The battleship cut through interstellar darkness along paths no star charts recorded, following echoes embedded deep within Megatron's stolen memories. These were not coordinates in the human sense, but scars in space left by repeated Space Bridge activations, hidden folds where reality had been stressed too often to fully heal.
Alex stood alone on the command deck, hands clasped behind his back as star systems slid past. He was not chasing conquest. He was chasing origin.
Megatron had not merely been a warlord. He had been an archivist of annihilation.
The secret base revealed itself gradually, cloaked within the debris field of a dead system. A shattered planet formed a ring of fractured continents, each piece slowly orbiting an invisible center. At that center hung the structure Megatron had built, massive and angular, forged from Cybertronian alloys older than most civilizations.
A reliquary of tyranny.
Gear's voice carried a note of calculated caution. Cybertronian encryption detected. Defensive constructs dormant but functional. Energon reserves at extreme levels.
Alex nodded once. He expected nothing less.
The battleship did not approach openly. Instead, Alex deployed a phased insertion platform that slipped through the debris field and anchored directly to the base's outer hull. The moment his boots touched its surface, ancient systems stirred, recognizing a presence that should not exist.
Alex did not announce himself.
He walked.
The interior was vast and reverent, less a military installation and more a shrine. Walls were etched with Cybertronian glyphs depicting their creation myth, the rise of the Primes, the fall into civil war. Energon conduits pulsed beneath transparent floors like veins beneath skin.
This was Megatron's truth, Alex realized. Not power for its own sake, but ownership of history.
He accessed the central archive first.
Data flooded his mind in structured waves, cleaner than the fractured remnants taken from Megatron's brain. This was the sum of Megatron's findings about Cybertron's lost golden age. Original manufacturing templates. Planetary-scale forges. The precise configuration of Cybertron's core before it became unstable.
Then the weapons.
Alex's expression did not change as the schematics unfolded.
Planet crackers capable of collapsing tectonic plates with harmonic resonance. Energon inversion bombs designed to turn living metal against itself. Stellar destabilizers refined from early Sun Harvester prototypes.
Weapons of mass extinction.
Megatron had not intended to rule a galaxy.
He had intended to remake it.
The next vault opened with heavier resistance, its safeguards built to repel even Prime-level authority. Alex bypassed them using a synthesis of AllSpark logic, Mother Box rewriting, and Kryptonian computational dominance.
Inside, he found them.
One hundred Cybertronian Seeds.
Each was a compact sphere of living metal and condensed AllSpark energy, dormant but potent. With sufficient power, a single seed could unfold into a proto-Cybertron, complete with infrastructure, manufacturing nodes, and the capacity to birth new Cybertronians.
Megatron had planned carefully.
Steal the Cube. Activate the Seeds. Rebuild Cybertron in his image. Populate it with loyal sparks forged directly under his control.
Alex absorbed the data and sealed the Seeds into his system space without ceremony.
Useful, he decided. But unnecessary for my purposes.
There was one final set of records.
Buried beneath layers of fear, hatred, and obsession was the truth Megatron had never shared with anyone.
The Quintessons.
Alex stopped walking as the information unfolded.
They were not myths.
They were not gods.
They were engineers.
The Quintessons were the original creators of the Cybertronian race, ancient beings who had built living machines as tools, then discarded them when they became inconvenient. They had enslaved early Cybertronians, experimented on their sparks, and used entire worlds as factories.
When the Cybertronians rebelled, the Quintessons had not been destroyed.
They had been imprisoned.
Megatron had known where.
Alex felt something shift inside him, not excitement, but inevitability.
Coordinates locked, he said. Prepare for dimensional insertion.
The prison lay far beyond conventional space, sealed within a pocket reality anchored by artificial laws and guarded by constructs older than recorded time. As the battleship breached the boundary, reality screamed in protest.
Alex welcomed it.
The prison world was grotesque.
Organic architecture fused with machinery on a scale that dwarfed Cybertron itself. Massive beings floated within containment fields, their forms shifting constantly, eyes opening and closing across their bodies. Quintessons. Arrogant even in captivity.
They sensed him instantly.
Another creation, one of them hissed through space itself. You come to serve or to die.
Alex stepped forward, Infinity Stones flaring into existence around him, their power restrained but undeniable.
I came to take what you stole, he said calmly.
The Quintessons laughed.
They unleashed everything at once.
Reality bent as conceptual weapons struck him. Thought-disruptors. Soul flayers. Temporal erosion fields. Attacks designed to erase identity, not flesh.
Alex stood unmoving.
The Soul Stone ignited first, anchoring his essence beyond their reach. The Reality Stone followed, overwriting their weapons mid-existence, turning annihilation into harmless light. The Power Stone pulsed, compressing entire attack vectors into inert mass.
The Quintessons recoiled.
Impossible, one screamed. You are not bound by creation law.
Correct, Alex replied. I am iterative.
He advanced.
With every step, he stripped them. Knowledge peeled from their minds. Engineering principles older than stars flowed into him. He learned how sparks were shaped, how AllSpark energy could be regulated, how authority over Cybertronian life was enforced at a fundamental level.
The Quintessons tried to flee within their prison.
Alex collapsed the pocket reality around them.
He did not kill them outright.
Instead, he used the Soul Stone to rip their authority structures apart, severing their dominion over Cybertronian creation. Their power flowed into him, not as worship, not as corruption, but as control.
Then he fused it.
The AllSpark responded.
Not as a tool.
As recognition.
Alex felt it fully for the first time. Its logic. Its limits. Its potential. The AllSpark no longer saw him as an outsider manipulating its energy.
It saw him as its administrator.
Supreme authority established, Gear confirmed, her voice steadier than ever. Quintesson control parameters overridden. AllSpark hierarchy rewritten.
The Quintessons screamed as their prison collapsed into nothingness, their existence reduced to echoes within Alex's expanding understanding.
When it was over, Alex stood alone in the void, the Stones dimming as balance reasserted itself.
He exhaled slowly.
Cybertron's creators were gone.
Its future now belonged to someone else.
Alex returned to the battleship and ordered immediate departure. As they folded back into realspace, his systems recalibrated automatically, integrating the stolen authority into every Cybertronian-derived framework he possessed.
Transformers would never rise against him.
The AllSpark would never act without his consent.
He looked toward the distant stars, where Earth waited, fragile and defiant.
The universal war loomed closer with every decision he made.
But now, Alex Price did not merely wield gods' tools.
He held their keys.
And the universe would have to adapt.