He needed to fight smarter, not harder. The only problem was, he had no idea what “smarter” might be. He stared at the knight in front of him as they exchanged blows. Its armor had a glowing, reddish-black set of eight arrows radiating from a central point towards each of the eight cardinal directions. The symbol of Chaos in the world of the Eternal Champion.
For the knight’s sake, he hoped Michael Moorcock or his publisher had not trademarked that symbol, or the knights would have Big Publishing coming after them. Of course, while that would be bad, it would not be as bad as putting a giant, stylized “S” inside a diamond on one’s chest. That would have set Warner Bros. on a warpath, and Tom was pretty sure their lawyers were meaner than a Knight of Chaos.
Given all the crazy stuff that he had seen the last few months, there probably was a universe in which people flew through the air in blue and red tights. In which case, maybe the Multiversal Trademark MTM would reside with the real Man of Steel, if there was one.
Of course, even the term multiverse might be copyrighted by Michael Moorcock, who had invented it. Hmm, if he was going to set himself up as a “dark lord,” he had probably better make sure he was not going to violate any copyright or trademark laws. Of course, the coop had already been flown on his new house. It was probably only a matter of days before he was swarmed by hobbits (©JRR Tolkien) with lawsuits.
“Ouch!” Tom shouted as he was split in two horizontally. He flashed himself whole. He needed to stop this internal monologue or he would lose this battle. That was a known problem for dark lords: they always had to have these infernally long monologues that ended up costing them the victory.
“Ouch!” Crap! He had done it again.
Think, Tom! These things were agents of chaos, whatever that was. Chaos was disorder, it was entropy, it was change, and it was energy. Certainly, the exploding knights released a lot of wild, crazy-looking black energy. The blasts had even looked chaotic; giant vents that spewed out of the hole in the knight in all directions. Very much like a regenerating Time Lord, only more evil-looking.
So if these things were chaos, raw entropy, then what would stop them? Order. That was the obvious answer. If you impose order on chaos, it loses its power. In physics, or at least in science fiction, unordered states had more entropy, more energy. They were hot. The opposite of a highly chaotic or entropic state was a perfectly ordered state. That only happened at absolute zero. At absolute zero, all the electrons were in their lowest energy state. All the uncertainty as to their position and momentum was resolved at that point. The entropy, the chaos was gone.
Tom paused to think about this. “Ouch!” he yelled as his leg was chopped off. He re-formed. If this logic held, then he had been going about this all wrong. Fire, like the volcano and its eruptions, increased temperature, increased entropy and energy. He needed to freeze the crap out of these things; then they would lose their energy, their entropy, their chaos. It would be hard to be an Agent of Chaos without any chaos! But how could he freeze these guys? He had fed the volcano by sucking Fire through the Fire portals, when what he really needed now was cold. How did he get cold?
CRUNCH! FFFOOOOOMMSSHHHHHH!!!! Another sphinx smooshed a knight.
Well, he could do cold fire. He had cold runes all over the place. How did they work? Tom had to think on what those runes were actually doing. It took a few moments because he was in the middle of battle, but he suddenly realized what had once been obvious to him: the cold runes were sucking Fire out of the rooms! They were returning Fire to the elemental plane of Fire. In fact, that was really what his cold fire was: it was anti-fire, negative fire.
That was the key: he needed to reverse the fire portals. Suck the heat out of these guys. Tom grinned. His Rod was directly connected to the Fire portal. He just needed to return Fire to its place of origin. He needed to concentrate. He shifted to his fire form, which he supposed was ironic. Turning into a living flame in order to figure out how to extinguish fire?
The knight took several swipes, rather ineffectively. Tom winced; the knight’s sword had started glowing differently. It was figuring out how to hurt his fire form. Fair enough; Tom almost had it. He concentrated on the Rod of Tommus and the Fire portal. He became one with the Fire, one with the portal. Yes, that was it.
Tom rematerialized and grinned at his knight. He swung the Rod of Tommus at it, imagining the Rod as the hose of a vacuum cleaner. He fully channeled the Fire portal, willing it to return Fire from the knight back to the elemental plane of Fire.
Wham! The Rod struck like a mace once more, but with far more impact. Ice crackled across the knight’s armor. Tom grabbed the Rod of Tommus like a baseball bat, willing it to suck as much Fire as it possibly could, and struck again. Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! He completely ignored the knight’s strikes against him. He let himself be hit, he took the damage. He wanted only to concentrate on sucking all the energy from the knight.
With each blow, he imagined the electrons orbiting the knight’s atoms relaxing, going to a lower, colder energy state. Wham! Wham! The knight’s armor was turning a dull gray all over. No more purple blackness. It was taking him a while to get the hang of this reverse Fire. It was different from cold fire, but not that different, if he really delved into the mechanics of each.
Wham! Wham! CRRRAAAAAACCCCKKKKKKKK!!!!!
The knight suddenly shattered like an ice sculpture. No giant gusher of energy, no explosion — it just shattered and then vanished. “BWAH HAH!” Tom shouted at the top of his lungs. He plunged the bottom tip of the Rod of Tommus into the ground and reached to the magma tunnels, to the DoomNet. While the others continued to battle the knights, Tom focused on pulling flame through the DoomNet to the Fire portal. He focused on the cold rune, imagining it traveling through the DoomNet. Tom began chanting the cold rune over and over at the top of his lungs.
A deep chill suddenly fell over the battlefield as the temperature began dropping fast. As he gained confidence in removing Fire, he upped the mana-draining net. He was going to suck any excess mana away from his enemies as well. He needed all energy to go. Anything the knights could use to focus chaos.
If he was doing things correctly, the DoomNet would not only be draining excess mana that was generated or released, it would be draining Fire. Actually, it should be draining fire even more effectively, since it would suck up all the Fire that was present in the region. That meant it should be draining the knights of Fire. He himself was actually getting cold. Given that he was a demon, he should not feel normal cold any more than he felt heat. He was therefore reasonably certain the reverse portal was actively draining Fire and energy. Draining chaos.
The rain that had been falling suddenly turned to sleet and then to snow.
“Holy shit!” he heard a D’Orc yell. “It’s snowing in the Abyss!”
There, finally. Tom had the portal completely reversed. By default, it would have drained Fire from the entire DoomNet, but he worked feverishly to restructure it. He wanted to focus the Fire drain to this region so that it would drain faster.
Lesteroth’s current D’Orc stopped ripping his right wing off in order to try and grab the snow that had started falling. Lesteroth used the brief lull to reseat his wing. Ouch! That hurt, but it would regenerate faster this way.
Lesteroth glanced down to see Talgorf sticking his tongue out, trying to catch snow on it. His D’Orc had also stopped squashing the smaller demon under his hoof to stare at the snow. All around them, D’Orcs and demons were stopping in amazement at the snow and the rapidly increasing cold.
It was suddenly a very cold day in the Abyss. Everyone knew to expect amazing things when the Abyss finally froze over. Of course, no one actually thought that would happen, but it seemed to be what was going on. Lesteroth laughed, looking at the snow.
“Wah hhabbaahnning?” came Bellyachus’s voice from a few feet over. “Asz gold!”
Lesteroth wondered why the demon’s voice was so muffled, but looking over, he quickly understood. Bellyachus’s D’Orc had shoved the demon’s head up his own butt. It looked to be a very uncomfortable position for Bellyachus, but it did explain why his voice was muffled and why he couldn’t see what was going on.
VOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!!!!!
Sekhmekt killed her second knight, but no explosion happened this time.
“That is pretty impressive,” Lesteroth said.
His D’Orc tormentor nodded in shared amazement before hugging himself. “It’s damn cold here,” he complained. Lesteroth had to agree even as the snow turned to painful shards of ice, slicing at his skin.