Seasons

Swordsinging

Warlock | Body | Life | Mind

Swordsinging has various other names and localized variations skewing how it may be learned or expressed. Slayer. Aural Arts, Battle Aura, Sword-Saints. Swordsinging is a magical martial practice even the best of mundane martial artists can tap into to a small extent, more often in pre-history before the modern masquerade veiled old truths behind the veil of fiction and lore, such as King Arthur. It used to be a rare artform, but with the bridge established to the world of Stackhold, Swordsinging became more common as it could be better studied and understood.

Rank 1

Abilities:

Battle Meditation:

Invokes a state of awareness with minor precognition, sensing injuries a moment before they happen still requiring skill, reflex, and prediction to judge the nature and path of attack. Training with Battle Meditation more quickly improves your reflexes and fine motor skills, and you have disproportionate strength based on your will, rather than your muscle alone. You gain half a second of harm-sense per rank in this magic.

Rank 2

Abilities:

Edge Song:

Allows you to hear a resonance from sources of lethal intent, visualizing the path of incoming harm and the position of those with killing intent from 100ft away. It provides an instinctual knowledge of danger and allows you to hide your own killing intent.

Rank 3

Abilities:

Blade Hymn:

Listen to the resonance of your own weapons to amplify them, doubling cutting power (quadrupling per rank past 3). You can fling this resonance to cause cuts that penetrate deeper than the weapon itself, or propel swings within an extra 5ft.

Blade Dancing:

Imbue resonance into weapons with an intent that amplifies and directs kinetic motions. This can turn a normal swing into a guillotine or curve the path of a bullet to defy physics.

Rank 4

Abilities:

Fore-Echoes:

A predictive modeling sense that merges Battle Meditation and Edge Song, running several simulations per second as "echoes" of events yet to occur.

Killing Intent Aura:

Wield killing intent as a tangible weight that can strike weaker beings dead or snuff out their consciousness for up to 24 hours. You can paralyze those of up to a rank less than you. Range is half your sensing range.

Rank 5

Abilities:

Mastered Blade Hymn:

Infusing weapons with resonance reinforces them to be as durable as steel beams and as sharp as razors. You can turn playing cards into deadly bolts.

Mastered Blade Dancing:

Create ranged slashes of resonance that curve, boomerang, or follow pre-set patterns. You can "charge" resonance for delayed effects, like an X-slash that travels after completion. Slashes can have a range of up to 5 miles.

Flicker Move:

Imbue yourself with resonance to execute preprogrammed movements at extraordinary speeds and precision. This allows you to flicker across a football field in 1 second, appearing as teleportation to the average person.