Blackness. Absolute, silent, and suffocating. It wasn't sleep; it was absence. But slowly, impossibly, sensations began to seep back in, like colour returning to a black-and-white world.
First, sound. The groan of stressed metal somewhere nearby, the sighing whistle of wind through unseen gaps, a faint, rhythmic hum that seemed to resonate from within his very being.
Then, feeling. Not the familiar softness of skin or the weight of limbs, but something... different. A contained solidity. A cool, smooth surface where skin should be. A strange, low-level vibration coursing through him, tied to that internal hum.
Where...?
The thought was sluggish, thick like mud. Xen tried to open his eyes, but the concept felt wrong. He didn't have eyes, not in the way he remembered. Yet, perception returned – a dim, blurry view of towering, jagged shapes against a bruised twilight sky. Rust-red metal, twisted girders, mountains of forgotten junk. The scrap heap.
The giant... the Spark...
Memory jolted back, fragmented but potent. The agony of disintegration, the cool rush, the dying Transformer, the light shoved into... him.
He tried to move, sending a mental command downwards. A small, articulated metal finger – impossibly tiny compared to the hand he remembered seeing – twitched in his field of view. He tried again, focusing. A three-fingered hand, slender and built for precision rather than force, flexed hesitantly. It was his hand now. This small, metal body... was him.
Panic tried to bubble up, cold and sharp, but the strange internal hum seemed to absorb it, leaving only a profound sense of disorientation. He attempted to sit up, pushing with his new arms. The movement was clumsy, scraping against the rough metal surface he lay upon. He managed to prop himself into a semi-upright position, his new optical sensors adjusting slowly to the gloom.
He was small. Incredibly small. The piece of scrap he was sitting on felt like a boulder. The peaks of the junk piles around him were like canyon walls. The hand of the dead Transformer lay nearby, inert and vast, a monument to a scale he couldn't comprehend belonging to.
It was then that something flickered into his vision.
Not in the scrap heap, but overlaid on it. A translucent, rectangular box materialized in the upper corner of his perception, glowing with a faint, soft blue light. Inside it, simple white text:
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Xen blinked his optical sensors. The box remained. He shook his head – a surprisingly fluid motion for this new neck – but the overlay stayed firmly in place, like a heads-up display from one of the video games he used to play. Hallucination? After-effect of... whatever happened?
More text scrolled into view. Xen stared, his internal processors – a concept that felt disturbingly natural – struggling to catch up. System? Host? Integration? This wasn't a hallucination. This was... intentional? Organized?
He remembered his life before. Hours spent navigating menus, optimizing stats, completing quests in virtual worlds. RPG. The term surfaced from his human memories, stark and unbelievable against the reality of rusted metal and his own small, mechanical form.
No way. It can't be....
Driven by a gamer's instinct honed over years, he focused his thought, his intent, on the glowing box. Status?
The box flickered and changed.
-----------------------------
STATUS: Xen
LEVEL: 1 (0/100 XP)
RANK: Scrap-Tier (0)
HEALTH (HP): 82/100 [Damaged]
ENERGON (EN): 3/150 [CRITICALLY LOW!]
CORE STATS: [LOCKED - Initializing...]
SKILLS: [LOCKED - Initializing...]
-----------------------------
Critically Low Energon. The warning blared in red, pulsing slightly. Even without knowing exactly what 'Energon' was beyond the faint scent in the air and the context of Transformers, Xen felt an answering pang from deep within his new body. A profound, draining emptiness. A desperate need. It wasn't like hunger or thirst; it was like his very cells – or circuits – were crying out for fuel, for the energy needed to simply be. The internal hum felt weaker now, the vibration less steady.
82 out of 100 HP. Damaged from the Spark transfer, apparently. That explained the lingering sense of... wrongness, beyond the sheer alien nature of his body.
Locked stats and skills. Initializing. So, this was just the beginning. The absolute ground floor. Level 1, Scrap-Tier. It felt appropriately bleak, sitting here in a literal scrap heap.
Another notification popped up, smaller this time, below the status window.
An objective. A quest. With a tangible reward tied directly to unlocking his potential. The gamer in him recognized the loop instantly, even as the survivor panicked about the flashing [CRITICALLY LOW!] warning.
He needed Energon. Now.
Ignoring the flood of existential questions threatening to overwhelm him, Xen forced his new body into action. His optical sensors scanned the immediate vicinity, automatically sharpening focus, zooming slightly on details his human eyes could never have perceived. He pushed past the initial shock, the sheer weirdness of it all, driven by the primal, system-enforced need flashing in the corner of his vision. Find fuel. Survive. Unlock the System.
His gaze swept across twisted metal, discarded tech, and settled on a flickering shard of crystal half-buried in the debris a few meters away. It pulsed with the same faint, blue light as the dying Transformer's Spark, only weaker, fragmented. Was that Energon?
How Do You Like The Pacing Tell Me Bellow!