CHAPTER II

Pain has a sound. If you listen closely enough to a nervous system tearing itself apart, you can hear the hum.

iLLLogick didn’t walk through The Resonant Wilds; he calibrated his way through them. Every step was a negotiation with his own biology. The landscape here wasn't mud and storm like Grim’s Domain; it was a collapsed cathedral landscape of neon green static and violet audio waveforms that had calcified into jagged rock.

He stopped. His right leg seized—not a cramp, but a Contracture.

It hit him with the force of a hydraulic press. The Stiff Person Syndrome (SPS) Flare didn’t ask for permission; it simply fired every neuron in his quadricep at once. The muscle turned to steel. The pain was blinding, a white-hot spike that threatened to short-circuit his vision.

In the old world—the world before The Wasteland—this was the moment any “warrior” would have fallen. He would have been the patient on the floor, waiting for the Valium to soften the cage of his own body.

But here? Here, the cage was the battery.

< Catalyst, > Indexor-Prime’s voice whispered in his ear, precise and cold. < Ghost Frequency detected. Mainframe tracking beacon active. They are triangulating the spasm. >

"Let them track it," iLLLogick gritted out.

He didn’t fight the lock. He leaned into it. He took that agonizing neurological pressure—the millions of misfiring signals screaming at his muscle fibers to contract—and he pushed it outward.

This was the Arcane Resonance. It wasn't just magic. It was conversion.

The air around his locked leg began to crackle with energy. The purple aurora of the sky bent toward him, drawn in by the sheer gravitational weight of his pain. The Iliad Nodes—those floating, sentient musical notes that orbited him like satellites—began to spin faster, vibrating with a low, menacing sub-bass.

Hummmmmmmmm.

The sound rattled the teeth of The Mainframe Constructs emerging from the fog. They were "Silencers"—sleek, mouthless drones designed to scrub audio from the timeline. They moved with the jerky, frame-skipping glitches of a bad stream.

iLLLogick’s wrists curled inward—the permanent contracture that marked him as a Pillar. He couldn't straighten them if he wanted to, so he used them as conductors.

"You want silence?" he whispered.

The lock in his leg reached critical mass. The pain was absolute. A normal mind would have shattered. iLLLogick didn't shatter; he discharged.

"FLARE."

He stomped his locked leg into the ground.

The energy didn't ripple; it detonated. A shockwave of Acid Green neurological lightning exploded from his point of impact, turning the violet landscape into a strobe-light nightmare. The physical force of his own muscle spasm was externalized, blasting outward in an omnidirectional wave of pure voltage.

The Silencers didn't die; they de-rezzed. The frequency shattered their code. Their sleek armor vibrated until it lost cohesion, turning to dust in the face of raw, unfiltered human suffering.

iLLLogick stood panting in the crater he had made. The green lightning faded, retreating back into the dull ache of his veins. His leg trembled, the muscle finally releasing its grip, leaving him weak, hollowed out by The Bleedback.

He looked down at his hands. They were shaking. Not with fear, but with the aftershocks of being a living conduit.

< Target neutralized, > Indexor noted. < But the Ghost Frequency signature was high. ECHRON heard that. >

iLLLogick straightened his hood, the purple glow of his mask illuminating the sweat on his neck. He looked at the empty space where the enemy had been.

"Good," he said, his voice rough with exhaustion. "Let The Deaf Arbiter know we're loud enough to break her scales."

He took a step. His leg held. He kept moving.
Because the only thing worse than the pain of moving was the silence of staying still.