Mazelton cracked his knuckles with satisfaction. He wasn’t too able to tell apart humans from animals or trees based on just the heat cores, but, on the other hand, he could say that human cores usually generated a given range of heat and moved around, so… good enough unless they came mixed in with a hoard of animals? And he could more or less accurately target things, regardless of whether he could see them with his eyes. His ability to physically aim his weapons didn’t magically improve, but it did a nifty job negeting concealment.

All of which was good, but he kept coming back to the issue of range. The heat weapons just had lousy range, at least the wussy ones he could make. Never mind rifles, a decent war archer could drop ten arrows a minute in a meter square at a hundred yards. Not aimed shots at that range and speed, of course, but the nice thing about being a war archer is that you usually had hundreds or thousands of friends around you, all shooting at the same range.

Didn’t matter if your weapon could one-hit-kill if you ate a half dozen arrows before you got into range. And the Collective did have rifles. Iron sights, thank Mother Moon, but still- one hundred yards wasn’t exactly marksman grade shooting.

The Nacon slave machines had gauss rifles. Or coil guns or some kind of damn electromagnetic slug throwers. Mazelton resolutely refused to think about that.

Stone god didn’t worry about range. It was bouncing energy beams all around and knocking things out of the sky like it was nothing. Stone god also had a heat core that pumped out a small sun’s worth of energy, so… not the best comparison. Still. Mazelton felt wronged. He had a black sun core, a really thorough understanding radiological warfare, and a near pathological absence of empathy. He could do better than this.

He drummed his freshly cracked knuckles on his knee. The dinner chat was still happily going- alright, not happily, even the career caravaneers were exhausted by this point of the journey. The desultory dinner chat was lingering on. Cookie’s cauldron was sitting on a heat stone, the caravaneers were huddled around a fire. Two different sorts of heat. The fire was a chemical reaction generating thermal heat, while the charcoal added infrared heat to the mix. The heat stone was, of course, just radioactive decay heating up whatever crap the manufacturer slopped together.

Hmm. How else to heat things. High energy radiation, the stuff with really tiny waves was the most obvious answer. Alpha, beta and gamma radiation, x-rays, that kind of thing. That stuff was excitingly nasty. When you started going the other direction, the energy required to do real damage got even more absurd. You had to stand in front of an almost impossible amount of radio waves to so much as warm your skin. You could use microwaves directly over the whole body, quite safely. Hell, the only thing that you would have to worry about is exposing metal to concentrated microwaves.

Mazelton stopped his fingers drumming. He was worried that if he thought about it, the idea would run away from him. He fished out a little unpolished core. So far, he had only tried to move around high energy radiation. But what if he didn’t want that? What if-

The little core started sparking, the shocks making it jump around on the stump he sat it upon. Everyone looked over at him.

“Nothing to worry about.” Mazelton smiled. Nobody believed him.

The next morning had that thready sort of coolness, twisting around the rising heat that told you summer wasn’t gone yet. Mazelton took a walk down to the river. A natural little shallow had formed, with a bit of an overhang from the bank. Mazelton could feel some surprisingly large fish hiding under there, swimming out to feed and darting back again.

Mazelton fixed the fish in his mind, keeping his heat sense on them. Not a hundred yards away, but… sixty? Seventy? A good long way. He wasn’t going to eat these fish. This was a sin. So be it. He would bear that sin, for his future family. He formed his hands into the tree of regret, then the held fist of calm resolve. His feet moved in the pattern of the executioner's bow.

With a long hiss of breath, he shook the fishes' cores. Mazelton let the energy flow from him in huge, languid waves. The cores jumped and sparked. So did the water around the fish. And the water in the fish. A second or two later, fish started flowing downstream, belly up. He called back his heat, sweeping up the minute traces of heat lingering in the water, washed down from the mountains. It was a tiny trace of energy, but it was there. He could recharge his core just from the flowing river, if he was patient.

Mazelton smiled. At long last, he had an uncounterable weapon that he truly controlled.

Well. It was counterable. Air strikes, for example. But the Nacon would be fucked, and that counted for an awful lot. Mmm. What was the range of artillery? Cannons could go as far as a mile, right? Or at least a kilometer. Proper field artillery… forty miles? More? Naval guns could shoot even further, right?

Alright, not going to worry about that. Raiders and people with small arms would just fucking die, and that was going to be good enough.

It was interesting. Harvesting heat from the river like this. He knew it was possible to passively collect ambient heat, his new weapon did it. The stone god did it. But for some reason, he hadn’t been doing it. He was still in the habit of actively drawing in heat and polishing his core. But that’s not what his core was like anymore, was it? No longer just a reservoir, but a whole water cycle. He gently, carefully, started letting the heat cycle through him. The amount of ambient heat was next to nothing, which is to say there was something there. A steady, tiny trickle. In time, just how strong would his core become?

Oh, wait a moment! If he could project the whole range of the spectrum…

Mazelton went down to the river bank, and found a sodden bit of earth. He vibrated the water molecules with microwaves, letting it turn into a rising mist. Then in the mists, he traced the light-lines that had charmed the glittering souls of Old Radler. He danced in his mist, letting his lights linger in wonderful patterns. For a glorious moment, he was back in the mists, he was climbing the ziggurats and glass towers, spinning around with the young and beautiful, mystifying them and losing himself in their charms. For a glorious moment, the Hurricane Lilly spun his magic, just for himself.

The moment ended. He let the mist and light drop. He was no longer the Hurricane Lilly spinning through Old Radler. He was someone else now. Still Mazelton. But someone else.

A young man was staring at him from the edge of the woods, a wet stain spreading across his crotch. Mazelton smiled, and raised one finger to his lips.