Maria on the other hand, was more preoccupied with fine-tuning her plan before relaying it to Arthur.
A few seconds back, on her way running to Arthur, she knew that she wouldn't be able to reach him on time and he would be seriously injured if not dead.
So in the split second she came to that realization, she executed the best plan to get him out of there with the least amount of extra damage to him.
Using an improvised version of her spear throwing technique, she threw a palm strike with her bare hands, twisting it to create a sort of spin effect that sent a concentrated blast of wind forward at a speed she couldn't make in short order.
This blast of air did little to no physical damage, but it served as an excellent means of knockback, blasting him meters away from his original position and saving him from possible death.
But now that she had saved him, she figured it was now time to fill him up on her plan of action.
An interesting find she made when she was abusing the newly discovered mind link to think up a plan was that she could also use it to blast her understanding of a matter into another person's mind though it came at a very minor cost to their sanity.
'A willing sacrifice in this situation. I'm sorry my love.', she thought as she sent her idea in a blast of psychic energies towards Arthur's brain.
After a near death experience, she could no longer deny to herself how much she liked and trusted him. driven by the need for them both to survive, she thought that a minor moment of pain would be better than one of them dying.
But while she didn't take this as something big, there were three things she didn't take into account.
How this mind meld she was experiencing came to be, how it affected her mind, and...
How Arthur would react to this direct violation of his privacy and psyche.
Because if she was in the right state of mind, she would've been able to recognize a lot of issues with this her idea, if it could rightfully be called her idea alone at this point....
All this means that she was very beyond surprised when the blast of energies sent him to the floor screaming, also partially transmitting to her and everyone else in the mind link, causing a brief pause for some people and an immense amount of pain for Shin, the originator of the mind link.
All this culminated in Arthur on the floor screaming from the psychic trauma along with a large part of the students with injuries of various types, but that would be a story for another time.
Right now, This unexpected reaction of his was enough to snap Maria out of her extreme focus as she realized that she had done something she probably shouldn't have.
***
'It hurts.' It was the thought that reverberated through Arthurs' mind at that moment, a headache affecting any an all people connected to him, making their situation worse.
To Maria's credit, the way she sent the information made it only reach Arthur, the one she targeted, because of her already high degree of control over mental energies in the form of emotional energies, otherwise, this situation would've been far worse.
But that also meant that Arthur here bore the full brunt of the pain it caused, with only the after effects reaching the others, but Arthur right now simply didn't care about that.
At this moment he wanted nothing more than three things, to get rid of the pain, to get as far away from her as he could, and to hide in a room, but their situation wouldn't allow it.
So, he had to make his situation not matter anymore, which meant he had to cooperate with the person he wanted to get away from so much.
Standing up after ten seconds of intense pain, he wiped the dust off his face and said, "Let's go" before shooting off and hiding up in the foliage of a burning tree, not even waiting for her reply or glancing at her.
***
Maria could see something was off with the way he acted. If there was any doubt that what she had done was something she shouldn't have before, now he had made it abundantly clear. But she could only shelve those thoughts for now and find a way to tackle the problem later. Right now, they had a vestige to finish off.
At this point the vestige had already healed up from the damage and had lost its red hue, telling Maria that she couldn't delay this any longer.
Kicking up a small cloud of dust and tiny debris, she launched herself straight at the vestige, her last working spear in her hand.
At this point she had found out the sweet spot to balance out the destruction and regeneration of her ability organ to be at about half capacity from normal.
While not entirely ideal she could still make due with it.
'I've haven't been playing it best this fight unlike with the first vestige. I should've used more of my armor and weapons' abilities', she thought as she activated the ability stored on her cloth armor now that it had repaired itself adequately enough to function the way it should.
A total of seventeen glowing spots appeared on her clothes, each glowing a golden colour, with four on her skirt, two each leg of her tights, three on her sports bra and the remaining six on her jacket, they all spread and formed lines, interconnecting and ending in a pattern both on the edges of the tights', her skirt and the back of her jacket.
The two that were on her legs formed two lightning symbols that hovered at the end of the lines and doubled, one set moving over to her heel joints and the other to her knees.
The four on her skirt attached themselves to the edges, forming two wing-looking structures hovering beside her waist.
The six on her jacket moved to the back and joined together to form a large symbol there, looking like six lightning bolts joined together to form a larger circular bolt.
The last three had two form a bolt sigil each and migrate to the sides of her head while the last one went to the center of her chest, forming the crest of the Demenion household.
Suddenly, her speed multiplied as she covered the little distance left between herself and the vestige in a fraction of a second, pushing her energy into her spear and slashing it against a tentacle, almost lopping it off.
All that was left apart from a loosely hanging tentacle and the screaming vestige was a trail of pale golden lightning.
This armor was one that added the speeding up effect of lightning to the wielder, making them faster than normal by a large margin. Coupled with the ability to gather and shoot off the lightning with a degree of control over it, this was a nice set that gave quite a bit of extra lightning damage to its user.
While its functions were certainly impressive, if this was all that the armor given to the third ranked student could do, it would only be just that, impressive.
But the really special part of this her equipment only came to light with the addition of the enchantment on her shoes.
With the combination of the inappropriately named airwalker enchantment on them, and the function of being able to throw and control lightning a bit, she gained an enchantment that enabled movement in three dimensions!
That's right, she could now walk on the air, transforming her movement ability and maneuverability to another level!
This was the set enchantment that came with her equipment, only possible when all pieces were together.
And believe me when I say that it wasn't easy to string together this set of enchantment on so little piece of material.
Why she wanted it on so little material is a story for another time.
For now, all that you need to know is that she had been training, though sparsely, for the last two weeks to be able to use this function effectively in battle.
Why she forgot up till now could be boiled down to two reasons, one was that she hadn't had enough practice with it to use it in high level combat better than her usual style, and...
'Damn it! I can't believe I forgot I had such a useful enchantment!!', she cursed her forgetful self a thousand times over in her head.
To put it in terms you could more easily understand, she had ADHD, and quite a severe case at that.
While she couldn't have used it for the entire duration of the battle, during moments when she was in a bind, her equipment would've been very helpful.
But talk less of the fact that she forgot that, there were times that she would even forget the faces of people she met seconds ago, leading to very awkward second meetings...
Anyways, this equipment would be one of the key factors for her plan to work, as now she didn't need to or even want to fight the vestige, but distract it and slow it down enough for Arthur to get ready.
And Arthur, despite all on his mind, wouldn't use it as an excuse to run away.
Instead, he focused all his attention on what he was preparing, not allowing the earlier issue to cloud his mind.
Or at least he tried to....
'How could she do something like that? Such a blatant invasion of my privacy and abuse of my trust, did she think I'd do nothing about it?', thoughts like these were circling his head, making it difficult to concentrate on his task.
He was just a bit shy of losing control when he forcefully concentrated on his task, using the anger he felt at this situation to further control the flames.
In his hands was a spinning semi-solid sphere, made up of pure flames, and he was constantly adding more flames into it, causing it to deform and almost burst out in several places when he lost his concentration.
'Almost there.', he thought with beads of sweat running own his face.
Soon enough it would be ready.