"There is something I need to tell you, Athena." Torment says as he sits down on her couch, and a small part of him fills with nervousness.
He usually never gets nervous, but this situation isn't normal.
She isn't just like any other carrier he has been together with.
"What is it?" She sits down beside him on the couch with a cube of energon and leans in against him.
Completely relaxed.
He enjoys the trust she so openly shows him and silently curses the fact, that it will not continue, when he begins to explain to her what he has done. But she deserves to know.
"I'm working together with the Joint Investigation Unit."
She leans away and looks deeply surprised at him, and he swiftly takes the energon cube from her hands and puts it on the coffee table, before it falls to the floor and spills its content.
"You-... And they-..."
He smiles softly at her loss of words.
"Why haven't anyone told me about this earlier?" She finally asks.
"It had to be kept secret." He explains seriously, "You see, I haven't been honest wit-..."
He abruptly stops, and Athena looks worried at him as he goes completely stiff.
His behavior changes in an instant, and then he is gone, and she sits alone on the couch with the frightening image of what he in truth is deep down in his spark, and which irrevocably has been burned into her processor.
His optics...
Spark-deep hatred, cold rage and the full intent to kill had radiated from them before he left her.
What she had seen right there had been the murderous monster he is, the side of him he has kept completely hidden from her.
She shudders while countless questions fill her mind.
What had he been about to say?
And why did he leave her like that?
There is a sharp sting of pain in his spark when Torment materializes on the road outside Athena's apartment complex, and he clutches his chestplates with a gasp and a vicious curse, before he transforms into alt-mode and drives away from the area at maximum acceleration.
"WHERE!" He sharply demands to know on the communications line with Shift.
Shift provides him with their former colleagues coordinates and change of directions, and another vicious curse leaves him.
They are onto him.
How the frag do they know where he is!
He doesn't have a tracking device on him.
Or...
A dark thought occurs to him and he fills with fury.
Prowl!
Has the Director equipped him with a device to track his movements?!
The more he thinks on it while Shift keeps updating him about their former colleagues movements, he begins to realizes that it is the truth.
He must admit that he would have done the same if their roles were reverse, but that still doesn't excuse what the Director has done.
Torrent would have hired a new hacker to fill out Shift's position, and the Joint Investigation Unit's data security is utterly pathetic.
It would not have taken long for his enemy to discover the tracking signal, that would lead Torrent directly to him.
With a curse, he listens to Shift's continuous updates and corrects his course in accordance with them.
He doesn't have long before they are on him.
It is impossible for him to outrun his former colleagues unless he utilizes his warp-gate to avoid the three hardened professional killers, who are hunting him and who are just as skilled and versatile in their area of expertise as he is in his. But the sharp pain in his spark, when he had teleported out of Athena's apartment, had been a clear warning that he shouldn't do it again.
One-on-one he has a chance to kill them without much effort, but three-to-one is going to be problematic, and they are not going to underestimate him. He has worked closely with them on several occasions and they know his talents and abilities just as well as he knows theirs.
This is going to get messy, and he can only choose the area of their conflict.
Which is going to be as far away from Athena as he can make it.
Hottrack materializes above him three minutes later, and civilians in the air and on the ground goes into panic when the flight-frame begins to open fire at him while Torment at his top speed drives down the main road. He zigzags between the fleeing civilians while explosions rain down around him, and he steers sharply to his left when he sees an opening to a side road to get the conflict away from the main road.
Several missiles are fired in rapid succession before Hottrack switches to his Gatling Gun, and Torment is forced to avoid the falling debris from the crumbling buildings around him while under heavy fire, when the flight-frame haphazardly fires at him, and he is hit by several of the projectiles which send countless sharp signals of pain to his processor.
Hottrack veers off and falls back the next moment, and it doesn't take long for Torment to realize why. A purple mist begins to materialize at the end of the side road, where the road leads out into another heavily trafficked main road.
Coil emerges from it with all of his heavy artillery drawn, and the weapons specialist opens fire on him while Torment at high speed approaches him.
He zigzags sharply from side to side to avoid the fired projectiles, but the side road is narrow and it is impossible for him to evade them all. He ignores the overwhelming pain, steels his resolve and increases his acceleration to maximum velocity with the intent to end this. He can't bring the conflict back out into the main road, and he knows that he has to kill Coil before the weapons specialist manages to land a lethal hit on him.
A few seconds later he transforms and slams into Coil with full force. They tumble around on the ground and fights hard to gain the upper hand on their opponent.
Torment manages to tear a cannon off of Coil's shoulder, that had been damaged by their collision, and he grips hard around Coil's throat as he rolls on top of the larger sire and forces him down with his weight.
He gets brutally torn away from Coil by Hottrack before his integrated weapons can emerge from his frame and kill Coil, and Coil rises from the ground with a murderous look in his optics.
"Traitor!" The weapons specialist growls accusingly as he moves threateningly towards Torment, "You got the devices removed on yourself, Darksteel, Switch and Typhoon. Didn't you forget someone?!"
"They were the only ones I could get to without alerting anyone to what I was planning to do." Torment explains with a hint of regret in his voice while his sharpened focus and alertness is turned to their surroundings, "I would have approached you if I had had the chance."
"That is not good enough!" Coil rushes towards him in an open attack and Torment evades it without much effort, "You were going to abandon us! Admit it! After all that we have done for you, you would leave us to die! You are the one that got us into this! And you will get us out of this!"
"I would if I could." Torment apologizes honestly.
"Don't tell me you have gone soft, Torment?!" Hottrack mocks him with a harsh, cruel laughter, but he ignores the flight-frame.
He knows they are trying to distract him and get him to lower his defenses.
And he still doesn't know who or where the third one is.
All he knows is, that he is here somewhere.
A shot suddenly rings loud and clear, and a paralyzing pain fills him when his warp-gate is hit by a projectile that penetrates through the reinforced armor, that is protecting his midsection. The warp-gate sends countless error messages while the open wound begins to bleed profusely.
Coil and Hottrack are on him in an instant. His arms gets restrained against his sides with a hard grip around them by the weapons specialist, while Hottrack swiftly sweeps him off of his feet, and Torment lands hard on the ground with Coil on top of him.
The grip on his arms is loosened a fraction as they fall to the ground, and he doesn't waste his opportunity.
The plasma cannon located in his right arm emerges and he aims it at Coil and shoots him in the a matter of a second. The shot immediately pierces the weapons specialist's chestplates and extinguishes his spark.
"Traitor!" Hottrack growls furiously and hits Torment hard in the face with a fist.
The shot took all of his remaining energy, and he is completely helpless when the flight-frame with a hard, restraining hold around his head forces him to keep it still. Hottrack pulls a dagger out of his subspace before he with precision brutally stabs it right into the area behind Torment's right audio, where his communications hardware is located and mercilessly twists it around.
His connection with Shift immediately begins to glitch out, and the communications line turns static before it a second later goes completely silent, when the hardware has been destroyed.
The pain is excruciating, but he doesn't have the energy to make a sound and remains passive while his awareness slowly begins to slip away.
His energon is pooling in a growing puddle beneath him and his sight has begun to blur.
It doesn't look good.
Can he do anything to get out of this situation?
His possibilities are rapidly running out together with his energon.
Seconds pass by without Hottrack doing any further.
Why isn't he finishing him off?
He vaguely sees the purple mist, when Doublewire teleports down from the top of the nearest building and walks over to Hottrack while he packs away his sniper rifle.
"Well, well, well." Doublewire says tauntingly, "What do you know, the infamous Torment is in fact capable of bleeding."
The sniper kneels down in the growing pool of Torment's energon and touches the rapidly bleeding wound with sadistic glee.
"I have looked forward to this." Doublewire says hateful, and he grabs Torment's jaw harshly and forces him to look up at him.
Torment's sight is fading rapidly as the loss of energon has begun to turn life-threatening.
"How disgraceful." Doublewire hisses in disgust.
"You are weak!"
"A traitor to your profession!"
"I would have preferred to kill you right now, but some of us do follow orders and Torrent wants to find out what you have leaked to our enemies."
He only barely registers Doublewire's hate-filled words at this point, but feels it when the sniper crudely begins to seal the leaking energon lines.
"We can't have that you die on us before all of the fun can begin."
Sirens begin to sound in the distance and rapidly come closer.
"Time to go." Hottrack says sharply and they haul him harshly to his feet.
His legs refuse to carry him and he loses consciousness completely in the moment before they teleport away with him.
Torment stares fatigued at Brakewave while the sire connects his systems with the equipment. The experienced interrogation leader is not a part of his team of teleporters, but he is still one of the close contacts that Torment has brought with him into the Organization.
Brakewave stares emotionlessly at him as the last connections have been made.
"I never imagined that you would become a traitor, Torment. And I want to know why you went against us. Since we both know, that you will not voluntarily give us the information we want, I'm not going to waste my time with trying to persuade you to talk."
Brakewave's words are neutral, but there is a hint of curiosity in them.
Torment shrugs with an indifferent expression.
If the interrogator wants to skip the roughing-up phase, then it is completely fine with him. His frame is already severely damaged from his fight with Coil, Doublewire and Hottrack, and if he can avoid any further physical damage, then he will accept it with a blessing.
His energy levels are barely above 40%, but it is far better than what they had been at, before he had been allowed to drink a small cube of energon to stabilize their dangerously low levels.
Brakewave is clearly not aware of what Torrent has done to Torment and his team, but even if he knew, he would be completely unaffected by it.
Utterly professional and completely loyal to his employer.
And unfortunately it is currently the Organization and Torrent who are his employers, despite the fact that Torment had been the one that brought him with him in on the project.
In the criminal underworld, loyalty only goes so far as to the one who pays you.
He knows that he is extremely lucky, that Darksteel, Switch and Typhoon didn't turn against him like the rest of his closest contacts has, when he informed them about his decision to change plans.
That they stayed loyal to him beyond what would be expected of them.
That they turned out to be friends more than colleagues.
And he will do everything he can to keep them safe.
A sad, faint smile slowly curves on his lips the moment he realizes that he actually is ready to die to protect them, and his spark finds peace as he accepts his fate.
Shift will make sure, that the Joint Investigation Unit knows everything it needs to know to bring a stop to the Organization and Torrent. He has done everything he can. Now it is up to the authorities with the aid of his friends to finish it.
He looks defiantly into Brakewave's optics.
Bring it on!
And then the torture begins.