Alex returned to where Cybertron should have been and found only absence.
The battleship dropped out of folded space into a grave of empty coordinates, sensors sweeping in widening arcs. No planetary mass. No Energon signatures. No machine-song echoing through the void. Just the cold, indifferent dark where a world had once existed.
Gear confirmed it a second later. Cybertron is no longer present. Planetary displacement detected. Method consistent with Quintesson level spatial manipulation.
Alex closed his eyes for a single breath.
So she moved it.
Megatron's memories aligned instantly, long-buried contingencies surfacing now that Alex understood what to look for. Quintessa had never intended Cybertron to remain where it was. The planet had always been a vessel, a shell awaiting a greater power source.
Unicron.
Earth.
Alex opened a new window of reality and looked homeward.
The battleship folded space again.
When it arrived above Earth, the planet was already screaming.
From orbit, Alex saw it clearly. Massive fault lines spiderwebbed across continents and oceans alike, glowing with infernal energy. The planet's magnetic field fluctuated violently. Deep within the core, something ancient stirred, restrained only by mechanisms no longer designed to hold it.
Unicron was awakening.
And Cybertron had been chained to him like a parasite.
Alex descended without ceremony, his ship tearing through atmosphere and cloud as if the air itself had decided to get out of the way. He aimed straight for the reactor chamber beneath Stonehenge, the scar in the world where Quintessa had bound Cybertron's core to Earth's.
The chamber was chaos when he arrived.
Transformers fought desperately, Autobots and Decepticons alike caught in a conflict that no longer made sense to them. Humans ran. Sirens wailed. Above it all stood Quintessa, radiant and terrible, her staff blazing with stolen authority, her voice echoing through stone and metal.
Cybertron shall be reborn, she proclaimed, and Unicron shall die to fuel it.
Alex landed in the center of the chamber.
The impact cracked stone and sent a shockwave through every combatant present. He rose slowly, robes untouched, Infinity Stones dim but present, his eyes fixed on Quintessa.
This ends now, he said.
She turned, recognition blooming into fury. You are an aberration. A thief of divine engines. You cannot command what we created.
Alex raised his hand.
The AllSpark answered.
Across Earth, across space, across every battlefield and hiding place, Cybertronian sparks felt the call. It was not forceful. It was absolute.
Return.
Transformers froze mid-motion. Weapons dropped. Eyes dimmed. One by one, they collapsed where they stood as their sparks were pulled free, not destroyed, not erased, but recalled into the AllSpark's embrace.
The war ended in a heartbeat.
Quintessa screamed.
You dare strip them from existence?
Alex did not look away. I am not stripping them. I am saving them from you.
The Mind Stone ignited.
Invisible force wrapped around Quintessa, tearing into her consciousness. Alex did not attack her body. He went for what mattered. Authority. Control. The scaffolding of dominance she had built atop Cybertronian creation.
Her power unraveled under his touch.
No, she hissed, struggling. We are their gods.
You were their jailers, Alex replied.
He stripped her clean.
Her connection to the AllSpark shattered. Her command over Cybertron's systems evaporated. The staff in her hands flickered wildly, its energy unstable, no longer recognizing her as a valid wielder.
She fell to her knees, reduced to what she had always been beneath the pretense of divinity.
Human voices cut through the moment.
Cade Yeager stood near the edge of the chamber, weapon lowered, staring at Alex with a mix of fear and awe. Vivian Wembley-Lennox stepped forward cautiously, eyes locked on the staff.
Who are you? Cade demanded. What's your purpose?
Alex turned his head slightly. To control Cybertron.
His battleship descended then, tearing through the cavern ceiling as if it were paper. Massive shields flared into existence around the chamber just as warning sirens shifted pitch.
Nuclear launch detected, Gear reported calmly. Multiple warheads inbound.
Alex did not look up.
The warheads struck the shields seconds later, detonations blooming like artificial suns. The chamber shook, but the barrier held, absorbing annihilation as if it were rain.
Quintessa looked up in horror.
This was never your world to end, Alex said.
He raised the AllSpark.
Unicron roared.
The planet convulsed as Alex drove the Cube's power downward, threading it through Quintessa's failed binding mechanisms and into Unicron's core. He did not destroy the ancient entity.
He siphoned it.
Power flowed upward in a torrent that made reality groan. Energy meant to unmake galaxies was redirected, refined, contained. The Cybertronian Seeds activated in response, unfolding into vast frameworks of living metal that began knitting together a new planetary shell around the AllSpark.
Cybertron was being reborn.
Cade ran toward Alex in desperation, shouting something Alex did not hear. Nano-tentacles snapped outward from Alex's armor, striking Cade mid-stride and hurling him backward into rubble without killing him.
Vivian moved faster, desperation overriding reason. She lunged for the staff, grasping it with both hands.
The energy did not recognize her.
There was no scream.
She was vaporized instantly, her form erased by power that obeyed no human will.
Quintessa watched it all in silence, broken.
Cybertron rose.
But it was not the world that had been lost.
Massive forges the size of continents formed first, followed by layered laboratories, shipyards, and weapon arrays integrated directly into the planetary crust. Towers of alloy and light spiraled outward, not in organic sprawl, but in precise, purposeful geometry.
This Cybertron was a fortress.
A factory.
A god-engine.
It was built in Alex's image, not physically, but philosophically. Order. Control. Preparedness at any cost.
As Unicron's energy was drained, Earth began to die.
The planet cracked from within, tectonic plates collapsing inward as the ancient being's presence vanished. Oceans receded. The sky fractured. Gravity destabilized.
Alex did not hesitate.
Cybertron fully formed around the AllSpark and folded space in a single, titanic movement, vanishing from Earth's orbit as the planet imploded behind it.
The explosion was visible from halfway across the system.
Alex did not watch.
He turned his attention outward as Cybertron reappeared in deep space, stabilized by the energy it had stolen. A nearby star flared as Alex deployed the Sun Harvester, siphoning stellar plasma to feed the planet's newborn systems.
Cybertron drank deeply.
Power levels stabilized. Production lines activated. Planetary shields locked into place.
Alex stood at the heart of it all, the AllSpark hovering before him, obedient and contained.
Set course for home, he said.
Gear acknowledged, her voice resonating through a world that now answered only to him.
Cybertron folded space again, leaving behind a universe that would spend millennia trying to understand what had just happened.
Alex Price returned to the Marvel universe not as a visitor or a scavenger.
But as the master of a living planet.
And the universal war was no longer a question of survival.
It was a question of timing.