Sentinels and the suit

Why engineered. The Nihil spore reads an ordinary human genome and rewrites it in minutes. This is called the Turning. A baseline soldier is brood within the hour. The Empire's answer is the Sentinel: a prime combatant grown in the Cradle foundries from a gene-line whose code the spore cannot parse. Sentinels are not born, they are specified. They are stronger, they heal faster, and they cannot be Turned.

The Lorica is the nano-combat suit, a second skin of nano-lattice composite in white and dark gray plating. The cyan visor, called the Sight, is the interface. It projects the Data Cards and thinks faster than the Nihil can move, which is why the world slows at a level-up. The brushed gold joints are actuator couplings, gilded because gold is inert to Nihil enzymes. The lattice learns from what it fights, which is why every run is a different build.