Nathan forced thoughts of ancient Primes to the back of his processors and began to scan his immediate surroundings. He was in a sprawling industrial vault, easily a thousand square meters of reinforced alloy and shadow. Every surface hummed with the low-frequency vibration of heavy machinery.
Not far away stood Starscream and a rigid line of Decepticons that mirrored Nathan's own stature. Further still, a mangled chassis lay prone on a diagnostic slab—unit T-18, Nathan surmised. Scalpel was currently burrowing into the fallen unit's chest cavity, his metallic limbs clicking as he performed a post-mortem or a frantic repair.
The room was cluttered with equipment that blurred the line between a laboratory and a slaughterhouse. There were massive glass cylinders suspended by hydraulic arms, containing biological samples and mechanical components harvested from Earth's local flora and fauna. Nathan recognized the silhouette of Cybertronian limbs interspersed with terrestrial animal parts—a grim testament to Scalpel's research.
A medic and a scientist, Nathan realized. Scalpel doesn't just fix us; he experiments on everything.
As he paced the perimeter, Nathan finally caught a clear view of his new self. The silver-white walls were polished to a mirror finish, reflecting his image with startling clarity.
He stared at a towering, monstrous silhouette. His chassis was a deep, light-absorbing obsidian, jagged and sharp-edged. His facial plates were a mask of predatory aggression—a permanent snarl etched into cold alloy. But it was the optics that haunted him: two burning pits of crimson light that flared and dimmed with every thought, radiating a primal, demonic energy.
Every inch of his frame felt built for violence, stripped of any aerodynamic grace or vehicle-mode softness.
No wonder the Decepticons are the villains, Nathan thought, a dry irony pulsing through his circuits.
He hadn't expected to look like a hero, but he realized that his current appearance was a death sentence for any peaceful interaction. There was no "heroic" blue or red here. This was a form that would make any human scream "monster" the moment they saw it. To the inhabitants of this planet, he was the nightmare under the bed, a ten-ton engine of destruction.
I look like the kind of thing Optimus Prime would execute on sight, he noted.
Still, there were advantages. He stood nearly nine meters tall—only a head shorter than Starscream himself. In the Transformers universe, size didn't always equate to strength—he knew about the ancient Mini-Cons like Micronus, who possessed god-like power in a tiny frame, or the legendary Headmaster Cogman, who could snap an Elite's fingers despite being human-sized. But size provided a different kind of power: psychological weight.
A nine-meter-tall machine was an apex predator to the humans. Nathan didn't underestimate the inhabitants of this planet; he knew their history, their capacity for adaptation, and the "weakening" effect this world seemed to have on Cybertronians. On this rock, even kings like Megatron and Optimus seemed to find themselves in the scrapheap far too often.
"T-22! Why are you still standing there like a deactivated drone?"
The barked command shattered Nathan's reflection. He suppressed his surprise and looked toward the source. Starscream was staring directly at him, his optics narrow and impatient.
T-22. Nathan recalled the system chime upon his activation. I don't even get a name. Just a serial number in a mass-produced batch of cannon fodder.
He moved instantly, his heavy footsteps echoing through the vault as he fell into line. To his left were units T-19 through T-21; to his right, T-23 through T-25. The six of them were nearly identical—rough, brutal, and silent.
Nathan stole a glance at his "brothers." They were perfectly still, their optics blank and obedient. Scalpel's logic chips had done their job; these units were the perfect soldiers—loyal, mindless, and ready to die on command.
This is how the Decepticons won the war for so long, Nathan realized. While the Autobots mourn every loss, the Decepticons just print more soldiers. Numbers over sparks.
He knew that to a Commander like Starscream, a Mid-tier unit wasn't a person; it was a statistic. A expendable asset to be traded for ground. If he wanted to survive, he had to keep playing the part. He had to be the perfect, silent T-22.
Let them think I'm just a number, Nathan thought, lowering his head in a practiced display of submission. The moment they look away, that number is going to change.