No sooner had we activated the strange contraption than bolts of searing pain shot like cold steel through our wracked and tormented bodies. Wide-eyed with horror, we stood aghast as we were consumed in a sickening act of transformation.

The walls of the cocoon themselves seemed to merge with our flesh as we became pierced and infiltrated, strands of luminous ichor and hardened brass twisting to mesh with our mutilated forms, as wires lashed to sinew and bolts splintered bones.

As the terror of our violent rebirth overwhelmed us, it was with a renewed ripple of shock that we realised we were being watched. He stood peering from the periphery with a covetous gleam in his eye, unruffled and clad in the familiar attire of the Sentinel. Had they been here all this time? Following us?

In that instant his smile evaporated as the infection seemed to spill out, consuming him now too in a fit of grotesque metamorphosis. But something in his dark heart rendered even our mutations benign in comparison to the fate that would befall his shrieking anatomy.