CHAPTER II
The Frequency of Contracture

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—a silent prayer that his spine wouldn't lock, that his hands wouldn't seize, that whatever part of him decided to betray him next would wait until after the fight.

The landscape here wasn't mud and storm like Grim's domain above. While The Phantom Architect held the sky over The Ciphered Marsh, iLLLogick held the ground. His territory was earthbound—a collapsed cathedral landscape where the churches of old Louisiana had fused with the digital rot of The Wasteland. Neon green static bled through shattered stained glass. Violet audio waveforms had calcified into jagged rock formations, frozen mid-oscillation like sound made solid.

Thirteen years of this. Thirteen years since a fourteen-year-old kid in gym class couldn't flatten his middle finger during push-ups. The coach had laughed. Told him to stop being dramatic. Three months later, his whole hand had locked into a fist during dinner one night and hadn't opened again.

That was how it started. A finger. Then a hand. Then his back, his legs, his torso—the Anti-GAD 65 antibodies declaring war on his entire nervous system, attacking the signals that told muscles when to stop contracting. By fifteen, he'd learned that his body would betray him without warning. By twenty, he'd learned to expect it. By twenty-seven, he'd learned to weaponize it.

He felt the flare coming before it hit.

A hum in his wrists—those permanently bent monuments to what the disease had already taken. Then a twitch in his shoulder blade. Then the cascade.

The Stiff Person Syndrome didn't choose one target. It chose all of them.

His back seized first, vertebrae locking in a rigid column that turned his spine to rebar. Then his hands clamped tighter, the already-bent wrists curling further inward as the tendons screamed. His jaw followed—teeth grinding together hard enough to crack enamel. His diaphragm stuttered, making each breath a conscious act of war.

Nine hundred milligrams of Valium every month, and his body still did this. Still became its own straightjacket without permission.

"Catalyst." Indexor-Prime's voice cut through the static of his misfiring nerves—precise, cold, familiar. Grim had built Indexor specifically for him, a synthetic partner to translate his chaos into something usable. "Ghost Frequency spiking. Mainframe tracking beacon active. They are triangulating the flare."

Of course they were. The same energy that made him dangerous made him visible. Power and target, fused into one.

"Let them track it," iLLLogick managed through his locked jaw.

He thought about his mother. Schizophrenia had stolen pieces of her mind for a decade. The stroke six years ago had stolen more. Now she needed him for everything—and he could barely dress himself some mornings. But he still showed up. Still made sure she ate. Still held her hand when the voices got loud, even when his own hands wouldn't stop shaking.

The universe had a sick sense of humor. A broken woman and her broken son, holding each other up. But she was alive. And he was alive. And that meant he kept converting.

He didn't fight the flare. Fighting made it worse—every muscle pulling against every other muscle, tearing himself apart from the inside. He'd learned that lesson at fifteen, screaming into a pillow while his body tried to fold itself in half.

Instead, he leaned into it.

He took all of it—the locked spine, the clenched hands, the rigid jaw, the stuttering breath—and he pushed it outward. This was Arcane Resonance. Not magic. Conversion.

The Arcane Orb of Resonance materialized beside him, a sphere of compressed sound and light humming at a frequency only he could feel. The Iliad Nodes erupted from its surface—sentient musical notes spinning into orbit like electrons gone feral, each one carrying a piece of the agony he was feeding them.

The violet landscape flickered. Reality skipped.

Hummmmmmmmm.

The sound rattled the bones of the Mainframe Constructs emerging from the fog between the ruined pews. Silencers—sleek, mouthless drones designed to scrub audio from the timeline. They moved with jerky, frame-skipping glitches. Music was rebellion. Sound was resistance. These things existed to delete both.

iLLLogick looked at his hands—his bent, permanent, never-healing hands—and he stopped seeing them as broken. He saw conductors.

He reached back and gripped Versebreaker. The Resonant Greatsword materialized in his twisted grip—heavy, segmented, its blade glowing with the purple that belonged to him alone. The weapon didn't require straight wrists or open palms. It required frequency. Resonance. The marriage of wielder and blade that transcended the limitations of flesh.

"You want silence?" he whispered through locked teeth.

The flare reached critical mass. Every nerve in his body was screaming now—back, hands, jaw, legs, all of it contracting at once, trying to crush him from the inside.

A normal mind would have shattered. iLLLogick didn't shatter. He discharged.

"FLARE."

The Neon Acid Green erupted from everywhere at once. His spine became a lightning rod. His hands became arc welders. The purple glow of Versebreaker shifted to that toxic electric green as he swung—not with muscle, but with resonance. The blade carved through the air and the ground simultaneously, the impact point becoming a detonation.

The Iliad Nodes screamed away from the Orb like shrapnel made of sound, each one targeting a Silencer with surgical precision. The frequencies collided—his suffering against their silence—and suffering won.

The Silencers de-rezzed. Their chrome bodies vibrated until they lost cohesion, collapsing into digital dust.

Then it was over.

iLLLogick stood in the crater of his own making, Versebreaker's blade fading from green back to purple. The Iliad Nodes drifted back to the Orb, their orbits lazy, satisfied. His muscles released in stages—jaw first, then hands, then back—each one leaving behind the ache that never fully went away.

The Bleedback left him hollow. Empty. A battery that had discharged everything and now needed time to build charge again. He looked at his wrists. Still bent. Always bent. The permanent reminder of what the disease had claimed.

But his enemies were dust.

"Target neutralized," Indexor noted. "But the Ghost Frequency signature was high. ECHRON's scales will have registered that."

ECHRON. The Deaf Arbiter. The Overseer who curated which sounds deserved to exist. She'd been hunting him since The Network formed.

iLLLogick straightened his hood, the purple glow of his faceless mask catching the sweat on his neck. He dismissed Versebreaker, the greatsword dissolving back into frequency.

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

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

Somewhere above, through the shattered cathedral ceiling, he could see red lightning. Grim holding the sky while he held the ground. He had a mother waiting for him. The Network depending on him. A body that would betray him again—tomorrow, or in an hour, or in the next thirty seconds.

But not right now. Right now, the cage was the battery. And the battery still had charge.