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In the early days, some half-millennia ago, the very concept of inertia hadn’t even been discovered yet. It had therefore been quite difficult and laborious to arrive at any kind of understanding of its nature. In fact, it wasn’t until a couple centuries of undeath that he really began to feel as though he’d truly wrapped his head around it. And even now, he occasionally still found himself questioning what he thought he knew.

His younger years had been quite turbulent, as a result. For a while, he’d thought that his power was simply to “adjust the weight” of things. That he could only make things lighter or heavier. Then he went through a period where he thought that, no, perhaps his power was instead to control some otherworldly force and flame, granted to him by the Void itself. There was ancient precedent for that, after all. Some called it the Inferno. Then, still later, he learned about a discovery called friction, and so he thought it might be that, too.

Even after he’d learned about inertia, that hadn’t been the end of his uncertainty. While he did indeed settle on it as the most likely candidate over which his power held sway, there eventually came the discovery of subatomic particles, which again threw him for a loop, making him reevaluate everything.

Ultimately, though, he returned to inertia, as it was the most fitting. He decided that even though it seemed like he could manipulate subatomic particles quite freely, everything of which he was capable could still be explained by the manipulation of inertia upon those same particles. The localized generation of heat, for example, might have looked like the result of excitement in particle vibrations, but it also could have been the subatomic application of inertia upon particles within an open system.

The sudden, dramatic change in inertia for certain particles but not others could theoretically create a need for energy transference among said particles in order to reestablish equilibrium. And the more dramatic the change, the more rapid the need would become.

The more heated, in other words.

So Iceheart’s ability to remove the heat out of any system, while indeed deadly, was by itself not nearly enough to give Dozer trouble. As long as he could still think, he could create as much heat as he needed. And in this fight, with his soul power added on top of things, he was constantly keeping his entire body heated nearly to the point of bursting into flames.