Cyclopean Towers

She took aim, took a breath, held it; and displaced the rock.

As the rock fell, a sinking feeling rose in her stomach.

Even from this distance, she could tell the rock was coasting just to the left of her target. She increased magnification to 200% and confirmed her fears; the rock tumbled, on course to miss by a hands width.

A heartbeat later the rock thudded into the ground with a small cloud of dust, obscuring her view of her target momentarily. She flipped her magnification off so she could get a broader view. Her target had moved off sun-side, obviously spooked by the rock that had appeared out of nowhere.

Mazo let out a breath, which turned into a sigh, and started scanning the ground to either side of her for another rock.

She had been experimenting with displacement in her downtime for a dozen spins, but she’d only managed a few direct hits. The Oracle laid out step-by-step lessons of course; with beginners’ tasks of stocking stones into cylindrical towers; whatever damn use that would be out here. It claimed that she should, with practice, be able to displace an object the size of her own head to a distance of 200 strides, comfortably.

So far she’d managed to hit a Scutter Bug with a pebble at a distance of maybe twenty strides, barely startling it. The one other hit she got was a fluke, bouncing off the back of a bug five strides away from her actual target. She had then worked out that if she sat in an elevated position to the bugs, and displaced a rock a little higher than that, then the rock should gather enough momentum to flip a bug.

If she managed to get it on target that was.

The oracle didn’t provide any advice on that.