumper? Was it the Bayverse protocols, numbing him to the consequences of his own actions? Was it the Matrix, filtering his emotional responses to prevent combat trauma from degrading his functionality? Or was it something worse—something human—the part of him that had spent a lifetime watching these exact scenarios play out on a screen and had been entertained by them?
He didn't know. And the not-knowing scared him more than Megatron ever could.
"I hear them, Cliff," he said, and it was not entirely a lie. "I just... process them differently. And I hope—I truly hope—that when this war is over, I will have the luxury of processing them the way you do. Because your reaction? The flinching, the shaking, the sounds in your head? That's not weakness. That's your spark telling you that violence has a cost, and every time I pay that cost, it takes something from all of us."
Cliffjumper stared at him. Then, slowly, his trembling eased. Not stopped—eased. The micro-tremors fading from "earthquake" to "light breeze." His optics steadied. His shoulders dropped from their locked position near his audio receptors.
"Thanks, boss," he said, quietly.
"Go rest. We'll try again tomorrow."
Cliffjumper walked out of the training area. In the doorway, he paused and turned back. "Hey, Optimus?"
"Yes?"
"For what it's worth... I'm glad you saved me. From that energon patrol. Even if everything after that has been—" He gestured vaguely. "—all of this. I'm glad I'm alive to be traumatized by it."
"...That is the most concerning 'thank you' I have ever received."
"You're welcome." And then Cliffjumper was gone, and Marcus-Optimus was left standing in the training area with a team that couldn't finish fights, a soldier with PTSD, an optic that wouldn't stop twitching, and a fifteen-year-old girl on his shoulder who was, for once, not saying anything.
He looked at Miko. She was holding her phone but not recording. Her expression was thoughtful. Actually thoughtful. Not "plotting something" thoughtful or "about to say something insane" thoughtful, but the genuine, quiet thoughtfulness of a person who had just witnessed something real and was taking the time to understand it.
"That was nice," she said. "What you said to Cliff."
"It was necessary."
"It was nice AND necessary. Those aren't mutually exclusive." She tilted her head, studying him from her perch on his shoulder with the intensity of someone trying to solve a puzzle. "You're weird, you know that? You'll drag a guy's face off for threatening us, but then you'll stop a training drill because your own soldier is having a panic attack and sit there and apologize to him for being too scary. You're, like... the most violent pacifist I've ever met."
"I don't think 'violent pacifist' is a real thing, Miko."
"It is now. I'm making it a thing. It's going on the fan page."
"Please do not—"
"Already done. In my head. I'll type it up later." She leaned back against the side of his helm, a tiny warm weight against his armor, and for a moment they were both quiet, and the quiet was good, and the world was simple, and Marcus-Optimus allowed himself to feel, just for a second, something like peace.
Then Miko said: "Hey, so, about the flamethrowers—"
"No, Miko."
"You don't even know what I was going to ask!"
"You were going to ask if I could use the flamethrowers during training drills to 'make it more exciting.' The answer is no."
"...I was actually going to ask if the flamethrowers have a 'low' setting that I could use to make s'mores."
Marcus-Optimus paused.
Considered.
Realized that using a plasma projection weapon system to toast marshmallows was simultaneously the most ridiculous and most human suggestion he had ever heard, and that the Marcus part of his soul—the part that missed coffee and cats and Saturday mornings—ached for it with a intensity that surprised him.
"...I will look into it."
"YES!"
"I am NOT promising anything."
"TOO LATE, IT'S HAPPENING, I'M BUYING MARSHMALLOWS!"
The drills continued for the next three days.
Marcus-Optimus adjusted his approach. He dialed back the intensity. He stopped demanding immediate perfection and started focusing on incremental improvement. He paired the training with tactical discussions—explaining why a wounded enemy was a future threat, why confirming kills mattered, why the habits they had developed during their years on Earth were going to get them killed in a serious engagement—and he did it without the Bayverse edge, without the growling intensity, without the implied promise of face-related violence.
He did it like a teacher.
And slowly, grudgingly, with the reluctance of soldiers who had been doing things their way for centuries and didn't appreciate being told their way was wrong, the Autobots started to improve.
Bulkhead learned to confirm his kills. He didn't like it—every final blow came with a wince and a muttered apology to the hologram, which was both endearing and slightly concerning—but he did it. Consistently. Reliably. And when Marcus-Optimus told him "good work, Bulkhead," the big green Wrecker's face lit up like a Christmas tree, because praise from the new, terrifying version of Optimus Prime was apparently worth approximately ten times more than praise from the old version, on account of it being so much harder to earn.
Arcee learned to finish her fights. She was clinical about it—one clean strike, no hesitation, no emotion—and Marcus-Optimus suspected that she was treating it as a technical exercise rather than a moral one, compartmentalizing the act of killing into a box labeled "tactical necessity" and storing it somewhere in her processor where it couldn't touch the parts of her that cared. It wasn't healthy. But it was functional, and in a war, functional was what kept you alive.
Bumblebee raised his blaster to setting seven. Then, during an intense drill where a holographic Vehicon nearly got past him to reach a simulated human target, he raised it to setting nine. The hologram didn't just deactivate—it was atomized, reduced to a cloud of simulated particles that drifted through the training area like luminous dust. Bumblebee stared at the empty space where the hologram had been, his optics wide, his doorwings flat against his back, and said:
Bwee bwoo bwee. (Approximately: "I... think I overcompensated.")
"Better too much than too little," Marcus-Optimus said. "We'll work on calibration."
Cliffjumper came back on day three. He was still shaky. He was still flinching. But he was there, and when he faced down his holographic opponent and raised his fists and actually engaged, Marcus-Optimus felt the Matrix pulse with something that was unmistakably pride.
Cliffjumper finished his opponent. It wasn't pretty—he closed his optics for the final blow, and his hands were trembling when he pulled them back—but he did it.
"Good," Marcus-Optimus said. Just "good." One word. No speeches. No philosophy.
Cliffjumper nodded. Once. Tight. And went to stand with Arcee, who put a hand on his arm and didn't say anything, because sometimes silence was the kindest language there was.
Marcus-Optimus watched his team and felt something uncurl in his chest that was too big for words and too warm for the Bayverse and too complicated for any single continuity to contain.
They were getting better.
They were going to be ready.
And then the Constructicons showed up.
Marcus-Optimus was in the middle of a tactical planning session—explaining the concept of overlapping fields of fire to a team that had apparently never heard of it and a teenager who was taking notes with the intensity of a graduate student—when the alarm hit.
Not the proximity alarm. Not the energon detection alarm. The seismic alarm.
The entire base shuddered. Monitors flickered. The overhead lights swayed. A low, bass rumble rolled through the floor like distant thunder, except it wasn't distant—it was getting closer—and it wasn't thunder—it was footsteps.
Very, very large footsteps.
"Ratchet!" Marcus-Optimus was at the main console in three strides, his combat subroutines already spooling up with the familiar eagerness of weapons systems that hadn't been deployed in almost forty-eight hours and were getting restless. "Source!"
Ratchet was already pulling up data, his fingers moving across the console with the practiced speed of a mech who had been running crisis management for four million years and had developed a relationship with the alarm system that could only be described as "adversarial." His face was pale. Or rather, paler than usual, which for Ratchet was saying something.
"Multiple Cybertronian signatures," he said. "Six—no, seven—individual contacts, approaching Jasper from the northwest. Speed: approximately sixty miles per hour. Mass signatures are..." He trailed off. Stared at the screen. Stared at it harder, as if staring harder would change what it was showing him. "That can't be right."
"What?"
"The mass readings. They're too high. For seven contacts at this signature profile, the combined mass would need to be—" He did the calculation. His optics widened. "—approximately four hundred tons."
"Constructicons," Marcus-Optimus said.
The word fell into the room like a bomb.
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. And in the silence, Marcus-Optimus's processor ran at speeds that would have made a supercomputer weep with inadequacy, cross-referencing every piece of Transformers knowledge he had ever consumed—every show, every movie, every comic, every wiki article, every late-night forum argument about power scaling and continuity errors—and arriving at a conclusion that made his spark pulse with something that was half dread and half excitement.
The Constructicons were not in Transformers Prime. They had never appeared, never been referenced, never been so much as hinted at in the show's three seasons and movie. They were a classic G1 element—six construction vehicles that combined into Devastator, one of the most powerful Cybertronians ever created, a gestalt combiner whose destructive capability was matched only by his stupidity, because the combination process had a tendency to merge six individual personalities into one collective consciousness that had the intelligence of a particularly angry building and the subtlety of a nuclear explosion.
They were not supposed to be here.
And yet, according to Ratchet's sensors, they were here, and they were heading directly for Jasper, and they were doing so at a speed that suggested they knew exactly where they were going and had every intention of doing something extremely unpleasant when they arrived.
"This doesn't make sense," Ratchet said, still staring at his screen. "We have no records of Constructicon activity on Earth. We have no records of Constructicon activity anywhere in this sector. Where did they—"
"It doesn't matter where they came from," Marcus-Optimus said, and his voice had gone flat and hard, dropping into the register that his team had learned to associate with "Optimus is about to do something that will be talked about for centuries." "What matters is where they're going. Jasper. Population thirty thousand. Twenty minutes out at current speed."
He paused. Let the math do the talking.
"If they combine—"
"If?" Ratchet's voice cracked. "Optimus, Constructicons don't travel in groups of six for the company. They're going to combine. They are absolutely going to combine."
"If they combine," Marcus-Optimus continued, as if Ratchet hadn't spoken, "we will be facing a single hostile entity approximately one hundred and twenty feet tall, with a combined mass of four hundred tons, minimal tactical intelligence but maximum destructive capability, heading directly for a civilian population center."
Silence.
"So," Marcus-Optimus said, "we should probably stop them."
"HOW?!" Ratchet's voice had ascended several octaves. "Optimus, a gestalt combiner is a strategic-level threat! In the war, it took entire battalions to bring down a combiner! We have five Autobots!"
"We have five Autobots," Marcus-Optimus agreed. "And me."
He said it simply. Without bravado. Without posturing. Without any of the dramatic weight that TFP Optimus would have given the statement. He said it the way you'd say "we have five forks and a chainsaw"—a simple statement of inventory that happened to include one item that was categorically different from the others.
On his shoulder, Miko leaned forward. Her eyes were shining. Her phone was recording. And she said, with the quiet reverence of someone witnessing a religious experience: "Oh, this is going to be good."
"Miko," Marcus-Optimus said.
"Yeah?"
"You cannot come."
"I am ABSOLUTELY coming."
"You are ABSOLUTELY NOT—"
"Optimus, I have been riding on your shoulder for three days. I have watched every training drill, every tactical briefing, every weapons diagnostic. I know your combat patterns, your engagement priorities, your optimal attack angles, and the reload time on every weapon in your frame. I am, at this point, probably the single most informed human being on the planet regarding Autobot military operations, and if you think I'm going to sit in this base and watch on a screen while you fight a GIANT ROBOT MADE OF SIX SMALLER ROBOTS, you are—with all due respect to the Matrix of Leadership and everything it represents—out of your fragging mind."
Marcus-Optimus stared at her.
Miko stared back.
In the background, Bulkhead made a sound like a tea kettle reaching its boiling point. "She—she used to talk to ME like that—"
"Not now, Bulkhead," Arcee said.
Marcus-Optimus continued to stare at Miko. Miko continued to stare back. It was the most lopsided staring contest in the history of staring contests—a thirty-foot alien war machine versus a five-foot-two teenager with a smartphone—and the teenager was winning.
"You will stay in the designated safe zone," Marcus-Optimus said, because apparently this was happening now.
"Deal."
"You will not leave the designated safe zone under ANY circumstances."
"Define 'any circumstances.'"
"Any. Circumstances."
"What if the safe zone is on fire?"
"Then you leave the safe zone. That is the ONE circumstance."
"What if the safe zone is boring?"
"That is NOT a circumstance."
"It could be."
"It is NOT."
"Okay, fine, I'll stay in the safe zone. Unless it's on fire. Or boring. Those are my terms."
Marcus-Optimus sighed. The sigh registered on Ratchet's seismograph equipment as a 0.3 magnitude tremor.
"Autobots," he said, turning to his team, who were assembled and ready and wearing expressions that ranged from "determined" to "terrified" to "I'm not sure what's happening but I have my wrecking ball." "Transform and roll out."
And then he paused.
Because he had never said that before. Not in this body. Not in this universe. The words had just... come out, rising from somewhere deep in his spark like a hymn from a church he'd never visited but somehow knew by heart.
Transform and roll out.
The Matrix pulsed.
The Autobots transformed.
And Miko, still perched on his shoulder with the determination of a barnacle that had found its forever-home, pumped her fist and whispered: "Best. Day. Ever."
They intercepted the Constructicons twelve miles outside of Jasper, in a stretch of desert that was empty enough to serve as a battlefield and far enough from civilization to limit collateral damage. Marcus-Optimus had chosen the location deliberately—he'd sent Bumblebee ahead to harass the Constructicons' flank and force them to alter course toward the engagement zone, a maneuver that was equal parts tactical brilliance and shepherd-dogging, and which Bumblebee executed with the nervous energy of a scout who had been told to "annoy something a hundred times your size" and was interpreting those instructions very literally.
By the time the full team arrived—ground bridge, because Marcus-Optimus was not going to drive twelve miles when he could teleport—the Constructicons had stopped moving and were arrayed in a loose formation at the edge of a dry riverbed.
There were six of them. Scrapper. Mixmaster. Long Haul. Bonecrusher. Scavenger. Hook. Six construction vehicles that had transformed into six hulking, brutal, ugly robots that looked like they had been designed by someone who thought the concept of "aesthetics" was a type of disease.
They were big. Not as big as Devastator would be—not yet—but individually they were each roughly Bulkhead's size, which made them the largest non-combined Decepticons the team had ever faced on Earth.
And they were mean. Marcus-Optimus could see it in the way they moved—the aggressive posturing, the constant micro-adjustments of weapons systems, the predatory attention they paid to every sound and movement in their environment. These were not Vehicons. These were not factory-produced drones with basic combat AI. These were veterans—old, scarred, experienced soldiers who had been combining and destroying things since before the fall of Cybertron.
"Autobots!" Scrapper's voice boomed across the desert, a gravelly roar that sounded like a cement mixer arguing with a garbage disposal. "Where is your Prime? Megatron sends his regards!"
Marcus-Optimus stepped through the ground bridge. He had deposited Miko in the designated safe zone—a rocky outcropping three hundred meters from the projected engagement area, reinforced with portable blast shielding that Ratchet had grudgingly fabricated—and had made her promise, three separate times, to stay put.
He did not have high hopes for that promise.
"I am here," he said, and his battle mask deployed with a click that echoed across the desert like a period at the end of a very short, very ominous sentence.
The Constructicons turned to face him. There was a moment—a brief, flickering moment—where six pairs of optics assessed the Prime standing before them and six tactical processors ran threat evaluations and six sets of combat protocols produced recommendations.
Marcus-Optimus saw the moment those recommendations came back.
He saw the moment the Constructicons dismissed him.
Because of course they did. He was one bot. One medium-sized Autobot with no visible heavy weapons, no support vehicles, no artillery emplacements—just a red-and-blue truck standing alone in a desert, backed by four Autobots who were collectively outmassed by the Constructicon team by a factor of three.
Scrapper laughed. "That's it? Megatron made it sound like you were some kind of monster. You're just the same old Prime. Bigger speeches, maybe, but—"
"Constructicons," Marcus-Optimus said, and his voice cut through Scrapper's laughter like a blade through a monologue. "You have two options. Leave this planet. Or be disassembled. Choose now."
"Option three," Scrapper said, grinning. "CONSTRUCTICONS! MERGE FOR THE KILL!"
And then the world changed.
It happened fast—faster than Marcus-Optimus had expected, faster than any episode or movie had depicted—because the Constructicons had been doing this for millions of years and had refined the combination process to a science. Six bodies leaped into the air simultaneously, their frames folding and reconfiguring mid-flight with the terrible grace of something that was supposed to happen, something that was designed, and the sound—oh, the sound—was indescribable. A symphony of grinding gears and locking joints and screaming metal that built and built and built until it peaked in a thunderclap that shattered rocks and sent shockwaves rippling through the desert floor.
Where six Constructicons had stood, one being now towered.
Devastator.
One hundred and twenty feet tall. Four hundred tons. A mountain of green and purple metal that blotted out the sky like an eclipse made of hate. His optics—two burning furnaces set deep in a head the size of a house—swept the desert below with the dim, furious intelligence of a being whose cognitive function had been reduced to its most basic components: find, destroy, repeat.
His foot came down. The ground cratered. The shockwave knocked Bulkhead off his feet.
His other foot came down. A fissure raced across the desert floor toward the Autobots like a zipper being pulled across the earth.
And his voice—a fusion of six voices merged into one tectonic rumble that seemed to come from the ground itself—shook the air with a single, terrible word:
"DEVASTATOR... DESTROY!"
On the rocky outcropping three hundred meters away, Miko was filming vertically and breathing so fast she was in danger of hyperventilating. "Oh my god oh my god oh my GOD he's SO BIG—OPTIMUS IF YOU CAN HEAR ME HE'S REALLY REALLY BIG—"
Marcus-Optimus could hear her. He was choosing not to respond, because he was currently looking up—way up—at a hundred and twenty feet of gestalt combiner bearing down on Jasper, Nevada, and running calculations that would determine whether thirty thousand people lived or died in the next fifteen minutes.
In the show—in normal TFP, the TFP that was supposed to exist, the TFP without a dead barista inhabiting the body of its protagonist—there were no combiners. There had never been a threat on this scale. The biggest enemies the Autobots had faced were individual Decepticons—powerful, yes, but individual, beatable by a team working together, defeatable through courage and cleverness and the narrative certainty that the good guys would find a way.
Devastator was not an individual. Devastator was a force of nature wearing a robot suit. And the five Autobots standing in his shadow had absolutely no framework for dealing with him.
"WHAT DO WE DO?!" Bulkhead shouted, stumbling backward as Devastator's next step sent another shockwave through the ground. "OPTIMUS, WHAT DO WE—"
"Keep him occupied," Marcus-Optimus said. "Draw his attention. Do NOT let him reach Jasper. Bumblebee, target the joints—ankles, knees, anywhere you can reduce mobility. Arcee, Cliffjumper, run interference—stay mobile, stay small, make him chase you. Bulkhead, you're the distraction."
"How am I a distraction?!"
"Hit him."
"WHERE?!"
"Anywhere. He's a hundred and twenty feet tall. You can't miss."
Bulkhead processed this, realized it was both insulting and accurate, and charged.
The next ninety seconds were chaos.
Bulkhead hit Devastator's left ankle with his wrecking ball at full power, and the impact produced a sound like a gong being struck by a meteor. Devastator looked down. Looked at Bulkhead. Looked at the tiny dent in his ankle plating. And kicked.
Bulkhead flew. Not "stumbled backward" flew. Not "lost his footing" flew. Flew. Through the air. For approximately two hundred feet. He hit the ground like a green meteor, carved a trench in the desert floor thirty feet long, and lay there for a moment, stunned.
"...Ow," he said.
Bumblebee opened fire on Devastator's right knee joint—setting nine, as instructed—and the energon bolts impacted with enough force to stagger the giant's leg. Devastator roared. The sound was physical—a wall of noise that flattened sagebrush and sent lizards fleeing in every direction—and he swung one massive arm at Bumblebee with the casual violence of someone swatting a fly.
Bumblebee dodged. Barely. The arm passed so close that the wind displacement spun him around twice. He transformed, raced between Devastator's legs, transformed back, and kept firing.
Arcee and Cliffjumper were running interference as ordered—darting around Devastator's feet, taking shots at exposed joints and cable bundles, using their small size and speed to stay one step ahead of the giant's slow, powerful swings. It was working—Devastator couldn't hit what he couldn't catch, and the two smaller Autobots were fast enough to stay out of reach.
But they weren't hurting him. None of them were. They were gnats. Annoyances. Inconveniences. Devastator could take their best shots all day and barely feel it, and every second he spent batting at them was a second he wasn't spending walking toward Jasper, but that equation had an expiration date because eventually he would get bored and just walk through them.
Marcus-Optimus watched. Analyzed. Calculated. And made his decision.
"All units, disengage. Fall back to minimum safe distance."
"WHAT?!" Arcee dodged another swing. "We can't just—"
"Fall. Back."
Something in his voice—something old, something final—made them obey. The Autobots disengaged, pulling back to a hundred-meter perimeter, and Devastator, free of his tiny attackers, turned his attention back toward Jasper and took a step.
Marcus-Optimus looked up at Devastator.
Devastator looked down at Marcus-Optimus.
The size difference was absurd. Obscene. A thirty-foot Prime standing in the shadow of a hundred-and-twenty-foot colossus, like David looking up at Goliath except David had a grenade launcher in his shin and flamethrowers in his forearms and a smile behind his battle mask that had absolutely no business being there.
"Hey," Miko's voice came over the comm from the safe zone, breathless and electric. "Hey, Optimus?"
"Not now, Miko."
"I know, but—his left hip joint. Where Scavenger and Long Haul connect. There's a gap in the armor plating. I've been watching the seam shift every time he takes a step. It opens about six inches wider on the left swing because Long Haul's transformation sequence is slightly misaligned—probably damage from the combination, or maybe a manufacturing defect. If you could get up to that joint, you could get inside."
Marcus-Optimus paused.
Every Autobot paused.
Ratchet's voice came over the comm from base. "...Did the human child just perform a real-time structural analysis of a gestalt combiner's transformation seams?"
"I watch a lot of engineering YouTube," Miko said. "Also, I've been studying Optimus's fight recordings. He goes for joints. Always. It's his thing. Joints and faces."
Marcus-Optimus felt a sensation that he could only describe as professional respect.
"The left hip joint," he repeated.
"The left hip joint. But you'd need to get up there first, and he's, y'know—" She presumably gestured at Devastator's hundred-and-twenty-foot frame. "—tall."
Marcus-Optimus looked at Devastator. Looked at his own hands. Looked at the energon hooks that he could feel humming in his wrists, ready to deploy, sharp enough to pierce Cybertronian armor, strong enough to support his full weight.
He made a decision.
He had the hooks. He had the flamethrowers. He had the grenade launcher. And he had a fifteen-year-old girl on a rock three hundred meters away who had just done more useful tactical analysis in thirty seconds than most military strategists could do in an hour.
"Miko," he said.
"Yeah?"
"Excellent work."
"I KNOW, RIGHT?! Wait—did Optimus just compliment me? BULKHEAD, DID YOU HEAR—"
"Miko. Focus."
"Right. Focusing. Go kick his butt."
Marcus-Optimus charged.
He covered the distance between himself and Devastator in four seconds—thirty-foot strides, each one eating up ground like a predator closing on prey—and Devastator saw him coming and raised a fist the size of a two-story building and brought it down with enough force to crack the earth's crust.
Marcus-Optimus dodged.
Not by much. Not gracefully. He threw himself sideways in a diving roll that carved a trench in the desert floor, and Devastator's fist hit the ground where he had been standing and the impact crater was forty feet across and six feet deep. Rock and sand erupted in a geyser that momentarily blocked the sun.
Marcus-Optimus came out of the roll on his feet, running, straight at Devastator's right leg. The energon hooks deployed from both wrists with twin snikt sounds that were becoming his signature opening move, and he leaped.
He hit Devastator's shin at roughly knee height—thirty feet up—and the hooks bit into the armor with a shriek of metal that set every Autobot's audials ringing. They held. The hooks sank deep, finding purchase in the seams between armor plates, and suddenly Marcus-Optimus was climbing.
Climbing a hundred-and-twenty-foot gestalt combiner.
Climbing Devastator.
Each pull covered about ten feet—hook in, haul up, hook in, haul up—and the motion was savage and rhythmic and utterly, completely insane. Devastator felt him immediately—the giant roared and swatted at his own leg like a human brushing off an insect, but Marcus-Optimus was already past the knee, clinging to the thigh plating, his hooks tearing parallel grooves in Devastator's armor as he hauled himself upward with a speed and determination that defied his size.
"HE'S CLIMBING HIM!" Miko screamed from the safe zone, her phone capturing the scene in shaky, adrenaline-fueled footage that would eventually become the most-viewed video on the internet and crash YouTube's servers twice. "HE'S CLIMBING HIM LIKE A MOUNTAIN! OPTIMUS IS CLIMBING THE GIANT ROBOT! THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY ENTIRE—"
Devastator's hand came around. Massive. Inevitable. A wall of green metal descending toward Marcus-Optimus with the unstoppable force of a building collapsing, and for a moment—one frozen, crystalline moment—it looked like it was over.
Marcus-Optimus looked at the hand. Calculated. And deployed the flamethrowers.
Both forearms ignited simultaneously, producing twin jets of superheated plasma that hit Devastator's descending palm at point-blank range. The plasma—hot enough to melt Cybertronian armor, hot enough to turn sand into glass, hot enough to make the air itself scream—carved into the giant's palm plating like lasers through wax. Devastator shrieked—a sound that was less voice and more tectonic event, a howl of pain and fury that made the ground shake and the sky seem to darken—and his hand recoiled, curling inward, fingers clenching around the burns.
Marcus-Optimus kept climbing.
Past the hip. Miko had been right—the left hip joint, where the combination seam ran between Scavenger's and Long Haul's merged forms, had a gap in the armor that widened with each step Devastator took. It was narrow—maybe three feet across at its widest—but three feet was enough. Three feet was more than enough for what Marcus-Optimus had planned.
He reached the gap. Dug one hook into the edge of the armor plating. Swung his body around and looked inside.
The interior of Devastator was a nightmare of exposed mechanisms—cables thick as tree trunks, hydraulic pistons the size of telephone poles, energon conduits pulsing with the combined life-force of six Constructicons flowing through a jury-rigged neural network that was already straining under the load of maintaining combination. It was chaotic, organic-looking in the way that really complex machines sometimes were, and it was vulnerable.
Marcus-Optimus grinned behind his battle mask.
His left shin opened. The grenade launcher deployed—a compact, brutal mechanism that unfolded from his leg with a series of clicks that sounded, in the enclosed space of Devastator's hip joint, like a countdown.
He fired.
The grenade—a compact sphere of compressed energon explosive with a yield approximately equivalent to a thousand pounds of TNT—arced into Devastator's interior, bounced off a hydraulic piston, ricocheted off an energon conduit, and lodged itself neatly in the junction where three major neural pathways converged.
Marcus-Optimus retracted his hooks and jumped.
Backward.
Away from Devastator.
Into empty air, a hundred feet up, with nothing between him and the ground but gravity and a really bad time.
He activated the jet pack.
The thrust kicked in at fifty feet—a blue-white explosion of propulsion that arrested his fall with a g-force that would have turned a human into paste—and he rocketed backward, away from Devastator, putting distance between himself and the giant with the single-minded urgency of someone who had just put a grenade inside a target and wanted to be elsewhere when it went off.
Three seconds.
Two seconds.
One second.
The grenade detonated.
The explosion did not happen to Devastator. The explosion happened inside Devastator. There is a meaningful difference. When an explosion happens to you, it hits your armor, distributes force across your external plating, and—if the armor holds—does relatively superficial damage. When an explosion happens inside you, it has nowhere to go except through you, and every joule of energy that would have been wasted on the surrounding environment is instead redirected into your internal mechanisms with the focused precision of a demolition charge planted by an expert.
The left hip joint blew out.
Not cracked. Not damaged. Blew out. The entire junction between Scavenger and Long Haul disintegrated in a fireball of orange and white that erupted from Devastator's side like a volcano made of Constructicon, and the giant—already unsteady, already off-balance from the flamethrower burns on his hand—lurched.
His left leg, suddenly disconnected from his torso, went limp. Dead weight. Four hundred tons of combiner, balanced on one leg, with a flaming hole in his hip where the other leg used to connect.
Devastator swayed.
Devastator tilted.
Devastator fell.
The impact registered on seismographs in three states. A cloud of dust and debris erupted from the crash site that was visible from orbit. The sound was—well, the sound was what you'd expect when something the size of a building hit the ground at terminal velocity: a boom so deep and so loud that it bypassed hearing entirely and went straight to the bones.
From the safe zone, Miko's phone captured the entire sequence. She was screaming. Not words. Just sound. Pure, undiluted, transcendent sound that was equal parts terror and joy and the specific frequency that the human vocal apparatus produced when the brain had received more awesome input than it could process and had decided to simply broadcast the overflow.
Devastator hit the ground and came apart. The combination—already compromised by the destroyed hip joint—failed catastrophically. Six Constructicons, dazed, damaged, and deeply confused, tumbled out of the collapsing gestalt form like clowns falling out of a car, except the car was a hundred-and-twenty-foot war machine and the clowns were terrified.
They didn't get up.
Not because they couldn't—most of them were damaged but functional, capable of rising, capable of fighting, capable of re-combining if given enough time and motivation.
They didn't get up because Marcus-Optimus landed among them.
His jet pack cut out at ten feet. He dropped the remaining distance and hit the ground in a three-point landing—fist, knee, and foot—that cratered the earth and sent shockwaves rippling through the scattered Constructicons. He rose slowly. Deliberately. His battle mask was deployed. His optics were burning. His flamethrowers were still hot, wisps of superheated plasma curling from his forearm vents like smoke from a dragon's nostrils. His energon hooks were deployed and dripping with armor fragments from the climb. His grenade launcher was still extended from his shin, the barrel still warm.
He looked at Scrapper, who was lying on his back ten feet away, staring up at the Prime with an expression of such pure, unadulterated terror that it would have been funny if it weren't so pathologically earned.
"I gave you two options," Marcus-Optimus said.
Scrapper made a sound that was not a word.
"Leave. Or be disassembled."
Another non-word.
"Choose."
The Constructicons chose.
They ran.
All six of them. Transforming into their vehicle modes with a speed and desperation that suggested they had collectively decided that whatever Megatron was paying them was not enough, would never be enough, and that the concept of "combat bonus" did not adequately compensate for the experience of having a Prime climb you like a jungle gym and blow up your insides.
They were gone in thirty seconds. Six construction vehicles disappearing over the horizon in a cloud of dust and terror, leaving behind nothing but the crater where Devastator had fallen and the fading echoes of what could only be described as mechanical weeping.
Marcus-Optimus stood in the crater. He retracted his weapons. Retracted his battle mask. Rolled his shoulders. And said, to nobody in particular:
"Hmm."
From three hundred meters away, over the comm: "HMMMM?! THAT'S ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY?! YOU JUST CLIMBED A GIANT ROBOT, SET HIS HAND ON FIRE, SHOVED A GRENADE INSIDE HIM, AND WATCHED HIM FALL LIKE A BUILDING AND ALL YOU SAY IS 'HMMMM'?!?!"
"It was a good tactical exercise."
"A GOOD—Optimus, that was the single most INCREDIBLE thing that has EVER HAPPENED or WILL EVER HAPPEN and you're calling it a 'TACTICAL EXERCISE'—I can't—I literally CAN'T—I'm going to PASS OUT—"
"Please do not pass out, Miko."
"TOO LATE, EVERYTHING IS GOING SPARKLY—"
"Miko."
"—I'M FINE, I'M FINE, I JUST NEED A SECOND TO PROCESS THE FACT THAT MY FAVORITE PERSON IN THE UNIVERSE JUST SOLOED A COMBINER—"
From somewhere in the desert, faintly, carried on the wind: "She said 'favorite person'..." Bulkhead's voice, small and broken and drifting up from the trench where he had landed after being kicked. "She said 'favorite person in the universe'..."
"You're still my favorite Wrecker, Bulkhead!" Miko called.
"...That's not the same thing."
"It's adjacent!"
"IT'S NOT ADJACENT—"
"ENOUGH," Marcus-Optimus said, and his voice carried across the desert with the authority of a being who had just single-handedly defeated a gestalt combiner and was not in the mood for interpersonal drama. "All units, regroup at the ground bridge. Miko, stay in the safe zone until I come to get you. Bulkhead, get out of the trench. And someone please check on Cliffjumper."
A pause. Then Arcee's voice, carefully neutral: "Cliffjumper is fine. He watched the whole thing from behind a rock. He's... processing."
"Processing how?"
"He said, and I quote: 'He climbed it. He climbed the giant robot. He CLIMBED it. Like a WALL. And then he put a GRENADE inside it. INSIDE. And it EXPLODED. From the INSIDE. I need to sit down. I'm already sitting down. I need to sit down MORE.'"
"...Tell him to take his time."
But the day was not over.
Marcus-Optimus felt it before he saw it—a prickling at the edge of his sensor range, a familiar energy signature that made the Matrix pulse with warning and his combat subroutines snap back to full alert with the speed of a light switch being flipped.
Megatron.
He was here. Half a mile out, on a ridge overlooking the battlefield, standing in his robot mode with his arms crossed and his fusion cannon humming at idle power. He had been watching. Watching the Constructicons arrive, watching them combine, watching Devastator rise to his full terrible height—and watching Optimus Prime climb the colossus like an angry squirrel and blow it up from the inside.
Marcus-Optimus turned to face him.
Their optics met across the desert. Blue and red. Prime and warlord. The two poles of a four-million-year conflict, staring at each other across half a mile of scarred earth and the smoking crater where a gestalt combiner had learned a very painful lesson about the new order of things.
Megatron's expression was... interesting.
It was the expression of a chess master who had been playing the same game for four million years and had just watched his opponent flip the board over and set it on fire. There was shock in it—the residual, bone-deep shock of seeing someone do something that shouldn't be possible. There was anger—the familiar, comfortable anger that had sustained him through millennia of conflict, the anger that was more habit than emotion at this point.
But underneath both of those, visible only because Marcus-Optimus knew exactly what to look for, was something else entirely.
Calculation.
Megatron was running the numbers. Megatron was looking at what Optimus had just done and asking himself the question that every military commander asked when an enemy demonstrated a capability that exceeded all projections:
If he can do THAT, what ELSE can he do?
And what happens when he turns that capability on ME?
Marcus-Optimus watched Megatron's optics—watched the calculation happen in real time, watched the variables being assigned and the equations being solved—and then he did something very simple.
He looked at Megatron.
Just looked. No weapons deployed. No battle mask. No threatening posture or aggressive stance. Just a pair of blue optics, calm and steady, fixed on the Decepticon warlord with an intensity that communicated everything that needed to be communicated without a single word being spoken.
I see you.
I know you sent them.
I know you're testing me.
I told you what would happen.
I was not bluffing.
Megatron's optic twitched.
It was the right optic. A small, involuntary spasm of the optical mechanism—barely visible at this distance, but Marcus-Optimus's enhanced visual sensors caught it, logged it, and filed it away in the section of his processor labeled "things that bring me satisfaction."
The twitch happened again. Then again. Megatron's jaw tightened. His fusion cannon's idle hum increased fractionally—an unconscious response, a warrior's reflex, the equivalent of a human's hand drifting toward a weapon when they felt threatened.
But he didn't fire.
He didn't attack.
He didn't charge, or monologue, or deliver any of the grand pronouncements about power and destiny and the inevitable triumph of the Decepticon cause that had been his signature for four million years.
He looked at Marcus-Optimus. He looked at the crater. He looked at the trail of Constructicon tire tracks disappearing over the horizon. He looked back at Marcus-Optimus.
And Marcus-Optimus tilted his head. Just slightly. Just enough to be noticeable. The Cybertronian equivalent of raising an eyebrow.
Well? Are we doing this?
The question hung in the air between them—five hundred meters of desert and four million years of history and the simple, brutal mathematics of what had just happened to the last group of Decepticons who had come to this planet with hostile intent.
Megatron's optic twitched one more time.
Then he transformed.
It was fast. Faster than Marcus-Optimus had ever seen Megatron transform—a blur of shifting metal and reconfiguring plates that compressed the Lord of the Decepticons into his jet mode in under a second. His engines ignited with a roar that split the sky. His afterburners kicked in with a force that left scorch marks on the ridge where he'd been standing.
And he fled.
Not "withdrew." Not "retreated to reassess." Fled. Full afterburner. Maximum thrust. A silver streak climbing the sky at an angle that suggested he wanted to be elsewhere as quickly as physics would allow, which was very quickly indeed given that Cybertronian jet modes were capable of speeds that would make human fighter pilots weep.
Marcus-Optimus watched him go. Watched the contrail—twin lines of thrust exhaust scratching across the sky like claw marks on a blue canvas—until it faded. Until there was nothing left but the empty sky and the quiet desert and the distant sound of Miko screaming about YouTube subscribers.
He stood there for a long moment. Alone. In the crater. With the Matrix humming in his chest and the weapons humming in his frame and the memories of two lives humming in his processor.
"Ratchet," he said.
"What." Ratchet's voice was flat. Exhausted. The voice of a medic who had watched his leader climb a hundred-and-twenty-foot combiner and detonate it from the inside and was now seriously reconsidering his retirement timeline.
"Megatron was watching."
"I know. I had him on sensors."
"He ran."
A pause. Then, very quietly: "...I know."
"Good." Marcus-Optimus rolled his shoulders one more time. Something clicked in his right shin. He paused. Looked down. Ran a quick diagnostic.
"Ratchet?"
"WHAT."
"I think my right shin just—"
"DON'T."
"—generated a new—"
"DO NOT FINISH THAT SENTENCE."
"—weapon system."
"WHAT IS IT."
Marcus-Optimus ran the diagnostic again. Read the results. Read them a third time to make sure.
"...It appears to be a shotgun."
From the comm, three distinct sounds occurred simultaneously:
Ratchet screaming.
Miko cheering.
And, very faintly, from the direction of Bulkhead's trench, the sound of a Wrecker quietly giving up on everything.
Aboard the Nemesis...
Megatron sat in his throne room. The lights were dim. The Dark Energon shard pulsed in its containment unit. Soundwave stood at his station, silent, monitoring, recording.
Always recording.
Megatron had not spoken since returning from the desert. He had walked from the flight deck to the throne room in silence, his footsteps echoing through the corridors with a heaviness that had nothing to do with physical weight. Vehicons had pressed themselves against the walls as he passed, their basic survival instincts identifying something in their leader's bearing that said do not interact.
He sat in his throne. He stared at nothing.
He replayed the scene in his processor. Optimus climbing Devastator. The flamethrowers. The grenade. The fall. The crater. And then—worst of all, most haunting of all—the look.
That look.
Those blue optics, calm and steady, across five hundred meters of desert, asking a question that had no good answer: Well? Are we doing this?
And Megatron—Lord of the Decepticons, Master of Dark Energon, the Slag-Maker of Kaon, the mech who had toppled civilizations and ground worlds to dust and faced down Primes and gods and won—had answered that question by running away.
He had run away.
From Optimus Prime.
The thought was a wound. Not a physical wound—Megatron had plenty of those, and they were irrelevant—but a conceptual wound, a wound to his identity, to his sense of self, to the fundamental narrative that had sustained him for four million years: I am stronger. I am more ruthless. I am willing to do what Optimus will not.
But Optimus was willing now.
Optimus had torn off a Seeker's wing and dragged his face through a ground bridge. Optimus had climbed a combiner and detonated it from inside. Optimus had looked at Megatron across a battlefield and silently asked are you sure you want to do this? and Megatron's processor had answered no before his pride could intervene.
The rules. The unspoken rules. The rules that had governed the war since the beginning. Named mechs don't destroy named mechs. The game continues. The cycle repeats. Push. Pull. Speech. Battle. Retreat. Return.
Optimus had shattered those rules. Completely. Irrevocably. He had looked at the game and said I'm not playing anymore, and the terrifying implication of that statement was that if the game was over, then the next time they met, it wouldn't be a battle.
It would be a conclusion.
"Soundwave," Megatron said.
Soundwave turned.
"What is our current Vehicon complement?"
Soundwave displayed the number. It was lower than it had been a week ago. Significantly lower. The Vehicon union—yes, there was a Vehicon union now, and yes, its existence was entirely Optimus Prime's fault—had submitted fourteen formal grievances, three petitions for hazard pay, and one request for a transfer to "literally any other war." Recruitment was at an all-time low. Morale was—
Soundwave displayed the morale assessment.
It was a graph. The graph went down. Not gradually. Vertically. The line representing Vehicon morale looked like a cliff face, and at the bottom of the cliff was a small text label that read "CURRENT STATUS: WOULD RATHER FIGHT UNICRON."
Megatron stared at the graph.
"And the Constructicons?"
Soundwave played back a recording. It was audio only—Scrapper's voice, transmitted from the Constructicons' ship as they fled Earth's orbit at maximum speed: "FORGET THE BOUNTY! FORGET MEGATRON! FORGET THE WHOLE FRAGGING WAR! I'M GOING TO A NICE QUIET GALAXY WHERE PRIMES DON'T CLIMB YOU AND PUT GRENADES IN YOUR JOINTS! DEVASTATOR IS RETIRED! WE'RE ALL RETIRED! SOMEONE FIND ME A PLANET WITH NO ROBOTS ON IT!"
The recording ended.
Megatron sat in silence.
"Soundwave."
Soundwave turned again.
"Has Starscream been... repaired?"
Soundwave displayed Knockout's medical report. It was long. It was detailed. It used the word "catastrophic" seventeen times. The summary was: Starscream was alive. Barely. His face had been reconstructed from scratch using whatever spare parts Knockout could find, and the result was... functional, but not aesthetically similar to the original. Starscream had not yet seen his new face. Knockout was dreading the moment when he did.
"Tell Knockout to... take his time," Megatron said. "There is no rush."
Because the longer Starscream was in medical, the longer Megatron didn't have to explain to him why the mech who had done this to him was still alive. And the answer to that question—because I'm afraid to fight him—was not one that the Lord of the Decepticons was prepared to say out loud.
Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
He sat in his throne. The Dark Energon pulsed. The ship hummed. The war continued.
But something had changed. Something fundamental, something structural, something that went deeper than tactics or strategy or the balance of power.
For four million years, the war had been a game. A terrible game, a devastating game, a game that had cost more lives than any being could count—but a game nonetheless, with rules and patterns and a rhythm that both sides understood.
The game was over.
And Megatron didn't know what came next.
He went to his quarters that night. He tried to recharge. He dreamed of blue optics and a Prime climbing his body with hooks and the sound of a grenade being loaded and a voice that said, very quietly, well? Are we doing this?
He woke up screaming again.
Soundwave recorded it.
The recording was labeled: "MEGATRON_NIGHTMARE_FILE_023.wav"
File twenty-three. Out of what would eventually be several hundred.
It was, Soundwave reflected with the closest thing to an emotion that Soundwave was capable of producing, going to be a very long war.
Or a very short one.
In the Realm of the Primes...
The Thirteen watched. Prima sat on the floor. Vector Prime checked his temporal analysis. Solus Prime examined weapon schematics. Megatronus filled his fifth datapad.
"He climbed a combiner," Megatronus said, his voice carrying the tone of someone who had been converted to a new religion and was still in the evangelical phase. "He climbed a combiner and detonated it from the inside."
"We SAW, Megatronus."
"I'm going to need a sixth datapad."
"You've written more notes about him than Alpha Trion has written about the ENTIRETY OF CYBERTRONIAN HISTORY."
"Alpha Trion's history doesn't include a Prime who uses a combiner as a CLIMBING WALL. My notes are MORE INTERESTING."
"I resent that," Alpha Trion said.
"Your history is four million years of 'and then they fought and then they talked and then they fought again.' MY notes are about a Prime who soloed a gestalt with a grenade launcher IN HIS SHIN. Tell me which is more compelling."
"..."
"THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT."
Prima sighed from the floor. "The shotgun. He has a shotgun now. In his other shin."
"Yes," Vector Prime confirmed.
"What's next? A cannon in his elbow? A missile silo in his chest? A SWORD in his—"
"We discussed the spine sword."
"That was HYPOTHETICAL."
"Not anymore."
"I—" Prima stopped. Took a breath. Or the metaphysical equivalent of a breath, since ascended beings didn't technically breathe. "Fine. Fine. He has a shotgun. He has a grenade launcher. He has flamethrowers and hooks and a jet pack and an axe and enough guns to supply a small army. And he just climbed a combiner and blew it up from the inside and made Megatron run away."
"Yes."
"And the human girl on his shoulder provided the tactical analysis that made it possible."
"Yes."
"...I like her."
Everyone stared at Prima.
"What? She's resourceful. And she has good instincts. The hip joint observation was excellent."
"She also has a fan page about his optic twitching," Nexus Prime pointed out.
"That is... less admirable. But still indicative of strong observational skills."
Megatronus looked up from his sixth datapad. "For the record: I'm PROUD of him. I said it. I'm not taking it back. He is the greatest Prime who has ever lived, and I include MYSELF in that assessment, which is saying something because I am MAGNIFICENT."
"You FELL from grace," Alpha Trion pointed out. "You betrayed the Thirteen. You became the template for a four-million-year war."
"Yes, and he's ENDING that war, which means my legacy is being REDEEMED, which means I have EVERY RIGHT to be proud." He paused. "Also, the shotgun is a nice touch."
"The shotgun is CONCERNING."
"The shotgun is EFFICIENT. Short-range. High-spread. Perfect for close-quarters combiner-climbing scenarios. The Matrix knows what it's doing."
"Does it? Does the MATRIX know what it's doing? Because from where I'm sitting—ON THE FLOOR—it looks like the Matrix has decided that its ideal bearer is a walking weapons factory with the combat philosophy of a berserker and the emotional support of a TEENAGER WITH A PHONE."
"Yes," Megatronus said.
"...Yes?"
"Yes. That is exactly what the Matrix has decided. And it is RIGHT."
Prima stared at Megatronus. Megatronus stared back. Somewhere in the background, Solus Prime was sketching improvements to the shotgun design with the focused enthusiasm of a craftsman who had found a project worth her time.
"I need to lie down," Prima said.
"You're already on the floor."
"Then I need to lie down MORE."
He lay down. On the floor. Of the Realm of the Primes. The most dignified place in all of existence.
And above him, the viewing portal showed Optimus Prime standing in a crater, his weapons humming, his Matrix singing, his team alive, his planet safe, and a fifteen-year-old girl on his shoulder asking if the shotgun could "do buckshot, because buckshot would be SO metal."
The shotgun could, in fact, do buckshot.
Everything was exactly as the Matrix intended.
END OF CHAPTER 3
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
DEVASTATOR. CLIMBING. GRENADE. INSIDE. BOOM.
That's it. That's the chapter summary. If you need more context than that, I genuinely don't know what to tell you.
Look, some of you in the comments have been asking "is this going to escalate?" and the answer is YES, OBVIOUSLY, have you been READING? We went from face-crushing in chapter one to face-GRINDING in chapter two to COMBINER-CLIMBING in chapter three. The escalation curve on this fic looks like a Saturn V launch trajectory. We are going UP. We are going up FAST. And we are NOT coming back down.
Miko is now functioning as Optimus's tactical advisor and I did NOT plan this but it WORKS because Miko is a fifteen-year-old who has been watching Optimus fight for a week straight and has developed the kind of pattern-recognition skills that usually require a military academy education and several years of combat experience. She watches engineering YouTube. She studies fight footage. She identified a structural weakness in a gestalt combiner's transformation seam IN REAL TIME while filming vertically on her phone. She is a PRODIGY of violence appreciation and I will not apologize for this.
Bulkhead update: Heard Miko say "favorite person in the universe." Has not recovered. May never recover. Current emotional state: "sitting in a trench contemplating the void." Wrecking ball remains unused and unloved.
Cliffjumper update: Was behind a rock for the entire Devastator fight. Came out afterward. Saw the crater. Went back behind the rock. Is currently still behind the rock. Arcee brought him a blanket.
Megatron update: Ran away. Actually physically TRANSFORMED AND RAN AWAY from Optimus Prime. Nightmare file count: 23 and climbing. Vehicon union has expanded to include a dental plan and a formal request for "any assignment that doesn't involve being within ten miles of the Autobot leader."
The Primes update: Prima is on the floor. Megatronus has filled six datapads. Solus Prime is designing an improved shotgun. Alpha Trion is being bullied. Everything is FINE.
Next chapter: Optimus discovers what Unicron is. Optimus discovers that the planet he has sworn to protect IS Unicron. Optimus has to process the fact that he is standing on a god of destruction.
Optimus does not process this well.
Nobody processes this well.
Especially not Megatron, who is about to learn that there is something on this planet scarier than Optimus Prime.
And then Optimus Prime is going to fight THAT, too.
Because of COURSE he is.
AuthorDude
P.S. - The weapons manifestation count is now: two energon swords, one battle axe, one barrage cannon, one sword/shield combo, two rotary energon cannons, energon hooks, a jet pack, two missile launchers, a chest-mounted particle beam cannon, combat teeth (yes, the teeth count), two flamethrowers, a grenade launcher, and a shotgun. If you're keeping score at home, that's eighteen distinct weapons systems in one frame. The average Autobot has two. Maybe three.
Ratchet has started a spreadsheet. He updates it every time something new appears. The spreadsheet has seventeen entries. The eighteenth entry just says "I QUIT" in red text.
He has not quit.
He will not quit.
But the spreadsheet remains as a monument to his suffering.