Maria was almost healed up from all the damage she had taken previously. If it was to be said which person in their class had the ability that granted the best self-healing, she would rank second.
But make no mistake. The first rank had a pure healing ability, otherwise she would be first.
Anyways, once the potions that Arthur had given her had healed her enough that she wasn't in any life threatening danger and the accumulated damage from the deactivation of her ability wouldn't end her life immediately, she deactivated her ability and let the potions that Arthur had injected into her do their work.
She was a little confused though, as she honestly didn't expect her ability organ to have held on for this long because of the way she overused it, but she pushed that thought to the back of her mind for now.
Partly because she needed to monitor her body and make sure she directed the healing energies and nutrients both to speed up the healing process and make sure it was thorough, but mostly because she was afraid to look at it and see how badly it was damaged or if it was beyond repair.
After making sure her body was healing properly, her mind drifted to her fight and how it ended, berating herself for all that she did wrong and what she could've done better.
This experience of not being able to regrow her limbs because of an overuse of her ability had taught her how much she had relied on it, and how helpless she was after she couldn't use her cheat healing method.
She made a mental note to carry at least one limb regrowth potion of the highest order with her for situations like this one when she couldn't use her ability. If nothing else, today had taught her that.
Her mind also wondered to the new way she harnessed her energy, finding it's new properties intriguing. Making a mental note to explore it more, she shifted her focus back to the present.
The pain that accompanied the various injections wasn't in any way little but with the way she had been abusing her body and destroying it when she fought with her ability, she had developed such an absurd level of pain tolerance that this one was little more than an inconvenience, something she could easily ignore.
And so, she did, instead focusing on more important matters.
Looking to her side, she saw the empty vials of medicines with trace amounts of their contents beside her, all the medicine that Arthur had injected into her.
Maria quickly identified them as four extremely concentrated nutrient packs, a solution to increase metabolism and natural healing factor, and three limb regrowth solutions.
But there was one more injected potion. One that she knew she had never seen before because she couldn't identify it, something that was more than a little shocking to her.
As the firstborn daughter of the Demenion household, there were pieces of knowledge that she was privy to, one of which is the name, appearance, function and other physical properties of almost all types of potions and medicines available.
So for her to see one that she couldn't in any way identify, she would definitely be surprised and more than a little curious about it.
The thought that Arthur put something nefarious into her didn't once even cross her mind.
Apart from the fact that it wasn't in his character, she was too smitten by him to even care.
But while she wasn't apprehensive, her curiosity did make her check on the effect it had on her body, and what she saw completely floored her mind.
'I must be seeing things. Definitely', she thought to herself when she observed her body and the changes brought about by the potion, completely flabbergasted.
While ranked second on the list for who had the best self healing factor, she held a firm and unshakeable first in the student who had the best understanding of their own body and could utilise it best.
In fact it was a long standing joke inside the school that Maria had more of an understanding of her body that anyone even in the older generation.
All this was to say that she could easily follow any medicine or poison in her body and control it to some extent, either minimizing the damage it would cause or sending it to where it would grant the best effect.
And while looking into her body, she noticed what the last potion was doing.
'Since when was there a potion that could heal ability organs?!', she practically screamed in her mind.
There had been a stump when it came to alchemists and scientists in the field of ability organ studies, namely how to heal them. Which is why for the last 150 years that medicine to reset the timer for how long you could use your ability had existed, medicine that could heal and repair them hadn't.
In fact, as at fourteen years ago, the leading scientists shelved the idea as they thought that it wouldn't be possible.
It was the general consensus that it wasn't possible to artificially speed up the process and everyone left it at that and seemingly forgot about it.
Maria knew this as she had gone through the research papers in an attempt to learn how to heal her ability organ with her ability, hoping she would find something to help or at least nudge her in the right direction from them, but she had eventually scrapped the idea when her research into it didn't lead to any breakthroughs on the issue.
But Maria couldn't really deny what she was witnessing as she saw what was deemed impossible by the world happen right in front of her eyes.
But as shocked as she was, she was even more grateful to Arthur. Such medicine must have been recently discovered by his family considering the fact that news of it wasn't yet out, and the materials for such a thing couldn't have been cheap. Yet, he still gave her such a precious thing freely.
She looked away from her body to gaze at the person in question, only for her to belatedly notice the problem with him.
The Arthur she was seeing now, covered in flames and blasting away at the vestige, was leagues above what he normally showed.
In terms of overall rankings in their class, from first to third went like this,
Alexander first,
Arthur second,
Maria third.
It was a well known fact that Arthur couldn't beat Alexander as every spar they had always ended in his defeat.
But the Arthur that Maria was witnessing must've been asleep till now because the amount of raw destructive power he was showing now was simply unreal.
If it was a matter of Alexander versus Arthur right now, the Arthur that she was seeing would most likely wipe the floor with Xander.
But all this were good things, so why was she saying problems?
Because even with all that she was seeing, another thing caught and held her attention far more.
'Crap, not again. Why did it have to happen at this time?'
Arthur's researchers instincts had kicked in.