I sighed with exasperation. The little fox was going to drive me crazy one day; I just knew it.
Between the two of us, we did the impossible task of swallowing a Tribulation meant for my eradication, and a few seconds later, the first strike of the Tribulation was entirely consumed, leaving only a few lingering bolts dancing across my skin that I drew into my Anima Depth.
The fox was panting, and her body was vibrating with excitement from the lingering power of the Tribulation inside her body. I looked at her with concern, but apart from her fur that refused to lie flat again and her swollen stomach, she was the picture of perfect health.
Then the second bolt came, and it was bigger; it was not surprising that the Tribulation did not like being eaten.
The eye in the sky flickered, and I felt its attention shift from me to the small silver creature that drank its judgement like water. My eyes widened, and I reached for the fox, but it was too late. The lightning bolt descended faster than the first one, and the fox met it with its mouth opened wide. A massive shockwave threw me back several dozen meters, leaving the fox to experience the Tribulation alone.
Inside the pyramid, when I called for the judgement of the heavens, the Arcanist who had been in my surroundings had suffered the wrath of heaven, and they were not there to help me survive the Tribulation. The fox was here to help me survive, and I know that the heavens would not take that lightly.
The sky roared, and the eye in the sky seemed to focus entirely on the fox. I felt her pain through the bond, sharp and bright; the Tribulation that should be shared between us had focused entirely on her.
"Elric... I should stop eating, but it’s too tasty, and I don’t want to!"
I was already moving towards the crazy fox. Lightning Incarnate carried me up into the column of lightning, my body dissolving into silver-white light, and I reached for the fox with both hands and held her against my chest, forcefully diverting a part of the lightning into my body.
My channels screamed as the Tribulation Lightning poured into me, but I was focused on the fox alone, running my hand down her fur as the lightning from the heavens poured down over us.
"I’ve got you," I whispered to the fox.
"I... I can take it!"
"I know, I know, but we are in this together."
A weird scream emerged not far from me, and I knew it was coming from the demon. Although it was not near me, it was much too close to a Tribulation, and the heavens were not fair.
Perhaps I should be a bit grateful, because the demon had absorbed part of the power that wanted to destroy me, but its nature was extremely weak against this light from heaven.
I felt the wrongness that was always there in the edge of my vision vanish, and a part of me felt a weird sense of loss, and then I realized that this loss was coming from the fact that I was not the one that got to kill the demon, then this feeling vanished as the pain of enduring the erasure from the heavens filled my soul and the entirety of my perception.
The fox and I endured the second bolt of lightning, and the eye above did not give us the time to catch our breath, as the third bolt of lightning slammed down upon us, bigger and far more dangerous, as the massive facility around us began to disintegrate from the shockwave and the stray bolt of lightning that was flying out from the Tribulation.
I pulled the fox closer to me, and the bond between us flared. I could feel her pain, but also her hunger and her desperate joy. She was not afraid, because she was alive and free, and what was even more important was that I knew that, like me, this Tribulation was also nourishing her.
A Heavenly Beast fed on the essence of the heavens itself, and the Tribulation was one of the best highways to eat this essence.
We have died together many times, and we knew how to work through tribulations and danger, so at first, I took on more of the load. When it became too much, I held back and allowed the fox to take the brunt of the lightning.
In this manner, we endured the fourth, fifth, and sixth Tribulation bolts, and the seventh shard of lightning was born inside me. I could not harness the mysteries of these shards, but the weight of the Tribulation lightning was becoming marginally easier to bear, despite the fact that the bolt was becoming stronger... it meant that the fox and I were getting stronger, faster than the Tribulation could erase us.
And then something changed in the seventh lightning bolt, as the Tribulation Lightning that had been pouring into me, that had been trying to erase me, began to flow past my Anima Depth and channels into the bond between me and the fox.
The Tribulation Lightning still wanted to kill the fox, because in its eyes, she was the one stopping the judgement of erasure from reaching me, and so it found a new way to get to the fox, and it passed through me, flowing through the link, and entered the mysterious space behind my Anima Depth.
"You should not have done that," the Moon Fox whispered, a moment before an incredible aura burst out from that mysterious space where the Moon Fox emerged.
This aura shattered the Tribulation and flowed into the foz in my arms, and her eyes brightened in shock, and then she howled and began to grow.
Her body expanded, and her silver fur blazed with the light of the moon, and the tails behind her grew from three to four, and her eyes burned with the same golden light that had once judged me.
However, this golden light in her eyes was swallowed by a wave of silver, and her eyes became twin moons. The half moon that floated above her head, which she now kept usually hidden, emerged, and it was brighter than before. In an instant, the seventh bolt of lightning was drawn into her body, and there was not even a single spark left.
She pushed herself away from my arms, and she bared her teeth to the Tribulation eye above before she growled, "More!"
The eye paused, and then the heavens screamed.