"I wouldn't have come here to stir things up if I didn't have ways to stay alive," Bella said with more than a little pride. "Conventional weapons can't hurt me. Now move!"
Cybertronians possessed self-repair capabilities. The movies made them look like they crumbled under U.S. military fire, but their bodies were extraordinarily tough. Even when damaged, they could heal through their own regenerative systems. Cases like Bumblebee's where the memory module was completely destroyed were rare.
"You two, I think they're starting to see through me over here! You'd better hurry!" Natasha's urgent voice crackled through the earpiece.
Nobody was stupid. After more than ten minutes of standoff, both Sector Seven's soldiers and Starscream's group had started noticing something was off. This whole thing looked a little fake.
"We're going loud. Get out of there." Bella hopped down from the truck cab.
She couldn't help Optimus with killing Megatron, but she could handle the soldiers guarding the AllSpark just fine.
She cast rapidly. A Mind Blast slammed into what appeared to be the command center. Then she raised her right hand—they were underground, beneath a dam, and the air was thick with moisture. Shimmering ice crystals coalesced in an instant, spinning into ice cyclones that formed around her body before sweeping toward the soldiers.
On the other side, Optimus Prime was equally decisive. A single front flip and he shifted back to robot form. Still airborne, a blazing red Energon sword extended from his right wrist. He hit the ground running and charged straight at Megatron.
At death's door, the weight of their fated rivalry jolted Megatron awake.
Crimson optics locked onto Optimus in robot form.
That first look would also be his last.
His body was still frozen. All the firepower in the world meant nothing when you couldn't move.
Megatron frantically ignited the spark in his chest. Great chunks of ice cracked and fell away. Give him five seconds—even three—and he'd break free.
But those few seconds were exactly what he didn't have. Megatron watched helplessly as Optimus Prime's greatsword closed the distance.
Panic surged through his circuits. He wanted to curse Optimus out: You dishonorable punk! Ambushing an old man of six million nine hundred thousand years old!
Optimus had no idea what was running through his mind. His earlier hesitation had been about Bella's safety, but seeing how confident she seemed, he wasn't about to hold back. Megatron would never hesitate to kill him, and the reverse was equally true.
The strike was fast and merciless. In one blinding motion, Optimus drove the Energon sword clean through Megatron's chest spark, then wrenched the blade free, raised his arm, and took the head clean off with a single swing.
The severed head tumbled through the air.
Megatron was dead.
A pathetic, inglorious death.
"Beautiful!" Bella cheered from across the chamber.
Something about the motion looked familiar. The way Optimus wielded that Energon sword bore a striking resemblance to an Assassin deploying a Hidden Blade—and both were, at their core, fighting for freedom. What did that tell you? That the Assassin Brotherhood and the Autobots were practically kindred spirits.
Spark destroyed, head severed. Megatron was well and truly dead this time, right?
Disintegrating him into atoms would have been the ideal outcome, but Bella didn't have that kind of power, and Optimus had no intention of butchering Megatron's corpse further. He shifted back into truck form, loaded Bella up, and gunned it toward the passage leading to the lower level.
Outside, Natasha didn't retreat right away. She and Jazz had set up a quick ruse—she shouldered her sniper rifle and put a round into Starscream at range, while Jazz fired a blast from his Cybertronian weapon at the human military position.
Both sides, already suspicious, exploded.
"Attack! For Megatron!" Starscream's group reacted fastest. Unlike the two leaders who'd spent their time as a miner and a librarian respectively, Starscream had been a scientist back on Cybertron. The moment he sensed something was wrong, his spark nearly burst with fury. In an uncharacteristically aggressive move, he led the charge toward the opposing force.
Sector Seven's soldiers had assumed the whole thing was fake—until the artillery landed on their heads and they instantly scrapped that theory. Natasha shut down the special effects and ducked into cover with Jazz, perfectly framing the Decepticons behind them as the ones doing all the shooting.
"Extraterrestrial life forms! Open fire!"
On the operations chief's command, gunfire erupted. Every caliber of weapon hammered into Starscream like a monsoon.
Starscream would never publicly admit he'd been played. His face dark with rage, he launched missiles at the human troops. He wanted every last one of them dead. The other Decepticons didn't back down either—they threw themselves into the brawl, howling as they clashed with the soldiers.
Having orchestrated the entire performance, Natasha and Jazz slipped away, skirting around the edges of the battle zone. Once they linked up with Ironhide, Ratchet, and Bumblebee, the group hit Starscream from behind.
"Enemies behind us too?!" Starscream identified the attackers and nearly lost it. Normally it was the Decepticons ambushing the Autobots—getting ambushed in return was humiliating.
Fury consumed him. He lashed out at the human soldiers, cursed Megatron in his spark, and cursed the missing Soundwave for good measure.
The three-way brawl descended into total chaos.
Bang! A gunshot cracked. Bella tilted her head to dodge, then snapped a kick into a fully armed soldier, knocking him cold.
Multiple spells in rapid succession were taking their toll. She was starting to tire.
She'd combined a low-level invisibility spell with Assassin stealth techniques, moving like a ghost—flickering left, darting right. Most of the soldiers never saw what hit them before they went down.
Alarms screamed through the base. The operations chief outside, locked in combat with Starscream, realized he'd been duped and urgently pulled troops back as reinforcements.
That gave the Decepticons—caught between the humans and Autobots—a desperately needed breather. Natasha adapted on the fly: if they couldn't take all of them down, they'd pick one Decepticon and hammer it relentlessly.
By now, Bella had dropped every soldier in the lower level. The only thing left in her line of sight was the massive metal cube floating in midair, a good 160 feet (50 m) tall.
With a cascade of mechanical clicks and whirs, Optimus Prime shifted to robot form. He strode forward and gazed up at the enormous cube.
Optimus wasn't Bumblebee or Shatter—he was a faction leader, arguably a planetary-scale figure. Bella had enough self-awareness this time not to try climbing onto his shoulder.
She studied the AllSpark carefully. Cybertronian script covered every surface of the cube, and the energy contained within was staggeringly immense.
Setting aside the current age of diminished magic—even in ancient times, Bella, as a fourth-circle mage, wouldn't have been considered a pushover. She could perceive things within the AllSpark that others couldn't, things fundamentally different from raw energy.
She could see souls.