Courage to Protect What's Important
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| "Courage to Protect What's Important" (Daijinamono o Mamoru Yūki) | ||||||
| Airdate | 2025 May 14 | |||||
 Watch this episode on YouTube
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As Optimus fights Ignite Leo, Hydrophant must overcome his fear of combat.
Synopsis
Ignite Leo is itching for a fight against Optimus, the supposed hero from the outside world. He attacks Optimus with many fast strikes, leaving the Autobot Leader struggling to react. Lightlong tanks a hit for Optimus, but his pleas for the lion energy beast to cease attacking fell on deaf audio sensors, forcing him to form Lightning Optimus with the Energy Master.
Lightning Optimus fires a sword beam at Ignite Leo, but it is neutralized by Spirituan's Earth Defense. Ignite Leo takes advantage of this to strike back hard, and also call out Optimus for not knowing how to use elemental energy. Just when he was about to deal the finishing blow, Hydrophant, motivated by the need to protect Lightlong, assumes his robot mode and fires a stream of water at Ignite Leo from his beast mode shoulder to scare off the lion, vowing that while he may not like fighting , he will protect what's important to him.
This vow ended up resonating with Lightning Optimus, who used the bond he had forged with Hydrophant to combine with the elephant, forming Lightning Aqua Optimus before finishing Ignite Leo off with an electrically charged vortex.
Afterwards, Lightlong confronted Ignite Leo on why he attacked the group, which the latter explains was to test Optimus' strength to stop others from getting their hands on the elemental shield, explained by Spirituan as something that has been around for a long time and is something the Dinosaur Tribe wanted to gain power, but he senses something evil from it. As soon as he said that, a mysterious purple energy beam abducts him.
Spirituan was later shown wildocked to Megatron's Right Arm, as the Decepticon leader declares that the pieces are in place...
Featured characters
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)
| Autobots | Decepticons | Energy Beasts |
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Notes
Continuity notes
- This is the first time a Wildocked Energy Master has (almost) been defeated by an Energy Beast, as well as the first time Elemental Energy is implied to have a Pokémon/Mega Man-esque rock paper scissors format.
- Lightning Optimus is formed for the second time. Notably, the entire combination sequence has been truncated significantly, only showing the final pose at the end.
- Optimus performs his first Wildocking with 2 Energy Beasts.
- The stegosaurus from The Power of Bonds! Wildocking! makes a small cameo here among Megatron's forces. Not much is known about them at the moment...
- Megatron's desire for the "Elemental Shield" from The Hero Who Descends from the Sky! was briefly shown when Ignite Leo was explaining why he attacked them, and some context about what it is is given in this episode.
