Damage Rejection

Damage Rejection is Grace's form of healing and regeneration. This type of restoration is superior to defensive and offensive regeneration, in speed, cost, and ability to heal (can heal difficult wounds like splintered bones and burns just as fast as a cut). When using this ability, Grace concentrates on a part of her body to repair and her body will automatically repair it. This ability can be used indefinitely, healing at a rate proportionate to the amount of power Grace has in her body, without any mental or physical strain on Grace although the damage inflicted on Grace itself takes a toll on her mind. However, with seasoning, Grace can use this ability faster and on pieces of her body blown off, pulling them back to her body.

There are a few restrictions with this ability, particularly unseasoned.
 * She needs to be awake to will her body back together, meaning the ability is tied to her mind's ability to recognize and pull together her body.
 * In its most basic stages, while still more effective than most healing capabilities of claymores and awakeneds, she could only heal wounds inflicted directly on her body and not any cut-off limbs. For this reason, she was originally classified as an offensive type warrior (although offensive types can eventually grow back their limbs)
 * Often slower than other types of seasoning if unseasoned.
 * It is possible, Faith reasons, that this type of rejection doesn't allow Grace to season on her own, although this likely is not a result of this type of healing, but Grace herself.

Omen, another user of this ability, taken from Grace, says it is a rejection of reality and events which inflicted harm on a body, removing the damaging event from existence and thus, having the body returned to its original, unharmed state. More specifically, this ability uses Aezathol's ability to create reality through her dreaming to substitute the current reality of being injured with another reality of being unharmed and whole. In contrast, denial is the undoing of something that has already happened to the user in the past and can't work against things like a constant barrage of attacks. Omen used the command "I reject" to undo damages to himself but Grace doesn't need to do this to heal. It is unknown how her ability works with pieces of her body entirely cut off or removed. When Crow bit off a piece of her shoulder and ate it, Grace was able to heal with no mention to the method, likely with her body treating these as cuts and rejecting the damage (although no piece of her body was seen rejoining it in these two cases). This pulling together of her body was seen with Omen and partially seen when Grace's arm was cut off by Desiree (her arm's fingers remotely twitched when she tried to reject the damages but the arm didn't return to her because Desiree was holding it.). It is possible that in the cases where part of her body was eaten (Crow, Nixie dissolving her chest), the pieces came back to her by erasing themselves from existence due to the erasure of the damage that caused them to exist or less likely, that grace no longer thinks of the pieces as part of her body and thus, the damage rejection does nothing to them. Possibly, this may be why Aezathol was surprised that that Grace was complaining about her missing arm, when she could have easily undone her damage.

This ability isn't a part of the Heart of Darkness (which she only gained after Natrice, but she had healed before like this) so it is possible it is something Grace had before hybridization. Omen claims this ability is a blessing from Aezathol so it is possible this came to Grace upon hybridization as well, or was something that Aezathol possesses as a result of contacting Grace.

The speed at which the healing form this ability occurs would "normally" be instantaneous. However, to replace reality, an aspect of time is involved since reality exists in time, the time being determined by seasoning (time for the yoki) which is also equal to the empowerment/strength of the user, which is why with more seasoning, Grace can use this ability faster although it slows down when she expends more energy. In the case of cut-off limbs, as with all yoki or aether using beings, the cut off parts of the body contain the user's essence and are essentially, still a part of the user's body. In rejecting, these pieces are put back into their correct places through the reality of being cut-off being replaced (over time) with the reality of them being correctly unified with the body. When Grace thinks about healing a part of her body, she is replacing reality for that part of her body, something which requires no conscious thought about the orientation of healing processes typically required for claymores.

Likely, damage rejection is the most powerful type of healing possible, considering it can heal any injury short of death (since death severs the mind, required for this ability) rapidly with seemingly no energy detriments, although it has its weaknesses and unseasoned, isn't as fast as other types of healing.