Zanma wanted to mutter “never again,” but he also knew well that this was, overall, a minor bump in his journey. To his relief, his next destination, a fishing town built next to a rare lake of water-adjacent coolant, was exactly as uneventful as he had hoped. Well, aside from a small incident involving the town’s sole evolver, a fish-like Eater, who still thought the War for Axis Fulcrum had not ended, and mistook him for an enemy combatant. The misunderstanding was resolved rather quickly; somehow the fishman accepted Zanma’s insistence that he was not a combatant and that the war was over. The fishman refused to accept the second part, just brushing it off as Zanma not knowing anything due to his young age. In the end, Zanma managed to turn the situation around towards a peaceable trade, exchanging some small things for a few interesting trinkets from the fishman.
Several days and hundreds of kilometers later. Night time. The first proper camp-site in quite some time, at one end of a broken over a bottomless chasm. There was, allegedly, a cargo tram to cross the gap, but the wait time was over a day, and so he had nothing to do but wait.
Zanma inspected his gun, that unwieldy thing shaped like a square rod with a grip and trigger glued on. It was large for a pistol, and had the raw power to blow a man’s head clean off in the manner of large-caliber c-prop pistols, but it still stood at the absolute bottom of true accelerator weaponry. A mere Type-1.
In the eyes of true evolvers, it was just barely a real weapon — more of a range toy, or a tool for disposing of pests, be they four or two-legged.
But there was something many didn’t know, even those who wielded these guns. Eighty percent of a Type-1’s operational mass was made up by the power supply — this was why his Hollow Men’s rifles had gone up in flames so readily when Gokaku shot them. The rest of the mechanism was so small it could fit into the space of a pen. This, among others, was a common design trick. Historically, stripping cheap personal weapons down to their bare minimum functional components and stuffing your puppets full of them brought about good results so consistently that even Old Taisei, ever the traditionalist, had considered it a boring, safe choice. The fact it was so widely considered a boring choice meant that a great number of puppetmasters scorned it altogether, or implemented these accelerators only begrudgingly, almost as an afterthought — usually on the head and as “spotting weapons” next to the puppet’s real armaments. This, in turn, made them less common than they ought to be. When one met a puppetmaster, they didn’t expect someone who actually used all the recommended techniques and followed all the best practices. Puppetmasters were, after all, still artists, and they all wished to be unique, even if they didn’t admit it out loud.
Simply deciding to incorporate compact, energetically cheap, low-output particle accelerators as support weapons as often as he could didn’t make him an exception by any means. He was, in some way, exceptional for following best practices far more closely than others, but he had his own tricks. This trick in particular was likely the most unorthodox thing he had ever done — he would apply the aforementioned accelerator doctrine to his own body, stepping onto the path of self-modification so often trod by puppetmasters who specialized in the Puppet Body Art. Rather than use a pistol as a sidearm, he would turn his actual arm into a pistol, in such a manner that it would be undetectable. Grafting weapons to yourself wasn’t unheard of by far, but they were usually noticeable; there was no hiding a rocket launcher or a blade coming out of your arm, or a particle beam in your eye socket. This was not a flaw, it was by design, because the trade-offs to making a weapon truly stealthy were too great. The current paradigm of “unseen when folded away, very visible when in use” was a natural middle ground.
If all went well, Zanma’s implanted accelerator would be undetectable, and even when fired, it would be extremely unlikely to be identified as a particle accelerator.
It turned out to be a matter of quite some searching, but Zanma managed to find a fully organic Type-1 model, on sale for far more than it rightfully ought to be, due to its status as a curiosity. A gruesome thing of yellowish bone and reddish flesh, resembling the spine of some nameless beast. Nonetheless, he had bought it, and with some regret, he stripped the accelerator organs from its synthbone shell, replacing them with full-synthetics so as not to kill the living weapon. As long as the power supply held up, it wouldn’t need feeding or anything of the sort. A gun that didn’t shoot didn’t exactly use up much energy. With some elbow grease, it would not be too difficult to later upgun it to a higher classification, perhaps as the main armament for an organic puppet… But the main goal of his search had been that organic accelerator module. A synthetic, and thus easier to source model would have worked just as well, but it would have been somewhat inconvenient, detectable by burst scanners, and it would have required a more specific implantation site to avoid impairing his range of motion. Without having to subject himself to any great deal of pain, he was able to implant the organic accelerator directly into his arm, into the free space where several of his wrist-bones had once been, such that it would fire out of the heel of his palm. His wrists, of course, had given out at one point during his apprenticeship — a common repetitive strain injury that would have healed on its own, but he had been next in line for wrist remodeling anyway, so the master had made an exception. From the outside, it looked the same, the only hint was an extended range of motion.
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Unlike ballistic or otherwise cartridge-fed firearms, the only thing that separated a Type-1 from a Type-2 was an acceleration loop — 95% of all Type-1s were linear accelerators, so implementing an acceleration loop would immediately bump up his implant’s firepower. At this scale and grade, the acceleration time was short enough that it barely impacted the practical fire rate. That was the theory of it, anyway. The practical application was much more complex, but not beyond his abilities. An organic acceleration loop at the scale and grade he required had been something beyond finding — he had not been given any choice other than to source the component from a rifle-scale unit, then cut it down to size. Another eyewateringly-expensive purchase, relieving him of one of his precious polymat chits; at least the pain made it easier to sell the lie that he had far fewer chits than he really did, to dissuade any would-be thieves or scammers. The implantation process had been difficult enough to require some painkillers and a few purpose-built puppets to help with the cutting, but it, too, had worked out. The loop-docking apertures at the ends of his fingers were indistinguishable from normal skin pores.
All of this mattered for the simple reason that Zanma could now kill with a wave of his hand, and summon far greater killing power were he to bother forming a gesture. To anyone who didn’t know, this alone would elevate his status from just an evolver to a mysterious, foreboding presence with unexplainable abilities. The fact you could power an accelerator with your own psionic strength just didn’t occur to people. To protect his deception from more discerning eyes, Zanma resorted to arguably the least conventional weapon in his arsenal — a manual fragment from a foreign and unknown psionic discipline, one of several such pieces looking for a puzzle to fit into in Old Taisei’s collection. That technique was Exotic Particle Distillation, a method for dragging higher-dimensional particles downwards, energizing them to adjust their size, and stabilizing them such that they could remain coherent under the Soltern megastructure’s baseline physics, at least temporarily. It wasn’t difficult, just tricky, obviously a foundation stone for its lost paradigm. By Zanma's reckoning, distilling two exotic particles took slightly less effort than forming a single psionic thread, and maintaining them was proportionally easier than sustaining his threads. Using exotic particles in place of conventional ammunition didn’t have substantial performance advantages — it was, however, convenient, and most importantly, they weren’t recognizable.
A typical ammunition pellet came out as a thin line of light perhaps with some sparks or small arcs from the air being energized, and its only substantial noise was the weapon’s power discharge and the whizz of air resistance. Particle clusters were different and left a stronger “beam-like” wake, but they were still recognizable. Exotic particles were darkly iridescent specks, tinged red by Zanma’s psionic aura, streaking through the air with an unsettling, oscillating whine, and trailing such that their flight brought forth the illusion of a contiguous beam, though one distinct from conventional particle clusters.
In some ways, it was true that Zanma may have been better off choosing a Type-2 or even Type-3 to begin with, but the problem with these more robust models was that, in the absence of power limiters, their minimum power output sat far higher. Meanwhile, a quality, organic Type-1 could be overclocked to the output levels of a Type-3 or even Type-4 without any modifications to the accelerator assembly. The usual concerns of burning out or bursting the power supply or the circuitry didn’t factor in whatsoever, since Zanma was the one handling those functions through his own telekinesis. The diagnostic capabilities a psion had within his own body far surpassed anything you could reasonably find on a low-tier model, and anyone who went hard into accelerator modification would just get neural bridge bolts or straight plug cables because it was that much easier to deal with just knowing the gun’s status.
Now, it was true that Zanma could inflict similar damage to what his implant could do through the direct application of psychokinetics. It was true that, at his level, he could make a man’s head explode with a stare. It would swallow up concentration and stamina like a black hole, but he could do it, and that was the crux of the matter — the accelerator’s appeal wasn’t a matter of ability, but of convenience and deception. The implant made it an order of magnitude easier to project power up to a certain limit, and he could do so without having to marshal his mental energy for outward projection. Since all the power transfer took place inside his body, and the surge was well within standard fluctuations, there would be no possible way for anyone or anything to pick up on his intent to fire his weapon before he actually moved his hand. Even the gesture to complete the acceleration loop could be easily swept under the rug — from gesturing in general to closing the acceleration loop, he could just do both of them all the time, make people think it was a habit, that he spoke with his hands. Why wouldn’t he? He was a puppetmaster, and many people assumed puppetmasters had to wave their hands and move their fingers to physically yank on the threads, to the point that a not insignificant minority of puppetmasters really performed such gestures as a bad habit or for self-image.
In a situation where, say, he was up against a superior force of mostly Zero Phasers with a few evolvers near or at his level, he could use the accelerator to pick off the chaff or harass the commanders while keeping the bulk of his real strength free for puppeteering, direct psionic attacks, or self-defense. Combined with the truth of his extraordinary endurance, it would appear that he was inexhaustible.
To anyone who didn’t know what he was, and even to many who did know, the accelerator served to complete an impenetrable lie.
“How do we fight against such a man?” they would think.
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