I Became a Decepticon

Late at night, after a terrifying thunderstorm that had come and gone even faster, a black-and-white Ford Mustang police car marked with the number 643 slowly drove deeper into a rundown factory on the outskirts of Fairfax City, abandoned for who knew how many years.

Its headlights blazed brightly!

If anyone had happened to pass by the police car at that moment, they would have broken out in a cold sweat.

Because under the headlights, both the driver's seat on the left and the passenger seat on the right were completely empty. There was not a single person inside the vehicle!

Even more chillingly, once the car came to a stop, bursts of strange, nearly indecipherable electronic noises began spilling densely from within. "Bzzzt... crackle..."

"Hey, Frenzy..."

"Damn it... Was the core template damaged by that lightning strike just now?"

As the calls rang in his ears, Sun Cheng's consciousness gradually returned. His head felt as though a red-hot iron bar had been rammed into it and was being violently stirred around. The agony, nausea, and intense dizziness made him think, I really wish I could just die right now.

Worse still, he was apparently hallucinating.

"...I am Frenzy... a mechanical lifeform from Cybertron..."

"No, no... I'm Sun Cheng, a failed college student who got drunk drinking alone..."

A flood of unfamiliar memories and consciousnesses clashed relentlessly in his mind, undoubtedly worsening his suffering.

Fortunately, the state did not last long. As an inexplicable cool sensation surged forth, Sun Cheng soon completely devoured the consciousness data belonging to the mechanical lifeform—Frenzy—and took control of this body.

That was right, a body—not a human body!

After fully digesting the absurd information in his head, the newly conscious Sun Cheng lowered his head with a strange expression. Using the two pairs of camera-like eyes on his face, which possessed a field of view approaching three hundred degrees and could even make out tiny particles on the ground over ten meters behind him to the left in the darkness, he looked at his slender metal arms.

"...This isn't a dream? I really turned into a robot? This..."

He had no choice but to believe it!

Leaving aside the fact that the structure of a mechanical lifeform's body could not be faked, information regarding the storage and encryption of memory files, energy consumption, component wear across the body, and its transformation functions continuously surfaced in his mind—or rather, within the core template inside it—once every second.

[Frenzy: Spy Robot.]

[Faction: Decepticons (Cassette Corps).]

[Partner: Barricade.]

[Height: 6 feet. Weight: 51 pounds.]

[Core: Lv. 1 Spy Template.]

[Status: Good!]

[Current Mission 1: Travel to Earth and search for intelligence regarding leader "Megatron" and the "AllSpark."]

[Secret Mission 2: Monitor Barricade and seek an opportunity to investigate why the deputy commander—Starscream—suddenly left Cybertron for the Solar System decades ago.]

As Sun Cheng wrestled with panic and confusion over what had happened to him, his body suddenly spun wildly through the air. Before he could even react, his excellent mechanical eyes had already transmitted the scene of the drastically changed surroundings to the core template inside his head.

"Wait... The police car I was in turned into a robot too? Is he my current partner—Barricade?"

The thought had barely surfaced when Sun Cheng quickly realized he was wrong!

"Damn Cassette Corps trash..."

With an irritable roar, Sun Cheng felt his body lighten before he had even hit the ground. A pair of massive black mechanical hands firmly seized him. "Warning... warning. Minor exoskeleton damage detected..."

His machine body kept him from feeling pain, but the repeated alerts flashing through his core template, along with the sparks bursting from where Barricade's huge hand gripped his body, told Sun Cheng just how bad his situation was.

"...I'm out of patience... pathetic insect... Now, either tell me whether the mission can still proceed, or die..."

As Barricade's cold mechanical voice sounded, the danger alerts in Sun Cheng's mind grew increasingly piercing, while an indescribable despair welled up within him.

At that instant, it was as though a voice rose from the depths of his soul, constantly warning him.

He would die!

He would really die!

"Lord... Lord Barricade... My template seems to have been affected by the lightning strike just now..."

Under the warnings of danger, Sun Cheng instinctively gave an immediate reply.

Even he could hear the trembling fear in his own voice.

A hint of a smile seemed to appear on Barricade's savage metal face, looking cruel and violent.

He appeared quite satisfied with Sun Cheng's terror. Yet as the light flickered in his two pairs of deep-blue mechanical eyes, his cold voice nearly caused Sun Cheng's core template to crash. "Oh? So that means I need a new assistant?"

Fear and unease intensified. This was a warning from the subconscious of the original owner he had devoured—Frenzy.

And Sun Cheng, who had inherited all of Frenzy's memories, finally understood his dangerous predicament.

He—Frenzy—was a mechanical lifeform from the Decepticon faction of Cybertron, a member of the Cassette Corps under Lord Soundwave.

As a Decepticon intelligence operative, after following Lord Soundwave to the Solar System in a remote corner of the Milky Way, he had received orders to accompany the Decepticon warrior before him, Barricade, to Earth in search of the long-missing Decepticon leader—Lord Megatron—and the sacred artifact, the [AllSpark]. Intelligence indicated that both were very likely on Earth.

Besides that, he had also received a secret mission from Soundwave, commander of the [Cassette Corps].

But clearly, Barricade did not trust him.

He could not help making an instinctive swallowing motion, but all that came out was a muffled electronic sound.

Under the urgent warning, Sun Cheng's brain began racing at an unprecedented speed. "M-my lord, although my condition has been affected somewhat, it won't interfere with the mission ahead..."

As far as he knew, although the Decepticons were mechanical lifeforms, their rigid hierarchy was even more severe than that of humanity's long-extinct feudal age.

Higher-ranking Decepticons exerted a suffocating level of suppression over those beneath them. It was one of the laws deeply imprinted within the [Core], the most vital part of their mechanical lives.

This was why Sun Cheng, who had now taken over the body of the mechanical spy named "Frenzy," could not muster even the slightest will to resist before Barricade, whose rank suppressed his own.

This undoubtedly deepened the unease in his heart!

"Oh? Is that so?"

Seeing Barricade curl his lips into a cold sneer, exposing a mouthful of savage, saw-toothed alloy teeth, while the hand gripping him tightened by another degree or two, it was clear he had no intention of letting him go.

Sun Cheng's heart clenched. Just as he was about to beg for mercy, a piece of information suddenly flashed through his mind. An idea struck him, and he hurriedly shrieked, "Lord Barricade, if you kill me, who knows how long it'll take for the next intelligence officer sent to assist you to reach Earth. I heard Lord Blackout is about to arrive in the Solar System!"

The moment the words left his mouth, his entire body suddenly tensed. He thought he had overplayed his hand, but in the next instant, he was violently flung away. He first crashed into a stone pillar inside the abandoned factory, then fell onto the filthy ground with a bang.

"Hmph..."

With a cold snort, Barricade stared down at him viciously for a long while before transforming amid a burst of mechanical sounds back into the black-and-white Ford Mustang police car he had originally been. "Get in. We're leaving!"

Decepticon bodies were made of memory metal. Nonfatal damage would repair itself before long, so although Sun Cheng's body was injured, it did not impede his movements.

Still, having his life completely at someone else's mercy had left him deeply humiliated and furious. He silently swore to himself that he would not let this go.

Without a word, he got into the car and sat in the passenger seat. With his head lowered, blue light flickering incessantly in his electronic eyes, Sun Cheng began sorting through his thoughts.

Just now, if he had not completely absorbed all of Frenzy's memories, he might very well have been killed by his partner—Barricade.

Sun Cheng was not being paranoid. In the original owner Frenzy's memories, Barricade, a renowned elite warrior among the Decepticons, was a contradictory mix of cold-blooded cunning and violent bloodlust. If he felt like it, he could casually torture and kill a lowest-ranking Decepticon like him. Even Soundwave, the leader of the Cassette Corps to which he belonged, likely would not step in to confront Barricade on his behalf.

Fortunately, the two of them had been sent to Earth on a mission, and Barricade was also on very bad terms with another Decepticon warrior—Blackout. Otherwise, Sun Cheng might have become the most tragic transmigrator in history!

Though in his view, being inexplicably transported into this new world and turned into a mechanical lifeform was already enough to count as eight lifetimes' worth of rotten luck.

That was right. Sun Cheng had already realized that he had transmigrated.

While sorting through Frenzy's memory data, he had learned that he was still on Earth. However, instead of his homeland—China—he was now in Fairfax City, Virginia, in the United States.

If it had merely been a change of location, Sun Cheng would not have felt so despondent.

The problem was that Frenzy's memory data had also told him that, although this world likewise had a country called China, its political system was Soviet-style socialism, a fact that utterly shattered the limits of his imagination.

After all, in Sun Cheng's original world, from the era of the Russian Empire through the rise of the Soviet Union, China and those two nations had endured more than a century of territorial disputes and border conflicts. Their enmity ran far too deep for words, so naturally China could never have adopted the other side's system.

What was more, this world had only just reached the year 2007, and there were even intelligent humanoid beings like "mechanical lifeforms"—something he could never have imagined truly existed, no matter how wildly he had let his imagination run before.

Following that line of reasoning, only one conclusion remained.