Chapter Text
Hunter O'Nion was, by his own admission, a nerd. Sure, he'd played a few sports, tried out for the school football team, and could bench press a fair amount of weight in the gym. But he was still a nerd. He was always the first to sign up for computer clubs at school, and his tinkerings with robotics had won him a few battlebot competitions.
So of course, he was going to be all over the reports of giant fighting robots tearing up cities. The obvious governmental cover-ups just added spice to the whole thing.
'Terrorist attacks', his left butt-cheek.
As soon as he graduated, he packed up his dad's old VW bus- his only inheritance after his parents' deaths- and went tooling around the country, looking for any trace of the giant robots. Which...wasn't as well thought out a plan, he'd quickly discovered. He had nothing to go on, save a few grainy seconds of cellphone recordings and posted reports of sightings. All of which always disappeared within minutes of being posted if he didn't save them fast enough, which only added fuel to the fire.
He was determined to find one of the giant robots and...he hadn't thought that far ahead. But he was going to find one!
He just wasn't expecting to actually find them.
Or, for that matter, for them to find him first.
***
"Grand. Just fucking grand."
Hunter glared at his van, specifically the steam rising from the engine, and aimed a kick at the bumper. What a fantastic place for the radiator to die on him, on the side of the road, outside a half-dead town, in the middle of fucking nowhere.
He paced around the van, yanked open the driver's door, and grabbed his wallet. Stuffing his wallet in his pocket, he slammed the door shut and turned to slouch toward the town in the hopes of finding a mechanic.
And that was when his van exploded.
Well, to be exact, something crashed into and through it, smashing it beyond recognition.
Hunter whirled back in time to see a confusion of color and light, punctuated by the sound of metal crashing into metal and weapons going off. He staggered as the ground shook with the impact of something massive.
Backpedaling, he gaped at the whirling flashes of yellow, chrome, and green as two...giant...car...things...seemed dead set on tearing each other apart. It wasn't until one of them skidded along the ground nearby, throwing up plumes of dirt and sand, that he realized he'd found his giant robots.
Now he just needed to survive the encounter to tell about it. Which wasn't looking good, as a wild spray of whatever weapons they were using had him ducking with a curse and scrambling for any kind of safety.
Safety he wasn't seeing, with the town too far to reach in time and not even a damn rock big enough to hide a fucking mouse in sight as the metallic crunches of a car wreck that never stopped continued entirely too close.
Suddenly, with an almost melodic clicking and clanking, a high performance engine roared behind him. He jerked to a yelping stop as a yellow fucking Lamborghini squealed around in front of him, tires leaving smoking skid marks on the pavement. The passenger door flipped open a second later, and a voice shouted, "Get in!"
Like he was going to argue. Hunter scrambled into the car, barely having time to yank his feet inside before the door was snapping closed. Then inertia almost tumbled him out of the seat as the car spun around and shot off down the road with squealing tires.
"You owe me a fragging wash after this, meatbag!" the voice from before snarled. "And get your feet off the dash!"
Struggling to right himself, Hunter had a moment of panic when he realized the car didn't have a driver, and the voice was apparently coming from the radio.
The voice was...coming from...the car.
Hunter twisted around at a muffled explosion, clinging to the seat as the car swerved wildly, and saw a nightmare combination of hatchback and sci-fi armory giving chase. Helpfully his mind connected the dots between the two cars and the two fighting robots who'd destroyed his van.
Wait.
Transforming...robots?
...no wonder he could never find any traces of the giant robots! They hid as cars! And what an A.I.! No wonder the government was trying to keep them under wraps!
Another explosion that nearly flipped the cursing Lamborghini over had Hunter focusing on the fight he was an unwilling part of. He found himself clinging to the seat again as the car spun around, tires squealing, and part of the hood just...transformed out of the way as some kind of gun rose from the cleared space to fire back.
"Hang on, squishy!" the car shouted. "I'm punching it!"
Hunter yelped as inertia threw him into the seat, that high-performance engine roaring, and it felt like he'd been strapped to a rocket as the car practically flew down the road past their pursuer.
He couldn't hear anything but the car's engine for several long moments, and when he was finally able to twist around to look through the back window again, there was no sign of the green hatchback from Hell. He sighed quietly and sagged in the seat, before another problem niggled its way to the front of his mind as the car kept racing along the pavement.
Where was the car taking him?