Northern Nevada, the Great Basin Wasteland.
A dry, cold wind swept through the gray-brown mountains in the distance, kicking up clouds of dust as it raced across the cracked earth.
This place lay far from any normal human settlement. No roads or lights marked the edge of the wasteland, only endless yellow-brown earth and countless steel corpses lying silent across it.
It had once been a military scrapyard and disposal facility run by the United States government.
Over decades, vast quantities of military equipment that had outlived their usefulness had been brought here for dismantling, storage, and burial: abandoned armored vehicles, unmanned combat platforms, damaged aircraft, experimental weapons from eras long forgotten, and Sentinel Robots of every kind.
Tens of thousands of metal wrecks stretched to the horizon. From afar, the place looked like a graveyard left behind after a war between mechanical civilizations, forgotten by the entire world.
Under the dusk sky, faint dark-red light glimmered inside a giant Sentinel that had been severed at the waist, deep in the heart of the graveyard.
The giant robot's chest cavity had long since been hollowed out. Broken cables hung from above, while heavy armor plates on either side had been welded over with sheets of metal foreign to its original structure, their surfaces densely carved with unfamiliar symbols.
The circular chamber that had once housed its power core had been turned into an altar. At its center stood a metal stele covered in dark-red rust, engraved with an inverted triangle surrounded by countless concentric circles and broken gears.
Dozens of shabbily dressed people knelt around it, heads bowed and hands pressed to the cold ground, murmuring under their breath.
Rusted machine parts, Sentinel processors, damaged prosthetic limbs, and decaying circuits had been neatly piled in rings around the altar.
"Order