As I braced for the inevitable, a single, hot tear escaped my closed eyelid, tracing a path of shame through the grime on my temple. The Architect’s gloved fingers found the clasps on my right boot. The small click of the mechanism was as loud as a thunderclap in my defeated silence. He didn’t rush. The act was a ceremony of degradation, and he was its high priest. The whisper of leather sliding down my leg, the final pull, and then… nothing. Both boots were gone. The cold of the concrete floor seeped into the soles of my feet, a final, damning confirmation of my state. I was brought low, grounded, stripped of a symbol I had worn with honor across worlds.

The Architect let out a soft, appreciative hum. “Perfection,” he murmured. Against my will, my gaze was drawn down. I saw my feet as he must be seeing them. They were not the delicate, pampered feet of a sheltered princess. They were the feet of a warrior. High, strong arches, sculpted by a lifetime of leaping, landing, and driving forward in battle. My toes were long and straight, the muscles and tendons beneath the skin clearly defined. The skin itself was fair, but the soles were tough, lightly calloused from countless hours of barefoot training on the packed earth of Themyscira’s sparring grounds. These feet had stood on the soil of Olympus. They had braced themselves to push a planet. Now, they lay bare and useless on a dirty floor, twitching feebly in their restraints.

“The very foundation of the goddess,” the Architect said, his voice laced with a cold, academic curiosity. He reached out and, with a horrifying intimacy, wrapped his hand around my right foot. His grasp was firm, his gloved fingers pressing into my instep, his thumb settling on the sensitive arch. I recoiled instinctively, a full-body shudder, but the Hesperian Alloy held me fast.

“All that divine energy… channeled through this flesh,” he mused, his thumb stroking my arch in a slow, analytical way that made my skin crawl. “But now the conduit is closed. So what is left? Just sinew and bone?”

His grip tightened. It wasn’t a sudden crush, but a slow, grinding pressure. His thumb dug deep into the soft, vulnerable curve of my arch, pressing a nerve against the bone. A sharp, electric jolt shot up my leg. I gasped, my teeth clenched so hard my jaw ached. This wasn’t the clean pain of a sword’s edge or the concussive force of a super-powered blow. This was a debasing, invasive pain, a violation designed to produce a specific result.

He squeezed harder. The pressure became a lance of pure agony. The muscles in my arch screamed, knotted and tearing. My entire body went rigid, every weakened fiber straining against the unyielding metal. The man, this small, insignificant man, was causing me a level of torment my most powerful foes had never achieved. He was proving his thesis on my own flesh.

“There,” he whispered, a triumphant gleam in his eyes as he saw the agony contorting my face. “There is the breaking point.”

The pressure intensified to an unbearable peak. And my control shattered. A scream was torn from my throat, raw and ragged. It was not a warrior’s cry. It was the shriek of pure, helpless pain, echoing off the concrete and steel of my prison. It was the sound of my own humiliation given voice, the ultimate admission of his victory over my body.

As the scream died in my throat, leaving me panting and trembling, he released my foot. The sudden absence of pain was as shocking as its presence, leaving a throbbing, fiery ache in its wake. He watched me, a small, cruel smile playing on his lips. He had done it. He had dismantled the stoic Amazon, and made the goddess scream from the simple act of crushing her foot.

“The specimen is ready for transport and further study,” he said into a communicator on his wrist.

With a series of hisses, my restraints detached from the dam wall. They did not release me, however. Instead, they reconfigured, folding my limbs inward, forcing me onto my back as the entire apparatus lifted from the ground, hovering silently. I was now strapped to a floating slab of black metal, a specimen on a tray. The Architect walked calmly ahead, leading my helpless, floating form away from the site of my failure and into a dark service tunnel.

The journey was a blur of concrete walls, humming lights, and the drip of unseen water. I was cargo. Less than cargo. I was an object, a prize being taken to a more secluded location. My mind reeled, trapped in a loop of the grinding pain in my foot and the sound of my own shriek. Each throb in my arch was a reminder of his touch, of my weakness, of the man who had so thoroughly and methodically unmade me.

We emerged into a vast, sterile white chamber. It was less a lair and more a laboratory or a museum exhibit hall, silent and cold. In the center of the room was a raised platform, empty and waiting. My platform. The Architect gestured, and my hovering slab drifted toward it, preparing to dock.

“Welcome, Diana,” he said, his voice echoing in the stark emptiness. “To the theater where we will dismantle the myth, piece by piece.”

As the slab locked into place with a final, definitive clang, my eyes fell upon a set of monitors on the far wall. They flickered to life, showing close-up, high-definition images of me, captured from moments before. My face contorted in pain. My bare, vulnerable feet. My body, pinned and helpless. He wasn’t just defeating me; he was documenting it, cataloging my humiliation for his own perverse satisfaction. The dismantling had only just begun.