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Prowl stood in the ruins of Praxus and felt nothing.
His gaze swept slowly from one side to the other, optical feed zooming in and noting points of interest without his conscious command. The square in which he stood was no longer flat and smooth for convenient alt mode travel, instead bursting in craters of impact site and swelling into piles of detritus. Just to his left stood a building he recognized as a hab suite complex, utterly collapsed from multiple storeys into a single dense pile of rubble and twisted metal. His doorwings fluttered in an involuntary ping of his surroundings, providing data on the sheer scale of the destruction. Automatically, tacnet supplied the numbers. A building of that size, with the average amount of people a standard Praxian living space supported, the time of the attack, and therefore the amount of people who would be at home instead of at work or leisure activities, all flashed as numbers one after another on his HUD. The calculation concluded in the number of likely casualties that had resulted from the destruction of that single building, shining coldly over his optical feed. Hundreds dead, here alone. And everywhere he turned there was another complex like this one, in identical state of obliteration.
Activating long-ago held routines, he began walking away from this residential district where he had lived for a large part of his life, down the ruined and blasted streets toward the city center. Transformation was impossible, as he had already concluded, and multiple times he had to climb servo and pede over obstacles of shredded road paving or collapsed structure plating, doorwings twitching out scans for safe pathways to traverse. As he had been at his post in Autobot Command Base during the attack, several orn had passed since the actual moment of the devastation. The fires had almost entirely burned out in the places where there was not a source of consistent fuel to keep them going. He touched pieces of lampposts that had melted into slag from the impact, but knew they were cool before contact, his infrared sensors showing them the same ambient temperature as the atmosphere around them.
So, too, as the orn had passed, had attempts been made to gather the deceased. Under Sentinel Prime’s rule they would have been stripped for parts and then smelted to recover any usable cybertronium from their frames wholesale. Optimus, however, had stated his intention to ascertain the wishes of as many of the dead as he could, recycling those who wanted it, but allowing for alternate funerary arrangement for those who did not. Prowl knew from the moment he heard the plan that such a thing was impossible. With millions dead, and when many of the citizens had never once set pede outside of their city of origin, the chances of records existing for every grayed-out corpse were so statistically unlikely that his processor automatically labeled them as unworthy of consideration. It was another example of Optimus’s compassion getting in the way of the reality of the situation, expending bot power and time on a task that was doomed from the start.
Prowl’s emotional subsystem attempted to flare with anger, but the error that had taken it had yet to recover. The more he learned of the situation in Praxus and the actions the Autobots were taking in response, the higher his anger rose until he reached levels beyond what his systems could process, and a failsafe had activated and suppressed all feeling until such a time as they would not threaten him with permanent processor damage or a crash.
The navigation routine concluded, leaving Prowl standing before the Praxian Enforcer Headquarters. It had been the target of such intense bombing that there was little visible rubble, and instead a melted slurry of the structural components of the building in a softly sloping pile. Fuel fire still flickered at the edges where he could just see it, the rainbow sheen of burning energon apparent in the flames. Though each enforcer had been assigned a hab suite in the city, the Headquarters had been fully equipped with barracks-style recharge berths and commissaries so that an enforcer never once had to leave the building if they did not want to in order to attend to the needs of their frame. That had been the habit of Prowl himself; he threw himself into his assigned function fully and utterly, and saw no point in leaving to go recharge and fuel in a hab he spent no time in otherwise. It had been yet another point of contention with his fellow officers, who thought he was attempting to insinuate they were less dedicated than him by comparison. The thought had not occurred to him until it was spoken to his faceplates, but privately he had to admit that he did think it was true. It was a simple fact that very few mechs poured the same amount of effort into their functions as he did.
Prowl moved on from the slagged Enforcer Headquarters, turning instead in the direction of one of the crystal gardens. Praxus had been known for its crystal tending for megavorn, often attracting tourism from those that enjoyed the aesthetic, as well as from those who found deeper religious meaning. Prowl could not count the times he had enforced the laws against specific sonic resonances that ran the risk of destabilizing the harmonies of the gardens, removing hopeful street buskers from corners where they were not permitted and putting down fights that resulted in noise complaints. Though he had no talent for culturing crystal growth himself, some part of him had once found contentment, perhaps, with the knowledge of the carefully managed crystal gardens and their association with his home city. It was not his function, but he did appreciate the time and skill that went into such a task, and found the end result pleasing and useful for how it contributed to the welfare of Praxus itself.
The terrain was so altered that the view of his optical feed of where he now stood did not match the stored status of the coordinates he had intended to reach in any aspect whatsoever. He knew that crystals were famously fragile, which was why the sonic restriction laws had been put in place, but the fact that not a single one remained, when several had been as large as a mech three size classes higher than him, seemed impossible to comprehend. He studied the craters in the area with every sensor he had, noting the differing composition of structured road and natural metal, and only saw bare fragments in terribly small amounts. Leaning down, he picked up a single, jagged shard, barely the length of a single digit on his servos. His emotional subsystem pinged again, anger and sadness warring to register, but were smothered at once by the overflow failsafe, leaving him as numb as he had been since the moment he laid eyes on the ruins of his city.
If the Decepticons had this kind of firepower and were both willing and able to use it, such that one of the wealthiest cities on the planet’s surface could be reduced to ash and dust over the course of a single orn, then absolutely nothing was safe. While it was true Praxus had never focused on the anti-air artillery that would have prevented the complete dominance of the attacking seekers, the city was far from left defenseless, and none of it had seemed to matter at all. Information on Decepticon casualties was difficult to come by, and frankly seemed to matter less than the knowledge that, of the three and a half million Praxians that had been recorded at the last census, before the war had made such things much more difficult, less than a hundred were confirmed to remain. Prowl now was a member of a frametype more rare than even point one percenters.
With the failsafe mercilessly suppressing his emotional responses still, his processor and tacnet were free to work in tandem to begin making plans, or, perhaps more accurately, to pull to primary processing plans that had been put aside. Optimus may find his ways to be unsavory and reprimand him for even suggesting them, but Optimus had yet again proven himself blind to the ugly truth of war. The Prime could spend his time on funerary rights for corpses that would never appreciate the effort, and sue for peace again and again with an opponent who would not listen, and insist that maintaining his moral purity was worth more than the countless deaths that came about as a result of his commands. It was a different kind of problem than those working under Sentinel Prime had faced, but it was still a Prime removed from the reality of living as one of his subjects. Optimus himself may be able to take nearly any hit with his Matrix-reinforced frame and built in armor and weaponry, but the average mech was far more likely to die from even a single impact of a Decepticon energy weapon. The death toll building up as a result of Optimus believing every bot could behave the same way as him had reached critically unacceptable levels. Feeling his doorwings lift high and determined, Prowl knew he could no longer stand by and tell himself that the Prime knew best.
His servo clenched into a fist, and the crystal shard shattered further into tiny fragments and crystal dust, all that was left of a piece of Cybertronian history once known across the planet.
Optimus had given any Praxian within the Autobot ranks a quartex off of duty in order to permit them to grieve unencumbered. Prowl did not need the time for anything as banal as emotional recovery, but it would serve him well for what he planned.
He had work to do.