Transformers Prime Exodus

ALL HAIL MEGATRON

The pit floor was rectangular, and large enough for a regiment to hold exercises on, two hundred mechanometers on its short sides and half again that distance on the long sides. It was made of ore pebbles crushed and discarded from the foundries because their concentration of metals was too low to be useful. Spaced at irregular intervals around the floor, mechanical debris and burning heaps of trash made optics tricky and created endless opportunities for tactical ambush and blind-side attacks. Surrounding the floor, four levels of seating rose vertically to a ceiling a hundred mechanos overhead. Banks of lights in every frequency from infrared to ultraviolet drenched the floor in merciless light. The stands were jammed with workers in the factories and elemental refineries of Kaon, stomping their feet in rhythm until the entire balconies of each level bounced up and down to nearly the limits of the metal frame’s tensile strength. The noise was already overwhelming, and would grow so loud in the course of the match that the gladiators would fight with no input from their audio arrays save a constant maxed-out white noise.

A hundred times and more, Megatronus had entered a pit, either this one or another much like it. Every time he had emerged victorious. The Tournament of Champions—this arena circuit’s grandiose name for itself— had now changed the rules for Megatronus’s opponents, allowing them to enter first and assume alt-form if they chose. Anything they could scan and assimilate might be turned into a camouflage shape. It was a cowardly way to fight, but it worked in Megatronus’s favor. When he could give the opponent the first shot—the opportunity to ambush him—and survive to win a total victory despite this, he looked invincible.

Word was spreading. It was not so many stellar cycles ago that Megatronus had been merely one of the more fearsome gladiators in the Kaon pits. Now he was without question the most feared. It had not been so long ago that Megatronus still had no name. Now he had chosen a name to strike fear into the timid and inspire loyalty among those who would follow him. That it was not his name did not concern him in the least; he who was born with no name did not care where his name came from when he took one.

There, he thought. My opponent is there.

His optics had locked on a heap of discarded body parts, the kind of scrap heap seen in the aftermath of an industrial accident, when dead Cybertronians lay awaiting reclamation and reconstruction. It was obvious, but Megatronus had long since realized that few of his opponents had any tactical subtlety.

Above and around him, the crowd thundered. He looked up at them and raised his arms over his head, waving them into an even greater frenzy.

This had dual purposes. One, it got the crowd on his side. And two, seeing Megatronus pantomiming victory before the fight had even begun would enrage any opponent with a shred of self-respect. Angry opponents were careless opponents. Careless opponents were dead opponents. The logic was flawless.

From the pile of body parts erupted not one, but three fighting bots. They were collectively one of Shockwave’s combiner experiments, he could tell right away from the way they moved together—and these three were primitive, drones barely capable of what more advanced Cybertronians considered consciousness. One immediately changed into an all-terrain vehicle, its tracks studded and magnetic; it headed for one wall of the pit, looking for a higher vantage point to establish a crossfire. Megatronus kept focused on the other two, which sprang immediately at him. The first he knocked down with a blaster shot; the second he swatted aside with a sweeping backhand. Keeping the ATV in his peripheral vision, Megatronus pivoted to prevent the two bot-form combiners from flanking him. One of them reared up and sprayed a stream of corrosive fluid at his face; he ducked aside, feeling the spray of it bum on his shoulder. The second made another pass at him, its blade-tipped hands flicking out at him.