Power Of The School's Strongest (Arthur X Maria) 4

A life core.

The very center of any vestige that was, as the name suggests, the core of their life.

It is the organ that holds their minds and where their thoughts were fromed.

It also acts like the storehouse for their life energy and their version of Neo energy.

(Think of the dantian for cultivators to get a better picture. It's not entirely the same but it's close enough to get the point across.)

The layer directly covering it was called a Richome by the first person to ever discover it.

It was sort of like the firmware of a computer system.

It acted like the bridge between the mind(Software) and the body(Hardware) of the vestige.

It was also the vestiges' last line of defense for it's life core.

It is the oldest piece of a vestige that was from when it was weaker than tier 1.

The innermost layer of the vestige that formed the very center of it's being.

What it first evolved from.

They could be made from flesh, plants, or even ice and fire or other inanimate objects.

Maria easily identified it as what had almost caused both of their deaths.

It turned out that the explosion from the spear didn't destroy the entire vestige as they thought before as the Richome of this one managed to come out intact.

When a vestige had it's body destroyed, that was the end of it. but if It's richome wasn't dstroyed by at least 50%, it would always regrow the entire thing with time.

Athough, the time it would take would vary from a week to years.

Maria should've asked herself how it was possible for this one to regrow in basically seconds but, in all honesty, she couldn't care less.

Not in her current state of mind at least.

Her only coherent thought at this moment would be how to make this thing disapear from the face of the earth.

Permanently.

And she planned to use this spear to make that happen to the best of her abilities.

With the same sequence of events from the last time she ran and threw Harpoon, she threw this one but with an even greater force.

But the thing is, this situation and the last were a little different.

The previous spear she used, harpoon, had an ability that allowed it to cut through the air when thrown, parting it and eliminating wind resistance like it was flying in a vacuum.

It was what allowed it to move so fast with little noise and maintain a very high speed.

The thing was, this spear didn't have that, and she threw it at speeds that would leave pre-apocalypse earth fighter jets jealous.

Due to the fact that the earth had evolved, the speed of sound now was much higher than before, but the speed this thing was thrown at still created a very impressive shockwave even though it didn't break the current sound barrier.

Some of the bright red flame was left behind as it wasn't fast enough to stay together with the spear.

That wasn't a problem though as they went after the spear of their own accord, leaving a trail of fire that chased after the spear.

This red laser beam of rageful destruction reached the vestige almost instantly, leaving the thing with no time to dodge or put up any meaningful defenses.

It immediately sank into it after it touched it and for a moment it was like nothing happened, that is until it's newly created mouths let out a screem that somehow sounded more mad than all the other ones prior.

*KROAOAOAOAOAAAAA!!!

*BOOMM!!

A large chunk of the vestige was blown apart with some of the thing into so tiny pieces that they couldn't even be seen well with the naked eyes.

Seeing this Maria's body trembled with a morbid satisfaction that the usual her wouldn't have done.

"Yes. Yes!! Feel pain! You will pay for what you did to him!", she screamed at the vestige even though she knew it couldn't understand her, not even bothering to think them instead.

After a big blow like this she would usually press her advantage and keep attacking it but instead she just stood there and observed it scream in pain with a malicious grin on her face.

She stopped smiling and her eyes narrowed a few seconds later as she saw that some of the parts that were destroyed started to fly back at it.

It was still left with various parts of it's body on the floor as they were too tiny to be called back, but the fact that it could do all that in 4 seconds was the part that raised the most warnings in her head.

"Good, good. You can regenerate. which means you won't die easily. It would be a shame if you died fast now wouldn't it?", she ignored those warnings though and instead rejoiced.

The vestige turned most of it's eyes on this side of it's head towards her as it let loose a scream and launched it's tentacles at her.

They were either swinging or piercing straight at her as they grew hard red stone on their tips with the intention of piercing through her.

Scoffing at it, she ran at the thing with no regard for the piercing attack as she decided to use the window of opportunity when they stabbed through her to cut them off and run at the thing.

Just as the thing was about to reach her though, her instincts blared to life again, warning her of impending doom.

She attempted to dodge the tentacles but wasn't able to dodge them all as one of them pierced above her knee... and made it blow up from the inside.

Making distance from the thing by jumping back a far distance on her one good leg, she looked at the place that blasted of and quickly made an analysis of it.

"These are the marks of a fire blast. Can this thing create fire now?", the thought seemed to wake her up from her anger induced stupor a bit as she looked at the thing with a new wariness in her eyes.

'If this thing can use flames to attack now does that mean it is now immune to them?', she thought with dread as she observed the vestige again.

She quickly noticed that it's tentacle that did that was melting and burning a bit, making her sigh a bit in relief.

'Good, it can still be killed with fire. It seemes to be even more weaker to it even.', she thought as she attempted to walk forward as now her leg was... still missing so she fell back down.

She looked down at her leg with confusion on her face as she wondred why she fell and noticed that her leg was still missing from her body, which pronpred her to look up just in time to see it dissapearing from her view and into the thing's mouth.

Seeing this she couldn't help but curse out loud as she admitted to herself that she messed up.

The way her technique worked to heal her didn't make her heal by regrowing the missing parts of her body.

Instead it would 'Call back' the body parts that were separated and reattached them back to the main body.

The missing parts would almost teleport even as they dissolved and turned into nutrients for the regrowth.

The matter had to come from somewhere and she didn't have a clue how to make it from thin air.

But for some reason that she couldn't understand the missing limb didn't dissolve when it was in the vestiges grasp.

So now that it was inside another being she couldn't call it back through the natural barrier of energy that existed around it, leaving her with no option but to regrow it.

Once the technique noticed that it couldn't feel the missing parts it would instead try to use her own body mass to regrow, leaving her weakened and lightheaded due to the sudden lack of nutrients, A state that would spell doom for her if it happened here.

Anger didn't know anything but to take care of the source of the hate, no matter what it had to do and leaving the consequences for later.

She took out a pill from her storage that was pretty heavy for it's small size and put it into her mouth, chewing on it ans swallowing it in seconds.

This pill had the simple function of supplying enough nutrients to the body enough to regrow a limb.

Her limb began regrowing in seconds and due to the sudden influx of energy and nutrients, she didn't pass out from the process.

This took seven seconds even though she was fast with it so she was wondering why the vestige didn't attack her so she looked up.

What she saw took her by surprise.

The vestige seemed to be...molting?

She was so surprised, in fact, that she didn't move from her positions, watching the process for three seconds.

What eventually brought her out of her stupor was it breaking out of it's molted layer of skin.

It didn't look any different than before except that it was significantly more red and smaller.

She looked at it closer though and noticed another difference. On it's body, in a red that was just a shade darker and more reflective than it's skin were marks.

To her they looked very familiar, though she was having trouble putting together why they did. 

Suddenly though, the red tatoos glowed an orange red with a ting of yellow, and her instincts rang again.

With flash of bright red lightning, she dissapeared from her position just in time to dodge a swiping tentacle, appearing ten meters away. 

Before she even looked around to locate it again her danger sense activated again, making her perception of time slow down.

She started running before she could even form coheret thoughts but in order to dodge the danger that was coming for her, she ran right into the path of a root that protruded from the floor.

While this technique was very useful it had two severe drawbacks.

Firstly, she had little to no control of herself when it initially activated.

Second, even though the technique had no trouble dodging eye to knee level obstacles, it would almost always fail to detect ground level threats.

(Have you ever wondered why people running away from monsters because of fear like to trip? Well now you know. It,s just that movies likr to take it too far a bit.)

She tripped and fell, but due to the fact that she was moving at extreme speeds, her fall and the damage it was doing to her was anything but pretty.

She rolled and crashed into more trees for 200 meters before managing to correct herself and stop, quickly hiding herself out of sight.

The gravity of her situation seemed to hit her like a ton of bricks as she put the pieces of information together in her mind.

She finally understood why those markings seemed so familiar.

Although fewer than the ones she knew, there was no mistaking them as she saw them every day.

And with that realisation came shock, anger, fear and finally, disbelief.

"This thing is stealing my powers?"

They were the tatoos that appeared on her body whenever she used her abilities.