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He didn’t want to rush in and attack the worm directly. He had a feeling that that would be playing into its slimy, nonexistent hands and would probably get himself counterattacked in some way. And at this distance, simply launching more discs probably wouldn’t do much. They were fast, sure, but the worm’s reactions were pretty fast, too, from what he could tell, and he wanted to save the discs anyway for an opportune moment. Right now, they were probably his best means of getting out of a very bad situation.

So he decided to go for something different--something that would allow him to easily harass the beast from afar and hopefully piss it off.

He’d been wanting to try using temperature manipulation offensively since the beginning of the fight, but he knew that it was still unstable here in the Undercrust. The moment he materialized any freezing iron, the ambient heat would cause it to weaken or even explode. Not particularly useful for caging a worm--and having endured one of those explosions himself, he was pretty sure they wouldn’t have enough force behind them to actually damage this monster.

It might be enough to annoy it, though. And he wanted to see if he could make the explosions any more powerful now, too.

He materialized a frozen boulder of iron, as big as the worm itself, and let it drop on the beast’s head.

It didn’t do much. It certainly didn’t explode. It must’ve had too much mass for the heat to compromise its structure that quickly. The worm didn’t seem particularly bothered by it, either, and just oozed out from below it and continued on its merry way, gobbling up debris.

Dammit. He annihilated the boulder.

Maybe this wouldn’t even work. He was going to have to figure out the optimal mass for these particular atmospheric conditions, and how many guesses would that require?

Or maybe...? Maybe he could keep the mass the same and just keep decreasing the temperature?

Hmm.

Surely, the lower the temperature of his iron, the more intensely the heat of the Undercrust would clash with it.

Worth a shot, he supposed. He had no idea how low he could push the temperature now. Hell, he didn’t even know that before the emergence. He hadn’t had the occasion or the notion to find the exact limitations of his ability to manipulate temperature.

But now was as good a time as any to find out.

Temperature manipulation was a funny thing. He’d come to realize that it wasn’t like other techniques. He couldn’t achieve it by just visualizing it in his mind the way he did when he was creating shapes or adding iron to things. With temperature, it was more like a command, as if he were giving his iron an order that it had no choice but to follow.

Velocity states were similar in that regard, but still not quite the same. With velocity, spatial awareness was as equally important as the command was, but with temperature, it was more... emotional.

Yeah. That was exactly what it was, Hector was beginning to realize.