Grey felt like his entire body was being torn apart, but most of that sensation was an illusion created by something arguably worse.
When he had activated The Virtueless earlier, the strain hadn't simply come from forcing his body to expand and imitate whatever monstrous state Atlas had once possessed, because Grey had also been reshaping his Neural Frame to mirror the effects the weapon demanded.
His Frame hadn't been allowed to function according to its natural structure, and forcing it into patterns it had never been designed to maintain had left behind countless microscopic fissures that still hadn't properly recovered.
Now Grey was doing the same thing again, only this time he was forcing the Last Paladin Frame into alignment with the others and rebuilding his Quasi Dominion before his Neural Frame had recovered from the first abuse.
