Power Of The School's Strongest (Arthur X Maria) 3

"What the heck did I just witness?", Arthur asked while staring at the scene in front of him with wide eyes.

"If you ask me who the heck am I supposed to ask?", Maria replied to him with more surprise than him.

To say the two of them were surprised would be an understatement.

Gobsmacked?

Flabbergasted?

Either one would be enough to describe their situation with surprise left to spare.

Even Arthur that was usually with a witty remark at every situation was left speechless for a moment.

Why were they surprised?

Because both of them knew damn well that this thing wasn't supposed to die with the last attack, much less with little to no damage to the surroundings except from a shockwave and a blast of red light.

But Maria was more surprised than him as she knew the amount of power in her attack, while powerful, should have at most blown up a part of the vestige before dispersing the rest of the energy in the surroundings.

The situation now literally used all it's power to obliterate the vestige and left everything else intact.

'Is this because of that last burst of rage energy I pushed into it?', she thought as she fell to the ground.

Some of the body parts landed on her as she was falling and coated most of her body in a layer of blood and tiny bits of flesh.

While mid air she stretched out her hand and the spear that she threw appeared in her hand like it teleported.

'The destruction is more than I thought it would be.', she almost cried as she saw the amount of damage that this technique did to her spear.

Even though the spear had a self repair function it would take a long while before it would reach a level she could use it again.

Storing it back she activated an ability on her shoes, air walker.

Then, like she was trying to slow down when sliding down a slope, she proceded to slow down as she was moving diagonally.

Once she hit the floor she immediately took out a potion and downed it.

This one was a low grade tier 4 potion as the injuries she had sustained during this battle was so much only a potion at tier 4 could heal her in one go.

After letting it take effect she deacivated her technique, instantly having a wave of tiredness and weakness wash over her.

While she had unlimited energy, stamina and even mental strenght during the activation, only the stamina and energy reserves would remain full as her mental strength couldn't be so easily recovered.

Add that to the fact that her ability had been heavily used and abused during the duration, you have a severely weakened woman who in all honesty wanted to just take a nap.

"Well.... that happened. Remind me never to piss you off again.", commented Arthur immediately after he came down from the treetop he was perched on.

"..."

"... oookaaay, I see that the side efects are kicking in."

"..."

Another thing about the rage technique was the fact that for every time she used it, she basically had her emotions sucked out in order not to let the outer emotional energy affect her too much. 

As her flaw was to have difficulty feeling positive emotions and she lost most of her negative emoions when she used the technique, she basically became a monster with no desires but to try to survive.

Because no matter how much emotions she had sucked out, it wouldn't change the fact that she would never want to make her sister sad.

After a few awkward moments of silence, Maria finally spoke, in a voice that seemed to be blank and devoid of life.

"Let's find the life core and meet up with the others. We need to help them."

"..."

However, it was Arthur's turn to be silent. When Maria looked at him, wondering why he didn't reply to her, she noticed his face that looked both doubtful and confused.

"Are you hearing that?"

"Hearing what?"

"That heartbeat."

"... yes. I'm starting to hear it now."

*BADUM

*BADUM

*BADUM

Slowly but surely, this heartbeat was getting louder and faster as time went on.

At first she was a little confused as to where this sound was coming from, but then, in a moment when time seemed to slow down, a series of events took place before she was even aware of them.

First, her instincts blared to life, screaming to her about impending death.

Then her body hairs stood on end and her pupils dilated.

Finally a wave of emotions hit her with a force that rendered her peculiar state useless.

And then, she felt it.

One emotion that was a response to the blaring alarm in her head, screaming at her to flee.

Fear.

Pure, undisguised terror. 

In a set of movements that she had no control over, her body sucked in the majority of the negative emotional energies in the surroundings and her eyes and tatoos glowed a blackish yellow.

In one motion, she rushed at Arthur, picked him up, and dashed away from her location, leaving a trail of dark gold lightning in her wake.

The two causes for her concern could be seen moving at a relatively fast speed even in this slowed down perception of time.

Red tentacles with glowing markings made it's way from under the ground to the location she stood just moments before.

If she had stayed there then it surely would've pierced through her heart.

All of this happened instinctually before she could even form the thought but she still wasn't fast enough to entirely stop what was to happen.

While she herself was able to dodge this sneak attack on herself, Arthur wasn't equipped with the speed to dodge it even though he knew it was coming.

Maria managed to get him out of the way and prevented him from getting his heart skewered but it still ended up going through his left arm and taking it off entirely.

She could've gone faster but the sudden change in velocity would've killed him if she moved any faster than she did now.

Even now his insides were almost turned to mush and most of his bones were fractured.

After putting a distance of 200 meters from it, her thoughts finally started catching up and she started to slow down herself as fast as she could without killing the half dead person with her.

Due to the speed she had that allowed her to cross 200 meters in a second it took her until she was a kilometer and a half from her starting position before she managed to stop.

Once she had stopped moving she immediately took out a high grade tier 4 potion in a cylindrical capsule and pressed it on his chest.

The technique she used now was one that heavily made use of fear emotional energy.

When a person is in danger, they would always feel fear and their body would always react in three ways due to that fear.

First of all, try to flee. 

If it couldn't do that though, it would instead try to fight of what was causing it so much fear and threatening it's life.

In other words, it's fight or flight mechanism.

This technique made use of that first reaction to run away at speeds they couldn't move at normally

The contents of the capsule started to drain as it was injected directly into his heart and moved throughout his body through his blood.

Given the extent of his injuries and how close he was to death, simply ingesting it would take too long to work.

The only reason they didn't use this method regularly was it was really painful.

But with an unconcious patient? That didn't matter anymore.

*BADUM

*BADUM

*BADUM

The source of the heartbeat-like sound could now be clearly seen as it pushed itself of the ground with more of those tentacles.

It was a round piece of flesh the size of a grown man's head with 16 tentacles coming out of it

All of a sudden the 16 tentacles shot out in all directions and grew mouths at their tips and started to suck in all the pieces of flesh that were bigger than a fist and Arthur's arm.

When it ran out of it's flesh to suck in it went after after the broken pieces of wood in the surroundings and broken rocks.

Though Maria ignored this for now and was looking at Arthur intently, waiting for the potions' effect to kick in.

Once she saw that he was stable she gently put him down to let him rest behind a tree to not let the fallout of what was about to happen affect him.

'He almost died.', she thought to herself with fear lacing her thoughts as she turned towards the monster that caused this, a blank look on her face.

Although it was entirely a bloody red now with parts of it's body made up of red coloured wood and stone, she could easily recognise the vestige that they had just fought.

'He almost died.', she thought to herself again with the same fear in her voice, but this time with more of another emotion felt.

It was also reflected on her body and eyes as the vibrant dark gold glow of her eyes and tatoos started gaining a shade of red to them.

She started running towards the vestige at a speed a little slower than prior but still enough to traverse that distance in five seconds, leaving a trail of golden lightning with a tinge of red in her wake.

Five hundred meters...

She took out a spear from her storage as the distance between them grew more closer. This one was a bit different from her last one and you could tell that it was less well made.

One thousand meters...

Most of her tatoos had been taken over by the red with most the lightning and her eyes.

One thousand two hundred meters...

She went into a javelin throwing stance as she began pulling in an amount of energy she hadn't even dared to before.

One thousand four hundred meters...

Her colour had changed entirely to a vibrant red and her Aura drew in the attention of every student and vestige in the forest.

One thousand four hundred and eighty meters...

She pushed in all of the gathered energy into the spear as she took a javelin throwing stance, forming a flame like aura around it making it start to fracture very fast.

With her thoughts starting to become muddled, she didn't even bother to think the next part but instead screamed it aloud, her eyes and body burning with an intense and vibrant red flame as she threw the spear in her hand.

"YOU ALMOST KILLED HIM!!!"

*BOOM!!