The year of war had changed them in ways that were small and relentless—each campaign filing off a corner, each exhaustion smoothing an edge until their movements became a single practiced mechanism.
They had learned to anticipate one another before a signal, to take up positions without words, to trade glances that carried entire tactics. In the field, they fought like seasoned soldiers: synchronized charges through ruined streets, coordinated hauls beneath falling fire, the brutal choreography that only came from repeating the same deadly steps until reflex replaced deliberation.
But beneath the marching, beneath the scars, the secret of Devastator remained theirs alone—an iron thing folded into the margins of every raid.
They merged only when the need was dire and the place was hidden: valleys cut off by storm, factories broken to jagged teeth, nameless mines that smelled of old fire and forgotten contracts. After each fusion, the giant was put away like a weapon too blunt to parade—cooled, separated, checked, repaired, the pieces recataloged so the world could not stitch the myth together.
The merges had become brief, clinical, practiced. Rituals of efficiency. Measures of control.
Devastator existed.
But only those Megatron trusted knew it.
So when Scrapper’s comlink finally buzzed with the code they had all come to recognize—no flourish, no extra instruction, just a location and a time—the ping landed in their processors like a cold, familiar order.
A single tone.
More than a sentence.
They all felt the old current run through them, the way a mech felt the first thrum of a power feed before a lift. No further directives were needed. They already knew what that tone meant. They had been taught to read silence as much as speech.
Each looked at the others in that brief space before movement began, optics colliding with the same mixture of resolve and calculation.
Scrapper’s jaw set.
Hook’s vents ran a quick inventory of diagnostics, clamps, cut sequences, emergency separation routes.
Bonecrusher let out a low sound that was less a laugh than an oath.
Mixmaster’s optics gleamed with hungry arithmetic—what compounds would corrode a hinge, what would seal a splice, what would smoke without wasting heat.
Scavenger’s fingers began ticking off rare thread sizes, escape caches, routes nobody important remembered existed.
Long Haul’s gait sharpened; every step he took in the base measured itself against how many loads he might have to move and how fast.
They were not naïve.
The coordinates pointed outside Iacon, directly at the Senate—the marble-and-spire heart of the caste that had governed the rules under which they had suffered.
In feeds, the building had always been shown as untouchable: broad steps, tall columns, windows like watchful eyes. Architecture dressed as doctrine, every spire a sentence in the law that kept miners down and commanders pampered. For vorns and haulers and seekers, it had been the place where fates were written and labor was rationed.
For the six, it was a symbol pressed so deep into the world that tearing it away would not only break stone.
It would break etiquette.
Expectation.
The very idea of untouchable power.
Now those coordinates sat in their memory banks like a fuse lit under the planet.
The calculus of risk tightened into a single brutal fact: they faced not an anonymous forge or a forgotten mine, but the Senate itself. If the strike hit, it would be more than damage to infrastructure. It would strike the narrative that kept the high caste above the rest.
It would announce that law had limits.
That symbols—the gilded façades, the carved seals, the pomp—could be unmade by hands the caste had spat out.
They had rehearsed covert merges and silent extractions. This was different. Where before secrecy shielded them, now exposure would be part of the blow. The Senate’s fall would not be hidden in the dark. It would be a message lit up for every sector to read.
That made the job both simpler and harder.
Logistics could be planned—approach vectors, splinter teams, exfil—but the cost would be public, raw, irreversible.
For a beat, none of them spoke.
Each ran through checklists internally: load-outs, backup contingencies, the places Hook would need to stand to triage a fused core gone wrong, the windows Scrapper would mark for splice points, the compounds Mixmaster would brew to shore up interlocks on the fly. Scavenger had already thought of escape caches and untraceable routes. Long Haul had already calculated hauling sequences that would keep the giant mobile but unseen until the moment to strike.
They knew, as soldiers did when an operation tilted from raid to reckoning, that the scale of risk had shifted.
The Senate’s gilded halls had been built to withstand storms of rhetoric and legal assault.
They had not expected an army assembled from pit mechs and scavengers.
The stakes had gone from survival to statement. The secret of Devastator—hidden, feared, and wielded sparingly—had suddenly been asked to do something larger than any single test or revenge. The knowledge settled over them like a fresh plate of armor.
Cold.
Inexorable.
Strangely inevitable.
Now it was their target.
They arrived before dawn, lime green and purple armor gleaming faint in the starlight, gathered in the shadow of jagged ruins that cut the sky like broken teeth. The air was thin and cold, wind carrying the metallic tang of old fires and the distant hum of a waking city.
Hook checked the subspace pocket where his kit waited, running through the inventory by memory rather than touch. Clamp set. Sealants. Emergency diagnostics. Separation protocols. The little rituals of readiness steadied him without needing metal in hand.
Scavenger clicked his hands nervously, fingers flicking over gears and threads as if the motion could burn the jitters out of his circuits.
Mixmaster muttered about compounds that could make the walls burn brighter, voice low and restless as he ran chemical permutations under his breath.
Bonecrusher cracked his knuckles with a savage grin, the sound hard and satisfied in the night, an animal readiness showing in the way his shoulders bunched.
Long Haul stood steady, loader racks aligned and ready, the weight of his frame anchoring the group.
Scrapper studied the outline of the Senate with narrowed optics, red glint tracking spire and buttress as he mapped weak seams and likely collapse points in the back of his mind.
Then Megatron stepped into their circle.
The red glow of his optics cut through the dark like a blade. His presence filled the space—massive, deliberate, a gravity that made the ruined stones feel small. His voice carried low but fierce, every syllable laid like a promise of upheaval, the cadence of someone used to being obeyed.
“Today, the Senate falls.”
He gestured to the gleaming spires beyond.
“Their gilded walls will burn, their voices will be silenced. The caste will know fear—not from whispers in the pits, not from gladiators in the shadows, but from us tearing down their seat of power.”
His words painted images—flame on stone, silence where pomp once thundered—and each image lodged in their processors like ammunition.
He looked to the six, gaze sharp and commanding.
“You are the distraction. You will draw the Senate Guard. You will break their defenses. You will make them look at you. And when their eyes are off me—”
His mouth curved into a dangerous grin.
“—I will gut the Senate where it stands.”
The grin was more threat than pleasure, a cold promise that folded the operation into something both tactical and personal. Around them, the ruins held their breath as if the night itself listened. The six felt the plan settle like load brackets on a beam.
Dangerous.
Exact.
Theirs.
For a long, held moment, silence sat between them like weight. The night air bit at exposed joints; their vents sounded as small hisses in the dark. The scale of Megatron’s words pressed into plating and frame.
This was not a scrape at the edges of caste power.
This was not a secret test in a slag pit.
This was the raw geometry of war, drawn up and aimed at the heart of everything that had kept them down.
Scrapper finally nodded, optics hard, jaw set into the familiar angle of a mech who had already sketched contingencies in his head.
“Then we’ll make them look at us.”
The sentence was flat and certain. Around him, his hands already flexed through the small mechanics of preparation—checking straps, flicking a stylus, tracing a route across a mental map only he could see.
Bonecrusher’s grin widened until it showed the viciousness that lived under his humor.
“They won’t be able to look anywhere else.”
The laugh in the line was low and dangerous. His shoulders bunched and his vents flared with the hungry eagerness that had once been called recklessness. The thought of drawing all attention, of becoming the impossible spectacle, thrilled him like a coming fight.
Hook’s voice was sharp, deliberate.
“I’ll keep us standing. But don’t make me rebuild us from nothing.”
The warning held both promise and command—the blunt, honest trade of a medic who had seen what failure looked like and refused to preside over it.
Scavenger’s hands clicked in their nervous staccato, betraying his edge even when his mouth tried bravado.
“Distraction, demolition, distraction,” he muttered, half to himself and half to the group. “Frag, that’s what we were built for.”
The repetition was prayer and boast at once.
Long Haul rumbled deep in response, low and sure as machinery settling into gear.
“Say the word. I’ll carry it.”
Simple.
Absolute.
Where others spoke of plans, Long Haul spoke of weight and distance—the practical facts of making an idea move.
Mixmaster’s grin was wide and wild, optics bright in the starlight as if some dangerous delight had lit him from within.
“Let’s show them what green and purple really means.”
His hands twitched, already imagining the reaction of compounds and the way the right catalyst could make a wall give exactly the way Scrapper wanted it to.
Megatron’s optics burned hotter as he stepped back, letting his words hang in the air like fire.
“Then go. Tear the Senate from its pedestal. Devastator will rise—and the Senate will fall.”
The Senate of Iacon had always prided itself on permanence.
Its towers gleamed in the old feeds—polished alloys catching the light in ruled planes, spires rising like the teeth of a crown. Marble and alloy had been set with the patient hand of a caste that measured cycles in empires. Facades were carved with flourishes that declared lineage and law, reliefs that told the stories the high castes liked to repeat to themselves. Atriums opened into galleries where carved voices spoke of governance and pedigree; antechambers of ritual and ordinance buffered each chamber so every pronouncement felt like the echo of something inevitable.
On the broad steps, the Senate Guard stood in shining ranks, cuirasses polished to a blinding glare, heads lined like a field of suns. Their discipline was ornament as much as defense: drills practiced until motion read like ceremony, halberds held at precise angles, boots aligned in a surface of polished order.
Banners hung from balconies and parapets, official colors rippling under the pale gold of Cybertron’s sun as if the air itself congratulated the institution for enduring.
Pages ran messages between pavilions.
Clerks moved with practiced procession.
Ambassadors and ministers rehearsed their faces and phrases for the cameras that watched the morning.
Around the Senate, the city came awake in the kind of calm long mistaken for security. Markets opened their shutters, servants and couriers threaded the plazas, and petitioners lined in thin, patient curls at ornate gates—all the ordinary machinery of rule.
The building’s systems hummed in efficient confidence: layered scan-sentries, patrol drones that looped predictable beats, gate sequences and biometric checks designed precisely to deny surprise.
The social lattice reinforced itself in a dozen small redundancies; habits of deference had been taught and learned until they were reflex.
Hubris had settled into the place like dust.
The Senate’s permanence was not merely stone and alloy.
It was conviction repeated in policy and pageantry.
Architects and archivists cataloged their own proofs of longevity. Guards believed in the solidity of their ranks. Citizens walked in its shadow believing the building’s presence was as natural and unchallengeable as the sun.
That confidence made the steps lighter.
The sentries slower.
The senators certain that anything beyond petition, protest, or posturing could not come for them.
They had no idea what was coming.
The ground shook before the first blaster fired.
A long, rolling quiver ran up through marble and alloy and made senators look twice at polished floors as if they had felt a pulse underfoot.
Outside, the six came like a machine born from slag and memory, lime green and purple catching the weak dawn and flashing like a promise. They tore through the Guard’s outer perimeter with the brutal choreography of hard practice and harder lives.
Bonecrusher was a battering ram incarnate, shoulders driving into shields until guards tumbled and ranks splintered. The impact sounded like a plate struck with a forged hammer; soldiers folded and skidded across the steps like broken struts, pikes and rifles scattering in the wake of his momentum. Each hit sent a shower of dented metal and shocked vent-huffs into the air.
Long Haul moved with steady, inexorable force—the slow certainty of a loader. He charged, and his racks became blunt projectiles, launching chunks of decorative masonry and barricade into the Guard’s lines. Where Bonecrusher made chaos, Long Haul made lanes. His weight shifted the balance of bodies and armor until the perfect geometry of the Guard’s formation became wreckage.
Scavenger blurred through the line with fingers and manic focus, snatching weapons from hands with a thief’s speed and a scavenger’s instinct. He didn’t kill when he could disarm; he ripped rifles and pikes free and tossed them aside with fast, almost gleeful movements. The sounds of clattering metal and surprised curses followed him like sparks.
Mixmaster moved like a small, volatile storm. He poured compounds from hidden canisters into the gutter, quick-acting reagents that found old oils and sealants and set them smoking, then burning in green chemical fire that crawled along the steps. The flames licked at polished metal, eating varnish and decoration, sending a choking tang of burning solvent into the air. Where they met Guard armor, the heat made soldiers stagger, joints warping, disciplined lines buckling before something both physical and chemical.
Hook was in motion the whole time, a medic in the center of a battlefield. He yanked Bonecrusher back from a stabbing blow with hands that did not tremble, then called a clamp from subspace and sealed a torn conduit before shoving him forward again. He patched, sealed, and moved, keeping the rhythm of their advance with a surgeon’s economy and a feral urgency that had no patience for injury.
Scrapper stood like a conductor in the middle of it, voice sharp and unrelenting.
“Left wall!”
“Down the east column!”
“Use that rubble!”
The six obeyed with the seamless brutality of a unit taught not to hesitate. He watched the field for flanks and weak points, fingers tracing the architecture like a builder marking a beam, then pointed them into gaps. His orders turned wreckage into cover, collapsed stairwells into choke points, and debris into improvised shields.
The Guard fought hard—trained mechs in lined armor, halberds striking, energy blades arcing. Energon spattered the pristine steps in ugly pits of light; sparks arced as pikes met fists; guards fell into carved balustrades with the sound of metal against stone.
But the distraction worked.
While shields and teeth took the brunt of the assault outside, eyes held on the steps.
The Guard never noticed the shadows slipping between columns.
Never looked up in time to see Megatron and his command strike sweep into the building like a storm.
Megatron entered first, fusion cannon humming with contained violence.
Starscream cut in above and behind him, wings angled tight in the corridors, crimson optics bright with the lethal satisfaction of old grievances given sanctioned form.
Thundercracker followed with grim precision, steady and controlled, covering the left with disciplined bursts that dropped guards before they could cry alarm.
Skywarp flickered in and out of the chamber shadows, black and purple appearing where no sane defense expected him, turning escape routes into ambushes.
Megatron’s roar rolled through the chambers like a breaker hitting the sea, and the shrieks of senators cut off one by one as his strike force moved like knives through the crowd. Panic thickened the air. Robes fluttered. Holos winked out. Pillars that usually swallowed sound gave back the brittle clatter of falling bodies and breaking status.
No Sentinel stood in defense.
Sentinel had seen the green-and-purple impossibility rising outside the Senate and turned toward it, pulled by the very spectacle Megatron had ordered into being. The Prime’s attention, his force, his outrage—everything the Senate might have hidden behind—went toward the monster at the gates.
Exactly as planned.
Inside, only old voices begged and spat. Desperate hands clawed at polished balustrades. Bodies collapsed fast under clean, deadly answers of blaster fire and fusion cannon. The Senate’s marble grew slick with scorched dust and the awful sparks that marked where armor had been pierced.
Outside, the Guard rallied into line, polished cuirasses flashing in a useless show of order, until the signal the six had rehearsed across a hundred practice runs tore through the chaos.
The Nexus flared.
Interlocks ground with the brutal intimacy of teeth finding gear. Plates shifted along seams as bearings freed and locked in new geometry. Flex-metal sang a high, keen note as lattices flexed into place, like a drawn wire across a vast instrument. Sparks howled in unison—not six fractured cries, but a single jagged scream rising through braided conduits and metal like a beast finding its voice.
The combined power drove currents through welds and braces until panels shivered and temporary anchors bit deeper into the slag.
The Guard faltered.
For an instant, their practiced drills looked clumsy against the sudden monstrous focus on the steps. Shadow swallowed the ranks as heavy feet and broader plates eclipsed the morning light. Optics turned upward in the same breath the great form began to unfold.
Devastator rose for the first time in public.
He towered above the Senate like a fallen monument remade for war—a colossus of green and purple, seams and plates welded into an impossible silhouette. Fists hung like thunderbolts at his sides, knuckles braced with the kind of weight that made the air tremble. His optic burned hot, unrelenting red, cutting across the plaza and over gilded spires, catching in cracked panes and stunned faces.
The roar that bellowed from him was not merely loud.
It was physical pressure.
An oscillation that rattled windows and sent shards of carved ornament skittering down the façade. Senators inside crouched and covered, voices smothered under the impact of the sound too late to matter.
The Guard charged anyway.
Blasters spat lines of blue and white, tracers arcing and turning to smoke where Devastator’s bulk occupied their aim. Pikes drove upward like a forest of desperate intent, points striking against plates never designed to yield to such force.
Then Devastator moved.
Mass in motion.
A singular swing carrying the combined impulse of six wills and the terrible efficiency of a machine finally allowed to act.
His fist came down into the Guard’s front line with a crash that turned formation into wreckage. Shields crumpled. Marble cracked. Soldiers flew backward in a scatter of armor and sparks. The steps beneath him buckled, but he did not stumble.
Inside the Nexus, six thoughts scraped, collided, then found one shared shape.
Break.
The word became motion first.
Then voice.
Devastator’s head turned toward the Senate façade, red optic burning across carved seals and gilded balconies.
His jaw opened.
“Devastator destroy.”
The words rolled over the plaza like falling stone.
A silence followed them.
Not full silence.
The battle still burned. Guards shouted. Blasters fired. Fires crackled green along the steps.
But something in the city paused.
He had named himself before, in secret.
Now the world heard it.
Devastator lifted one huge arm and drove his fist into the outer wall. The Senate’s polished face buckled inward. Relief carvings shattered. A balcony tore loose from its supports and collapsed in a shining rain of metal and stone.
“Break wall.”
The command was simple.
Enough for all six to agree.
The wall obeyed.
Inside, Megatron heard the impact through three levels of polished arrogance and did not slow. He moved through the Senate chamber like a blade with purpose, each step taking him deeper into the institution that had once believed itself above consequence.
Starscream swept a pair of guards aside with bright, surgical fire, his mouth curled in a grin that was too sharp to be joy.
“Your distraction is effective,” he called over the chaos.
Megatron did not look back.
“It was never in question.”
Thundercracker’s blaster cracked twice, controlled and exact. “Outer Guard is breaking formation.”
Skywarp appeared beside an inner door, one hand already on the locking mechanism, grin wide and wicked. “Then let’s make sure the inner ones don’t get a warning.”
Megatron’s cannon lifted.
The door ceased to exist.
Outside, Sentinel’s approach hit the outer plaza like a stormfront.
His forces poured toward Devastator, drawn by the impossible scale of him, by the roaring green-and-purple shape that had no place in Senate doctrine, no permitted category, no sanctioned existence. The Prime’s attention snapped to the monster smashing the outer defenses, and with it came every command protocol meant to preserve the Senate’s heart.
Too late.
Exactly where Megatron wanted it.
Devastator turned toward the incoming force, optic flaring.
Inside the Nexus, aggression surged. Caution tried to route it. Weight steadied it. Structure shaped it. Chemistry thrilled through it. Small sensor awareness marked every motion, every weapon, every shifting point of danger.
They did not need elegance.
They needed attention.
Devastator spread his arms and roared again, louder than the first, louder than the Senate alarms screaming behind him.
“Devastator break!”
Then he slammed both fists into the plaza.
The shockwave cracked the marble approach in a jagged web, throwing guards off their feet and forcing the nearest ranks to scatter. Pikes clattered. Blasters misfired. The perfect lines of Senate defense became frantic movement and shouted correction.
Sentinel’s command channel screamed for containment.
Containment meant eyes on Devastator.
Containment meant force poured outward.
Containment meant Megatron had space inside.
The Senate chamber doors blew open from within.
The sound rolled out beneath Devastator’s next roar, too small for the crowd outside to understand, but the six inside the Nexus felt the timing like a structural shift. The plan was working. Megatron had entered the heart.
Devastator’s mouth opened again.
“Senate fall.”
He seized one of the great decorative columns flanking the outer steps and wrenched it sideways. Stone and alloy screamed. The column tore free in pieces, collapsing across the approach and cutting off a clean Guard charge before it could form. Devastator hurled the broken remains into a defensive tower, and the impact caved its face inward, alarms choking mid-wail.
Hook’s caution tightened the energon flow before the next swing.
Scrapper shaped the angle.
Bonecrusher drove the force.
Long Haul carried the weight through the spine.
Mixmaster felt the flex-metal heat and kept the motion within tolerance.
Scavenger tracked every weakness opening in the wall.
Devastator did not speak those thoughts.
He moved them.
Inside, the Senate died.
Not in a grand debate.
Not in a vote.
Not in the ceremonial language it had used to dress cruelty as law.
Megatron moved through the chamber with Starscream, Thundercracker, and Skywarp cutting paths behind him, and the old order broke in bursts of light and screams of metal. Senators who had signed condemnations, rationing decrees, caste restrictions, labor mandates—voices that had shaped the suffering of millions from polished chairs—found there was no procedure for this.
No appeal.
No delay.
No filibuster.
No protection in ritual.
Megatron’s cannon burned, and each blast was an answer to centuries of law written against the people below them.
Outside, Devastator kept the world looking at him.
He smashed the Guard’s next barricade flat.
“Destroy guard.”
The words were blunt, heavy, not clever. The intent behind them was absolute. The Guard scattered before his stride, and those who did not move fast enough were swept aside by the force of him. He did not chase individuals. He did not need to. His task was larger.
Be seen.
Be impossible.
Be the terror at the gate while Megatron cut out the heart.
A broadcast drone swung too close, its lens staring wide into Devastator’s face.
For one frozen instant, his optic filled the entire feed.
Red.
Furious.
Alive.
Then Devastator’s hand closed around the drone and crushed it into sparks.
Across Iacon, screens stuttered.
Then replayed what they had captured.
Green.
Purple.
Colossal.
A weapon no Senate record had approved.
A monster made from laborers the system would not have noticed until they tore the system’s walls down.
The plaza buckled under him.
The Senate Guard, once shining and ceremonial, was no longer a line. It was fragments trying to become a defense and failing each time Devastator’s shadow passed over them. Sentinel’s force pressed harder, trying to draw him away from the façade, and Devastator answered with another two-word judgment.
“Devastator crush.”
His foot came down between two broken ranks, shattering the marble and throwing the nearest guards backward. The impact shook the outer columns. High above, a row of carved senatorial faces cracked through the middle, ancient expressions split from brow to chin.
Inside, Megatron reached the central dais.
The highest seats of the Senate rose before him, arranged to look down upon anyone made to stand beneath them. He stopped at the foot of those steps for half a breath and looked up.
For once, the room above him had nothing to say.
Starscream hovered at the broken edge of an upper balcony, optics bright, wings tight, watching exits.
Thundercracker stood near the main corridor, steady as a gate.
Skywarp flickered behind a senator trying to flee through a private passage and shoved him back into the chamber with a laugh too sharp to be mistaken for mercy.
Megatron raised his cannon.
The first high seat burned.
Then the next.
Then the next.
The Senate’s carved authority became fire and falling metal.
Outside, Devastator felt the collapse through the ground.
Not just stone.
Meaning.
Something in the Nexus aligned for one sharp, clear instant.
Six minds.
One will.
The Senate falls.
Devastator lifted his head, optic burning across the plaza, across the cameras still trying to recover signal, across Sentinel’s forces and the shaken Guard and the city that had thought permanence was the same as power.
His voice came out lower this time.
Clearer.
Still simple.
Still heavy.
“Senate fall.”
Behind him, the first great spire cracked.
A fissure ran from its base up through gilded panels and carved law-script, bright dust pouring from the seam like the building had begun to bleed light. The spire tilted, slow at first, then faster, tearing free from its anchors with a shriek of tortured alloy.
It fell across the morning sky.
The sound of its impact swallowed every alarm.
For one breath, even the battle seemed small.
Then the Senate began to come apart.
Not all at once.
Not enough to bury Megatron’s strike force, not yet. Scrapper’s calculations held inside Devastator’s motions, every blow angled to draw attention, break defense, and destroy symbols without collapsing the inner strike zone before Megatron was clear.
But the outer face shattered.
The broad steps split.
Balconies dropped.
Banners caught fire.
Carved seals broke under green chemical flame and purple-shadowed fists.
The institution that had dressed itself as eternity learned the language of impact.
Megatron emerged from the broken Senate entrance through smoke and falling dust, cannon still hot, optics burning like war given a body. Starscream came behind him, mouth curved with vicious satisfaction. Thundercracker followed, steady and grim, one shoulder scored by fire. Skywarp appeared last from a flicker of shadow, laughing under his vents as the passage collapsed behind him.
Megatron did not look back at the dying chamber.
He looked up at Devastator.
The giant turned toward him, red optic flaring.
For a fraction of a cycle, the world held the image: Megatron below, Devastator above, the Senate breaking behind them.
The old power in ruins.
The new power visible.
Megatron lifted one hand.
Not a plea.
Not a signal for restraint.
A command.
Devastator stilled.
The massive frame held in place amid falling dust and burning banners, fists clenched, shoulders heaving with the effort of contained force. Inside the Nexus, six instincts strained to keep breaking, keep smashing, keep driving the message deeper into stone.
Megatron’s optics narrowed.
“Enough.”
The word cut through them.
Devastator’s head lowered slightly.
The fist that had been lifting toward another wall stopped in midair.
For a moment, the whole plaza saw what Shockwave, Soundwave, and Megatron already knew.
The monster obeyed.
Megatron’s mouth curved.
“Withdraw.”
Devastator’s optics burned against the broken Senate one last time.
His voice rolled low, rough, and simple.
“Devastator obey.”
Then he turned.
Each step shook the plaza. Each movement pulled the Guard’s eyes with him, dragged Sentinel’s forces farther from the gutted chamber, stretched the chaos wide enough for Megatron’s command group to vanish into smoke, shadow, and preplanned escape routes.
Behind them, the Senate burned.
The spires that had promised permanence cracked against the dawn.
The banners that had hung above petitioners curled black at the edges.
The Guard’s formation lay in ruin.
And across the city, through broken feeds and frightened witnesses, one impossible image spread faster than any official statement could contain.
Green and purple.
A giant on the Senate steps.
A name spoken like falling stone.
Devastator.