The pain of the fusion was ripping through my body. I felt myself...changeing. Dozens of colors flashed in my mechanial eyes, the memories of the past month being twisted, changed. Fading in and out of death. I swear I even saw God face-plaming himself. I even remembered the pain of when I first died.

There was a striking set of differences this time around. 

It wasn't black, but a multitude of colors. Instead of being crushed, I was destroyed and rebuilt. Instead of nothing, there was only one thing in my head, repeating...

Kill.

Destroy.

Devour.

Conquer.

This kept on repeating in my head until it all started merging into one word:

RULE.

A fraction of a second after this word appeared, I woke up. I was focused, yet still confused. My mind was scrambled, but then it started to organize and connect after awhile. All of the pain and torment I felt within my body  and mind almost immediately disappeared. But the grogginess that latched onto my mind when the shard started to fuse with me stayed along for who-knows-how-long.

I looked around with a kind of clarity that surpassed anything I've ever felt. My eyes closed to blink, but it felt like I'd closed them for hours. And when they finally opened, I looked around again at the cave that was familiar, yet alien. 

Colors were more vivid and I honestly saw the heat that was rolling out from the hot rock around me like a raging sea. 

I’d seen that effect before. It looked like the colored smoke they use at concerts. It also looked like when the light streamed through fog in the early morning, making the condensed water molecules that were visible to the naked eye take on the hues of a sunrise. Here though, it was a completely different sensation. Air itself was given substance by the heat, emblazoned in a ghostly, fiery red. It did not obstruct my vision. Instead, it was just like another fact of life had been revealed to me, joining the other types of stimuli I was used to receiving.

It all felt a bit surreal. 

With a thought, I recalled the memory of the few minutes before I picked up the shard and the scene played like a movie. Not only that, there was a slight time dilation between what he used to replay the memory versus when I came out. How could I possibly tell? It was like every lesson in mathematics I'd learned at school had been organized and arranged for my express use along with the acute calibration of my strangely enhanced senses. 

There have been cases in humans where someone has had an especially impressive affinity for keeping time with their “internal clock”, but since my mind can perfectly recall information now, I was able to bring forth the unit from experience and apply it in sync with reality. In fact, it didn’t even register as a task to my brain... like it was beneath it. All of it. In the hierarchy of thought, my mind no longer considered such things as hard or complex. Only simple.

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Raising a hand slowly, I rotated and flipped it back and forth, fixated on the roiling hear. Turning inward, I felt more than saw the heat being shuttled to a new area within his sternum, nestled in where my past life's lungs would have been.

Unfortunately, I was not familiar enough with my changed body yet, so I’d need to seek some hints from my body on how it navigates the processes.

Tightening my hand into a fist, a surge of power accompanied the motion, bringing along with it an immense, invincible feeling of strength. Indomitable in nature, a vast river of heat flooded through my hand towards my clenched fingers, warming the new claws and making the dark tone of his newly changed hand a reddish hue from the heat. Letting the tension fade, I went through my muscles, and one by one and flexed, feeling the destructive potential housed within. This would take some getting used to. 

Just by by own conservative estimates, and disregarding the new solar heat energy, it was easily my Energon levels felt like it was 500%better after my of ‘upgrade’. This felt like a better word, because it felt like this was nothing short of an “out with the old, in with the new” kind of scenario. I reckoned that I could take an entire bar in a fight and come away from it without even a bruise. Well, if they were other Cybertronians.

"Wait, can we even get drunk?" I wondered.

Finally forcing myself to rip attention away from the unspeakable gains I was discovering, I looked up and took in the state of the area at a glance. I frowned. I closed my eyes again before inevitably reopening them a moment later. I thought imust be hallucinating. 

I looked down at my body. It looked like Issei's Juggernaut Drive form except it was black and white, with glowing purple lines, no tail or wings, and my forearms were connected together. Also, there were no orbs or green crystals on my new body, except for one on my chest, which probably held the Dark Spark Shard.

"That reminds me, how am I able to keep myself stable? I should be mentally unstable..wait. Why are there so many notifications?" I said.

I check them, and it was terrifying.

Skill Get! Dark Energon Manipulation: Control Dark Energon.

Skill Get! Shadow Armoury: Create melee weapons out of darkness.

Skill Get! Database Storage Lv 1: Store a certain amount of forms in your enhanced database. (Stored forms, 2. Max: 5)

Title Obtained! One chosen by The Dark Spark: You have been able to withstand the amount of Dark Energon generating from the Shard. You have been chosen by the Darkness.

Quest Started: Rebuild The Dark Spark Time limit: However long you needed Discription: Haven being chosen by darkness, Echo Dark Prime has been giving the quest to rebuild the Dark Spark.  Rewards: The Complete Dark Spark. ???

"What the Fuck?! That's really bad! Now I have to travel across the universe to find the shards..."

"I should probably fix the evac pod and start doing this..."

Little did I know at the time, but the other voices I had heard in the void also began different quests. And all of them eventually lead to...

Earth. 

---End of Chapter---