"The one who sent the signal has to be Megatron. He left Cybertron ten thousand years ago searching for the AllSpark and has been missing ever since. He's the only one who can command every Decepticon." Optimus Prime filled in the last missing piece of the puzzle.
Now the question staring Bella in the face was whether she even wanted to stay involved.
She'd already given them the name Hoover Dam. Everything that followed could happen with or without her—at least as far as the Autobots were concerned.
She glanced at her unofficial little sister. Natasha's eyes were brimming with excitement. If Bella tried to sit this one out, that girl was absolutely not going to let it slide.
"Hoover Dam has a sizable garrison. How exactly do you plan to get in?" Natasha probed, testing Optimus. "Kill your way through?"
Whether Optimus Prime could be trusted wasn't just Natasha's concern—it was a critical question for Bella too. Both sides needed mutual trust, or at the very least a process for building it.
You could never fully trust an outsider. Bumblebee had only been given some leeway because he'd lost his memory and was still young. Optimus was different. He was a genuine faction leader with a whole squad of soldiers behind him—no lone wolf by any stretch.
Optimus didn't bother wondering whether Natasha was testing him. He answered firmly, "We didn't come here to wage war. We won't kill anyone."
The three Autobots behind him each nodded in agreement, backing their leader's words.
"Miss Bella, we don't have much time. I don't know how to earn your trust, but I need to find the AllSpark immediately. If Megatron gets his hands on it, he'll use it to build an army beyond anything you can imagine and conquer Earth."
His tone was heavy, his voice deep and commanding—genuinely moving.
That kind of speech worked wonders on a Sam Witwicky. For Bella and Natasha, though? Just another Tuesday.
They could run out to buy a bag of baby formula and bump into two or three lunatics trying to conquer the planet on the way back.
Sensing their skepticism, Optimus didn't push. It wasn't as though he had no other options. "Goodbye, Miss Bella, Miss Natasha. We'll go to this dam and find Megatron our own way."
Bella hurried to stop him. No matter what, she couldn't let them march into Hoover Dam on their own.
Between the babysitting and the chaos, she'd been completely out of the intelligence loop for the past two days.
Natasha felt the same way. Little Kitty had run them both ragged—they were almost out of touch with the outside world. She scratched her head. "Give me a minute. Let me check what the situation is at the dam."
Bella pulled out her own phone and called that rich heir, hoping to get an update on Sam Witwicky's situation.
The call went through—and that's when she found out. The lead from Transformers 1 through 3 was dead. Oh well. Dead was dead. California had claimed too many lives already.
Only then did she notice the mountain of missed calls from Sadako. She called back. Sadako sounded dazed, murmuring that she felt dizzy. Bella didn't press it—just told her to rest.
Natasha finished her calls and leaned in, whispering, "Sector Seven's in trouble. The higher-ups want to disband them…"
The two of them huddled together for a long discussion before Bella finally turned to Optimus.
"Based on our intelligence, the AllSpark and Megatron are both in the same place—Hoover Dam. Humans discovered them in 1913 and 1935, respectively. We can hand both of them over to you, but on one condition: the entire operation must be directed by us. You assist only. No attacking a human military installation." Bella laid down the ground rules.
Optimus nodded. "Agreed. But I hope we can move quickly—time really is running out. This Autobot is Jazz, my second-in-command. He's versatile and can provide a great deal of support. That's Ratchet, my medical officer. And beside him is Ironhide, our heavy weapons specialist."
With both sides on the same page, Optimus formally introduced his team.
After that, Bella brought the four newcomers—along with a still-confused Bumblebee, whose memories showed no signs of returning anytime soon—back to her place to plan their next move.
The arrival of Optimus and his team hadn't gone unnoticed. Plenty of people had seen four meteors streak across California's sky, and intelligence agencies around the world had flagged the reports. But the Pentagon never got the memo—because their military network had been crippled by a bizarre data stream.
Fifteen minutes earlier, before the four Autobots even entered the atmosphere, a military satellite had suddenly begun pumping enormous volumes of garbled data back to ground command.
The sheer volume nearly crashed the entire network.
At first, the brass assumed it was a cyberattack from a hostile nation. But then they realized something didn't add up—the data contained classified NATO and Russian military deployments. No one launches a cyberattack using their own state secrets. That would be suicidally stupid.
The Pentagon concluded that the satellite had accidentally intercepted sensitive intelligence from multiple countries, and they pulled together a team of experts to crack it open.
Soundwave could strip Sadako's curse off its videotape medium and decode it digitally because Cybertronian technology was that advanced. Earth wasn't there yet. So with the Pentagon's network half-paralyzed, the news of Optimus and the others landing on Earth didn't reach them in time.
As the experts racked their brains, trying every method they could think of to decode the data stream—barreling full speed down a road that would end very badly—a figure hovered silently in the sky above.
A bright yellow figure sighed softly in midair. The Ancient One stood in the sky, hands clasped behind her back, her expression serene. No one could see her.
She hadn't planned to intervene. But the situation was sliding rapidly from science into the arcane. If the Pentagon decoded even a fraction of that data, the consequences would be severe. She had no choice now.
Her hands moved. Countless hand seals took shape beneath her fingers, weaving together into arrays, the arrays merging into the embryonic outline of a Law—something far beyond ordinary magic.
The Marvel world had no unified system for ranking sorcery. Everyone was self-taught. Even Kamar-Taj's accumulated wisdom had gone half-obsolete as global mana concentrations plummeted. Everyone was making it up as they went.
Bella categorized her own psionic spells by intensity and subjectivity, from the First Circle to the Ninth.
The Ancient One's framework was simpler. Drawing heavily from Eastern philosophy, she divided magic into three tiers: Technique, Method, and Dao. Technique was the lowest, Dao the highest. She'd barely managed to get one foot into Dao territory before hitting a wall—constrained by countless limitations, she'd made no further progress since.
Still, she could simulate certain aspects of Dao-level Laws. The simulations were imperfect, but within the material plane, they were already enough to overpower lesser gods.
She didn't use the Time Stone. Instead, she replicated a fraction of its power. One moment the Pentagon experts were poring over their screens—the next, they blinked, and the anomalous data stream had simply vanished.
They were baffled. The Ancient One turned, took a single step, and was in orbit.