[Nexus 6P General] daeboe:
That one got me to boot into recovery. Thank you Tigran!

edit: Well, after sideloading the AK2 and getting a failure message, it's bootlooping again. Strangely enough, it's not letting me back into recovery using the previous steps I took to get into it.

I'm going to go test to see if the freezer trick works.

I got the phone to go to 8.1, boot into TWRP 3.2.1.0, flashed the BLOD workaround zip file, got halfway through the aroma installer of the EX Kernel before it failed. Put the phone in the freezer for 5 minutes again and finished with the kernel, It got through halfway of booting up, then the phone fell flat on its face. The charging function works perfectly fine though. The charging doesn't force the phone into a loop like it did on 7.1. I'll update again once I fully charge the device, freeze it, boot it up in the freezer, and see if holding the internal temperatures near freezing gives me a functional device.

I never quite got around to the freezer part. I checked up on the phone wondering if it had a good solid charge for me to be able to throw it into the freezer. It was booted into 8.1. I used it for a few minutes, set up the TWRP app (installed without the phone looping), and left it on the charger. The charger I used was just a 2.1A USB socket in a power strip I had sitting around. Now the phone is plugged into a pixel 2 usb charger (hitting that fast charge). I'll update again if the phone falls flat on its face, but for now it's working properly.

The steps I took personally are as follows:

1. Turn off the phone from the bootloader and place it in the freezer for 5-8 minutes.

2. Flash the 8.1.0 zip file (ending in e1) from google factory images using the flashall.bat file after extracting it to my adb folder.

3. Flash the patched boot image provided from this link in the second post.

4. Flash the 3.2.1.0 recovery image provided from this link in the second post.

5. Shut down the phone from the bootloader and throw it back in the freezer for another 5 minutes.

6. Flash the AK2 workaround zip located at this link in the second post.

7. Flash the ElementalX kernel located at this link located in the second post.

8. Turn off the phone and connect it to the charger, letting it show the battery charging icon, then going back to a blank screen.

9. ????? (forget about the device being on a charger for 45 minutes. It probably booted itself well before 45 minutes)

10. PROFIT!!!!!

One extra thing to note: I had about 50% charge initially on the phone (after flashing everything onto the device). When I checked up on it, it had 48% after being on the 2.1A charger for 45 minutes.

Final update on my phone flashing: The phone itself seems to be working fine. I've booted into the recovery and rebooted the phone multiple times (getting magisk from recovery, and xposed from magisk then from the xposed app itself. Phone seems to be handling reboots to recovery and the system itself just fine. No freezer or temperature modulation was used.

[MENTION=5211723]AndroidHtc101[/MENTION], let me know how your process goes. I'm curious as to whether or not there's some files being patched post flash from the AK2 file that's being interrupted if the CPU is too hot prior to executing.