Durability

At the third, another and larger oil depot, somewhat more spread out, he left the others below and did a quick pass aloft, marking avenues of retreat.

[...]

Grimlock roared, earth-shatteringly, and swung his massive tail, bashing Cyclonus off his feet. But that was a blow his armor could withstand, if not without a second-tier array of pain sensors activating. Cyclonus rolled away with the momentum of it and back onto his feet, just barely ducking away in time from Grimlock’s jaws snapping onto his shoulder, and whirled around to slam a hard punch directly into one of Grimlock’s optics, which Frenzy had already hit dead-on with three shots: the lens cracked directly across.

“Raarrgh!” Grimlock yelled. “Grimlock eye hurts!” and in a fury simply smashed his massively armored head directly against Cyclonus’s. Cyclonus toppled backwards dazed with his entire skull clanging, a clamoring of pain circuitry and complaints from his diagnostic systems distracting him, and he only just managed to dump the reports from frontal processing in time to roll desperately out of the way as Grimlock smashed down with both feet directly where he had been on the ground, landing so heavily the entire concrete surface cracked into a deep meter-wide chasm running in both directions.

But the roll left him positioned behind Grimlock once again, and Cyclonus clenched his jaw and forced himself through the pain and up onto his side to crush the second spur as well with his two hands clenched together. He had only a moment of satisfaction, and then Grimlock kicked backwards, sending him flying thirty meters through the air to smash bodily into the far silo. Swindle was hiding from the battle there, behind some machinery: he jumped when Cyclonus came smashing past him.

“Keep filling cubes!” Cyclonus snarled at him as he fought his way out of the groaning steel beams; Swindle blinked and then said with wide relief, “You got it!” and ran around to the back of the silo. Cyclonus pushed himself up only slowly, with a gasping effort.

[...]

Megatron was on the repair table alongside him this time: Slag and Swoop had gotten in several solid hits. Hook patched him up first; after Megatron stood, he came and glared down at Cyclonus a moment, and then said curtly, “Report to the command center when you’re done,” before stalking out.

While doing Cyclonus’s repairs, Hook actually tried to simultaneously steal a bit of his internals and wheedle more information about Unicron’s possible location out of him. “I could whip up a few warp-capable drones and just send them looking…”

“Hook,” Cyclonus said warningly, “put it back.”

“I just thought it might need some tuning up,” Hook said, so unenthusiastically it barely functioned as an excuse, and put the small power-cycler back in place. He stared longingly at the panel after he closed it. “I don’t even understand how he did it!” he burst out. “It’s theoretically impossible to do quantum etching without a laser running the diameter of half of Cybertron! And you’d need a focus the size of the Arcturus Crater!”

Cyclonus did not satisfy his curiosity. His diagnostics were indicating that his systems were back at self-repair levels, and the terse order was in his private queue reminding him to report to the command center: Megatron presumably wished to review the raiding strategy with him.

[...]

Starscream gestured at him. “You took out Grimlock. I’d have expected you to be in the infirmary for a week, not walking out after a few hours. Does your armor just hide damage, or are you really in decent order?”

“I am functioning within battle-ready parameters,” Cyclonus said shortly.