When the Seed Is Planted, When the Bugle Sounds
In the pitch-black, deathly silent chamber, flickering arcs of light danced.
They were not bright. If anything, they were ominous beams, dim and laced with malice, dancing around the suspended body of a Sentinel as if administering some sort of rhythmic "electroshock therapy."
Each time the arcs leaped, the prisoner's body convulsed in a decidedly undignified way.
But the Sentinel Primarch being tortured was strong. Even as she endured pain and mental torment, she refused to let out so much as a weak whimper, and she would not bow to her enemy.
Generally speaking, though, prisoners who refused to yield under such circumstances did not earn the villains' admiration. They only brought worse torture down upon themselves.
Lady Elsa, First Centurion, had long since lost the ability to keep track of time. Most of the functional modules in her body had been forcibly shut down. The ones still running were not a concession from her fallen sisters. They were kept active only so the corrupted could better pump tainted energy into her mechanical body, corroding its hardware, and flood her with corruptive memes to assault her sapient spark. But breaking through the Sentinel Primarch's mental firewall was no easy task.
The defensive programs personally written by the Creator kept rewriting themselves, resisting the corruption that had already taken root in her body.
Compared to the corruption of her body, Elsa could clearly feel that her very existence was being quietly "rewritten." It was a change to her lifeform—or "hardware"—as if the foundational code were being altered from the ground up, changing some of her most important parameters.
No will of steel, not even that of a mechanical lifeform, could resist this kind of rewrite.
This punishment was unlike anything she had