We are a literate, intermediate to advanced AU Transformers RPG Based off of the first season of TFP with dashes of other incarnations sprinkled here or there. Characters from any continuity are welcome however must be restyled to match the TFPrime universe.
Active, with ongoing plotlines, we are always willing to integrate new characters into storylines once incorporated into the setting.
The rifle was still mag-clipped to the small of the big tankbot's back. It had not been touched once in the encounter, forgotten in a haze of bloodlust that only rending an opponent into scrap with his bare hands would satisfy.
Even now, the rifle was the last thing on his mind.
Maximus faltered.
The warlord's mocking words rang in his audials. They seemed to come from far away, barely audible over the unsteady whine of his own battle engine as it stumbled in mid-stride. For an instant the the warlord was gone, the desert was gone. In their place he saw-
- fire, crackling on torches and smoldering within the ruins. It illuminated the mob of prisoners as they gathered beneath a red Elba sky, a throng of cruel faces eagerly raised to the scent of sacrificial blood-
Maximus caught himself and whirled to face Megatron, the heel of one palm already pressed to his optic.
No! He's only trying to bait you. Everyone has heard about what happened at G9. What happened to you- no one knows that. No one! Not even the Wreckers! Stay focused!
The ground rumbled, and Maximus realized that Megatron was charging him. Fury and shame howled in his neural net as he leapt forward to meet the attack, one armoured forearm raised to parry the sword while the other fist swung at the warlord's midriff.
"I said shut up!" he bellowed. "That prison resisted more attacks than it ever lost! Your Decepticon- butchers will be caught again, and there will be no Rig for them a second time! I'll rip them down to their sparks with my own hands!"
Last Edit: Apr 15, 2013 19:45:33 GMT -5 by Deleted
Heavy pedes dragged out two trenches in the earth as Megatron flexed around the punch, absorbing the blunt force of it with the mesh habituated to violence. He had recovered before the momentum had petered out, fists held low and wide as he smiled around a growl.
"I remain unconvinced."
Maximus's determination to fight with his bare hands - an apparently suicidal decision - was aggravating as well as amusing. Megatron occupied the mech's attention with a swift roundhouse as his fusion canon whined up a charge, Dark Energon flashing between his plates at the surge in power as he rerouted energy to the devastating weapon. Automatically, his sword retracted.
"I will not make sport of you as you have my soldiers." He caught a large fist as it came at his throat and carried the force of it aside, thrusting away with the length of his arm until they were almost shoulder to shoulder.
Megatron slammed the barrel of the cannon into Maximus's body, the blow heated with the contained charge.
Maximus was well armoured - he was a tank, meant to move fast and take damage. But even through the red haze of anger he knew that a shot from the fusion cannon would not just sear plating, but gore a hole right through him. Blast his internals across the desert floor.
Cold fear gripped his spark.
Megatron stood alongside him, cool and aloof. His voice was a low growl in his audials, his teeth a line of jagged steel that gleamed as he spoke his contempt. The warlord had brushed aside his attacks as if they were nothing and closed the distance between them in the pulse of a spark. The shot already charged in the barrel of the cannon spat dark plasma against Maximus' armour. He had an instant to react before it was let loose and he was blown apart.
Fear turned into panic.
I can't die here! Not like this!
Time seemed crawl to a halt.
Maximus desperately twisted, his feet kicking up a cloud of dust. He staggered back, enough to separate his body from the muzzle of the cannon, so that when the shot was fired it would merely tear a hole in his flank and not rip him in half. There was no time to lash out with his fist. No time to draw his rifle. But the machine guns were integrated into his battle systems and they responded without fail, unfolding from the armoured bays in his lower legs and swivelling to target the warlord.
"I didn't survive this long to let a Decepticon stop me now!" he bellowed as he fell back, and the machine guns lit up the night with noise and fire. "Not you, not any of your monsters!"
Last Edit: Apr 21, 2013 20:02:03 GMT -5 by Deleted
Megatron's cannon accelerated Maximus's retreat with a single blast, the superheated plasma scorching through the mech's side as he twisted out of direct line of fire. The stench of burnt protoform singed the air, riding the twists of black smoke that rose from the cauterized wound beneath the torn and buckled flank armour.
As Maximus toppled back, the blistering arc of his machine guns angled upwards and peppered the warlord's chassis and helm. He shielded his optics on instinct with a snarl, plates clamping tight against the munition though still taking damage.
Lunging onto the ex-warden's frame, Megatron moved to smash the leg turrets whilst he aimed to sink his claws into Maximus's exposed and burning mesh.
Maximus felt the blast, and then the impact of the ground against his back.
In an instant his self-diagnostic coolly brought up a damage report. It was heavy and internal: his armour had shielded him against the worst of the shot, but plasma had blasted a molten hole through his left side. He could feel it burning into him, devouring mesh and metal alike while it spattered the earth beneath him with his own smoking fuel. His battle net fought to seal off the fuel flow to the affected area, as well as the pain. His was a war-build, every circuit designed to keep him undistracted by internal distress for as long as he remained conscious in a battle.
It was not working.
Disconnected from pain, his mind ran wild. It went to the last time he had suffered damage like this and filled his neural net with memories of agony, of bleeding into his ruined armour, onto that miserable table. A heavy weight was kneeling on him, and as if from a distance he registered that one of the turrets in his legs had just been crushed in its mounting. Claws sank into the burning hole in his flank and seized hold of something internal, and Maximus went mad.
With berserker strength he tore at the warlord, his red optics ablaze as he roared. Black gore flecked the air. The remaining gun turret fired wildly, sparking and striking between their plating.
And quietly, Maximus' battle net sent off one more report.
Activated by damage, it broadcast itself across the Autobot emergency frequency. Its message was curt and simple:
Autobot unit in immediate distress at these co-ordinates.
Last Edit: Apr 24, 2013 23:33:18 GMT -5 by Deleted
Like a switch being flicked, Megatron was suddenly fighting himself as he'd been when Barricade was missing and tortured to the brink of death. Maximus was feral and blind with rage and pain and hate, exceeding the tolerance of the hydraulics in his hands to manually buckle and tear away at the edges of the warlord's armor. Where there was a breach, he clawed with blunt fingers, denta bared - and Megatron would not have been surprised if those had come into play. He fought at him as if to tear the mesh from his protoskeleton, red optics blazing and flecked with their shared energon.
Autobots did not fight like this.
Where Maximus grew less coordinated and more savage from the damage he was taking and the battle lust that had taken full command of his senses, Megatron remained controlled. He absorbed the pain, battle computer swiftly rerouting fuel, setting clamps and dumping heat whilst he tore out a fuel pump and tangle of cabling from the hole in Maximus's side and threw it aside.
Infused with Dark Energon and sharing strength with a violent, potent spark in Barricade, Megatron bucked with the point-blank force of the remaining machine gun firing into his pelvis and thigh but maintained focus enough to cleave off the weapon with his re-extended sword.
One of the massive treads on Maximus's back roared and flipped them both, putting Megatron on his backplates long enough for his cannon to take a solid punch down the barrel. Megatron groped for the dismembered machine gun and stabbed it into the mech's weeping side, then planted a foot to push him off.
There was no space for snide comments or mockery: only the shrieking tear of metal, high-pressure gushes of energon, and slitted optics in the dark. Megatron straddled Maximus's chassis, kneeplate digging in to his gaping side, and sought to destroy the wild pair.
Last Edit: Apr 24, 2013 17:21:50 GMT -5 by Deleted
And then Optimus hit Megatron precisely like a Peterbilt 379 going just short of 80 mph. More precisely, he drove out of an emergency groundbridge less than 20 meters out from the pair of battling mechanoids, hit 80 mph, then transformed and let the meteoric momentum carry his fist straight into the Decepticon’s head. The impact shocked up his arm, through the protoskeletal core of him and seemed to hit his Spark like a catalyst. Prime’s pede’s hit ground, one step behind Megatron’s stagger – because even taken off-guard, on the ground, grappling, he’d managed to gain his feet – and drove the wrecking ball weight of his straight kick directly into the warlord’s abdominal plating.
Optimus didn’t stop.
He ignored Fort Max on the ground and kept attacking. The world snapped down to the electro-magnetic perimeter of his sensor field, his body shell running hot, every fuel line shot through burning with battle imperative. His focus was the bite of his transformation cog as his right arm reconfigured to battle blade, the molecular edge of it heating instantly on his wrist, his left arm canon and the six shot volley he unleashed at the warlord’s legs, looking to kneecap or cripple the mech’s footing before the fight even started. He didn’t look back at the groundbridge closing behind him, at Fortress Maximus hemorrhaging fuel into the dirt, at the gore and wreckage of the Decepticon foot soldiers or the injured that still lived.
He just attacked… because if he did not, Megatron was going to get a shot off at Maximus. Because if he did not, then the backup that was simply not coming fast enough was never going to have a chance of getting here in time. Because if he didn’t attack he would remember that he’d been almost alone on base when he’d caught Max’s signal. Save for their mini-con monitoring team on the groundbridge, all other combat-ready Autobots were on deploy investigating ion-trails at potential Nemesis sightings or in the middle of patrol. Optimus kept firing, closed the distance between him and the warlord like it was nothing at all. Fifty meters out. He kept firing. Thirty meters out. He’s not dead. Just focus. Twenty meters. Ten.
Contact.
Last Edit: Apr 24, 2013 19:59:56 GMT -5 by Deleted
All at once, the terrible weight bearing down on his chassis was gone in a blast of wind and howling metal.
The noise of the violent impact was loud enough to shock Maximus back into sanity. The red mist disappeared from his vision. The reverberation that shook the ground when two heavy frames hit earth a short distance away rang through his back, and the big mech coughed, spat up black fluid and rolled onto one elbow.
Dust hazed the air. He saw figures moving within it, briefly illuminated whenever a barrage of shots lit the night. He recognised the tense, intent field before he recognised the shape of the Autobot who now brawled with Megatron.
It was Optimus.
Optimus!
Stunned, Maximus could only watch as the Autobot commander charged down the Decepticon warlord, his ion cannon blazing his path. His mind reeled. He had seen Optimus like this only rarely in the past. Once was at Simanzi, that vicious blitzkrieg pitched in filth and horror. And then Maximus had gone on to Elba and Optimus had gone on to face the Exodus, and somewhere in the daily routine of running the penitentiary he had forgotten what it meant to watch the Prime roar into the fray personally. Like a vengeful fist of Primus.
'Your madness brought him here,' said the quiet voice. 'Get up.'
Fuel spilt inside his frame and streaked through the dirt on his legs as Maximus staggered upright, throwing dust from his treads. The plating around the hole in his side was buckled, molten to the touch and torn open further by the barrel of the machine gun driven into the mess like a thorn. Lines and circuitry were severed beneath it, or else melted into slag from the blast. Handfuls of innards had been ripped out. Neural pathways had shut down to stave off the pain, but already he could feel his battle engine throttling down, weakened by damage and energon loss. His mangled pride kept him on his feet.
Get up!
Inoperative systems scrolled in red across his HUD when he tried to focus. Critical frame damage and no guns. But the big rifle was still clipped to his back, and Maximus reached for it shakily as he revved his engine, shaking off more dust. He would not stand aside and let Optimus fight alone.
Last Edit: Apr 24, 2013 23:20:06 GMT -5 by Deleted
Megatron did not wait for Optimus to come to him, sprinting to meet him with equal speed and ferocity. Their clash was solid and booming, sending up a curtain of fine earth that tore into streaks as they twisted against each other on splayed pedes. Charge jumped between them whenever contact was made - contact an inadequate word to describe the scrape of blades, solid punches and crash of armor as they shouldered against one another.
"Good of you to join us, Prime," the warlord hissed into Optimus's faceplates when a parry and block left them leaning into one another, swords quivering with the strain. "How long do you think it'll be before Maximus bleeds out?"
Optimus barely let him finish, his right pede coming up again to break their locked-horns hold and following straight through with a blade. Megatron took the blade's strike in favour of the leg, catching the limb at the ankle and throwing himself into a roll before Optimus could swing his other pede up into his helm.
The blade slid out from the shallow angle into his collar faring mid-fall, coming up again in defense as Megatron worked the roll to land on top. His own sword was almost clean again, momentum and heat clearing Maximus's energon from the metal. Megatron brought his sword and fist back high, aiming to punch through the Prime's shoulder.
Having his head loll to one side felt like a monstrous labour, far harder than he could vaguely recall the effort had ever been. Visor flickering with stifled attempts to reboot, his mind wandered with half-instinct to take stock of the rest of his body. He had a strange feeling of detachment, a fog that carpeted his neural net and made his sensors sluggish. Especially his right arm; that felt the heaviest of all.
Optical sensory systems power: 12.14%...37.5%...52.0%... He had no idea where he was. No idea what he had been doing. No idea why everything felt numb.
Optical sensory systems power: 83.9%
Atracchus just stared. It was the ground, he expected that to be there, but there was something missing from this picture. Problem-solving loops were summoned into hazy existence but drew blanks in his processor, until a whisper in his mind made a helpful suggestion; one that dropped liquid nitrogen into his tanks. His visor flared. There – his arm. It was not there.
It was like turning on a switch. The pain came flooding back, the sudden sensory onslaught making Atracchus purge through his energon intakes onto the dusty floor beneath him. It was thick and black with internal fluids. Errors clogged up his HUD until he almost couldn’t see for the scrawl of red warnings. The damage was bad. Crushed plating, internal bleeding, bruised organs, energy draining, broken leg, missing arm…
He remembered how he lost it now. Remembered how Maverick and the rest of their patrol had been brutalised to death.
Remembered Lord Megatron’s sword hovering inches from his head, staving off the final killing blow, before lunging to his and every other Vehicon’s defence.
Remembered the face of the mech that did this to them – a bot driven so mad by rage that he was barely even Cybertronian. He was only a machine – forged to hate, to slay, to destroy without mercy… Atracchus shivered, plagued by the images of his fellow Vehicons being slaughtered, the memory of his own torture…
The colour of Fortress Maximus’ optics.
The ground softly reverberated against his dorsal plates. Some higher power dragged his sight away from the shredded socket that once housed his arm and towards the direction of the fray. Two warriors clashed on the open battlefield, illuminated by the strobe of their plasma rounds and the sparks of metal clashing on metal. Atracchus slowly inched upright with a chorus of pain-laden keens, dragging himself forward through fistfuls of earth with his one remaining hand. It was Megatron and…Optimus Prime. There could be no other that would invoke such a ferocious confrontation, as though millions of years of war had boiled down to this handful of kliks, this luminous night sky, and this patch of soil in all of the known universe, on which to decide the fate of all of Cybertron, even though no planet still remained. It was an awe-inspiring sight. Atracchus was transfixed, ignoring the worst of his shivers, the corrosive fire in his lines and linkages and struts, and the swirl of error messages that threatened to drown him forever in a sea of red that Fortress Maximus’ optics had been unable to provide.
And then somehow, he saw it. Saw that demon – still living – rise and stand. Saw him unclip the weapon with an agonised uncertainty. Read his intentions to upset the balance, to destroy Lord Megatron at a blast like themselves.
So long as there was a sparkbeat pulsing throughout his chassis, Atracchus would not let this stand.
Once again he swept aside some of the cloying errors, and blithely ignored the rest. Disregarded readings that energon was at critically low levels. Completely ignored the major structural damage his frame had received. Atracchus’ one remaining hand transformed into a blaster and cycled up hot. He lined up the shot at Fortress Maximus as best as he could, still shaking intensely with the shock and the pain, and fired off one plasma blast.
The recoil swept right through his chest – down his leg, up his ghostly arm, and pierced the inside of his helm with white-hot talons of sheer agony. Energy levels dropped below the minimum. Static snowed in the edges of his optic feed as he slammed flat on his back. Visor flickering, his head was thrown backwards as stasis caught him, as heavy as the cave-dark of his mines.
Optimus twisted hard to the right, whipped his own blade across his body, striking the other blade away, but not before it laid open a sparking tear of metal across his collar-faring, a molten line of pain across his gun arm, rivers of electrical lightening jolting white-hot down to his wrist before battle-tech took the dermal sensors offline. The pain lived on in his subcutaneous neural circuitry, too deep to be scrubbed numb but it didn’t matter. He barely felt it as he answered the attack by rushing the warlord again, hurling himself into a relentless series of kill-strikes – blade blurring lines of molecular heat through the air as each swing was dodged or deflected until, finally, they locked cross-guard again.
This was bad. Not just Fort Max’s condition, but the fact Megatron was here at all, responding to an attack on his ground troops. A month of hunting the damaged warship, dog fighting Starscream’s aerial defenses, taking Decepticon mining operations, all without ever a glimpse of aid from the flagship. Something had, apparently, changed. It meant that the Nemesis, wherever it was, had enough energon to power their groundbridge and even reserve to warrant the Decepticon’s arrival to bring down one of the Autobot’s lone heavy hitters.
It meant their window of opportunity to hunt down the damaged Nemesis was likely closing… or closed entirely.
But none of that mattered right then because Megatron was right: Fort Max was bleeding out.
Prime growled – an engine noise sound laced with battle rage – and rammed forward, dropping his center of gravity sharply under Megatron’s and shoving up and forward, breaking their cross-blade lock and striking the warlord’ blade aside as it immediately whipped back at him, deflect, ducked, deflected again, then charged, slamming his shoulder into the bigger mech which, this time, did not catch him so off guard. Megatron threw him off, back into a sword-play distance. Between them, it was a toss-up who was the better in a bladed contest, but Megatron still had weight on him. Up close though, grappling, Optimus fought dirty – nerve circuit strikes and hydraulic shots.
His optics never left Megatron as he shouted, “Fort Max! Fall back immediately and call for evac!” He darted at Megatron, fired at the mech, his shot struck away like an errant lob ball from his opponent’s blade, exchanged another blow and parry. “Go! Now!”
Last Edit: Apr 27, 2013 23:23:26 GMT -5 by Deleted
Maximus stood in a tense battle stance. He hesitated, unsure. He had bent orders before - it was part of being an officer. But he had not disobeyed a direct command before, and never one from Optimus.
He wanted to now.
Megatron and the Autobot commander were still locked in battle, the crack and silvery slash of their blades loud in the night. A blow had pared open Optimus' arm but it seemed to Maximus that he pressed on without registering the injury, his mind focused. When he shouted for an evac Maximus hesitated, his rifle gripped in both hands. Megatron was fresh, still hungry for the fight. His sword arm was brutal and fast, each strike landing hard. Optimus was one of the best warriors the Autobots had produced, but Megatron had dragged himself up from the dregs of the gladiatorial pits, where the skilled were torn apart by the mad, the merciless, by the monsters too vicious and empty to die.
You could not fight such mechs. He knew that now. He did. You put them down like a mad turbohound. Fuming, Maximus raised his rifle and drew an unsteady bead on the Decepticon warlord. He ignored the fuel that painted a widening swathe down his leg and sighted along the scope. Optical targeting pinned a cross on Megatron's back and the heavy photon rifle hummed. Optimus would be angry with him. He could deal with Optimus' anger. But he could not fall back and watch as-
The shot came out of nowhere.
White light erupted across his vision. Maximus felt the kick an instant later as it cracked into the side of his head. Things tore in his neck as it hurled him aside - he staggered, crashed down onto one knee. His rifle hit the ground as he threw out a hand to catch himself before he ploughed into the earth. Static and red warnings fought for dominance across his neural net and the big mech heaved for air. Fuel clogged his vents. It flooded his chassis. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't see...!
Last Edit: Apr 28, 2013 17:49:11 GMT -5 by Deleted
Orion Pax should have been dead inside his first vorn as a fighting Prime. Indeed, that had likely been the Counsel's intention when they nominated an archivist with no weapons tech, no combat experience, and a frame used to standing still for hours on end whilst his mind tackled terabytes of information across multiple processing threads.
They hadn't known about the hours spent beneath the Iacon hall of records: where a gladiator showed his friend self-defense moves for a planned visit to Kaon, and the archivist discovered a natural skill and nurtured it. Megatronus had taught Orion about his body; about the non-critical zones that could get him killed, and how to turn the most likely strikes back on his opponent in such a way as they wouldn't get another chance. It had been brutal play, the sparring a potent combination of Orion's diligence and Megatronus's complete lack of mercy.
They had learnt each other, the millisecond tells of weight shifting, hydraulics rolling and subconscious field vibrations of anticipation. Their minds were already well acquainted, moods and attitudes glaringly obvious from across the length of the Hall's central archive room. It had been a natural progression, after Orion could tell from the slight angling out of Megatronus's shoulders that the Syndicate had put a bolt on him recently, for Megatronus to know that Orion would land toe-first, right leg, eighty-three percent of the time from a crescent kick of that velocity as the momentum carried through his hips.
That percentage had come down as the eons had waged on, and Optimus had found a perfect synergy between fighting smart and fighting brutal. The Prime landed on his left foot from the crescent kick, the energy from the snap of his leg whipped through Megatron's flank and felt clean through to the other side. He palmed the blade that immediately followed into the breached sphere of his defense to the side with a spray of sparks, his hand already numb from the circuit strikes.
Another shoulder barge as Optimus continued to bully the heavier mech back. Anticipating the next assault of his centre of gravity, Megatron brought his fist up into the other mech's jaw hard enough to crack his faceplate and surged forward to catch his midrift and send him onto his backplates. The leg-sweep was expected, and the axe kick dodged as Optimus rolled aside and left Megatron to lay a thunderous crater into the ground instead of his helm.
Back into sword play. Parry. Thrust. Spat energon and screaming neural lines caught in the eternity between cut and cauterized. Hard. Relentless. Familiar.
The thought struck from nowhere. It was the sort of thing Barricade would do, with his far lighter and nimble frame. Ineffective for actual combat, but excellent for evading a larger mecha's floor sweep and flipping to their exposed side.
Megatron hacked out some distance between them, took a solid kick to the abdomen for his trouble, and then launched one pede into the air before the other followed in succession. The butterfly kick was such a large, circular motion that Optimus was able to dodge it completely, and so unnatural a move for the warlord that it put his stance off. A sliver of vulnerability in his defense.
Counting on that sliver to be there, Megatron had geared to put the full force of weight and momentum into his strike before he'd landed. It wasn't as much as he'd hoped - Optimus held firm and ready, but a flash from a blaster and the sound of Maximus crying out as it struck made the Prime falter.
An instant after he came back into contact with the ground, Megatron brought his sword down hard.
Last Edit: Apr 28, 2013 17:19:18 GMT -5 by Deleted
Quantifiably, time did not stop. The moment in which the gunshot cracked – the electric buzz of an ion-slug leaving its barrel followed by the spark-stopping shout – it happened in an instant. Happened so fast it was almost one sound: the shot and the sound of Max’s voice cut with metal ripping apart, a sound Optimus knew so well he felt it like a jolt to his laser core. And he did something he had not done in a very long time at hearing that sound, having heard that sound so many time in fact he’d been inured to it, he’d thought. The shot that threw Fort Max to the ground – it made Optimus miss a step.
One step.
And that was all Megatron needed.
The edge of the warlord’s blade caught his already wounded shoulder and tore it open the rest of the way down, cleaved a sparking path from his left collar to his right hip and the world went white. The blow was so powerful it knocked the Prime back out of sword range, standing there looking… just surprised. The pain took a moment, you see. There was so much of it to process that for a split second he felt absolutely nothing… and then every neural line in the Prime’s frame seemed to catch fire. Error code slammed his HUD, four dozen hydraulic systems locked and he staggered, stunned, is armor laid open to the proto-skeleton, raw circuitry sparking, his abdominal plates soaked instantly in a cocktail of coolant and in-system energon. He knew instantly… Megatron had cut something critical inside him.
“I…”
He didn’t know what he’d meant to say. Megatron was smiling at him. His own hand was blue in front of him, soaked blue from trying to hold the massive gash in his chest together. Fuel loss warnings flooded his sub-systems, his transformation cog locked agonizingly inside him, jarring, a fresh threshold of pain breeched instantly. Optimus staggered back another step… and felt his knees hit the ground. He couldn’t move. His lower hydraulic systems went offline. Critical systems failures bloomed in bursts of pain and motor lock across his body shell, his vision lined with static and error code. Move. He couldn’t move. Get up and move!
The blow landed just as Maximus' optics came back online.
Disoriented, he shook his head. The static in his vision fritzed once and cleared, enough to give him a blurred view of the desert. He looked up, in time to watch the sword come down. It bit deep and ripped through the stroke, and when it was done Optimus stood alone with his chassis carved open.
Energon slashed into the air.
Maximus knelt on one knee, frozen in horror.
It was like watching a vid, a bad one - a playback he could not walk away from. Optimus sank to the ground on his knees, and through the static Maximus saw the way he clutched the great rent in his chest. Numbly he watched as those hands lowered slick with fluid.
After that, Maximus did not recall standing.
He was on his feet and lunging, his neural net firing purely on white-hot combat drive. In an instant he was upon Megatron. He hit the Decepticon like a head-on train and roared through the attack. With an outflung arm he smashed Megatron back, a hammering blow that rang back through his own plating and sang in his audials.
But as the warlord reeled away Maximus did not press his attack. Instead he hit the earth at Optimus' side in a cloud of dust, already reaching to grasp his friend's arm. He roughly slung it around his neck and stood, dragging Optimus with him. There was no time to be gentle. No time to rage or allow the guilt to overwhelm him. Megatron would not be staggered for long. And then they would be the ones to do the flinching.
"With me, sir," he said in a low voice, while over his internal comm he dialed the base frequency and bellowed, "I need an immediate ground bridge to this location, now!"
And felt the tell-tale prickle of energy at his back as it spiraled opened, bathing the grisly battlefield in green light.
Laser fire split the night. It flickered over his head and shoulders in blasts, focused intently upon Megatron. It thundered in his audials, all noise and confusion. Maximus did not know who was on active duty in the Autobot base at that hour, and did not care. Perhaps later he would offer his thanks. Here and now, his world had shrunk to a single, crystal-clear purpose. His own frame huffed, heaved a foul mix of coolant and fuel as he staggered backwards into the ground bridge, Optimus a dead weight against his injured side. His rifle swung from his hand. The green light tingled against both of their plating and sparked on raw circuits.
"This way, sir," he said.
What a stupid thing to say. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.