Inside the quarry, all sorts of debris filled the air, pulled relentlessly toward the cavernous, roaring maw of Devastator.
Like a bottomless void, the giant construct consumed everything. Massive jagged stones, heavy metal struts, and abandoned excavation rigs were drawn into his metal throat, chewed apart by grinding gears.
"Hide! Get down, hide!" Skids and Mudflap shrieked, their voice modulators cracking.
Simmons and Leo didn't need the warning. They had already bolted toward a massive communication tower, wrapping their arms around its lattice frame.
The tower's concrete foundations ran dozens of meters deep into the bedrock, but the suction force was so immense that their legs lifted off the ground, leaving them dangling horizontally in the air. They had to constantly dodge the jagged stones whistling past their heads.
"We're going to die! We're dead!" Leo screamed, his eyes wide with sheer terror.
The events of this single day had easily eclipsed the sheer excitement of the first twenty years of his life combined.
"Oh, look at this guy. Total rookie. Can't handle a real arena," Skids muttered.
"Yeah, pretty pathetic," Mudflap agreed, delivering their usual commentary despite the danger.
"Hold on! Just hold tight!" Simmons yelled, his fingers white as he gripped the structural cables.
Sensing that the four tiny specs were still resisting his vortex, Devastator swung his massive upper frame, adjusting his intake vectors to increase the suction power.
*Wroooar—*
The low, vibrating rumble of tearing wind grew deafening. Simmons felt as if he were trapped inside the localized eye of a category-five hurricane.
"Guys, I've got an idea!" Simmons shouted, his eyes darting across the terrain. He realized that the zone directly beneath the titan's crawling chassis was completely unaffected by the vacuum grid. "Get under—"
"Oh my god, watch out!" Leo cut him off with a panicked shriek.
It was too late. The structural frame of the tower began to buckle under the strain. The specific section of cable Skids was clinging to snapped with a loud crack.
Instantly, the green twin went airborne, spinning helplessly toward Devastator's gaping mouth.
"No, no, no! I don't want to be slagged!" Skids flailed his arms wildly. "He's going to eat me! I need to grab something—"
*Gulp.*
Devastator snapped his massive jaws shut, swallowing the Autobot whole.
The titan suddenly shuddered, his intake grid locking up as if a bone were caught in his throat. Black acrid smoke began pouring out from the seals along his neck joints.
"He did it. He actually stopped the big guy," Mudflap sighed, shaking his head. "He saved us, but he got completely digested."
"Move, move! Right now!"
Simmons grabbed his pack and dropped to the ground the moment the wind died down, running hard away from the fractured tower. "Sprint toward him! Get underneath his chassis!"
"Wait for me!" Leo scrambled after him, his boots digging into the loose dirt.
The moment the three of them slid beneath the massive belly of the construct, a localized blast erupted directly from the titan's primary optic sensor.
*BOOM!*
The next second, Skids punched his way clean through the titan's face, covered in fluids and loose wiring.
"The show's just starting, you oversized trash compactor! You shouldn't have eaten me! I'm going to tear your face apart!"
"Keep swinging, brother! Nobody messes with the Autobot twins!" Mudflap roared. He deployed his integrated pulse blasters and surged forward to join the assault.
Small, rapid explosions rippled across Devastator's upper hull. Roaring in sudden pain, the titan thrashed his massive head, but Skids executed a quick flip, latching firmly onto his upper spine. Facing opponents this small and agile, Devastator's massive scale was transformed into his greatest disadvantage.
Crouched safely beneath the thrashing titan, Simmons tried to calculate a solution. "Stay right here, kid! Watch his treads, don't get flattened!"
After warning Leo, Simmons pulled his secure satellite unit from his pack. *Time to see if Sector 7's old backdoors still carry a signal...*
---
Out in the open waters of the Red Sea, an entire carrier strike group cut through the waves. Inside the bridge of the lead supercarrier, a middle-aged officer with thinning hair lifted a secure receiver.
"This is the Captain of the USS John C. Stennis. State your identity."
The moment the words left his mouth, a barrage of frantic shouting cut through the line. "Hey! Where the hell are you guys?"
"Are you watching the weather channel? The sports network? A late-night comedy?"
"We are actively engaging hostile alien targets on the ground! We have thousands of reconnaissance satellites in orbit, so where the hell is our fire support!"
"Identify yourself!"
"Captain Wilder, commanding the Stennis," Wilder responded, instinctively straightening his posture under the raw authority in the caller's voice.
"Alright, Captain Wilder, it doesn't matter who I am. What matters is that right above my head is an incredibly massive alien threat."
"Your target arrays should be able to lock onto my localized signature. I need you to open fire immediately with your heaviest kinetic asset!"
"If you're going to waste my time arguing about proper chains of command or missing authorization codes, then pretend this call never happened."
"Understood, sir. Message received."
Wilder set the handset down and turned to his executive officer. "Establish an immediate link with the USS Kidd. Order them to spin up the railgun."
"Yes, sir!"
Ten minutes later, along the deck of the accompanying destroyer, a sleek, experimental electromagnetic railgun slowly elevated from its housing. Though designated as a railgun, it wasn't an orbital asset—it was a surface-to-surface high-energy weapon.
The deployment of this specific kinetic system was actually linked to Skygnaw's actions. The technical schematics he had leaked to Clarice months ago had been torn apart by weapons research teams. While they couldn't replicate the advanced Cybertronian drives, they had managed to successfully construct this high-energy electromagnetic accelerator.
Using non-contact magnetic rails, the weapon utilized raw electromagnetic force instead of chemical propellants to launch a specialized slug at hypersonic speeds.
With its capacitors fully charged, the massive barrel adjusted its traverse, locking onto a vector toward the southwest.
`[Sea Level: 35.7 meters. Coordinates: 29.32 North, 35.66 East.]`
`[Firing Vector: 6-2. Five o'clock position. Target locked.]`
`[Maintain target track. Secondary rail array online.]`
`[Three... Two... One... Fire!]`
---
Along the eastern ridge of the village, the low, heavy rumble of armored columns echoed across the desert as waves of human tanks and combat vehicles breached the perimeter.
At a glance, there were easily over a hundred armored hulls. Aside from a few light armor units deployed via heavy transport drops, the vast majority of the tanks had mobilized from the closest regional facility—the Garaman Army Base.
The heavy infantry carriers ground to a halt just outside the village layout, dropping their rear ramps to deploy lines of fully kitted, battle-hardened soldiers.
"Hell yeah! The cavalry's here!" the NEST operators cheered, their spirits instantly lifted.
The arrival of a full armored division meant they actually stood a chance to survive this meatgrinder. They wouldn't have to die in this forgotten corner of the desert.
In truth, the efficiency of the deployment was entirely due to NEST's home command. After exhausting every encrypted sub-band and realizing Lennox's team was completely dark, General Rennoco had bypassed standard channels to contact theater command directly.
Though the regional generals couldn't confirm Lennox's clearance codes due to the blackout, a quick cross-reference of the grid indicators made Rennoco realize exactly where his men were.
The theater command, which had initially sent only a token force based on Lennox's early compromised brief, immediately ordered a full-scale deployment, mobilizing every available airbase within the theater grid. Every single operational asset was routed to the sector. That was the sole reason dozens of strike fighters were already screamin' through the airspace, with more wings trailing close behind.
---
The sudden surge of human reinforcements caused the Decepticon advance to falter. The vast majority of the frontline units were lower-tier hatchlings, and they couldn't simply ignore a concentrated barrage of human kinetic weaponry.
"Vector 3200! Hostile target locked! Load Sabot!"
The commander of an M1A2 Abrams main battle tank tracked his optics onto a Decepticon grunt who was unleashing a steady stream of plasma fire toward his column. He barked the order down to his loader.
"Sabot up!"
"Target tracking stable... Fire!"
The gunner stomped on the foot pedal. The massive seventy-ton tank rocked violently on its suspension as a massive tongue of fire erupted from the muzzle.
*Boom!*
An armor-piercing fin-stabilized discarding-sabot round tore out of the barrel at hypersonic speed, the sheer friction distorting the air around the slug as it streaked toward its target.
*Whistle— Crack!*
The heavy kinetic dart punched clean through the Decepticon's center chassis, exiting out his spine in a shower of sparks and fluids.
*Tak... Tak...*
The grunt's heavy rifle discharged a few erratic shots into the dirt before the red glow in his optics flickered out. His massive frame collapsed heavily onto the sand.
"Yes! Direct hit!" the tank commander cheered through the intercom, his eyes glued to the targeting feed.
Before deploying, they had been briefed that these metal monsters were vulnerable to concentrated fire in the head and chest. He hadn't quite believed it at first, but it looked like the desk jockeys at intelligence had finally gotten a brief right.
Before the commander could savor the kill, another Decepticon used a wrecked vehicle hull as a makeshift shield, deployed his integrated heavy blaster, and locked his sensors onto Tank 32.
*BOOM!*
"Shit—"
The commander's warning was cut short as a blinding beam of superheated plasma expanded across his optics.
*Shriek—*
The energy beam cut through the heavy composite armor as if it were tissue paper. Three seconds later...
*EXPLOSION!*
The tank's ammunition magazine suffered a catastrophic sympathetic detonation, tearing the turret off its ring and sending a pillar of fire into the sky.
From the moment Tank 32 locked onto its target to the confirmed kill, less than ten seconds had elapsed. Five seconds later, the tank was a burning hulk of scrap.
This brutal sequence was merely a tiny microcosm of the wider valley.
The human armor layout unleashed an unceasing barrage of high-explosive shells, while the Decepticon line answered with devastating energy fire. Above them, shattered fragments of burning human aircraft regularly fell from the sky like meteors. Both sides tore into each other in a savage, unrelenting clash of iron and blood across the desert sands.
Though the ground audience was limited to the combatants, the orbital audience was massive. Every global superpower with functional surveillance assets was watching this sudden, unscripted second battle unfold, coming right on the heels of Yunu's destruction.
On one side stood the absolute peak of human conventional military might; on the other, a terrifying legion of alien conquerors.
Even though global command structures couldn't understand why their satellites suffered catastrophic hardware failures shortly after entering the sector's airspace, they continued to burn through their orbital arrays without regard for cost. Military platforms were spent first, followed by commercial clusters and civilian weather arrays.
No one could afford to miss a war that was mathematically destined to decide the future of human civilization.
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