'Sure there is a high chance that my time would run out and I would get energy poisoning that would kill me, buuutt on the other hand I reeeally want to know!', he thought while weighing the pros and cons in his mind (but even though the cons heavily outweighed the pros the idea was still winning in his mind for some reason).
After a relatively long battle in his mind over which option to pick, he eventually ,to absolutely no surprise, picked to risk it!
Having come to a rational(?) and logical(?) decision and with his arm mostly healed, Arthur let loose a wild grin that made the previous ones look normal and started cranking up the heat on his claws to really absurd levels and fast.
'First, I need to take out those tentacles.'
He thought as with a sharp intake of air and a blur of motion that was just a notch slower than the speed of sound, he launched himself out of his hiding spot.
His thought process that started from when he hid to now barely lasted fifteen seconds, meaning he didn't waste much of his precious time (but I'm sure the reason why the time was precious was different to us than it was to him).
He proceeded to give the vestige several flyby's, severing most of its tentacles in a few seconds and riddling its body with a plethora of gashes, leaving lingering flames on the wounds.
With another scream and a lucky tentacle hit, it managed to push Arthur away from itself.
Arthur didn't let up though and immediately rushed back into the fray, immediately cutting off two more tentacles and then deciding to move on to the last stage of his plan.
The idea to cut of the tentacles could be said to be the best idea that he could've come up with when dealing with the vestige at this speed as the vestige would find it increasingly hard to hit him at this speed which would make it easier.
But his idea was also not well thought out. As of now, his organs were beginning to fail not only because of the energy flowing through him but also from the rapid and abrupt changes in direction that he executed.
They were beginning to become mush because of the combined effect of the G-force and rampant energies.
Not to mention the danger as a single well placed tentacle hit would've decimated his body more than it already was.
But the excited Arthur couldn't care less about all that in this state even though with the time he wasted hiding and thinking he only had about four minutes to live.
Lost in the euphoria of his experiment, he started moving around his opponent at a rapid pace, a part stupid and part brilliant idea forming in his mind.
He rapidly started moving around the vestige, leaving a trail of flames that he did not allow to dissipate.
Revolving around and around the vestige, he surrounded the vestige in a spinning ball of flames as a result.
It got to a point that all that could be seen was a rapidly revolving ball of flames that seemed to be getting faster, louder and hotter as time went by.
Arthur quickly flew out of that raging inferno, his armor red from the heat, which was saying a lot because the materials used to make it was easily able to handle up to 800 degrees without showing any signs that it was hotter than usual while his claws were made of a special alloy that could easily handle twice that much!
He didn't pay attention to that though as he stopped using his ability for a few seconds, killing the flames on his body.
His body temperature started cooling down immediately as his body quickly started to freeze over in the brief time he stopped using it.
But then, with a deep breath, his body temperature started to rise fast as he slammed his feet into the ground to create traction for what he was about to do.
He let out a torrent of flames from his hands, the knock back from which would've thrown him back if he hadn't rooted himself in place.
* Whooooshh
*KROAOAOAAAAA
The flames combined with the ones on the sphere and added to them, making the vestige trapped inside scream louder from the increased heat.
The already loud, hot and violently spinning sphere kicked it up a notch and started shrinking, making things very bad for the vestige as it's scream seemed to grow even louder.
This scream seemed to make the grin on Arthur's face grow wilder, his joy from the experiment evident.
'Note to self, extreme control and heat increase over the flames I produce is significantly harder than it looks or should be. Need to work on that.', he thought to himself with the same wild grin on his face .
Apart from his flaw preventing him from hitting his limits, it also prevented him from safely experimenting with his flames regularly due to a lack of means to safely keep reducing his temperature while his ability was active.
This caused his control over his own flames to not be the best it could be. They were still good though, at least for someone of his age.
But high degree of control mattered in this particular endeavor, something which would become apparent soon enough.
After about seven seconds of adding flames to the ball, he stopped adding more and kept trying to compress the flames, putting his full might and concentration into the task.
Slowly but steadily, it kept on shrinking as the vestiges screams became louder, even drowning out the sound of the flames, something that seemed odd enough for even Arthur to comment on it.
'Where is all the air for the scream even coming from?', Arthur thought after a few more seconds, wondering if the damn thing had an unlimited amount of air stored in its body.
His surprise grew as he felt that the sphere he was concentrating so hard to shrink stopped shrinking, and then started to slowly expand.
'Oh, come on! How is this even possible?! You can't just be breaking my common sense so easily like this!' he practically shouted in his mind with an expression of incredulity on his face, fighting for control over the flames' shrinking from the vestige.
It seemed that, in an odd twist of events, the screams of the vestige started to push back the flames and weakened Arthur's control over them.
The feat that the vestige just did required both a fine energy control and, most importantly, a sane mind, both of which a vestige was supposed to lack.
But Arthur seemed to either not comprehend the implications of his discovery or just outright ignored it. Instead...
'I wonder what it would become if I left it to grow', he thought and this time, he failed to suppress this thought fast enough, letting it take root.
And once that thought took root in his mind, it refused to leave, instead growing stronger and more prominent.
This was why his researchers instinct was so dangerous. If he allowed an intrusive thought to take root in his mind, it would be almost impossible to get it out. The thought would only become stronger as time went by until he could no longer ignore it and carried it out.
This guy was a shining example of 'Letting your intrusive thought win'.
If not for the fact that he had an ability with a very obvious flaw, people would have thought that this trait was his flaw instead.
This was one of the reasons that he was ranked second, below Alexander. The amount of tasks and missions he had failed or teammates he had almost killed because he let his intrusive thoughts win was well into the double digits now.
In fact the only reason he still hadn't left the vestige to run away was because his thirst for battle of strong opponents was still there and he hadn't fought to his heart's content.
Besides, he still felt that unless he beat it and then let it go, it would most definitely kill him. He might want to let it go, but he didn't want to die doing so.
So it seemed like he hadn't lost all his senses and still had enough self preservation to try keeping his life safe, but not enough to notice the increasing effects of the foreign energies rushing through his body, or the sneak attack that the vestige was sending towards him from underground.