Rendezvous

A day later, after entering Guinea, Optimus Prime finally found a secluded spot at the border between Ivory Coast and Liberia.

He stopped before a small lake deep within an uninhabited forest, intending to rest here for a few days and calm himself down.

His mentor Sentinel Prime's betrayal had dealt him a tremendous blow.

But for Optimus Prime, the greater blow was the chain reaction caused by the incident. It had left him completely unable to see the Autobots' future.

Late at night, Optimus Prime lay in an open space by the lake, gazing up at the sky. He made no response as small animals that came out at night to drink and forage moved around his body, even climbing onto him.

Still staring in the direction of the starry sky where his homeworld Cybertron lay, Optimus Prime lost himself in thought.

Cybertron was, for all practical purposes, beyond saving.

A civil war that had lasted millions of years had utterly devastated the home upon which both sides depended for survival.

Nearly every mineral vein that could be found on Cybertron had been exhausted by both sides in the war.

The oceans had dried up, the mountain ranges had fractured, and even the planet's core had been fitted with a series of energy conversion devices in the later stages of the war, supplying the Decepticon Corps with vast amounts of energy.

After the civil war ended, Autobot scientists had specifically conducted projections on Cybertron's condition.

They believed that even in the best-case scenario, if Cybertron suffered no further damage from then on, it would still take tens of millions to over a hundred million years under the planet's own restorative power for it to have even a slim chance of returning to what it had been before the civil