The fox burst out of my chest in a flare of silver light, landing on my shoulder, her fur blazing, and her blue eyes bright with anticipation.
"I’m out!" she shouted. "Now, where’s the lightning?!"
I did not answer. The heat was becoming unbearable, as the facility was beginning to collapse; all of it was melting, flowing like wax in a furnace.
Then a phantom wave appeared above that blew out the melting roof above me, revealing the heavens above me, and it was almost as if I had been taken from the earth and brought to the sky since my Tribulation was hovering above me, so close it was almost as if I could touch it.
The sky above me could no longer be called a sky, as the Tribulation had transformed it into a churning, impossible vault of cloud the colour of a bruise, wheeling overhead in a slow, enormous spiral, and at the centre of the spiral, a dark eye, with a cross at the center; it was the same eye that had judged me before I became an Adept.
But this time, it was different. It was larger, more detailed, more... real. I could see the lines of its iris, the depth of its pupil, the way it seemed to look through me rather than at me, as if it were reading me.
This eye no longer looked like a strange form of magic created by the heavens; for a moment, it was as if I was looking at the eye of a real being, and with everything I was discovering about magic and this world, it would not shock me if there was someone or something behind this damned Tribulation.
"Here we go again," I muttered.
The fox’s claws dug into my shoulder. "It’s beautiful."
I glanced at the mad critter on my shoulder. "It’s going to kill us."
"Probably. But what a way to go!"
"I think this loop has taught you a bad lesson about life and death."
"That is not the right question, Elric," the fox shook her head, are you going to stand here and take it, or are you going to poke out that giant eyeball looking down on us?"
I could feel the excitement of the fox in our link, and a crazy grin touched my lips. What, the heavens wanted to kill me, but there was no reason why I should just stand here and take it. From the beginning, the lesson I had learned was that even if the problem was too big, what mattered was how I stand.
Titan’s Marrow made me a giant. I thought I was a bit taller, but that was to be expected; this ability was growing, and I covered my arms with the golden lightning of Lightning Tribunal, the Tribulation Lightning that I controlled.
In that moment, I felt the Lightning Law shards inside of me beginning to resonate, and instead of four shards, I could feel there were now five of them. The fifth law shard must have appeared the moment I died and resurrected, reminding me of that weird red lightning that filled my body when I held the Death Consort Title.
These law shards were stirring inside me, but I could not touch them, and I felt a sense of loss inside me because I instinctively understood that if I could harness the powers of these shards, then this Tribulation would be nothing.
The Tribulation eye blinked, the first bolt of lightning fell, and with a roar, I sent my own Tribulation lightning towards the descending bolt.
It was a brilliant effort, but the lightning that fell from the sky could not even be called lightning; it just resembled one. The brilliant golden bolt shredded through my own, and I became Lightning Incarnate a moment before the Tribulation slammed into me.
The platform I was standing on stopped existing, and the six floors underneath, straight down. I did not fall, since the lingering lightning surrounding me held me up. I could not even scream in pain as I was stunned in place, while my body was being erased.
Unlike a normal lightning bolt that strikes down and vanishes in the blink of an eye, this Tribulation Lightning was constant. It held me up in the air while more of it kept pouring down from the eye... and technically, this was still just one bolt of lightning.
Last time, as an Adept, I survived a Tribulation by embracing it and letting it remake me. I tried to do that now, opening myself to this lightning that was erasing me, but the damned Tribulation laughed at me.
This Tribulation had no interest in remaking me; the heavens may have endured an Adept like me to exist because, despite my powers, I could not change the world, not on a large scale.
However, from what I did with my Inscription, I understood that reaching the Arcanist Tier meant something very different, especially for someone like me. I drank this Tribulation into my channels, and I understood that this thing had come to finish me, because something with my soul and my future was, in the ledger of the heavens, a thing that should not be allowed to continue.
Embracing the judgement of the heavens did nothing. It poured into me, and my crystallising soul began to expand slowly; this would have been a good thing for me, since I did not know of anything that could expand the soul like this, but the only problem was that this lightning was erasing me while also pouring into my soul, and it was not stopping.
However, I knew enough about Tribulation at this point that I understood that even if there were ninety-nine paths of death, there would always be one path of life, and many times, it was up to me to find that path for myself, or resign myself to die.
With a force of will from understanding how to wield Tribulation lightning, I diverted half of the lightning ravaging my body into my channels, and they drank it up, but I did not know how much they could collect before even my channels could no longer hold.
There was too much of it, and it would fill me up until I burst, and this would have happened if not for my channels that were capable of holding Tribulation Lightning.
My channels were rapidly filling up, and hoping I do not regret this, I called out with my soul,
"Moon Fox... Food!"
She came off my shoulder and up into the column of the Tribulation with all three tails spread and her mouth open, and she began to drink the lightning.
I have seen the fox do a great many ridiculous things. I have never seen anything like this. Her small body was blazing brighter and brighter, and as she drank, the pressure on me eased. My soul, which was expanding too dramatically, began to reach a state where I could fully adapt to the changes that were coming, and inside me, I felt the sixth Lightning Law Shard appear.
"More!" the Moon Fox howled, drunk on lightning, and I could see that her body was slowly growing, and in a second she had almost doubled in size, or perhaps it was just her fur standing on end.
"Elric, there is so much; it’s so good..."
"Don’t die," I sent through our bond. "That’s an order. Don’t you dare eat so much you die."
"NO PROMISES!" she screamed aloud.