Have you heard the sound of the heavens screaming?
How can I describe it... Well, to call it a sound would be wrong, since it was not really a sound, more like a... a pressure, or better yet, a force that pressed down on my soul and tried to crush the very idea of me.
The fox stood in front of me, and even though she was still small, her presence was blazing, almost as if I was seeing the promise of the Heavenly Beast that she would become... a creature that could eat even the heavens.
"MORE!" she howled again, and the sky answered.
The eye in the sky changed, and my heart skipped a beat, as a sense of desolation flashed through my soul.
No, something was very wrong here; this was not how it was supposed to go.
The cross at the centre of the eye widened, and widened, until it was not a cross anymore but an opening, and what came down was all the bolts of lightning... the Tribulation had determined that we could no longer be erased with a single bolt... now it was releasing all of them at once.
"When it rains, it damn well pours."
∞
I did not need to tell the fox that we had to give it our all; the power that was descending on our heads was enough to vaporise me to nothing.
"Hold on, and do not let go!" I mentally sent it to the fox.
"Elric. We can, um, just die and try again."
The fox was right, but I feared that she was learning all the bad lessons from the loop. It would be easy to lost ourselves in the endless resurrection that it afforded us, but there was a right way to use this power and a wrong way, and I knew in my heart that allowing myself to give up before this Tribulation was me losing all the progress I have made when I faced the first one... even if I survived, something of me would be left behind.
Like it or not, the fox was still a child, a very powerful child, but that did not mean it was not my responsibility to guide her in the path that I believed could give us the best advantage.
"No, we do not back down to the heavens, or we will never learn to stand when it matters the most." I paused, "It would be like acknowledging it was stronger than us, and we won because we cheated."
"But... we do cheat, like a lot actually."
"Not now!"
Since all of this communication happened through the bond, it was instantaneous, and the heavens were still falling on our heads.
I stepped forward and opened every channel I had to receive the lightning. They were all swollen and tender, but Cor Telluris did what it was created to do, and it made my channel something that was beyond all meaning, and it had held all the powers of heaven that had been pouring inside me, and it had to hold more.
"WHOOM.... BOOOMMM!!!"
The impact of the lightning that slammed into us was apocalyptic, and I thought the entire facility around us began to vaporise. My skin vanished instantly, and my flesh began to slowly fade away.
Everything I had, from my spells, Lightning Resonance, Mortal Shell, Endurance, Titan’s Marrow... everything held, but they slowly faded away under the assault from a lightning that I feared could vaporise a small city.
The only thing that remained behind was my decision to keep standing, and even when I no longer had a body, my will remained, and that will would never vanish.
Beside me, the fox was swallowing as much lightning as she physically could, and I felt her screaming in pain as she tried to pull as much lightning away from me, but I was doing the same and pulling as much lightning away from her.
Damnit, I was the big brother here, and it did not matter if my body was gone; anything that would make the fox cry should never get past me.
I cried out in rage against the heavens, and at this moment, the seven shards in my soul turned over, all at once, and almost opened.
I felt it, by all the light in heaven, I felt it. The shards were stirring, and the Lightning Law itself was leaning toward me, seven fragments of a truth about the world reaching for a hand that could hold them, and it was almost like, if I had been one breath stronger, one shard further, I would have caught them, and this Tribulation would have ended in a sentence.
I was not strong enough, maybe not in this loop, but I got a fingertip on the edge of the Law, and it slipped, and... no, no! Open for me!
The Tribulation was forgotten as I pushed for the shards, trying to grab them, but they kept slipping away. My hands were too small, and they were too bright and too massive for me to hold.
However, it was in the midst of me reaching out for these lightning law shards that I realized that all of my body had been vaporised, but something remained... my Anima Depth and my channels!
They did not vanish despite the power from the heavens, and as I was reaching for the law shards, a part of their power was pouring into my channels, and slowly, my flesh and bones were emerging from the channels, undergoing the baptism of lightning.
A massive shockwave exploded from me and the fox, and with an apocalyptic sound that I could not describe, the world around us shattered, and I grabbed the fox as the entire facility was destroyed around us.
The lightning had gone through me, and at the edge of my vision, I could see the massive statue of that hooded figure, cracking down the middle before it was shattered to pieces, and this shattering caused another massive shockwave which shattered the eye in the sky, and suddenly I was swept by a power that could destroy everything.
I don’t know how I could recover so fast, but my bloodied arm was wrapped around the fox, and I was screaming, and I was falling... it took everything inside me to focus my mind, and I took on the aspect of the Moon Fox, and my falling body stopped in the air.
All around me, the massive facility was tumbling down, and it took me a moment to look down to realize that the facility was falling from the sky in pieces.
What the... I was in the sky?! This entire facility had been floating in the sky all along?
Then I heard a massive crack that spanned the horizon, and the fact that I was in the sky became the least of my worries, because the debris from the falling facility had cleared, and I froze in place.
I hung in the open air, I knew that I was dying, and the clouds were under my feet.
The wind hit my face, but I could barely feel it, because far below me, even though I was high up in the air, I could see that the world was on fire.
All of it, from horizon to horizon. Cities I would never learn the names of gone to embers, forests to grey ash. The sea itself was steaming white where something too large had struck it.
I was gasping with shock. I barely had any body left, and after surviving the Tribulation, whatever vitality I had stolen from the Lightning Shards was leaving me, but I could not even think about anything before the horror of this moment.
"Crack! Boom!"
The sound of the world ending shook me, and I looked to the sky above me, and I saw them...
Enormous... Impossible... The size of weather.
By all the light in heaven, they were Sovereigns.
I could see them, vast shapes wreathed in Laws I had no names for, striking at one another across gulfs that made my Tribulation look like a struck match, and every blow between them lit the cloud from beneath and sent more fire down onto the world below.
A dozen of them, more, tearing at each other across the roof of a dying continent, a war the size of the sky, a war the size of the world.
And it had been going on the whole time while I was inside a vat. This was happening while I learned to read inscriptions off a dead knight’s armour, this was happening while I slept and planned my future.
"Mum... dad... Mel..."
The last of the impossible vitality left me, and I fell into darkness, and the last thing I saw was my status screen blazing red as a new notification pressed itself into my dying soul.
[ New World Quest: Stop the Destruction of Aelmar ]