Endgame
For a brief moment everything came to a halt. Ratchet glanced over at Fluttershy, Fluttershy glanced from him to Ultracon and Ultracon only had optics on Ratchet. Then, as if time was starting to move again, Ratchet leapt towards Fluttershy while firing at Ultracon, forcing the leader of the Deceptacons to dive behind cover to avoid being hit.
“What’s the game plan here?!” Ratchet asked Fluttershy as he kept up the suppressing fire on Ultracon, hoping to keep him pinned for as long as he could.
“Right now I need to either find out how to shut down the armor or make it release my friends that are powering it!” Fluttershy yelled over the cracks of energon fire. She jumped on a few keys and tried to access the terminal, but all her efforts did was manage to turn one of the cameras off. “Darn it all, how hard can I be to work advanced alien tech from another world?!”
“I could access it for you, but in order to do that I’d have to stop firing on Ultracon and give him a chance to kill the both of us,” Ratchet snarled, before Ultracon began to unleash blasts of energon towards the pair. Ratchet threw himself over Fluttershy to protect her from the assault, clenching his jaw as the blasts bombarded his back. “What do you think? What to switch places?”
“Sure. Give me your rifle and I’ll stop him myself,” Fluttershy said to Ratchet with a smirk. Ratchet smiled at her response before he quickly hit a few panels on the terminal, bringing up the information on the armor that was kicking the energon out of Prime.
“That’s all I can do for now! You have to figure out the rest!” Ratchet roared before he spun around and charged through the energon barrage. He slammed his shoulder into Ultracon with such force that he ripped the Con from his feet and carried him on his shoulder, slamming the Con into a wall back first. Ultracon drove a foot into the chest of Ratchet and sent him skidding backwards, where he dug his fingers into the ground to keep from going any further.
“Do you really think this is wise, Autobot?” Ultracon asked Ratchet as his right arm transformed and a sickly green whip saber emerged from within. Ultracon cracked the saber across the ground and it sliced an S into the floor like it was made of butter. “You’ve surely heard of what I am capable of and what I can do to an Autobot. Is it truly wise to fight me all on your own?”
“In terms of tactics and strategy, taking you on alone might be the dumbest thing I could do at this very moment,” Ratchet agreed before twin scalpels shot out above his wrists. “But ever since I met that problem child called Fluttershy I’ve been doing dumb thing after dumb thing and somehow we’re all still standing. Who knows, maybe sometimes you have to do something dumb.”
Ultracon narrowed his optics before he let his whip sword fly towards Ratchet. Ratchet watched as the sword crackled through the air on an arch straight for him, calculating the distance and angles at which it was moving. At the last second he stepped to the side just in time for the blade to whip past him.
“But don’t think for a moment just because I’m more open to dumb ideas that I’ve stopped using my processor,” Ratchet finished with a malevolent smile. With a burst of fire erupting from under his feet, Ratchet dashed up to Ultracon and jabbed at him with his blades. Ultracon weaved to the side to avoid being hit while also twirling his energon saber around himself, forcing Ratchet to back away to avoid being sliced up by the blade.
Ratchet calculated the position and timing of the blades before he struck out with one of his scalpels. His timing was slightly off and in the next instant his blade was cleaved from his wrist, leaving Ratchet with a sizzling green stump where his blade used to be. Ultracon took that moment to press his own attack, whipping the sword all around the area, forcing Ratchet to stay mobile to avoid being sliced to pieces.
“How’s it coming, Fluttershy?!” Ratchet yelled over at the human girl before he dove out of the way of the whip once more.
“I’m doing the best I can with this advanced, alien tech! I think I’ve learned how to move the mouse!” Fluttershy yelled back.
“By the Primes!” Ratchet cursed before transforming into vehicle mode and driving underneath of Ultracon. Ultracon only had a moment to process what was happening before Ratchet transformed back into robot mode right underneath of Ultracon, launching the Con into the ceiling. As the Con returned back down Ratchet slammed a shoulder into his falling body, launching him across the room and into the side of an energon tank.
“Enough of this,” Ultracon snarled before his whip sword retracted into his body, only to be replaced with a triple barrel cannon a moment later. Ratchet’s optics widened in horror before he dove out of the way of the incoming barrage. Explosions rocked the terminal chamber with such intensity that Fluttershy nearly fell off of the terminal. Ratchet kicked over one of Soundwave’s operating tables and used it as cover, bringing out his rifle and returning fire on Ultracon.
“Ratchet, the stupid thing is password protected!” Fluttershy yelled over at Ratchet, who could barely hear her over the sounds of the battle. “What would the Deceptacons use as a password for their super-secret computer? I’ve already tried evil and mean!”
“How would I know what the Deceptacons would use?! I’m an Autobot!” Ratchet roared back before he kicked the table he was crouched behind towards Ultracon, who brought his blade once more to slice the piece of metal in half before continuing to fire.
“Come on Fluttershy, you can figure this out,” Fluttershy told herself, trying to ignore the cries and shouting going on behind her. She glanced up at the camera that was still on the “battle” between the armor and Prime, but it was hard for her to watch. The armor had driven Prime’s head through the floor and was dragging him face first through the metal and wiring. Prime was covered in his own energon, but seemed to still be functioning. For the time being.
‘Nothing works!’ she roared in her mind when she tried another password only for it to fail once more. ‘I’ve tried everything I could think of and none of my ideas worked. I can’t ask any of the Deceptacons and my only other option is to destroy this piece of machinery that’s over ten times larger than me! I don’t even think my magic could-‘
Then Fluttershy remembered the day that Stickshift had been killed. It was a day that she would never be able to forget and she remembered each detail perfectly. Usually she focused on the loss of one of the Autobot’s and the pain that it brought her, but in that moment she was remembering another detail. How she had felt so helpless and weak that she had let her magic consume her to the point that it lashed out at everything around her. Including the communications terminal. And that she had destroyed it.
Realizing what she had to do, Fluttershy cranked her magical power up to eleven and surged with magical energy, so much that she was at the point where her hair stood straight up and her eyes went white. She then slammed her hands onto the terminal and channeled all of that magic into the wires and metal. The terminal began to screech as the metal was warped by the magic, while energon and smoke poured out from within then center as the magic overrode the wiring. Lights exploded, holograms vanished, and when she looked up at the camera where Prime was, she saw her efforts being rewarded as the armor took a shuddering step forward before it collapsed to the ground.
Then the terminal exploded in her face.
Pain slashed through the girl as the explosion rocketed her across the room. Her aura of magic protected her from anything that would have been lethal, but plenty of metal and glass slashed through her body. She hit the ground hard and rolled to her side, gasping in silence as she tried to get the air back into her lunges. Smoke filled the room from the decimated terminal, cloaking the two fighters from her view.
‘It’s not over yet, Fluttershy. You have to get back up and help,’ she thought, forcing herself to ignore the agony in her limbs as she tried to push herself back to her knees. Then she spied a hand reaching down to her, a hand that belonged to a bot she knew all too well. Ratchet was offering her his hand.
“Come on Fluttershy, let’s put an end to this once and for all,” Ratchet told Fluttershy as she rolled onto his hand, weakly sitting it ad trying to ignore the fire lancing through her nerves. “Ultracon is too strong for me to defeat by myself. But if the two of us work together, we can bring him down for good.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Fluttershy asked, even though everything was hazy and she wasn’t thinking too clearly. “Let’s take this Con down. For Stickshift.”
“For Stickshift,” Ratchet agreed before he opened up his chest plate. Fluttershy activated her harmonic form once more and moved into position, inserting her arms and legs into their normal positions. Tendrils wrapped around her body to root her in place and the chest piece closed around her, while the spark within began to glow with light.
But then everything around her started to change. The cavity she was in began to warp and shift, with more tendrils wrapping around her arms and legs as well as her body. Panic clutched at her throat as she tried to figure out what was going on, but it wasn’t until she saw shades of green begin to appear that the idea of what had happened entered her mind.
“No,” she whispered to herself as one last tendril wrapped around her face. In that moment she could see what her host was seeing and what she saw devastated her. For the bot she was in was looking across the room at Ratchet, who was struggling to get up to his feet as energon leaked down from his side.
The optics of her partner then looked down at his own body, which was now green and yellow with pink highlights on it. A whip sword formed out of one hand while a now massive cannon filled with magic appeared on the other. But it was the laugh that told Fluttershy what she had unintentionally done. A laugh that made her soul turn to ice.
“Ah Fluttershy, I knew you would see things my way eventually,” Ultracon laughed as his body began to syphon the magic out of Fluttershy, who screamed in pain as it happened.
“Welcome to the winning team.”