With a deep inhale of breath, Arthur thought to himself, 'I have at most five minutes before the rampant energies flowing through me render me useless, so let's make them count!'.
With a sudden burst of flames, Arthur launched himself at the vestige, the claw on his good hand primed for a slashing attack as the flames intensified to launch him faster.
With an aerial maneuver that would've left an ordinary person with broken bones, he barely managed to dodge five stone-spiked tentacles that came whistling through the air, swinging at him with devastating force.
A warning from his instincts and quick deceleration helped him avoid a sixth one that came swinging from behind another, aligned perfectly to be kept out of sight from him and thus creating an artificial blindspot with an attack that would have mangled him if he kept going at the same speed.
His quick thinking saved him, but that maneuver caused him to lose all the momentum he had up till that point, leaving him static within its attack range.
The vestige didn't sit by and let it's prey slip away as it sent the tentacles to his stationary target for another barrage, the tentacles whistling through the air like deadly iron coated whips.
With another quick set of movements made by letting out blasts of flames from his body in the opposite direction he wanted to move, he managed to dodge all but one that managed to land on his shoulder guard, exploding right after and sending him flying away, smashing into a tree.
"Seriously?", he said with a groan as he stood up.
"Since when could it cause explosions? And why didn't it use it when it was fighting her? Does it really hate me that much?"
His vision and hearing were a little muddled due to the light and sound so it took him a while to look and notice the fact that its limb was melting off.
'Okay, well that answers that query.', he thought as he now knew why it didn't use it on Maria.
Maria could quickly heal from the damage that that kind of blast would cause so considering it's higher intelligence, it probably thought that it was useless to use on her after it tried and failed a few times.
Arthur was out of commission during that time so he didn't know if it was true or not but he could more or less infer that to be the truth.
As for why it was using it against him now even though it was prior proved useless...
'Is it just me or is it looking at me with more hate than before?', he thought as he tried desperately to dodge the flaming pieces of itself it was now chucking about, half shouting a few curses between his dodges.
He managed to get closer to it again but was quickly forced to retreat by the barrage of whip like attacks that moved at him from almost all directions, targeting him from his blind spots and in intervals that made them difficult to react to or predict, a maneuver that was executed slightly better than it was before.
For a vestige that got it's intelligence of recent, it seemed to be way too creative in it's methods of attacks and attack patterns, quickly switching and displaying a large mastery of combat that seemed to be growing by the second!
He kept on dodging, trying to put some distance between them now so he could try to think of a better strategy after he noticed his mistake of flying in too close.
But the vestige seemed to understand his plan as it kept trying to block it's path, preventing him from retreating by using its tentacles to block off his escape routes.
With no other choice, he let out blasts at an angle instead of perpendicular to his body, sending his body spinning as he coated his body in intense flames, shooting out like a drill and away from the vestige.
'What's with this thing? It feels like I'm fighting a small army of war veterans who use whips and slings!', He thought as he put a bit more distance between them and hid himself behind some trees, suppressing his energies while trying to orient himself and get his bearings after that dizzying maneuver he used to escape.
Losing sight of its enemy, the vestige started swinging its self-created projectiles at the location it saw him last and then everywhere, making them blow up upon first contact with anything solid and hoping to hit him, forcing him to sneak away despite his dizziness that had still not subsided when several lucky shots almost landed in his location.
'This thing is incredibly deadly right now and it seems to be growing in technique insanely fast.', he thought with narrowed eyes when he finally managed to stop seeing the ground in the sky, his mind working in overdrive to see how he could survive and kill it.
'But if I let this thing keep growing, how much more powerful would it get in a day?', but although the situation could easily lead to his early death, he still found himself asking questions like that.
'How about a month? or even a year? What if-', a sharp pang of pain from several places on his body quickly sent him out of his dangerous spiral of thoughts.
'Oh right, I'm on a timer. Gotta stay focused.', he inwardly reprimanded himself as he almost let his 'researchers instincts' take over.
You see, Arthur had a bit of a problem. Whenever he was in a battle with an opponent that would require almost all his concentration or more to defeat, his mind would often wander to different experimental scenarios, which sometimes would lead to him finding more creative or faster ways to defeat his opponent.
Now normally this would be a good thing, but his mind also tended to wander to other things during this time period. For example 'What would this thing turn into if I fed it this?' or 'How strong would it get if I let it grow?' or 'Will this thing be useful for the other thing I'm doing?'. Things like those.
Simply put, he was the type of guy that would get either crazy or brilliant ideas during a battle and want to test them out right there and then, no matter if they were useful to the situation or not.
This strange quirk of his was one of the things that helped him get so strong as it gave him various ideas on how to develop his abilities, but this very same quirk had almost killed him, several times at that, whenever he tried something stupid in a life-or-death match!
His record for dumbest thing he tried to do was trying to capture a vestige that melted anything that touched it by, you guessed it, touching it!
In his defense, he said that he was so engrossed by the experiment that he wanted to carry out that a fact as important as that slipped his mind, claiming that it seemed like a good idea at the time.
So yeah, it was kind of a huge double edged sword. But did it matter to Arthur? If you asked him, you would get a resounding 'heck no!' as the answer while he would go on a ramble about how 'the danger makes the experience more thri- *cough*, more informative'.
His words not mine.
Long story short, he was well aware that him allowing his mind to drift off in this fight could very easily spell his doom.
But did he give a damn?
'Even though I have little to no chance of capturing this thing alive, nothing says I can't test other things, like how high I can take my temperature with this infused lifecore for example, right?'
...Apparently not.