AllSpark energy. The lifeblood of the Transformers universe — the spark that turned dead metal into living machines. A force so powerful it was practically divine, capable of birthing an entire civilization of mechanical beings from nothing.
Kade didn't have that kind of power. Not yet.
But what he did have was enough.
The moment his energy poured into the wrecked SUV, changes began happening at a scale no human eye could follow. Deep in the vehicle's skeleton, ordinary steel atoms shuddered, split, and reformed — their crystalline structures rewriting themselves into something that had never existed on Earth. The dead metal became something alive. Something with potential.
The engine turned over.
Not a sputter. Not a cough. A full-throated roar that shook sand loose from the cliff face behind it. The remaining headlight — the right one, the only one that wasn't smashed — flickered on and swiveled toward Kade like an eye focusing on a familiar face.
"What the — " One of the insurgents stumbled backward, rifle half-raised.
None of them knew the SUV's fuel tank had been blown open. None of them knew the engine block was cracked in three places. They just knew that a vehicle which should have been scrap metal was suddenly, impossibly, running.
Kade was faster than all of them. He grabbed the warped window frame, vaulted through the shattered windshield, and threw himself into the mangled cabin. A half-second later, automatic fire raked across the SUV's exterior — sparks flying, rounds pinging off metal that was suddenly a lot harder than factory steel.
"Oh, brilliant!" An electronic voice erupted from the dashboard — bright, loud, deeply offended. "Not even thirty seconds old and you lot are already shooting at me? Unbelievable! Absolutely no manners! You people are the worst — the absolute bottom of the barrel — the skid marks on the underpants of society!"
The engine screamed. The SUV lurched forward like a bull out of a gate, accelerating with a violence that had no business coming from a vehicle with two blown tires and half an axle. In the space of ten meters it hit a hundred kilometers an hour and plowed straight through three insurgents who never had a chance to dive clear.
The impact was... decisive.
The SUV whipped into a handbrake turn that sprayed sand thirty feet into the air, then sideswiped two more insurgents with its passenger door — which swung open at the last second like a flyswatter and launched both men tumbling across the desert floor.
"And the crowd goes wild!" The electronic voice switched to a pitch-perfect imitation of a stadium announcer. Crowd noise and all.
Inside the cabin, Kade braced against the roll cage with one hand and reached through the smashed rear window with the other. His fingers closed around the stock of a fallen AK-47 — still warm from its previous owner. He racked the charging handle by feel, shouldered the weapon through the side window, and started shooting.
Three-round bursts. Controlled. Each one aimed.
A head snapped back. A body folded. Another dropped mid-stride.
"Not bad," Kade muttered, already shifting to the next target. "Barrel's shot to hell, though."
The AK's accuracy was garbage — the insurgents clearly hadn't cleaned the thing in months. Inside twenty meters he could make it work. Beyond that, it was a coin flip. But twenty meters was enough when your ride was doing the heavy lifting.
The insurgent leader had done the math faster than his men. While the SUV was tearing through his people from the front, he'd circled around to the rear — probably figured a vehicle couldn't see behind itself.
He figured wrong.
"Oi! Yeah, you, mate — behind ya!" The SUV's voice chirped in a broad, cheerful tone that sounded like it had learned English from a Crocodile Dundee marathon. Then it switched to something that was either badly mangled Pashto or complete gibberish, rattled it off at machine-gun speed, and slammed into reverse.
The leader had no idea what had just been said. That was fine. The bumper hitting him at highway speed communicated the message clearly enough. He flew backward, ragdolling through the air, and landed — with the kind of cosmic irony that felt scripted — directly on top of the remains of the captive his dogs had killed.
Fresh blood. Fresh meat. The dogs didn't recognize their master's scent through all the gore.
Kade heard the screaming start and didn't feel a single thing about it.
By now, half the insurgents were dead or broken. The survivors had figured out that rifles weren't cutting it, and someone was scrambling for an RPG launcher from the back of one of the trucks. Then another. Two men, two launchers, loading with the frantic speed of people who knew they were next.
Kade switched to single shots. Breathe. Squeeze.
The first man's head snapped sideways before his finger found the trigger. The second caught a round through the eye socket a half-second later.
But there was a third.
Kade saw the flash before he heard the sound — the distinctive whoosh-bang of a rocket-propelled grenade leaving the tube. The warhead was already in the air, spiraling toward the SUV on a thin trail of white smoke.
He didn't have the marksmanship to shoot an RPG out of the air. Not with this piece of junk AK.
But the SUV did something impossible.
Its left-side wheels punched downward with hydraulic force, and the entire vehicle tipped — no, cartwheeled — into a full three-sixty lateral roll. The RPG streaked through the space where the cabin had been a fraction of a second earlier, close enough that Kade felt the heat on his face through the broken window, and detonated against the cliff behind them in a shower of rock and fire.
The SUV landed right-side up, skidding, and its crumpled hood panels flew open like jaws. A spray of bolts, brackets, and engine components erupted outward in a shotgun blast of shrapnel that shredded the RPG shooter where he stood.
"Same trick doesn't work twice, genius!" the SUV crowed. "Haven't you people ever watched anything?"
That broke them.
The remaining insurgents — five, maybe six — turned and ran for the intact vehicles. Kade leaned out and started picking them off, but the AK's accuracy betrayed him at range. He dropped three more before the last survivors piled into a truck and floored it toward the horizon, fishtailing through the sand.
Kade watched the dust trail shrink. "Bloody hell. Give me an Austeyr and they wouldn't have made it past fifty meters."
He climbed out of the wreck and stood in the settling dust, surrounded by bodies and burning vehicles. The silence after combat always felt the same — too big, too sudden, like the world hadn't caught up yet.
He looked back at the SUV. Something pulled at the edge of his awareness — a connection, warm and electric, like a second heartbeat running parallel to his own.
"So that's what the AllSpark does," he said quietly.
As if responding to his attention, the SUV began to change.
Metal shrieked and groaned. Panels split along invisible seams, folding and rotating with mechanical precision. The chassis telescoped upward, the axles became legs, the doors became arms, and the engine block buried itself deep inside a torso that was still assembling itself. In five seconds flat, the ruined SUV had become something else entirely.
A robot. Five meters tall, silver-gray, broad-shouldered. Its right arm hung limp — the damage from the original RPG hit had carried over, leaving a visible gap in the shoulder plating. But the rest of it was intact, solid, and very much awake.
Two blue optical sensors locked onto Kade from above.
The robot snapped to attention and saluted with its working arm.
"Commander, sir! Striker Blitz, reporting for duty!" The voice was the same one from the dashboard — loud, eager, practically vibrating with enthusiasm. "Designation: assault and forward combat operations. Loyalty: exclusively to you, Commander. I am not affiliated with any Autobot or Decepticon faction — I serve under your direct command and yours alone."
Kade stared up at five meters of sentient metal standing at parade rest in the Afghan desert.
"Right," he said. "Good to know."
"Now — regarding our unit designation!" Blitz barreled on without pausing. "I've been thinking about this, and I strongly recommend we adopt a name that commands respect. Something like 'The Thunder Legion.' Or 'Omega Strike Force.' Or — oh! — 'The Invincible Mechanical Gods of —'"
"Blitz."
"Sir?"
"Shut up."
"Yes, Commander." Blitz saluted again, snapped back into vehicle form with a rapid-fire clack-clack-clack of transforming plates, and sat there silently. Engine idling. Headlight watching Kade like an obedient dog waiting for its next command.
Kade didn't care about team names. This wasn't some anime where shouting your attack gave it extra power. Even if he called his outfit the Thanos Fan Club, it wouldn't make a difference. What mattered — the only thing that mattered — was whether Blitz and whatever came after him would be enough to keep Kade alive in a world where gods walked the earth and aliens fell from the sky.
He turned away from Blitz and looked across the aftermath.
The other captives were huddled near the cave entrance, wide-eyed and trembling. Most of them looked like they'd just watched something from a fever dream and weren't sure they were awake yet.
Only one person wasn't falling apart.
The doctor — Yinsen, Kade remembered now — was crouched beside a wounded captive, pressing a torn strip of fabric against a bleeding leg wound. Calm hands. Focused eyes. He hadn't even glanced at Blitz.
Good man, Kade thought. A genuinely good man.
And then, behind him, a groan. Fabric rustling. A sharp intake of breath followed by a hiss of pain.
Kade turned.
Tony Stark was sitting up on the stretcher, one hand braced against the electromagnet on his chest, blinking at the carnage around him like a man who'd woken up in someone else's nightmare.
PLz Throw Powerstones.