Razergill was dead.
The proud commander of the Flyshark Legion had conquered countless worlds alongside Silas Trifang, only to meet a pathetic end on Kugrage, an utterly obscure planet.
He had realized something was wrong at the absolute last second, but Niru's mech had held him in an iron grip.
By the time he broke free from the mechanical embrace, it was already too late.
No one expected a commander to choose absolute self-destruction when neither side had even shown a clear disadvantage.
Niru's customized mech was far more powerful than the rest of the Dreadbeast regiment, and it carried a hidden annihilation device in its spine.
The mechanism was originally installed to prevent the colonel from being captured alive if his position fell.
After all, a regimental commander carried entirely too much high-value intelligence in his memory banks.
Once the Dreadbeast pilots processed the shocking double deactivation, their disbelief turned to pure rage, and they charged blindly into the hostile lines.
Stripped of Razergill's command signals, the Flyshark drones operated like a body without a brain, losing all their ferocity.
They were rapidly driven completely out of the first defensive ring.
When the news reached the other three fronts of Tas City, the remaining Sharkborn legions halted their assaults by consensus.
Even General Sickleback, who had just led the Blackshark Legion to become the third unit to breach the first ring, cursed bitterly and ordered his troops out of the captured trenches.
His drones lacked the natural mobility advantages of the flight and tread units, relying entirely on his strict coordination and frontline presence to secure their gains.
"Razergill spent eons bragging about how invincible his Flyshark division was, only to prove himself utterly useless," Sickleback spat.
"We finally opened a massive crack in their lines, and now we are forced to abandon it."
No matter how much resentment tightened his processors, he dared not press the assault on Tas City with a solitary legion.
The conscious chiefs felt zero grief over the deactivation, harboring nothing but utter contempt for their fallen peer.
Razergill had always used his elite flight wing to flaunt his status, acting as if he outscaled the other chiefs while enjoying Silas Trifang's favor.
In the end, he proved to be nothing but a fragile ornament, entirely useless under real pressure.
Inside Tas City, General Silae beamed with absolute relief upon learning the invaders had been repelled and the western ring was secure.
Yet his satisfaction lasted only a few brief micro-cycles before his lieutenant delivered a devastating update that left him completely paralyzed.
"General, Colonel Niru is..."
Niru had sacrificed his own frame to take out the hostile commander.
Silae's optics flickered wildly as he registered that the Dreadbeast regiment had lost more than half its active frames, wiping out nearly ten percent of the empire's entire mechanized force.
A solitary reinforcement run had depleted their absolute best assets. How could they possibly hold out down the line?
While Silae wrestled with his losses, Silas Trifang went into a state of absolute fury inside his flagship orbiting the planet.
"What in the void was Razergill doing?"
"A complete and utter waste of high-tier resources!"
Just like his frontline chiefs, Trifang's immediate subroutine wasn't mourning the fallen commander, but unleashing a furious stream of curses.
He understood Razergill's combat specifications perfectly; while he didn't occupy the absolute peak tier among the chiefs, his combat metrics easily ranked within the top five.
"Could our intelligence logs contain errors?"
A brief wave of anxiety spiked his processors, but he quickly shook his helm in self-derision.
His processors were simply overheating from rage. The data regarding Kugrage had been handed down directly by their masters, making an error mathematically impossible.
The fact that the high lords had assigned his fleet to subjugate this world proved his military strength was more than enough to swallow the planet.
The solitary logical explanation was that Razergill had allowed his defensive filters to drop.
After all, a live battlefield shifted constantly, and any anomaly could manifest on the grid.
"Gnash, transmit a direct warning to every legion chief. I refuse to log another failure, and I absolutely do not want to see another conscious officer deactivated on this world!"
"Right away, Commander," Garth Gnash replied instantly.
The loss of the flight chief had severely destabilized the commander's temperament, and he needed to alert the remaining chiefs to tighten their operations.
When Trifang entered a rage script, he completely deleted all past relationships and merits from his memory sectors, punishing every unit regardless of their historical achievements.
The moment the Blackshark, Groundshark, Flyshark, and Whiteshark divisions pulled back, the second wave of the armada launched a rapid push, denying Tas City even a single micro-cycle to stabilize.
The fires of war erupted once more.
Trifang traditionally maintained twelve primary legions under his command, but if a campaign dragged out, his fleet could rapidly scale up to thirty divisions.
The flagship housed massive incubation chambers, though these emergency drone waves naturally lacked the refined combat specifications of his permanent forces.
Every commander understood that sustaining an army drained refined energy, and during baseline cycles, Trifang lacked the resource reserves to maintain a massive standing military.
Outside the walls of Tas City, the thunder of heavy artillery remained unbroken.
On the first day of the new push, despite multiple unexpected variances, the outermost defensive ring managed to hold its ground.
By the seventh cycle, although Silae deployed two separate mech units to plug the gaps, the first defensive ring finally collapsed.
First the eastern sector fractured, then the western perimeter fell. Out of the two hundred thousand troops under Silae's command, a staggering twenty thousand soldiers had already been wiped from the active registry on the very first ring.
What followed was a massive domino effect.
By the tenth cycle of the siege, the second defensive perimeter fractured, costing the lives of roughly ten thousand Mindborn defenders.
On the fourteenth cycle, the third ring fell.
By the nineteenth cycle, the fourth defensive layer was completely lost.
Although the loss of the outer layers allowed the high command to heavily reinforce the firepower anchoring the final ring, the concentrated defenses still failed to halt the steady advance of the Sharkborn legions.
Just as the absolute final line outside the city gates stood on the verge of fracturing, a colossal purple-grey wedge silhouette slowly drifted out of the infinite dark surrounding Planet Kugrage.
"That dusty sphere must be Planet Kugrage," Skygnaw murmured to himself, looking out through the high bridge tower.
The Nemesis fully proved its value as a premier Decepticon flagship, pushing its propulsion arrays to the maximum without regard for fuel consumption to bridge the gap to this star system in less than a month.
Following a brief notification routed to Shockwave, he had launched from Cybertron, bringing along Dirge's five-bot Inquisition cell, the Predacons, and a selected detachment of two hundred elite Aerospace Force troops.
Shockwave likely harbored a deep distaste for him charting deep-space expeditions with their ultimate flagship, but his personal power output currently dominated the faction's logistics.
Aside from these core divisions, the interior decks housed Blackarachnia and an unexpected asset who technically held zero business joining a deep-space campaign: Ratbat.
When the mechanical bat first petitioned to join his network, Skygnaw's processing core registered absolute distrust.
An active operative belonging to the Cassette Division offering his alignment out of pure volunteerism was a data point he refused to accept without calculating Soundwave or Megatron's direct influence behind the script.
Was the bat planning to embed himself under his command simply to run an espionage script?
After all, back when he operated under Starscream's division, Soundwave had commanded him to execute the exact same tracking script.
It was an ancient Decepticon tradition.
Yet Skygnaw quickly shifted his calculations. As a confirmed Leader-class titan, he held zero operational reasons to restrict his choices out of caution.
Furthermore, Ratbat's specialized energy-scanning subroutines might prove highly useful when harvesting Planet Kugrage, leading him to accept the petition smoothly.
In truth, Skygnaw's tracking logic had over-analyzed the asset's motives. Ratbat had boldly approached his terminal simply because the brutal terminations of Rumble, Slugfest, and Overkill had severely shaken his core filters.
To put it plainly, the bat intended to switch his badging alignment permanently.
His reasoning was remarkably basic.
Skygnaw currently lacked a dedicated intelligence division under his personal command, and if he performed flawlessly to cement his value, the leader might authorize him to direct their future black-ops network.
That administrative post was infinitely safer and more comfortable than running live field operations under constant threat of deactivation.
No matter how masterfully an operative managed data extraction scripts, they remained entirely helpless when facing a high-tier front-line warrior.
Historically, Ratbat's primary designation hadn't always been Ratbat, at least during the eras preceding the last thousand cycles.
His original designation was Wingthing, having been deactivated by an Autobot fireteam during the early global civil war before Soundwave systematically rebuilt his spark, mirroring Barricade's resurrection.
Yet while Barricade's rebuild resulted in a massive boost to his physical specifications, Wingthing's restoration left his baseline power completely unchanged, simply adding a permanent energy-tracking directive to his programming.
His shift routine had effectively transitioned from relentless to completely unbroken.
Following his system reactivation, he permanently deleted the title of Wingthing from his directories.
He maintained zero functional friendships, dealing strictly in practical trade, and post-resurrection, he reserved his loyalty exclusively for his own preservation.
Skygnaw held zero interest in validating the bat's devotion. Demanding absolute loyalty within the Decepticon ranks was as mathematically absurd as expecting pure romance from a documented deceiver.
The asset remained a top-tier espionage agent, and as long as his subroutines executed directives efficiently, his system was satisfied.
After all, as an ancient organic thinker once noted: within any era, what resource holds the highest value?
Talent.
The Nemesis closed its distance to Planet Kugrage, and at a specific coordinate, a massive orbital armada abruptly entered Skygnaw's visual field.
The exact millisecond his sensors logged the hulls, he interpreted the strategic layout perfectly.
"The fleet has held its orbital position without descending to the surface. It appears the conflict down on the dirt remains undecided. These primitives are remarkably resilient," he mused.
He had initiated his transit late, yet his arrival aligned flawlessly with the climax.
Kugrage was a civilization that had naturally engineered its own advancement, entirely distinct from the braindead experimental subjects he had encountered on primitive worlds who struggled to process basic math.
The fact that their defensive layers had endured a relentless invasion for nearly a month fell perfectly within logical variables.
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