Pain
That was the only thought that was going through his head at this moment.
At first he was confused, wondering what happened that made him feel this high amount of pain.
Then he started to recollect the events that led up to this moment, though recollect wouldn't be the right word to use in this situation.
He didn't even know how it happened really. Everything happened so fast he was left dazed.
But three things stayed crystal clear in his mind.
An overwhelming feeling of danger, the sensation of losing his arm, and the look of fear and hurt that were on her face the last time he saw it.
Maria Demenion.
He at first thought that the woman hated his guts for some reason.
She also seemed to really hate Alexander too. But slowly and with time, the hate she had for Arthur himself started to transform to dislike, then mild annoyance, then seeming indifference, then back to annoyance.
It was to the point that he didn't even know what she felt towards him most of the time.
But it couldn't have been more clear to him at that very moment.
'She... likes me?', the thought seemed so incredulous to him that he was having a hard time believing it.
But when he remembered the face she was making, he couldn't help but believe it.
Arthur was in no way dense. He could easily tell that there was a big chance that she really liked him. The thing was that the equally big chance that it was just him seeing it like that gave him pause.
What if she doesn't like me? What if by even telling her this she comes to hate me?
Questions like those ones plaged his mind every time.
But he couldn't really ignore it when the evidence was planted right in front of his face.
Granted, there was also the chance that he was reading too much into her expression and she didn't really like him.
But this train of thought brought forth another question to his mind.
'Do I like her?'
To be honest.... he didn't really know.
To be fair he didn't really dislike any person. In fact it could be said that he liked every woman that he had ever seen.
But would he say that he liked her above the rest?
He wasn't really sure. But he would sure as heck want to find out.
"YOU ALMOST KILLED HIM!!!"
*BOOMM!!
Those words seemed to bring clarity to his already awakening mind as his eyes shot open with an urgency he didn't know he could muster, followed by a grimace from the pain that still racked his body.
His memories of the minute he was knocked out finally came back in full force as he remembered what happened.
He lifted his left hand to try to calm the dull pain in his head, only to find it missing.
He was first confused until he remembered the sharp pain he felt there before, indicating that something had happened to his arm during the vestiges' sneak attack.
While the potion that Maria gave him was good enough to heal all his greivous injuries, it wasn't enough to regrow his limbs.
Maria didn't have any potions like that as her ability allowed her to heal from any injury no matter how greivous it may have seemed as long as she had the right amount of nutrients in her system.
Arthur had them though and he took one out along with a nutrient pill, silently rejoicing that he hadn't used the coolant or he would be dead by now.
While he was healing he had the time to think about the situation at hand. It didn't take him long to notice the discrepancies with the situation.
He certainly saw that the thing blew up initially with no part of itself bigger than an oven, so why was it back together so fast and even seemed stronger than before?
He breifly thought that he may have been knocked out for a long while but he quickly discarded that idea.
If that was true then the others would have come to help by now.
'Is it part of it's ability? Or is this something we have never seen before?'
Whatever the case, he knew he had to heal fast. Maria wasn't going to be able to last too long against it.
This thought made him look at her and he was dumbfounded by what he saw.
'What the heck happened while I was asleep?',he couldn't help but ask himself as he saw how she was fighting, quickly noticing the new colour of her energy.
---
Maria looked intently at the thing that was in front of her, not wanting to miss a single micro movement it made.
Suddenly and without preamble, six of it's tentacles came swinging and piercing at her, forcing her to dodge out of the way.
In the position she dodged to another one was coming towards her as she was mid air.
It seemed that she couldn't dodge it but with a flexibility she didn't know she had, her body moved out of the way with a burst of orange lightning and she used her hand to grasp onto it, pulling herself on top of it and using it as a springboard to launch herself towards it's main body.
Tentacles started flying from all directions towards her as she jumped from appendage to appendage, trying to reach it's main body all while drawing in more and more energy from the surroundings.
She didn't have any more spears to throw at it at this moment as she had destroyed her last of five spare spears within the last two minutes while trying to damage it a few seconds ago.
On the bright side it helped her understand what was happening with her ability and what gave it it's new 'colour'.
As it turned out, all her energy was being attracted to the vestige.
And it wasn't like it was a good thing for the vestige.
Her energy had become twice as destructive to it than before.
In exchange for this, she couldn't use the energy to hurt anything else. Anything that she infused with this energy would stay the same, like she hadn't done anything to it, but once it was free of her control, it would always fly towards the vestige like it had a mind of it's own, inflicting harm on it by slowly destroying it's cells.
With this in mind she first though of putting distance between them and blasting the raw energy at it, but it seemed that it would begin to lose effect and dwindle in potency two seconds after it came out of her or when it was five meters away from her so she scrapped that plan.
In order to deal the most damage, she had to either make sure the energy got to it within those two seconds or she was within five meters from it.
Hence why she decided to get up close and personal.
As she managed to reach it's main body once more after dodging for what felt like forever, she used the strategy she had been doing since she lost her spears.
She started raining down punches on it while loading them up with more and more energy until a bright red flame was seen on her hand.
After several punches landed on it in half a second she would quickly leave the area and move to another area and repeat the process.
The places she left would then blow up with a flash of red light and a lot of flesh would get thrown of it's body.
To prevent it from regenerating fully again she would suck up some of the exploded flesh into her spatial storage, slowing down it's regeneration.
It made tries to stop her by hardening the areas she was punching with red stone or trying to skewer her with spikes and it even tried to manifest a mouth and eat her leg once, but she would always respond to that by punching it until it broke, thwarting it's effort again.
After this had gone on for a few seconds it would finally be able to smack her away, which she blocked from hitting her main torso by using either her legs or hands, with only a few managing to hit her abdomen.
The hit would always break her bones and split her flesh but she would heal from it and continue on a second later.
But despite seeming like she had an advantage against it, she knew,
'I can't keep this up for much longer.'
Even though she was definitely doing damage to it, even more than the last time she fought it, it was also clear that it was even stronger than that time, making the situation similar to before.
Apart from that, she was getting a bad feeling from this thing, and it kept on growing the longer that she fought it.
She kept getting this nagging feeling that she had forgotten something very important about it, something that would definitely not let this fight end in her favour.
Noticing this, she tried harder and harder to damage it, hoping to either remember what it was or take it out before it became a big issue, but the feeling of danger didn't decrease or stop, instead, it kept steadily growing larger and larger until she was feeling suffocated.
Not able to take it anymore, she distanced herself from it and and hid herself, deciding that it was time she took a big risk.
She started to gather emotional energy into her body, quickly reaching her max threshold, and blitzing right past it with no care.
The amount of energy she gathered quickly got higher than the last big moment, reaching a point where it started to destroy her body.
If not for the technique healing her body faster than the energy influx could destroy it, she would have long exploded by now.
Her energy levels rose to the point that it alarmed every being in the forest, making them turn their heads again to her direction.
The vestige also noticed what she was doing and quickly found where she was hiding, screaming and rushing towards her to stop her.
'That's it you stupid thing, come closer.', she thought as she watched it move towards her.
All that energy was being gathered into her palm, into an orb of pure raging energy that kept getting brighter and less stable.
Knowing she had no time and she didn't need it to last really long, she just pushed it all in while trying her very best not to let it explode in her face.
Once the vestige was 20 meters near her she started running towards it with the orb in her hands, the veins on her head bulging as she desperately tried to contain the energy while running towards it with all her might.
She jumped up and reached 30 meters in the air as she prepared to throw the orb at it, feeling her victory very close.
Time seemed to slow down as she was in the air, a smile slowly spreading on her face as she was releasing the orb with a fierce throw.
Suddenly, her instincts blared at her again, warning her of impending doom once more.
A thought surfaced into her mind at this moment as she finally remembered what it was that she forgot.
'Wait.', she thought. 'Didn't this thing have an ability?'