Chapter 89 - The Translation Plague (2)

It wasn't pain—or not only pain, not the simple physical agony of injury or burning that the human nervous system was designed to interpret and respond to. It was shock, overwhelm, violation on a neurological level, the sound of someone experiencing something their nervous system wasn't designed to process, something that bypassed normal sensory channels and rewrote fundamental aspects of cognition in real-time. Whisper clutched their head with both hands, fingers digging into their temples hard enough to leave white pressure marks in the skin, hard enough that Zeph worried they might actually injure themselves, their body going rigid as if struck by lightning, every muscle locked in sympathetic response to whatever was happening inside their skull.