Maria kept mostly quiet and played ignorant about how she knew that her apprentice viewed her as a mother-figure. But she did subtly start moving the subject of her discussions with Elizabeth towards family, hoping that the young Blood Mage would voluntarily confess how she viewed her teacher on her own once she was comfortable talking about the subject. However, things didn't really remain peaceful for the two as multiple threats continued to appear, mostly just towards the town of Lordan but also towards the by now seven years old Elizabeth specifically. In the latter case it was mainly wizards and witches wearing black robes and skull-masks, either alone or small groups, seemingly appearing out of nowhere about once a month. None of them succeeded nor did they leave with their lives.
The closest one group got to successfully killing Elizabeth was when they kidnapped her and intending to rape her before killing her. They didn't get the chance as Elizabeth delivered a kick to the first one's nuts and a serrated blade-enhanced metallic punch to his ribs, puncturing his lung and letting him bleed out, before taking out the second one by means of friendly fire. The third one ended up technically killing himself via collateral when a spell misfired, somehow ricocheting all over the small ruin (which shouldn't have been possible considering the kind of spell it was), before severing the chain of a chandelier hanging above him. Causing said chandelier to fall on him. Still high on adrenaline, but still lucid enough to think, Elizabeth quickly grabbed her belongings and started running back to the not-so-abandoned mansion she and Maria had made their home before the reality of what she'd just done set in. It wasn't the first time she killed nor was the first time that she had done so without her teacher nearby, but it was the first time someone tried to… force themselves on her. Maria comforted her apprentice when Elizabeth returned home, taking a few days off of training to help the young Blood Mage cope with the traumatic stress from the most recent and so far strongest experience. Talking to the local priest about it and asking her teacher how to deal with the trauma didn't really help, but it was a step in the right direction of coping with it. The priest was actually a bit more helpful in this case than Maria since the priest was more or less the closest thing that Lordran had to a therapist. That and most of the various means of coping that Maria knew of wasn't exactly healthy, mostly due to the fact that they usually involved alcohol, something that was essentially brainwashing or simply burying the memory and slowly going insane.
One of the first things that Maria taught her apprentice was what it meant to be a Hunter, to take up a weapon, what it meant to take a life and that the theft of life should never be something to enjoy. Especially since Elizabeth was a Blood Mage, as the temptation to claim blood from one's enemy would almost certainly rise whenever she claimed a life, and her teacher was talking from experience, being a Blood Mage herself, as she also had to fight down the temptation every single time another being fell at her hands. Be it by a bullet from the Evelyn or by the blades of the Rakuyo. Another thing that Maria taught her apprentice was that Hunters fought smart, not hard unless necessary, studying their dance partners in the dance with blades and death that the fights that the Hunters got into. When Elizabeth asked (actually raising her hand as if she was in a more mundane class) why her teacher called a fight a dance with death, the answer was that a fight as a Hunter was akin to a dance in that one could see a rhythm and a beat in the clashes between Hunter and prey. Especially when said prey was a person who was also trained in combat and if the Hunter's opponent was still sane… or at least somewhat sane.
Something that the Hunter gave her apprentice a rather extensive lecture about was the history and origin of the Hunter profession. The main reason why it was a rather extensive lecture was because Maria actually took the time to go over all three of the three main factions in Yharnam's claim was the origin of the job. According to the house of Cainhurst, the title of Hunter originated from the title of Huntsman (or Huntress in the case of women), which were more or less something in between mercenaries and bounty hunters of the Magical World. The profession leaked into the Mundane World in Yharnam once the Huntsmen and Huntresses started losing work in the Magical World, becoming the profession that it is today. The Healing Church didn't give any explanation regarding the origins of where the Hunter-profession came from, only that being a Hunter (at least of the Healing Church) was a holy duty, putting the spirits of the ones tormented by Beasthood and madness to rest. An explanation that sounded more akin to an exorcist than a Hunter to Elizabeth, which earned the young Blood Mage a curious look from Maria which turned into a heatless glare due to the apprentice interrupting her teacher, mostly just out of very slight annoyance, causing said apprentice to go quiet again. The Workshop claimed that the title of Hunter was something that the civilians of Yharnam came up with and the title stuck. According to Maria's old mentor Gehrman, the old man who tried to decapitate Elizabeth with his Burial Blade, the Workshop was originally hired by the Healing Church to simply make the weapons that the Church would use, but the Church rejected some of the weapons that the Workshop made. Mostly those that sacrificed beauty for effectiveness, which led to the formation of the various sub-factions in the Workshop and their members to take up arms to join the Hunt on their own accord. The mentioning of, in the words of Elizabeth, the old fart who stole her old hand, the young Blood Mage gained a rather angry expression while muttering something among the lines of either shoving Gehrman's own gun down his pants and firing or chopping off the lower half of his left arm with his own weapon if Elizabeth ever saw him again. While Maria pointed out that her apprentice would most likely not succeed if she met the Old Hunter again, she did share some of the sentiment, not exactly happy with what her old mentor did to her apprentice.
