The last thing Marcus Chen remembered about his old life was the semi-truck.
Which was ironic, really. Cosmically, hilariously, stupidly ironic. Because Marcus Chen—age twenty-seven, barista by day, Transformers wiki editor by night, owner of every single Bayverse Optimus Prime action figure ever manufactured including the rare Japanese import of the Age of Extinction Leader Class with die-cast metal parts—had spent his entire adult life watching a fictional semi-truck transform into a thirty-foot-tall alien robot warrior and brutally dismantle his enemies with an arsenal that would make the entire United States military weep with inadequacy.
And then an actual semi-truck ran a red light on Fifth and Broadway and turned him into a memory.
He didn't even get to finish his coffee.
One moment he was crossing the street, grande mocha in hand, earbuds in, listening to Steve Jablonsky's "Arrival to Earth" from the 2007 Transformers soundtrack because he was that guy, and the next moment there was a horn, a flash of chrome grille, and then—
Nothing.
Well, not nothing nothing. That would have been too simple. That would have been too clean, too final, too merciful for whatever cosmic entity apparently had both a sense of humor and an encyclopedic knowledge of the Transformers franchise.
No, what happened instead was that Marcus Chen opened his eyes—or rather, his optics—and found himself staring at a ceiling made of rough-hewn rock, illuminated by the soft ambient glow of energon-powered lighting systems, and his first coherent thought was: Why can I identify the specific electromagnetic frequency of the light source currently hitting my retinas?
His second coherent thought was: Why am I thinking about electromagnetic frequencies?
His third coherent thought was: Why does everything feel... heavy? And metal? And WHY CAN I FEEL MY CHASSIS—
He sat up.
Or rather, he lurched up, because his body was approximately twenty-eight feet tall and weighed several tons and was made entirely of living metal alloy and he had absolutely no idea how to operate it, so what was supposed to be a smooth sitting motion turned into a catastrophic full-body convulsion that sent him rolling off of what he dimly recognized as a medical berth and crashing onto the floor of what was unmistakably, undeniably, impossibly the Autobot base from Transformers Prime.
He knew it was the Autobot base from Transformers Prime because he had spent an embarrassing number of hours studying screenshots of the show's backgrounds for a fan wiki article about Autobot architecture. He recognized the curved walls. He recognized the computer terminals. He recognized the ground bridge controls. He recognized everything, and the recognition hit him like—well, like a semi-truck, because apparently the universe had committed to a theme.
"Optimus!"
The voice came from somewhere to his left. It was high-pitched, concerned, and immediately recognizable to anyone who had watched all three seasons of Transformers Prime, the Predacons Rising movie, and the subsequent Robots in Disguise sequel series.
Ratchet.
Marcus—Optimus?—Marcus—turned his head toward the voice and saw a white-and-orange Autobot rushing toward him with the harried expression of a doctor whose most important patient had just face-planted onto the floor, and his brain—processor—did something very complicated involving the simultaneous integration of two complete sets of memories, one belonging to a twenty-seven-year-old human coffee enthusiast from Portland, Oregon, and the other belonging to the last Prime of Cybertron, leader of the Autobots, veteran of a four-million-year civil war, and bearer of the Matrix of Leadership.
It was, to put it mildly, a lot.
The Marcus memories were relatively straightforward: childhood, school, college dropout, series of dead-end jobs, an apartment full of Transformers merchandise, a cat named Megatron (because he thought it was funny), an encyclopedic knowledge of every continuity in the Transformers franchise with a particular fondness for the Bayverse films despite their many, many flaws, and a death-by-irony that he was still processing.
The Optimus memories were... less straightforward.
Four million years of war. Four million years of watching friends die. Four million years of making impossible choices and bearing impossible burdens and fighting the same enemy over and over and over again across a galaxy that seemed determined to make him suffer for the crime of believing that freedom was the right of all sentient beings. Four million years of restraint, of mercy, of holding back, of being the better bot, of letting Megatron walk away because maybe this time he would change, maybe this time the cycle would break, maybe this time—
And then there were the other memories. The ones that weren't from this universe's Optimus Prime. The ones that had apparently hitched a ride with Marcus's consciousness and were now seamlessly integrating themselves into his neural architecture like malware with a really good user interface.
These were the memories of Bayverse Optimus Prime.
The Optimus who had torn Bonecrusher's head off on a freeway.
The Optimus who had shoved a blade through Grindor's skull and twisted.
The Optimus who had ripped Megatron's face apart with his bare hands and a pair of energon hooks.
The Optimus who had pulled The Fallen's spark out of his chest and crushed it.
The Optimus who had executed Sentinel Prime point-blank after Sentinel had begged for mercy.
The Optimus who had decapitated Megatron with a battle axe while Megatron was trying to surrender.
The Optimus who looked at four million years of war and said, "You know what? I'm done being nice."
The Optimus who rode a giant robot dinosaur into battle while dual-wielding a sword and a shield.
That Optimus.
Marcus—Optimus—whatever he was now—felt those memories settle into his processor like molten metal being poured into a mold, and something fundamental shifted in the core of his being. Something that had been soft and patient and merciful looked at four million years of the same war against the same enemy and said, very quietly, No more.
"Optimus, can you hear me? How many digits am I holding up?"
Ratchet was kneeling beside him, running a medical scanner over his frame, and Marcus-Optimus realized he should probably respond before the medic had a spark attack.
He opened his mouth. His vocalizer activated. And the voice that came out was deep, resonant, and carried the unmistakable timbre of Peter Cullen's vocal performance filtered through what sounded suspiciously like a bass amplifier hooked up to a subwoofer.
"I am... fine, old friend."
Holy scrap, I sound amazing.
Ratchet did not look convinced. "You collapsed during your patrol. Bumblebee had to carry you back through the ground bridge. You've been unconscious for six hours. You are the opposite of fine."
"I assure you, Ratchet, I am—" He paused. Something was different. He looked down at his hands. They were blue. They were metallic. They were his. And yet, they weren't quite the hands he expected. They were the hands of TFP Optimus—sleek, streamlined, designed for a children's television show with Y-7 violence ratings—but as he flexed his fingers, he could feel things hidden beneath the plating. Mechanisms. Systems. Weapons.
So many weapons.
He ran a quick internal diagnostic, and what came back made his optics widen fractionally behind his faceplate—which was currently retracted, because TFP Optimus had a mouth and apparently the cosmic entity responsible for his situation thought that was important for emotional expression.
His frame was a TFP Optimus shell.
But inside that shell...
Inside that shell was a weapons loadout that would have made the entire Decepticon armada collectively void their tanks in terror.
He had his standard ion blaster. That was normal. Every version of Optimus had a gun. Fine. Expected. Boring.
He also had:
Two retractable energon swords (standard TFP issue, mounted in both forearms)One Bayverse-style energon battle axe (collapsed and stored along his spinal strut)One Bayverse-style barrage cannon (folded into his right forearm beneath the sword mechanism)One Age of Extinction-style sword/shield combination (compressed into his left forearm beneath the other sword mechanism)Two rotary energon cannons (one in each shoulder pauldron, because apparently symmetry mattered)A pair of retractable energon hooks (the face-ripping kind, stored in both wrists)A jet pack (because Last Knight Optimus had a jet pack and the cosmic entity was thorough)A pair of forearm-mounted missile launchers (twelve missiles each, micro-warhead, heat-seeking)A chest-mounted particle beam cannon (because why not)And, most disturbingly, a set of teeth in his faceplate that could deploy on command and were apparently sharp enough to bite through Cybertronian armor.
He was, in essence, a walking armory wrapped in a children's cartoon character's body, and the sheer wrongness of the combination was enough to make him bark out a laugh that startled Ratchet so badly the medic dropped his scanner.
"Optimus? Did you just... laugh?"
"Forgive me, Ratchet. I was simply... reflecting on the nature of existence."
Ratchet stared at him with an expression that said he was seriously considering a full cortical diagnostic. "You hit your head, didn't you? When you fell? I knew I should have padded the patrol routes—"
"I did not hit my head." Marcus-Optimus rose to his full height, and the motion was smooth this time, effortless, as if his new body had decided to start cooperating now that he'd had a moment to integrate. He rolled his shoulders. Hydraulics hissed. Something in his chest hummed with barely contained power, and he recognized it as the Matrix of Leadership, which was apparently real and currently residing in his chest cavity and pulsing with a warm, ancient energy that tasted like starlight and responsibility.
He was Optimus Prime.
He was actually Optimus Prime.
Not the nice one.
Oh no.
He took a moment to access his chronological databanks, cross-referencing his memories of the show with his current timeline position, and what he found made every combat subroutine he possessed snap to full alert simultaneously.
It was early. Very early. The show hadn't started yet—not quite. The Autobots were already on Earth. Jack, Miko, and Raf hadn't been found yet. Cliffjumper was still alive.
Cliffjumper was still alive.
And if his timeline calculations were correct, the events of the pilot episode—"Darkness Rising"—were approximately seventy-two hours away, which meant that Cliffjumper had seventy-two hours before Starscream stabbed him through the chest with an energon prod and Megatron used Dark Energon to resurrect his corpse as a mindless Terrorcon.
In the show, Optimus had reacted to Cliffjumper's death with dignified grief. A moment of silence. A speech about sacrifice. The kind of response you'd expect from a leader on a TV-Y7 show where nobody really died permanently and violence was sanitized and the good guys always held back because the network censors said so.
Marcus-Optimus looked at the memory of Cliffjumper's death and felt something ignite in his spark that was decidedly not TV-Y7.
It was hot. It was bright. It was the kind of fury that four million years of war had compressed into a diamond-hard core of absolute, unrelenting, savage protectiveness, and it had a very simple message:
Nobody dies on my watch. Not this time. Not EVER.
"Ratchet," he said, and his voice had dropped an octave without him meaning it to. The medic looked up. "What is the current status of all Autobot field operatives?"
Ratchet blinked. "They're all on patrol. Arcee is running the northern corridor, Bumblebee has the eastern approach, Bulkhead is monitoring the canyon routes, and Cliffjumper is—" He checked a screen. "Cliffjumper is investigating an energon deposit in the Nevada desert. Standard recon. Why?"
"Recall him."
"What?"
"Recall Cliffjumper. Now."
"Optimus, it's a routine patrol. There's no indication of Decepticon activity in that sector—"
"Ratchet." He turned to face the medic, and something in his optics must have changed, because Ratchet took an involuntary step backward. Marcus-Optimus didn't blame him. He could feel the Bayverse combat protocols humming beneath his plating like a swarm of angry wasps, and he suspected that whatever expression was on his face right now was closer to Dark of the Moon Optimus than the calm, collected leader the Autobots were used to. "Recall him. Please."
The "please" seemed to throw Ratchet off more than anything else. Optimus Prime giving orders was normal. Optimus Prime saying "please" with the intensity of someone who was three seconds away from tearing a console out of the wall if he didn't get compliance was... less normal.
"...Alright." Ratchet turned to the communications array. "Cliffjumper, this is base. Optimus is requesting you return to base immediately."
Static. Then, a familiar voice—cocky, irreverent, alive: "Tell the big guy I just picked up a massive energon signal out here. Biggest one I've seen in weeks. I'm gonna check it out and—"
"Negative," Marcus-Optimus said, stepping forward and leaning into the comm. "Cliffjumper, you will return to base. That is a direct order."
A pause. "Boss? You okay? You sound... different."
"I am fine. Return to base."
"But the energon—"
"I will investigate the energon deposit myself. With a full team. You will return to base, and you will do so now, Cliffjumper."
Another pause, longer this time. Then: "...Copy that. Cliffjumper returning to base. But for the record, I could've handled it."
"Noted. Optimus out."
He straightened up and found Ratchet staring at him with the expression of someone who had just watched their cat start speaking fluent Mandarin. "Optimus... what is going on with you?"
Marcus-Optimus considered his options. He could tell Ratchet the truth—that he was actually a dead human from another dimension who had been reborn as a version of Optimus Prime with the personality of the Bayverse incarnation and enough hidden weapons to level a small city. He could explain the concept of a "crackfic" and watch Ratchet's processor crash from the sheer absurdity of it.
Or he could just... be Optimus. Be the Optimus this universe needed, even if it wasn't the Optimus this universe was expecting.
"I had a vision, Ratchet. From the Matrix."
It wasn't entirely a lie. The Matrix was in his chest, and it was showing him things—flashes of the future, fragments of what was coming. Dark Energon. Unicron. Predacons. The Omega Lock. The fall of Jasper. All of it, laid out before him like a roadmap of suffering that he was now uniquely positioned to prevent.
Or at least to make significantly more violent for anyone who tried to cause it.
Ratchet's skeptical expression softened into something approaching concern. "A vision? What kind of vision?"
"The kind that requires us to be vigilant. The Decepticons are coming, old friend. They are close. And when they arrive, I intend to ensure that we are ready."
"We're always ready—"
"No." Marcus-Optimus turned and walked toward the main console, his footsteps reverberating through the base with a weight that seemed heavier than mere physical mass. "We're not. We've been surviving. Hiding. Reacting. Running small patrols and hoping the Decepticons don't find us. That ends now."
He pulled up the base's tactical display—and was quietly impressed by how naturally his new fingers interfaced with Cybertronian technology—and began highlighting sectors. "I want overlapping patrol routes. Full energon deposit mapping. Defensive emplacements at every approach vector. And I want weapons drills. Daily."
"Weapons drills? Optimus, we haven't run formal combat training since—"
"Since Cybertron. I know. That was an oversight I intend to correct." He turned back to Ratchet, and for just a moment, he let the mask slip. Let the Bayverse show through. Let Ratchet see the shadow of a Prime who had pulled a spark out of an enemy's chest and watched him die without an ounce of remorse. "We are five Autobots on an alien world, surrounded by billions of organic beings who cannot defend themselves, facing an enemy that outnumbers us a hundred to one and has a warship in orbit. We do not have the luxury of being unprepared."
Ratchet opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "...Who are you and what have you done with Optimus Prime?"
"I am Optimus Prime." And the terrifying thing was, he meant it. He could feel the Matrix humming in agreement, feel the weight of the title settling on his shoulders like a mantle made of obligation and righteous fury. He was Optimus Prime. He was all of them. The philosopher. The leader. The warrior.
The executioner.
"I have simply... recalibrated my priorities."
The next seventy-two hours were, by any reasonable metric, insane.
Marcus-Optimus threw himself into preparation with the intensity of a man who knew exactly what was coming and had absolutely no intention of letting it play out the way it had in the show. He ran combat drills that left the other Autobots exhausted and confused. He redesigned the base's defense grid three times. He made Ratchet install redundant ground bridge systems "just in case" and didn't elaborate on what the "case" might be. He memorized every energon deposit location on the planet, cross-referenced them with known Decepticon activity patterns, and developed a prioritized extraction schedule that was so thorough Ratchet accused him of being replaced by a drone.
He also spent approximately six hours standing in the base's storage bay, systematically deploying, testing, and re-stowing every single weapon hidden in his frame, and the sounds that came from that bay during those six hours were enough to make Bumblebee refuse to go in there for a week.
The swords were beautiful. The axe was devastating. The guns were—well, the guns were excessive, and he knew it, and he didn't care. Every time he deployed the barrage cannon and watched it unfold from his forearm in a cascade of shifting plates and clicking mechanisms, he felt a surge of satisfaction so profound it was almost spiritual. This was what four million years of engineering evolution looked like. This was what happened when you took the concept of "be prepared" and gave it to a species of sentient machines with a cultural predisposition toward engineering perfection and an existential-level motivation to not die.
He was a weapon. He was a walking, talking, thinking weapon wrapped in the shell of a children's cartoon character, and every time he looked at his reflection in the base's polished walls and saw the clean lines and bright colors of TFP Optimus staring back at him, he had to suppress a laugh, because underneath that family-friendly exterior was enough firepower to glass a continent and the willingness to use it.
The Autobots noticed. Of course they noticed. Optimus had gone from "stoic philosophical leader who occasionally deployed arm blades" to "terrifyingly efficient combat machine who was running weapons maintenance at 3 AM and muttering about 'acceptable force escalation protocols'" in the space of a day, and the tonal shift was... significant.
Arcee was the first to say something. She found him in the main bay at 0200 hours, running simulations on the tactical display, and leaned against the doorframe with her arms crossed.
"You're different."
He didn't look up. "I am the same Optimus I have always been."
"No. You're not." She stepped closer, studying him with the sharp optics of a warrior who had survived more battles than she could count and had developed an excellent sense for when something was off. "You've been running combat scenarios for six hours straight. Last week, you spent the same amount of time reading human literature. Shakespeare, I think."
"Both are valuable uses of time."
"You've been testing weapons I didn't even know you had. Since when do you have an axe?"
"I have always had an axe."
"You have never had an axe."
He paused. Considered. "I have an axe now."
"Optimus—"
"Arcee." He finally turned to face her, and he made a deliberate effort to soften his expression, to pull back the Bayverse edge and let some of the TFP warmth through. She didn't deserve to be frightened of him. None of them did. They were his team. His family. The people he would burn the universe down to protect, and the fact that he was now apparently equipped to burn the universe down made that distinction important. "I cannot explain everything. Not yet. But I need you to trust me when I tell you that something is coming. Something dangerous. And when it arrives, I intend to meet it with everything I have."
She studied him for a long moment. Then, slowly, she nodded. "I've always trusted you, Optimus. Even when you're being weird about it."
"Thank you, Arcee."
"But if you start monologuing about the faces of your enemies, I'm staging an intervention."
He froze.
Give me your FACE!
"...That is fair."
Seventy-two hours passed. Then seventy-three. Then seventy-four. And Marcus-Optimus began to wonder if his timeline calculations were off—if this universe's events didn't map perfectly to the show's chronology, if the butterfly effect of his presence had already begun altering the course of—
And then the proximity alarm went off.
It was a sharp, piercing tone that cut through the base like a blade, and Marcus-Optimus was on his feet and moving before the first echo had faded, his combat subroutines spooling up with a speed and ferocity that made his own processor do a double-take. Every weapon in his frame went to standby. His battle mask deployed with a sharp click-hiss that sounded, if he was being honest, incredibly cool.
"Ratchet! Report!"
The medic was already at the console, fingers flying. "Massive energon spike, sector seven-alpha. It's—Optimus, this reading doesn't make sense. It's not just energon. There's a secondary signature layered over it. Something... I've never seen anything like this."
Dark Energon.
The words surfaced in his mind with the cold clarity of absolute certainty, and the Marcus part of him shuddered while the Bayverse Optimus part of him felt its fury ignite like a fusion reactor going critical.
Dark Energon. The blood of Unicron. The substance that Megatron was going to use to raise an army of the dead. The substance that had been used, in the show's timeline, to desecrate Cliffjumper's remains and turn him into a mindless monster.
Not. This. Time.
"It's Dark Energon," he said, and his voice was flat and hard and carried absolutely zero of the measured philosophical tone that TFP Optimus was known for. It was the voice of a mech who had already decided how this was going to end.
Ratchet looked up sharply. "How do you—"
"I know." He was already moving toward the ground bridge. "Ratchet, open a bridge to those coordinates. All Autobots, converge on my position. This is not a drill."
"Optimus, we should—"
"Now, Ratchet."
The ground bridge spiraled open—a swirling vortex of green and white energy that cast dancing shadows across the walls of the base—and Marcus-Optimus strode through it without hesitation, without fear, without a single backward glance.
He emerged into the Nevada desert.
The sun was setting. The sky was a bruised canvas of purple and orange, and the desert stretched out around him in every direction—vast, empty, beautiful in the way that only truly desolate places could be. The air was dry and still and tasted of dust and something else, something wrong, something that made his energon run cold and his spark pulse with a revulsion so deep it felt ancestral.
Dark Energon.
He could feel it. A corruption in the electromagnetic field, a wrongness that pressed against his sensors like greasy fingers on clean glass. It was coming from the north—a massive deposit, just as Ratchet had said, and as he turned to face it, he saw the source.
The Nemesis.
Megatron's warship hung in the sky like a thundercloud made of malice and purple steel, its hull blotting out the sunset, its engines thrumming with a low bass note that he could feel in his struts. It was even more impressive in person than it had been on screen—a two-mile-long monument to Decepticon engineering, bristling with weapons, radiating menace, and currently disgorging a river of Vehicon drones from its launch bays.
Marcus-Optimus counted them.
Twenty.
Thirty.
Forty.
Fifty Vehicon drones, descending toward the desert floor in a coordinated drop pattern, their crimson visors glowing like dying stars, their arm-mounted blasters already charging with the telltale whine of energon weapons preparing to fire.
And at their head, descending from the Nemesis on a column of dark energy that crackled and spat like a living thing, was Megatron.
He was big. Bigger than Marcus had expected, even with the TFP character models as a reference point. His frame was a fortress of gunmetal gray and purple highlights, scarred and battered and ancient, every inch of his armor telling the story of four million years of violence. His fusion cannon hummed on his right arm like a caged sun, and his optics—red, burning, mad—swept the desert below with the casual arrogance of a being who considered everything he saw to be either a resource to be exploited or an obstacle to be destroyed.
And in his left hand, pulsing with sickly purple light, was a shard of Dark Energon the size of a compact car.
Marcus-Optimus felt his battle mask lock into place with a finality that felt like a promise.
He had played this scene out in his head a hundred times over the past seventy-two hours. In the show, this confrontation had been dramatic but restrained—a philosophical exchange, a clash of ideologies, the kind of dignified conflict that befitted a children's television program where the good guys always held back and the bad guys always escaped to fight another day.
That was not going to happen here.
Marcus-Optimus planted his feet. He felt the desert floor crunch beneath his weight, felt his frame shift and settle into a combat stance that was not from the TFP playbook. His legs widened. His center of gravity dropped. His arms came up—not in the open-palmed "let us talk about this" gesture that TFP Optimus favored, but in the closed-fist, elbows-tucked, weight-forward stance of a fighter who had already decided that talking was over.
The ground bridge opened behind him again, and the other Autobots emerged—Arcee first, lithe and deadly, followed by Bumblebee's yellow frame, then Bulkhead's massive green bulk, and finally Cliffjumper, who had to be physically restrained from charging forward immediately because Cliffjumper had never once in his existence met a fight he didn't want to be in.
"Stay behind me," Marcus-Optimus said.
"What?" Cliffjumper sputtered. "Boss, there's fifty 'cons out there and one of you—"
"I am aware of the numbers." He didn't take his optics off Megatron. "Protect each other. Protect the humans. If any Vehicon gets past me, put it down. But none of you engage Megatron. He is mine."
"Optimus," Arcee said, and there was something in her voice—not quite fear, but definitely concern. "What are you planning?"
He didn't answer. Because Megatron had landed.
The Decepticon warlord's feet hit the desert floor with an impact that sent shockwaves rippling through the sand, and he rose to his full height—taller than Optimus, broader, heavier—and fixed his burning red optics on the lone Prime standing between him and whatever he had come to claim.
"Optimus Prime." Megatron's voice was a rumble of barely contained violence, each syllable dripping with four million years of hatred and a kind of twisted respect that was worse than hatred because it implied familiarity. "I had hoped you would come. I have something to show you."
He held up the Dark Energon shard, and it pulsed—throbbed—with that sickening purple light, and Marcus-Optimus felt the Matrix in his chest recoil from it like a living thing flinching away from a flame.
"Behold," Megatron continued, his voice rising with the fervor of a zealot, "the blood of Unicron himself! Dark Energon—the key to true power, the essence of chaos, the very—"
"Megatron."
Marcus-Optimus's voice cut through the warlord's monologue like a blade through silk. It was quiet. It was calm. It was the kind of calm that preceded natural disasters.
Megatron paused, optic ridge raised. "Yes?"
"Put. It. Down."
A beat of silence. Then Megatron laughed. It was a terrible sound—deep, resonant, genuinely amused—and it echoed across the desert like distant thunder. "Oh, Optimus. Still giving orders you cannot enforce? Still clinging to the delusion that words can stop what is coming?" He stepped forward, the Dark Energon shard casting hellish shadows across his scarred face. "You are weak, Prime. You have always been weak. You hide on this miserable planet, protecting these pathetic organic creatures, while I—I have found the key to ending this war. The key to raising an army that will—"
"I said put it down."
And something in his voice changed.
It wasn't louder. It wasn't angrier. It was colder. It was the sound of every Bayverse Optimus moment—every decapitation, every execution, every face torn from a skull, every spark ripped from a chest—compressed into three words and delivered with the absolute certainty of a being who had decided, completely and irrevocably, that this conversation was over.
Megatron's laughter faltered. Not stopped—faltered. Because even Megatron, for all his arrogance, for all his madness, for all his millennia of war, recognized on some primal level that the mech standing before him was not the same Optimus Prime he had fought a thousand times before.
This Optimus was different.
And then the Vehicons opened fire.
Fifty drones, fifty arm-mounted blasters, fifty streams of burning energon lancing through the desert air toward the cluster of Autobots—and Marcus-Optimus moved.
He moved like nothing TFP had ever animated. He moved like the Bayverse, all spinning plates and whirring gears and brutal, efficient violence that turned every movement into a weapon. His right arm came up and transformed—not into the neat, clean blaster that TFP Optimus used, but into the barrage cannon, a massive rotary weapon that unfolded from his forearm in a cascade of shifting metal that sounded like a transformer transforming inside another transformer, which was technically exactly what it was.
He fired.
The first Vehicon's head simply ceased to exist. One moment it was there—a faceless purple visor atop a black metal body—and the next moment there was a superheated hole where its face had been and the body was toppling backward, sparking, twitching, done. Marcus-Optimus was already tracking the second target before the first had hit the ground.
BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
Four shots. Four kills. The barrage cannon roared like a wounded god, each discharge sending a shockwave through the air that kicked up sand and rattled the plating of every bot within fifty meters. Vehicons exploded. Not the sanitized "sparking and falling over" explosions of TFP. Real explosions. Chunks of metal flying in every direction. Energon spraying like blood. The acrid smell of burning Cybertronian alloy filling the air like a promise of things to come.
"What—" Cliffjumper started.
"STAY BEHIND ME!" Marcus-Optimus roared, and then he was charging.
He crossed the distance between himself and the Vehicon line in three strides—each one covering twenty feet, each one accompanied by the thunderous crash of a thirty-foot robot at full sprint—and then he was among them, and the barrage cannon retracted and the energon swords deployed from both forearms simultaneously with a sound like two stars being born, and then—
Then it was just violence.
The first Vehicon he hit never saw it coming. Marcus-Optimus's left blade caught it across the midsection and bisected it—not cleanly, not neatly, but with a savage diagonal cut that sent the two halves of its body tumbling in opposite directions, trailing energon and sparks and something that looked disturbingly like Cybertronian intestines. His right blade was already moving, punching through the chest of the second Vehicon with enough force to lift the drone off its feet and hold it there, impaled, sparking, its limbs twitching in the involuntary death spasm of a machine whose central processor had just been turned into confetti.
He shook the body off his blade like a human flicking water from their hand and spun into the third Vehicon, leading with his shoulder, and the impact was catastrophic—the drone's chest caved inward like a tin can being stepped on, its internal mechanisms rupturing in a spray of sparks and fluid, and it flew backward into two more drones and all three of them went down in a tangle of limbs and screaming metal.
Four seconds. Five Vehicons down. Forty-five to go.
Marcus-Optimus didn't slow down. He couldn't slow down. The Bayverse combat protocols were singing in his processor, turning every movement into a calculated act of maximum destruction, and the TFP body was responding with a fluidity and grace that the Bayverse's complex transformation sequences could never match. He was faster than he should have been. Smoother. The TFP aesthetic—clean lines, flowing motion, almost dancerlike combat—married to the Bayverse's absolute commitment to ending fights as quickly and decisively as possible created something that was, frankly, terrifying to watch.
He carved through the Vehicon line like a buzz saw through butter.
A drone raised its blaster. Marcus-Optimus caught its arm with his left hand, twisted, and the arm came off with a shriek of tearing metal that sounded disturbingly like a scream. He used the severed arm as a club, smashing it across the face of the next drone, caving in its visor and sending it spinning, then hurled it like a javelin at a third drone thirty feet away. The severed arm hit the third drone center-mass and punched through its chest with enough velocity to pin it to the rock formation behind it.
Six seconds. Eight Vehicons down.
A group of ten drones tried to form a firing line—a basic Decepticon infantry tactic, spread out, overlapping fields of fire, strength in numbers. Marcus-Optimus saw it forming and felt something that might have been amusement if it wasn't so close to contempt. His shoulder pauldrons opened. The rotary energon cannons deployed—two spinning barrels of destruction that spooled up with a rising whine that peaked at a frequency just below hearing and then—
BRRRRRRRT.
The sound was indescribable. It was the sound of reality being shredded by concentrated energon fire, a continuous roar of destruction that turned the firing line into a suggestion. Drones came apart. Not one at a time—simultaneously. Ten Vehicons, caught in a crossfire of rotating energon bolts, disintegrated into a cloud of shrapnel and superheated gas that momentarily turned the desert air opaque.
When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left but craters and scattered pieces of Vehicon small enough to fit in a shoebox.
Twelve seconds. Eighteen Vehicons down.
Marcus-Optimus could hear the other Autobots behind him. They weren't fighting. They were watching. And the sounds they were making—the sharp intakes of air, the muttered Cybertronian expletives, the quiet "what the frag" that he was fairly certain came from Cliffjumper—told him everything he needed to know about how this looked from the outside.
It looked like a massacre.
It looked like a massacre because that's what it was.
A Vehicon lunged at him from the right—brave, stupid, or both—swinging an energon baton at his head. Marcus-Optimus caught the baton in his bare hand, crushed it like an aluminum can, then grabbed the drone by the face—the face—and squeezed. The Vehicon's visor cracked. Then shattered. Then the entire head crumpled inward like a paper cup, and Marcus-Optimus tossed the body aside with the casual disregard of someone throwing away an empty wrapper.
Give me your face, some part of him thought, and then immediately: No. Bad. We are NOT doing the face thing. We have standards. Low standards, but standards.
A cluster of drones opened fire from his left. He felt the energon bolts impact his armor—stinging, painful, but not penetrating, because the TFP Optimus frame was apparently even tougher than it looked—and he turned toward them with the slow, deliberate motion of something that had been inconvenienced rather than threatened.
The battle axe deployed.
It unfolded from his back with a mechanical symphony of clicking and locking components—a massive, two-handed weapon of burnished metal and glowing energon that was easily twelve feet from pommel to blade tip. It was the axe from Age of Extinction, the one he had used while riding Grimlock, the one that had become the visual shorthand for "Optimus Prime is done playing nice," and the sight of it—gleaming, humming, hungry—made every Vehicon in visual range take an involuntary step backward.
Marcus-Optimus swung it.
Not at a drone. At the ground.
The axe hit the desert floor and the energy discharge carved a trench ten feet deep and sixty feet long that bisected the battlefield with the precision of a surgical laser. The shockwave alone sent fifteen Vehicons flying, their bodies ragdolling through the air like toys thrown by an angry child, and the three that were unlucky enough to be standing directly in the trench's path simply... weren't. Anymore. Anywhere.
He pulled the axe free from the ground—it came loose with a sound like the earth sighing—and charged the survivors with a war cry that was half Cybertronian battle chant and half something that sounded suspiciously like "I have HAD it with these Monday-to-Friday Decepticons on this Monday-to-Friday PLANET!" but he would deny that to his dying day.
The remaining Vehicons broke.
Not "strategically retreated." Not "fell back to regroup." Broke. As in, dropped their weapons and ran screaming in every direction, because they were mass-produced drone soldiers with basic combat programming and absolutely nothing in that programming had prepared them for an Autobot leader who fought like a category five hurricane had been given a battle axe and a grudge.
Marcus-Optimus let them run.
Not out of mercy. Out of strategy. Because frightened soldiers told stories, and stories spread fear, and fear was a weapon that didn't require ammunition.
He turned to face Megatron.
The Decepticon leader was standing exactly where he had been at the start of the fight. He had not moved. He had not fired his fusion cannon. He had not sent reinforcements or called for a retreat or done any of the things a competent military commander should do when someone was systematically dismantling their forces.
He had watched.
And the expression on his face was one that Marcus-Optimus had never seen in any iteration of Megatron, in any continuity, in any medium.
It was fear.
Not a lot. Not the kind of fear that made you run or surrender or beg. But it was there—a flicker in the red optics, a tension in the jaw, a fractional widening of the gaze that spoke of a fundamental recalculation happening somewhere deep in Megatron's tactical processor.
He wasn't supposed to be able to do that, Megatron's face said. That's not how this works. I bring an army. He gives a speech. We fight to a draw. We both retreat. That's the PATTERN. That's how it's ALWAYS been. What in the PIT just happened?
"Megatron," Marcus-Optimus said, and he walked toward the warlord with the axe resting on his shoulder like a lumberjack heading to work. His frame was splattered with Vehicon energon—glowing purple-blue against his red and blue plating—and his optics burned behind his battle mask with a light that was less "noble Autobot leader" and more "apex predator who has just been mildly annoyed."
"We need to talk about your life choices."
Megatron's grip tightened on the Dark Energon shard. "You... you've changed, Prime."
"I haven't changed, Megatron. I've stopped pretending." He planted the axe in the ground—it sank three feet into the desert floor like it was pushing through water—and crossed his arms. "Put the Dark Energon down. Walk away. Do not come back to this planet. This is not a negotiation. This is not a philosophical debate about the nature of tyranny versus freedom. This is me, telling you, one last time, to leave."
"Or what?" And there was the Megatron he knew—the defiance, the pride, the iron will that had sustained a four-million-year war through sheer stubbornness. "You'll add me to the scrap heap with my soldiers?"
"No." Marcus-Optimus's voice dropped to something barely above a whisper, and it carried across the silent desert like a death knell. "I'll do worse."
He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to. The fifty pieces of dismembered Vehicon scattered across the battlefield elaborated for him.
Megatron stared at him. Marcus-Optimus stared back. The desert wind howled between them, carrying the smell of burned metal and spilled energon, and for a moment—one perfect, crystalline moment—the entire world held its breath.
Then Megatron smiled. It was not a happy smile. It was the smile of someone who had just realized that the game they had been playing for four million years had changed rules mid-play, and they weren't sure if they were excited or terrified by the prospect.
"This isn't over, Prime."
"It never is."
Megatron activated his jet thrusters and launched skyward, the Dark Energon shard still clutched in his hand, his cape of thruster exhaust leaving twin trails of purple fire across the darkening sky. The Nemesis's hangar bays opened to receive him, and within sixty seconds, the warship was climbing, its engines roaring, its hull disappearing into the upper atmosphere.
Marcus-Optimus watched it go. He watched until it was nothing but a speck against the stars. Then he pulled the axe from the ground, collapsed it back into his spinal housing with a series of precise mechanical movements, and turned to face his team.
The Autobots were standing in a line. They were staring at him. Their expressions ranged from "deeply concerned" (Ratchet, who had arrived via a second ground bridge and was clutching a medical scanner like a security blanket) to "absolutely horrified" (Bumblebee, whose doorwings were hiked up to maximum alert position) to "mildly impressed but also terrified" (Arcee, who was doing a very good job of keeping her face neutral but whose optics were approximately twice their normal size) to "OH PRIMUS WHAT THE FRAG DID I JUST WITNESS" (Bulkhead, who had actually taken a step backward and looked like he was considering the merits of a career change) to...
Cliffjumper.
Cliffjumper was just standing there. His mouth was open. His optics were wide. His horns—those distinctive, proud, Cliffjumper horns—were actually vibrating with some combination of shock and what Marcus-Optimus sincerely hoped was not trauma but was almost certainly trauma.
Because Cliffjumper had watched the entire fight. Had watched his Prime—the wise, measured, philosophical leader he had followed across a galaxy—tear through fifty Decepticon soldiers with the methodical brutality of a harvester threshing wheat. Had watched Optimus Prime bisect a Vehicon with his bare hands. Had watched Optimus Prime cave in a drone's face with nothing but grip strength and fury. Had watched Optimus Prime deploy weapons that he didn't know existed and use them with a proficiency that suggested not just practice but enthusiasm.
Cliffjumper's mouth worked silently for a moment. Then: "Boss?"
"Yes, Cliffjumper?"
"What... what was that?"
Marcus-Optimus retracted his battle mask. He let his face be visible—the blue optics, the noble features, the strong jaw, the expression that was trying very hard to be "reassuring leader" and was landing somewhere around "smiling predator." "That," he said, "was a warning."
"A warning." Cliffjumper's voice was faint. "You call that a warning?"
"I left them alive, didn't I?"
"You—" Cliffjumper looked at the battlefield. At the scattered remains of fifty Vehicons. At the craters. At the trench. At the literal pieces of Decepticon soldiers that were still sparking and twitching in the sand. "You call this leaving them alive?!"
"The ones that ran away are alive."
"THAT DOESN'T MAKE IT BETTER!"
Marcus-Optimus considered this. "It makes it accurate."
Cliffjumper turned to Arcee. "Did you see what he did to that one drone's face?"
"I'm trying very hard not to think about it."
"He grabbed it! By the face! And he—" Cliffjumper made a crushing motion with his hands, then immediately stopped when he realized what he was doing and looked at his own hands like they had betrayed him. "I'm... I'm going to need a minute."
"Take all the time you need," Marcus-Optimus said, in what he genuinely intended to be a comforting tone but which came out sounding like a lion purring, which was somehow worse.
Ratchet finally spoke. "Optimus. Medical bay. Now."
"I am not injured."
"I'm not checking for injuries, I'm checking for neurological corruption!" The medic was already marching toward the ground bridge, his tool kit clutched in both hands like a weapon. "Because the Optimus Prime I have known for four million years does NOT fight like that! He does not tear drones apart with his bare hands! He does not deploy weapons that aren't in ANY of his schematics! And he CERTAINLY does not threaten Megatron with ambiguous promises of violence and then smile about it!"
"I wasn't smiling."
"Your optics were smiling, Optimus! YOUR OPTICS!"
Marcus-Optimus followed Ratchet through the ground bridge, the other Autobots trailing behind at what they clearly considered a safe distance. As they walked, he ran the numbers in his head. Megatron had retreated, but he hadn't dropped the Dark Energon. He would be back. He would always be back—that was the fundamental truth of the Megatron/Optimus dynamic, and no amount of Bayverse-style violence was going to change that overnight.
But something had changed. He had seen it in Megatron's eyes. For the first time in four million years, Megatron had looked at Optimus Prime and seen not a rival, not an equal, not a philosophical opposite whose moral restraint could be counted on to limit his effectiveness—
He had seen a threat.
And that, Marcus-Optimus thought as he stepped back into the Autobot base and felt the familiar hum of the Matrix warm his spark, was a start.
The next day, the humans arrived.
Marcus-Optimus had been expecting it. He knew the sequence of events from the show—Arcee's cover blown in front of Jack, Bumblebee's encounter with Raf, Bulkhead's inadvertent acquisition of Miko—and he had made a deliberate decision not to interfere with these meetings because, crackfic universe or not, those relationships were important. The humans grounded the Autobots. Gave them something to fight for beyond the abstract concept of freedom. Made the war personal in a way that four million years of ideology never could.
Also, he was secretly looking forward to meeting Miko, because if there was one character in TFP who would appreciate his new approach to Decepticon management, it was the fifteen-year-old Japanese exchange student who treated giant robot battles like live entertainment.
He was not disappointed.
The three humans were brought to base in the standard way—scooped up by their respective Autobot guardians after witnessing things that civilians were not supposed to witness, brought through the ground bridge, deposited in the central hub of the Autobot base, and given the standard "we are autonomous robotic organisms from the planet Cybertron" speech. Marcus-Optimus delivered it himself, standing at his full height with his hands clasped behind his back, and he made sure to use the exact wording from the show because some things were sacred.
Jack was overwhelmed. Raf was excited. Miko was...
Miko was vibrating.
Not metaphorically. The girl was literally vibrating with barely contained energy, her eyes as wide as dinner plates, her phone already out and recording despite Ratchet's strident objections. She looked at the Autobot base the way a kid looked at a candy store. She looked at the ground bridge the way a scientist looked at a breakthrough discovery. She looked at Bulkhead the way a puppy looked at its favorite human.
And then she looked at Optimus.
Specifically, she looked at Optimus's arms. At the forearm plating that, if you looked very carefully, showed the faintest outline of hidden weapon housings. She looked at his shoulder pauldrons, which were fractionally wider than standard TFP design because they contained rotary cannons. She looked at his back, where the collapsed battle axe created a subtle ridge along his spinal strut.
And then she looked at the floor of the base, where someone (Bulkhead) had failed to completely clean up the energon splatter from when Optimus had come back from yesterday's battle and tracked Vehicon remains across the floor like a cat dragging a dead bird through the house.
Her eyes went even wider.
"Did you—" she started, pointing at the energon stains, then at Optimus, then back at the stains. "Did you do that? To a Decepticon?"
Marcus-Optimus considered lying. Considered deflecting. Considered giving the measured, appropriate response that a responsible leader should give when a fifteen-year-old human asked if he had recently murdered someone.
"Yes," he said.
Miko's face split into a grin so wide it threatened to divide her head in half. She spun on Bulkhead with an expression of pure, undiluted betrayal.
"You said Optimus was the 'calm, wise leader type!'" she accused.
Bulkhead sputtered. "He—he was! Until two days ago!"
"You said he 'mostly just gives speeches and looks noble!'"
"He did! I don't know what happened! Nobody knows what happened!"
Miko turned back to Optimus. Her grin had evolved into something that could only be described as worship. "Can I see your weapons?"
"Miko—" Bulkhead started.
"No, seriously, how many weapons do you have?"
"That is classified information," Marcus-Optimus said, because it was, and also because the actual number was high enough to potentially alarm a teenager. Or terrify her. Or—given what he was rapidly learning about Miko's personality—make her like him even more, which would make Bulkhead cry, and he didn't want to make Bulkhead cry.
"I bet it's a lot," Miko said, staring at him with the intensity of a forensic investigator. "I bet it's, like, so many weapons. I bet you've got swords. And guns. And, like, a rocket launcher or something."
"I have two swords, an axe, a barrage cannon, a rotary cannon array, a particle beam emitter, twenty-four heat-seeking micro-missiles, forearm-mounted energon hooks, a jet pack, and a chest-mounted—" He stopped. Every Autobot in the room was staring at him. "...That is classified information."
"OH MY GOD," Miko shrieked, and the sound she made was at a frequency that actually triggered Ratchet's audio pain receptors. "YOU'RE LIKE A GIANT ROBOT SWISS ARMY KNIFE! BULKHEAD! BULKHEAD, DID YOU HEAR THAT?!"
Bulkhead had heard it. Bulkhead was standing in the corner of the room with the expression of a man watching his girlfriend leave him for his best friend's cooler, more heavily armed brother. His shoulders were slumped. His optics were dim. His wrecking ball—his signature weapon, the thing that had made him unique, the thing that Miko was supposed to think was the coolest weapon in the base—hung limply at his side like a physical manifestation of his deflating ego.
"I have a wrecking ball," he said, in a very small voice, to nobody in particular.
"That's great, Bulkhead," Miko said, without turning around, her entire being focused on Optimus with the gravitational intensity of a collapsing star. "Hey, Optimus, can you show me the axe? Please? I will literally do anything. I will clean the base. I will eat my vegetables. I will stop sneaking through the ground bridge. Well, I probably won't stop sneaking through the ground bridge, but I'll feel bad about it."
Marcus-Optimus looked at Miko. He looked at Bulkhead, who was retreating further into his corner with every passing second. He looked at the other Autobots—Arcee with her arms crossed, Bumblebee with his doorwings twitching in amusement, Ratchet with his face in his hands, Cliffjumper who was sitting on a crate in the far corner of the room staring at nothing and occasionally twitching, which was probably something they should address at some point.
He looked at Jack and Raf, who were standing together with the shared expression of two people who had walked into what they thought was a pet store and found themselves in a weapons testing facility.
He made a decision.
"Perhaps later," he said, and even that measured response was enough to make Miko pump both fists in the air and let out a whoop that rattled the light fixtures, and Bulkhead made a sound like a hydraulic press experiencing a crisis of confidence.
I'm going to have to manage this carefully, Marcus-Optimus thought. The last thing I need is for Miko to start treating me like her personal war hero when I'm trying to—
Miko had already pulled out her phone and was typing furiously. "I'm making a fan page. 'Optimus Prime: Giant Robot Death Machine.' With a sword emoji. And a fire emoji. And—"
"Please do not make a fan page."
"TOO LATE! It's already got a sword emoji!"
In the corner, Bulkhead let out a sound that was suspiciously close to a sob.
Marcus-Optimus sighed. It was a deep, resonant, very Optimus sigh that carried the weight of four million years of war and about thirty seconds of dealing with Miko Nakadai. He pinched the bridge of his nose—a gesture he had picked up from his Marcus memories and which looked absolutely bizarre on a thirty-foot robot but which felt entirely appropriate.
"Ratchet," he said.
"What."
"I need you to set up a human-safe observation area. Reinforced barriers. Blast shielding. Energon-proof glass."
"Why?"
He looked at Miko, who was now attempting to climb Bulkhead's leg to get a better camera angle of the energon stains on the floor.
"Because I have a feeling our new charges are going to be... present... for future engagements, regardless of how many times we tell them not to be. And when that happens, I want them protected."
"Or," Ratchet said, with the tone of someone who considered this an entirely reasonable alternative, "we could simply not let them come."
"Have you met Miko?"
Ratchet looked at Miko, who had successfully scaled Bulkhead's leg and was now sitting on his shoulder, taking a selfie with the distant energon stains in the background, while Bulkhead stood perfectly still with the resigned expression of a being who had accepted his role as furniture.
"...I'll start on the blast shielding."
The Decepticons came back three days later.
Marcus-Optimus had known they would. The Dark Energon was too important to Megatron, too central to his plans, too intoxicating to a mind that had already been warped by four million years of violence and a pathological need for power that bordered on the metaphysical. Megatron would come back. He would come back with more soldiers, more firepower, and the absolute conviction that what had happened in the desert had been a fluke—that Optimus Prime could not possibly be as dangerous as he had appeared, that there must have been some trick, some deception, some explanation that didn't require rewriting Megatron's entire threat assessment model.
He was wrong.
The alert came at 0847 hours. A massive Decepticon force—Ratchet counted the signatures and went pale, or as pale as a white-and-orange robot could go—had mobilized in sector twelve, near an abandoned mining facility that the Autobots had previously flagged as a potential energon deposit. The force included approximately eighty Vehicon drones, two Decepticon elites that the sensors identified as Knockout and Breakdown, and Starscream.
No Megatron.
Marcus-Optimus found that interesting. And telling. And exactly the kind of tactical decision he would expect from a Megatron who had watched his previous army get dismantled by a single Prime and had decided that the appropriate response was to send someone else to test the waters while he stayed safely aboard the Nemesis, running calculations and trying to figure out what in the Pit had changed.
"Full mobilization," Marcus-Optimus said, and the calm in his voice was the calm of deep water—smooth on the surface, crushing at the bottom. "All Autobots, combat loadout. This is going to be loud."
"Optimus, eighty Vehicons—" Ratchet started.
"Eighty Vehicons, a medic, a bruiser, and a coward. The numbers are irrelevant."
"The numbers are NOT irrelevant, Optimus! This is a significant force escalation from the last engagement, and—"
"Ratchet." He placed a hand on the medic's shoulder—gently, because Ratchet was his friend and deserved gentleness even when Marcus-Optimus was running at approximately 90% combat readiness and his internal weapon systems were cycling through their deployment sequences with the eager anticipation of hunting dogs hearing the word "walk." "The numbers. Are. Irrelevant. Trust me."
The ground bridge opened. The Autobots went through.
And behind them, completely unnoticed because she had hidden herself inside the wheel well of Bulkhead's vehicle mode during the mobilization scramble and had transferred to a rocky outcropping near the ground bridge exit with the practiced ease of a girl who had been sneaking into places she wasn't supposed to be since before she could walk, was Miko.
She had her phone. She had it set to record. She had the camera pointed directly at Optimus Prime. And the grin on her face suggested that she was about to witness something that would either be the greatest thing she had ever seen or the most traumatizing.
Spoiler: it was both.
The abandoned mining facility was a maze of tunnels, rock walls, and open galleries that had been carved into the Nevada desert decades ago by humans looking for copper and silver. The Decepticons had set up a perimeter around the largest gallery—a natural amphitheater of red rock about three hundred meters across—and the Vehicon drones were positioned in defensive formations that actually showed a modicum of tactical competence. Someone had been drilling them. Probably Starscream, who, whatever his many character flaws, was a genuinely skilled tactician when he bothered to try.
Breakdown stood at the center of the formation like a pillar of blue-and-gray confidence, his hammer crackling with energon. Knockout was behind him, running a scanner over the energon deposit with one hand and buffing a scratch on his arm plating with the other. Starscream was... above. He'd taken a position on a high rock ledge overlooking the gallery, his wing-mounted null rays charged and ready, his posture suggesting that he planned to command from a distance and let the drones do the actual fighting.
Smart, Marcus-Optimus thought. For Starscream.
He assessed the battlefield in 2.3 seconds. Processed the enemy positions, identified cover points, calculated optimal engagement angles, and developed seventeen distinct attack plans ranging from "surgical precision strike" to "apocalyptic devastation." He selected plan eleven, which fell somewhere in the middle and which he had mentally titled "Controlled Chaos, Emphasis on Chaos."
"Autobots," he said, and his voice echoed off the gallery walls with a gravitas that made every drone in the formation snap to attention, "engage the perimeter. Arcee, take the left flank. Bumblebee, right flank. Bulkhead, center. Cliffjumper, support Arcee. Take down the drones. Leave the elites to me."
"Both of them?" Arcee asked.
"Both of them."
"Optimus, Breakdown alone is—"
"Leave them to me."
The battle began.
It began with Bulkhead—beautiful, wonderful, underappreciated Bulkhead—smashing through the center of the Vehicon formation like a wrecking ball through a sheet of drywall, which was both a simile and a literal description of his attack, because he was using his actual wrecking ball and the Vehicons were offering about as much resistance as drywall. Drones flew. Metal crunched. Bulkhead roared his battle cry—"I'M BULKHEAD!"—with the conviction of a being who was, after several days of existential crisis brought on by a teenager's shifting allegiances, determined to prove that he was still relevant.
Arcee and Cliffjumper hit the left flank with the coordinated precision of two warriors who had been fighting side by side for millennia. Arcee was a blur of blue—leaping, spinning, her arm blades flashing as she dissected drones with surgical efficiency. Cliffjumper was louder, messier, more enthusiastic, his horns lowered as he bodychecked a Vehicon so hard the drone's chassis folded in half.
Bumblebee took the right flank with a series of rapid blaster shots that were, Marcus-Optimus noted approvingly, significantly more accurate than usual. The scout had been paying attention during weapons drills.
And Marcus-Optimus went up the middle.
Straight toward Breakdown.
The big Decepticon saw him coming and grinned—the confident, aggressive grin of a warrior who liked his odds. Breakdown was a brawler, a close-combat specialist, built like a fortress and about as subtle. His hammer came up. Energon crackled along its head. He planted his feet, set his stance, and waited for the impact.
Marcus-Optimus obliged him.
The impact was staggering. Marcus-Optimus hit Breakdown at full sprint, leading with his shoulder, and the collision sent shockwaves through the gallery that cracked rock walls and knocked nearby Vehicons off their feet. Breakdown's grin vanished. His feet dug trenches in the ground as he was pushed backward—ten feet, twenty feet, thirty feet—by the sheer force of the impact.
"What—the—FRAG—" Breakdown grunted, and swung his hammer in a horizontal arc aimed at Marcus-Optimus's head.
Marcus-Optimus ducked. Not by much—the hammer passed so close to his helm that it scraped paint—and then he was inside Breakdown's guard, too close for the hammer to be effective, and his right arm was already transforming. Not into a sword. Not into a gun.
Into the energon hook.
It deployed from his wrist with a sharp snikt that sounded like a switchblade being opened by someone with very bad intentions, and it caught Breakdown under the chin—not deep enough to kill, but deep enough to lift—and suddenly Breakdown was dangling off the ground, his feet kicking, his optics wide, supported entirely by a curved energon blade that was resting against the underside of his jaw with approximately zero tolerance for sudden movements.
"Listen carefully," Marcus-Optimus said, and his voice was very quiet and very close and Breakdown could see his optics at point-blank range and there was nothing calm or philosophical about what was in those optics. "I am going to put you down. When I do, you are going to transform, and you are going to fly back to the Nemesis, and you are going to tell Megatron that Optimus Prime sends his regards. Do you understand?"
Breakdown made a sound that was halfway between a whimper and an affirmative grunt.
Marcus-Optimus retracted the hook. Breakdown fell to the ground, landed badly, scrambled to his feet, transformed into his vehicle mode with a speed that suggested he had never wanted to be a truck more badly in his entire life, and fled. His tires screamed against the rock floor. He hit the gallery exit at approximately three times the posted speed limit and disappeared into the desert with the urgency of a mech who had just looked death in the face and decided that discretion was, in fact, the better part of valor.
"BREAKDOWN!" Knockout's shriek echoed through the gallery. "BREAKDOWN, GET BACK HERE! YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME WITH—"
Marcus-Optimus turned to look at Knockout.
Knockout stopped talking.
Knockout was a vain, self-absorbed Decepticon medic whose primary concerns in life were his paint job, his finish, and his general aesthetic appearance. He was not a frontline fighter. He was not a warrior. He was a doctor who happened to work for the bad guys, and he was currently standing alone in a rapidly emptying battlefield, staring at an Autobot leader who had just dangled his partner off the ground by the chin with a weapon he shouldn't have, surrounded by the rapidly diminishing remains of his drone escort.
Marcus-Optimus took one step toward him.
Knockout transformed so fast he left skid marks on the rock and was gone before Marcus-Optimus's foot had finished hitting the ground.
That left Starscream.
Marcus-Optimus looked up.
Starscream was still on his ledge. He had not moved. He had watched Breakdown get lifted by the face and Knockout flee in terror and his entire drone force get systematically destroyed by five Autobots (well, four Autobots and one Autobot-shaped weapons platform), and his expression had gone through several interesting phases—confidence, confusion, alarm, horror, and finally a kind of frozen panic that suggested his processor was caught in an infinite loop of threat assessment and kept returning the same answer: RUN.
"Starscream," Marcus-Optimus called up, and his voice carried easily in the sudden silence of the post-battle gallery. The fighting was over. The last Vehicon had fallen. The other Autobots were standing amid the wreckage, catching their breath, trying not to look at the things Optimus had done, and mostly failing.
"Y-yes?" Starscream's voice cracked.
"Come down here."
"I would... rather not."
"It was not a request."
"It was phrased as a request—"
The jet pack activated.
Marcus-Optimus launched skyward with a roar of thrust that sent a plume of dust and debris cascading across the gallery floor. His ascent was ballistic—thirty feet in one second, sixty in two, ninety in three—and Starscream had approximately half a second to process the fact that Optimus Prime was flying directly at him before Marcus-Optimus's hand closed around his ankle and both of them went tumbling through the air in a chaos of thruster fire and flailing limbs.
They hit the ground together. Marcus-Optimus landed on his feet. Starscream landed on his face.
The Seeker scrambled upright, wings askew, one null ray sparking uselessly, and found himself looking down the barrel of the barrage cannon from a distance of approximately three feet.
"Message for Megatron," Marcus-Optimus said.
"W-what message?" Starscream was shaking. Actually, physically shaking, his wing panels rattling against each other like wind chimes in a hurricane.
"Tell him this: Earth is under my protection. Every human on this planet. Every Autobot. Every living thing. If he brings Dark Energon here, I will find it and I will destroy it. If he threatens the humans, I will find him and I will—" He paused. Considered. The Marcus part of him wanted to say something witty. The Bayverse part wanted to say something terrifying. He split the difference. "—express my displeasure."
"Your d-displeasure?"
Marcus-Optimus leaned closer. His battle mask was still deployed. His optics were glowing behind it with an intensity that made the ambient light around them dim by comparison. "I will express my displeasure creatively, Starscream. With implements."
Starscream's optics went so wide they almost fell out of his head. "I—yes—understood—message received—I'll just—" He transformed. Mid-sentence. His jet mode wobbled skyward on uncertain thrusters, leaving behind a thin trail of leaked hydraulic fluid that was the Cybertronian equivalent of a fear response. He vanished into the sky like a high-heeled missile having a panic attack.
Marcus-Optimus watched him go. Retracted his battle mask. Retracted the barrage cannon. Dusted off his hands with a very human gesture that he really needed to stop doing because it was suspicious.
He turned around.
The Autobots were staring at him again. This was becoming a pattern.
"What?" he said.
"You have a jet pack," Arcee said.
"Yes."
"Since when do you have a jet pack?"
"Since recently."
"Define 'recently.'"
"Recently."
Arcee opened her mouth, closed it, and turned to Ratchet. "I'm not dealing with this. He's your project."
"He is NOT my 'project,' he is our leader, and he has apparently lost his mind, and—" Ratchet stopped. His optics focused on something behind Marcus-Optimus. His expression shifted from exasperation to horror. "Is that... is that a human child?"
Marcus-Optimus turned.
Miko was standing on a rock outcropping approximately fifty meters away. She was holding her phone. She had recorded everything. And the expression on her face was one of such pure, unadulterated, transcendent joy that it made her look like a renaissance painting of religious ecstasy, if the religion in question worshipped giant robots with too many weapons.
"THAT," Miko shouted across the battlefield, her voice cracking with the effort of trying to convey the full scope of her emotions through a single word, "WAS THE MOST AMAZING THING I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!"
Behind her, from the direction of the ground bridge, Bulkhead's voice drifted over the rocks, small and sad and broken: "She used to say that about my wrecking ball..."
Marcus-Optimus sighed again. The Matrix pulsed warmly in his chest, and he could have sworn it was laughing at him.
That night, after the humans had been returned to their homes and the base had been cleaned (again) and Cliffjumper had been found sitting in a dark corner of the storage bay muttering "the face, he grabbed him by the face" and gently redirected to Ratchet for what the medic was diplomatically calling "post-engagement stress counseling," Marcus-Optimus stood on the roof of the mesa that housed their base and looked up at the stars.
He could see the Nemesis up there. A dark spot among the constellations, barely visible, orbiting. Watching. Waiting.
Inside that ship, Megatron was nursing his Dark Energon shard and his wounded pride and what Marcus-Optimus sincerely hoped were the first seedlings of nightmares. Because if Marcus-Optimus had learned anything from his time as a Transformers fan—from the hundred-plus hours of content across movies, shows, comics, and games—it was that Megatron never stopped. He never quit. He never gave up. He would keep coming, keep pushing, keep scheming, until either he won or he was destroyed.
But now he would come carefully. Now he would come afraid.
And that fear—that tiny, crucial crack in the armor of Megatron's certainty—was worth more than a hundred victories.
Marcus-Optimus flexed his hands. Felt the weapons humming beneath his plating. Felt the Matrix humming in his chest. Felt the desert wind on his frame and the starlight on his optics and the strange, impossible, ridiculous reality of his situation settling over him like a blanket made of cosmic irony.
He was a Transformers fan who had been hit by a truck and reborn as Optimus Prime with a Bayverse combat loadout in a TFP universe. He was a walking crackfic premise with the firepower to back it up. He was, by any reasonable standard, the single most absurd thing that had ever happened to this universe, and the universe seemed to be adjusting to him with the resigned acceptance of a parent whose child had just announced they were going to be a volcano for Halloween and there was nothing you could say to change their mind.
He was Optimus Prime.
He was going to protect this planet and everyone on it.
And Primus help anyone—Decepticon, Unicron, or cosmic horror—who tried to stop him.
Because he had an axe, and he knew how to use it.
And he was just getting started.
Somewhere aboard the Nemesis...
Megatron sat in his throne room. The lights were dim. The Dark Energon shard pulsed in its containment unit, casting purple shadows across the walls. Soundwave stood silently at his station, monitoring communications, saying nothing, because Soundwave always said nothing and that was why he was the best subordinate in the Decepticon army.
Megatron had not moved in three hours.
He was staring at nothing.
He was thinking about Optimus Prime's optics.
He had fought Optimus Prime a thousand times. Ten thousand times. He knew every move, every strategy, every weakness. He knew how Optimus fought—controlled, restrained, always holding back, always pulling punches, always hoping that this battle would be the last, that this conversation would be the one that finally reached through the hatred and found the friend that Megatron had once been.
Those optics in the desert had not been hoping.
Those optics had been promising.
Megatron shifted in his throne. The movement was small, unconscious, and entirely unlike the confident, domineering body language that the Decepticon leader had maintained for four million years. If Soundwave noticed—and Soundwave noticed everything—he gave no indication.
"Soundwave," Megatron said, and his voice was... careful. Measured. The voice of someone who was choosing their words very deliberately because the wrong ones might make the thought that was lurking in the back of his processor become real. "Pull up all combat data from both engagements. Cross-reference with historical records of Optimus Prime's fighting capabilities."
Soundwave complied. Data scrolled across his visor. Then stopped. Then scrolled again, faster, as if the data itself was having trouble believing what it was showing.
"The discrepancy is... significant," Megatron said, reading the analysis. "His combat efficiency has increased by four hundred percent. His weapons loadout has expanded beyond any known configuration. His tactical behavior has shifted from defensive to—" He stopped. Read the next word. Read it again. "—to predatory."
The word hung in the air like a bad omen.
"Something has changed," Megatron said. "Something fundamental. And I intend to discover what."
He stood. Walked to the viewport. Looked down at the Earth below—blue and green and crawling with six billion organic beings that Optimus Prime had apparently decided to protect with the ferocity of a cyberwolf guarding its den.
And for just a moment—one small, shameful, human moment—Megatron felt a shiver run through his frame that had nothing to do with the temperature of the ship.
He was not afraid.
He was not afraid.
He was Megatron. Lord of the Decepticons. Future ruler of Cybertron. Master of Dark Energon. He was not afraid of Optimus Prime.
He was not.
He went to his quarters.
He did not recharge well.
He dreamed of blue optics behind a battle mask, and a voice that said, very quietly: I will express my displeasure creatively.
With implements.
He woke up screaming.
He would deny it for the rest of his existence.
Soundwave had it recorded.
Soundwave had everything recorded.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Alright, so yeah, this is going to be more violent than my Superman stories. Significantly more violent. Like, "the rating exists for a reason" more violent. If you came here expecting the gentle philosophical musings of TFP Optimus, you are in the wrong fic. You are in the VERY wrong fic.
Look, I know the Bayverse gets a lot of hate. I KNOW. I've heard it all. "The plots don't make sense." "Sam is annoying." "There are too many explosions." "Megan Fox is just there to look pretty while leaning on cars." "Age of Extinction is two hours and forty-five minutes long and approximately two hours and thirty minutes of that is unnecessary." "The Last Knight made me want to leave the theater and I was watching it at home." "Dark of the Moon is the only good one and even that's debatable."
I KNOW ALL OF THIS. I acknowledge all of this. I have LIVED all of this. I sat in a theater in 2017 and watched The Last Knight and felt my soul leave my body during the "Optimus is evil now for fifteen minutes for no reason" subplot and I STILL walked out of that theater thinking "...but the robot fights were cool though."
Because here's the thing about Bayverse Optimus that people don't talk about enough: he's the most REALISTIC version of a guy who's been fighting the same war for millions of years.
Think about it. You've been fighting Megatron for FOUR MILLION YEARS. Four million years of the same arguments, the same battles, the same cycle of "fight, talk, mercy, betrayal, repeat." Four million years of watching your friends die because you showed mercy to the same enemy AGAIN. Four million years of being the "good guy" while the bad guy exploits your goodness like a character flaw.
At some point? You snap. At some point, you stop giving speeches and start giving CONSEQUENCES. At some point, you look at Megatron asking for mercy in Dark of the Moon and you say "You. Don't. Deserve. To. Live." and you MEAN it. At some point you're riding a giant robot dinosaur into battle with a sword and a shield and you don't even QUESTION why because the war broke you three million years ago and this is just what Tuesdays look like now.
THAT'S Bayverse Optimus. He's not a philosopher. He's not a saint. He's a tired, angry, traumatized veteran who has been pushed past every limit a sentient being has and has come out the other side as something that is simultaneously the greatest hero in the galaxy and the scariest thing any Decepticon has ever seen.
Is the Bayverse mostly just explosions and Sam screaming? YES. Is it cinematic art? NO. Did Michael Bay understand the source material? DEBATABLE AT BEST. Is the scene where Optimus rides Grimlock while dual-wielding a sword and shield one of the coolest things ever put on film regardless of the movie it's in? YES. ABSOLUTELY YES. I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL.
So yeah. This is a fic about THAT Optimus in the TFP universe. It's going to be violent. It's going to be ridiculous. Miko is going to love it. Bulkhead is going to need therapy. Megatron is going to develop an anxiety disorder.
And Optimus is going to have SO. MANY. WEAPONS.
You've been warned.
Next chapter: Optimus discovers that this universe has UNICRON and reacts... poorly.
AuthorDude