Experience Chain Timer Issue

NOTE: I'm going to post this here because I'm not sure if this is working as intended and I just happened to noticed it now or if it is a bug. I would like the opinion of the community first. If it is indeed a bug I'll go through the steps and properly report it.

So, tired of FATE grinding and needing to level up Lancer so that I can acquire Invigorate for my Bard, I spent this afternoon doing an EXP chain party around Hawthorne Hut.

While doing this I noticed that the timer for the EXP chain will suddenly go up and down in blocks of 10 seconds. It looked like this:

Engage a mob, EXP Chain Timer is ticking down, Kill a mob, timer is at 19 (the time it was when I first noticed), as I'm move to the next one the timer jumps from 19 to 9, engage new mob, timer comes back up to 19, immediately goes back to 9 and keeps counting down.

It happened several times while I was playing. Has anyone else seen this?

if you kill a mob that's higher level than you during an exp chain, you get some time added to the chain's duration

im not sure that the 10 second drop is all about

Once you get to chain 7 or 8, you only have 10 seconds to kill the next mob to keep the chain going. Even if you had 50 seconds left,killing a mob makes it drop because it gives you less and less time per mob until its only 10 second a kill to continue the chain. If that made any sense.

Thanks to both, I didn't realized that that was part of the mechanics.

What I do find aggravating is that mobs take somewhere around 3 seconds to "die" after their HP hits 0; many times I've lost chain #5 and been taunted with the little "Time's Up!" message. I don't know if it was the same way in FF11 since there was no timer and no way of knowing, but I kinda wish there wasn't a timer here because I hate getting worked up over something so silly, but yet I can't help it.