Chapter Text
Serving Lord Megatron was an honor, whatever the means of doing so.
It occurred to him, while standing there in the dimness, perceiving the distinct, faint wisp of energy radiating from spilled bodily fuel glowing dimly into the darkness, taking in the sight of a robotic appendage –a tubular structure much like his data cables, but which instead of extending out from his body it crawled up his torso in its incursive journey–, that the current situation might very well be labeled under less than flattering appellations. Others might, at least. But he was aware that the state of affairs was apposite. It could have ended tragically, after all... It could have been disastrous
That whole ordeal with the infectious Energon had ended in disaster, granted. Half the army had been wiped out, sacrificed as food to an esurient, monstrous drone, from which the disease—the virus, the curse, whatever—had spread to the dead. Troopers were not meant to be that kind of fodder...
A tragedy, therefore... Granted. Although his pragmatic and hardened computing of external events hardly considered it as such.
And the Insecticons, gone, their raw strength and advantageous numbers dismissed into banishment. Granted.
Nevertheless, it could have ended even worse. Megatron could have become a mindless, insatiable terrorcon, just like the one that decimated the army, but exponentially mightier. The predacon beast could have been gotten infected as well, and then, so much for the remnants of the Decepticon army. So much for any of them. Of course, the abominations would eventually hunt down the Autobots as well, and in a way, they would be some sort of defeated. Defeat at the hands of the Decepticons… well, one Decepticon at least…
And what a despicable form of victory that would be! Underhanded, indirect, vile...
By the time Megatron reached the treacherous Arachnicon, Soundwave was standing just at the other end of the hallway. Megatron had crossed paths with him merely by chance, as he had been passing through the area on his assigned orders to dispose of Airachnid, and Soundwave had assumed that Megatron would step aside to let him. But Megatron had, instead, graced the Arachnicon with his attention. Much to Soundwave's chagrin.
"Soundwave!" Airachnid had called out to the sight of Soundwave, her swarm holding after her. "Tonight we'll know the sound of your screams..." she threatened.
There was such deep grudge and animosity dripping from her voice, corrosive as the acid hidden in the lines within her hands. Soundwave had never entertained the idea that she loathed him so much for that time when he hurled her back into her place, stomping on her face and discouraging riot. Still, it wasn't surprising.
He shifted, as if daunted, or ready to fight. Was it worth it, though? Was she worth it? No. Why to spend any more time and energy on her? He still had the infected Vehicons to deal with. He would simply dismiss the nuisance, but not before fiddling a little with the smug traitor's excessive self-esteem.
As she charged forward, lured by Soundwave's fighting stance, his processor had begun to determine a distant location to send her along with all of her stolid subdues, when the heavy clanking of Megatron's footsteps echoed behind the charging horde.
Airachnid stopped and looked back at once as the swarm continued to advance, rushing around her, veiling her in a curtain of buzzing wings in its hostile rush toward the communications chief.
It was too late for Soundwave to abort.
“You’re just in time, my Lord,” she intoned disdainfully, among the last stragglers of the metallic swarm torrent. “You've been on a lucky streak the entirety of your life…" she purred, her deceitful, sweet tone morphing into one of deadly hostility. "It's about time you run out of luck!"
The rear guard of the swarm detached from the rest to turn on Megatron, obeying that uncanny phenomenon of knowing exactly what their Queen wanted from them without her uttering a single word, when blue and green light bursted ahead, along with the thunderous sound of a Space Bridge swirling into life. Airachnid turned in time to see half of her army vanishing through the vortex, ensnared, dispatched to a remote location.
"No!" she roared, but there was nothing left to do. And she was not going to make the mistake of allowing herself be carried away by her rage, falling yet another humiliating time for Soundwave's infuriating traps.
The portal closed behind the last Insecticon, shrinking in on itself as if imploding.
"It wasn't your brightest idea trying to lure a predator." Airachnid hissed, hovering in the center of the hallway on her additional spider legs.
She was unamused to acknowledge that she must now face Soundwave alone. At least, hold him off long enough for her minions to deal with Megatron. The Vehicons behind each officer worried her little. Her last encounters with both, however, had taught her each lessons: Intimidation was ineffective; speed and strategy were crucial.
Before Laserbeak could disengage from Soundwave's torso, a thick jet of cybersilk was pouring down on him, solidifying on contact and preventing his deployment, adhering him to the torso of his host while also sealing the data cables of the later within their ports.
Suddenly deprived of the advantage that his elusive minicon and versatile appendages provided, Soundwave flinched slightly, sharply turning his visor toward her. Airachnid smirked at him before rushing at him, nimbly and lightly wading through the flurry of gunfire that the Vehicons unleashed upon her, missing every shot.
A quick check, as swift as thought, informed Soundwave that she was moving 10.83 nanokliks faster than her maximum recorded speed, and despite his agile body and processor, he got close to being impaled by the spider's legs as sharp as laser scalpels.
The remaining Insecticons spearheading the charge against Megatron found no reward but his wrath, and were deftly flung aside by arms as solid and virtually impregnable as the walls they were sent crashing into. The second pair were luckier, managing to ram into him amidst the confusion of screams and strikes, and the Vehicon escort's gunfire bouncing uselessly off the Insecticons' near-impenetrable armor.
Megatron staggered back, snarling furiously, but recovered quickly and intercepted the jaws that tried to close on him, gripping them in his talons. Behind him, the futile shots of the escorting troops mixed with the shrill battle calls of the Insecticons – half shriek, half howl – and the tortured screech of shredding and crushing metal, informed him that more offline Vehicons were piling up on the Energon-spattered floors of the ship.
Enraged and bewildered, he glanced briefly over his shoulder to witness the pitiful and incompetent resistance of the equally pitiful and incompetent newly manufactured Vehicons, barely trained soldiers that fell apart before the optics with contemptible ease. Here were the last protoforms, on which the code of some Vehicon had been imprinted and reproduced carelessly and in a hurry.
Until now, he had not bothered to ascertain the quality of the results. Considering, in his arrogance, any Spark to be his inferior in both power and ingenuity, he had not realized how morbidly faulty these new soldiers really were, how much their incompetence and stupidity were due as much to a negligent training as to a botched production. They were not just weak and stupid compared to him. They were entirely malfunctioning.
In a fleeting moment, he belatedly realized that the negligence was not exclusively due to Starscream's mediocre training (as he had been determined to believe), who did not consider it necessary to bother with Vehicons that were so abnormally prone to explode. It was a general negligence. He himself, supreme general and master, had only bothered to ensure that they were loyal.
And these had been the last protoforms. There would be no more clones. They had wasted them all.
A third Insecticon lunged at the ex-gladiator, and he was forced to release the jaws he held to protect himself from an attack to his midsection. The attacker's momentum pushed him backwards, while his arms immobilized the snapping jaws, and both opponents were abruptly forced to a stop by a blunt metal wall.
Meanwhile, during a dance of evasions, blocks, and occasionally landed attacks, Soundwave busied himself by drilling through the web that kept his cables disabled, using the prongs at the end of each into that function. Airachnid attacked relentlessly, displaying a resistance she had not shown until then. The few shots that the surviving Vehicons managed to land did not seem to slow her down. Energon slid over her small body, falling in threads from the limbs wounded by Vehicon shots or by the slashes inflicted by Soundwave. And it also puddled under the almost pierced crust of cybersilk, where the sharp prongs inevitably hurt and grinded the outline of the ports that housed them in their attempt to break free.
Suddenly, the backup fire was abruptly halted as a group of Terrorcons charged towards their former peers, and the Vehicons had to redirect their attacks in their own defense.
The shock momentarily distracted Soundwave, just for a second... Enough for the blades on his opponent's legs to trace an abstruse bloody pattern on his torso. He jumped back repeatedly, avoiding deeper stabs that continued to harass him.
The last unfortunate leap inevitably delivered him into the frenzied clutches of the newly transformed terrorcons, who did not hesitate to seize him, and Airachnid laughed, turning her back, pleased with her own ruse.
“You’re not the only one who can play that game,” he said, languidly making her way over to the pile of Insecticons still besieging the livid Megatron. “I would very much enjoy the sight of your petulant spark being extinguished by puny drones , dear Soundwave… Shame, more pressing matters call for me.”
Soundwave didn't scream, much to her disappointment, but the cacophony that reached her auditory receptors seemed raucous enough for her to gloat over her vengeance.
Cornered and outnumbered, but not defeated, Megatron was dispatching a freshly decapitated Insecticon, and burning a hole through another with a blast from his fusion cannon, when Airachnid unleashed a generous torrent of potent cybersilk onto his arms, nullifying his weapons.
The crimson glow of his irate gaze turned towards her, and a roar bursted from his vocoder.
"Do you really think you can defeat me?" he bellowed, threatening to unleash his anger on her.
At a silent command from their queen, two Insecticons grabbed his arms wrapped in sticky cybersilk, pushing him once more against the wall, to which a second torrent of webbing pinned his hindered limbs.
“Shut up!” Airachnid snapped in an uncharacteristic, hoarse, violent cry, the silky lassitude of the devious predator suddenly replaced by a savage ferocity.
She had materialized above him, her spidery legs flanking him in a prison of blades. Four pairs latched onto the wall behind him, and the remaining pair came down on his shoulders, lancing the first layer of armor; her maddened face hatefully close to his. And a cybersilk ribbon muffled Megatron's pained and angered growl, ensuring that the command was carried out.
Megatron glared at her, struggling in his bonds despite razor-like limbs trying to slice through a second layer of metallic exoskeleton. The webbing was already beginning to give way...
Suddenly, the hunter's sharp face disfigured itself, splitting and spreading out like an aberrant flower of metal and cables that undulated like small, enraged snakes, exposing the inner components of her face. And she lunged.
A hideous proboscis of metallic spirals and spikes emerged like a harpoon from the depths of her cavernous duct, propelled toward Megatron's armored neck...
Just as Silas had done to Airachnid seconds before a brief incursion into her lines –stopped in time before deactivation– infected her, turning her into what she now revealed herself to be. But unlike the Vehicons and Silas, she was not a living corpse devoid of reason or will. She was perfectly conscious, cunning as ever, but she had gained speed, and her already existing Energon-thirsty viciousness had increased. And she craved internal Energon, now literally.
The proboscis lashed out, thrusting and twisting again and again in its attempts to find entry, slicing gashes into the less reinforced metal of Megatron's face, and repeatedly stabbing at the same point, slowly boring an entrance, then writhing eagerly again in search of a more immediate one.
Suddenly, a pair of familiar cables seized the ravenous Terrorcon, squeezing her in crushing coils. She hissed, her limbs and plates buckling painfully under the mounting pressure. In a blur of motion and sound, she felt herself released, or rather, flung into a new vortex of time and space, a new portal strategically placed between Soundwave and the last survivors of his pursuers. And so, Insecticons and Terrorcons joined those who had preceded them on their one-way ticket trip to the moon.
A few remaining Terrorcons were dispatched with swift, clean stabs to the Spark. And finally, the hallway fell silent, littered with corpses. Only two Cybertronians survived.
Megatron, released from his bonds, lay on his knees, one hand clenched around his neck, an unusually shocked expression in his nearly bulging purple optics.
Purple.
Distressed by the number of incongruities that his association processing generated –purple optics in the absence of dark Energon; an expression of the like on the face that should be proud, scornful or fierce– Soundwave examined him from afar. And detected the trickles of Energon oozing lazily between his claws.