Chapter Text
The lab was never supposed to exist.
It lay buried deep beneath Kaon’s foundations, deeper than the mineral veins the miners had stripped bare long ago. It was a place made for secrets, no map of it existed. There were no records of its construction still in existence. No one spoke of it. No one who worked within its walls dared try and leave. It was a place of whispers—staffed by mechs who knew they would never return home.
Its black walls sucked in the light of the fluorescents, jagged and dull. The air had a potent chemical rot, sharp and bitter. The stale scent clung to every inch of the building—every vent, every pipe, every scalpel. The scent never left. Solvents, cleaning fluids, and sterilizers—none strong enough to hide the rusts and old fluids. It stuck to the walls, to the scientists plating, to each datapad they touched. The more days passed, the stronger it became, a permanent reminder of every experiment and every failure never recorded.
Beneath the silence of Kaon’s war-stricken surface, hope had been promised. Cybertron was starving. The veins of energon had long run dry, every mine had been stripped to slag. Every ration was thinner. Mecha tore each other apart in the streets over a cube, half-empty. Divisions fought over shipments that would have been thought pitiful only years prior. Every spark guttered toward extinction. The air in the cities had become brittle with desperation, and whispers of cannibalism spread like shadows. Even the strongest frames looked gaunt, optics dim from the long starvation.
Shockwave had whispered of salvation. A project that would remake the Cybertron they knew. Not victory of the war that ravaged their planet but something deeper. If Cybertronians could be altered—if their frames could endure without fuel itself, if they could begin to recycle their own resources, if they could just adapt to the famine—then maybe their planet had a chance of survival.
Shockwave’s assistants had spoken of a cure for the wasting world. It could fix everything if they dared to finish it.
And they dared.
The subject on the operating slab was supposed to be their savior—the answer to the famine.
What lay there… was nothing close.
What had once been a mech was now half-machine, half-thing—its plating was stripped off entirely, showing its raw struts and wiring. Its helm was fused tight to melted wires, empurata made grotesque. Energon leaked from it in thin hissing trails, burning where they landed, filling the laboratory with a sharp ozone stink. A virus whispered in its frame, overrunning its veins, pulsing under the surface with unnatural rhythm. Its transformation cog was wrenched open for the experiment, it pulsed faintly. The air buzzed of static from an overheating system, accompanied by a smell of metal cooking.
Inside the spark chamber, the virus stirred. The twitch of its servos—rather claws now—moved too fast, too hungry.
”Stablilize!” A scientist shouted, her voice wavering with exhaustion. “Reinforce the binds—now!”
The scientists moved too slow. The figure on the slab convulsed, frame arching off the table. The steel supports screamed as metal wrapped against the creature's unnatural strength.
The optics flared online. Instead of red or blue—or even yellow—a white light shined through the slivers of its optics.
Its sound it made was no scream. It was tearing—a shudder of grinding metal so shrill it shook the tools off the table. The creature bent at impossible angles, its frame splitting apart. The restraints grounded, they gave way with a single motion, they bent, they snapped.
The two guards raised their cannons, but the virus was already there. A single lunge and the first was on the floor. Their helm crushed open—fluids sprayed the walls in a pattern that painted the black steel. Before the next knew he was being torn in half from chest to hip, his insides spilling out like a waterfall of wires and squirting energon.
Alarms howled. Flashing red light bled across the corridors. Doors sealed too late.
The scientists scattered, but there was nowhere to go. The virus leapt from host to host like a living storm. It moved faster than fear. It crawled beneath plating, fusing itself into the victims’ circuits. One mech staggered mid-sprint, their limbs locking into spasms, metal bending and splitting as they screamed. Fingers now stretched into hooked claws that tore their own face away until they collapsed.
The lab became a cathedral of agony as sounds and voices overlapped. There was a chorus of screaming metal and sobbing pleas that were drowned out beneath the blaring alarms. The walls seemed to vibrate with the weight of their terror, shaking dust from the ceiling vents that fell into the choking clouds of carnage.
The head researcher scrambled for the console, stumbling to reach the failsafe. He clawed toward the panel, desperate to burn the evidence before it could breach these walls.
He made four paces before the virus claimed him too.
His limbs bent at wrong angles. His body dragged down the wall—claimed by the mass of twitching cables and shrieking metal. His servos left streaks of energon across the floor until they too disappeared.
The failsafe was never touched.
The alarms screamed on with no one to hear them. The war above raged on, oblivious.
The lab burned, fluorescents shattered, with shards of glass showering down falling like shooting stars. The floor was awash with fluids, forming rivers that carried fragments of plating and torn wires. Every wall marked and blackened with smoke and streaked in the shine of energon.
Minutes passed. There were no survivors.
Silence fell.
And then—a flash of movement.
The shape dragged itself up from the dark wreckage. Hunched with limbs that stretched too long and too thin. It clawed upwards with terrible patience that left swears of energon along the walls. Its plating split and stretched until it was barely recognizable. It’s optics glowed pale and empty.
The first infected.
There were no survivors.
There was no containment.
There was no warning.
And by the time the smoke rose through the cracks of Kaon, the tunnels of the lab below were nothing but ash.