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

Begin by learning Battle Meditation, invoking 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

Next learn to listen to the Edge Song. Hearing a resonance given off by sources of lethal intent, allowing the trained to visualize the area and path of a blade or bullet, or similar effect of incoming harm, as well as the position and projection of those who bear killing intent. You can sense killing intent from 100ft away x2/rank. Accuracy of projections scales, but it's less a full visual and more an instinctual knowledge. Sensing killing intent is passive, Edge Song itself is added to Battle Meditation. You can train to hide killing intent of your own.

Rank 3

Advance to the techniques of the Blade Hymn. Listening to the resonance of your own weapons and pairing them with your own resonance to amplify them. This increases cutting power and the resonance can interfere with Edge Song's detections. Cutting power is doubled, which quadruples with each rank past 3. You can fling this resonance to cause cuts that penetrate deeper than the weapon itself. A bullet might have the area of a cannonball, a blade may bite as deep as a lance. Your swing may propel itself to cut within an extra 5ft, likewise x4/rank past 3. With the technique of Blade Dancing, you can imbue the resonance instilled into your weapons with an intent that allows you to amplify and direct kinetic motions by charging it in the first place with a directed motion. Doing a spin before a swing for example will actually do something for you, turning what would be a normal swing into a veritable guillotine. Adding a curve with the shot of a firearm could curve the bullet with an infused motion being conveyed into the bullet to defy physics.

Rank 4

Mastering your Battle Meditation & Edge Song, you are always considered to be within the state of Battle Meditation unless you, as an inversion, takes mild concentration to deliberately tone it down. Your battle meditation's harm sense prediction merges with your Edge Song to create an effect called the Fore-Echos, a predictive modeling sense as though running several predictive simulations per second as though "echoes" of events yet to occur are impressed upon your mind. With your mastered Edge Song, you can wield killing intent itself like a weapon, projecting with great magnitude such that those who cannot hear the Edge Song will feel its presence as a tangible weight and an oppressive grip on their heart. Weaker beings may be struck dead, but with training you can just snuff out their consciousness for up to 24hrs. You can paralyze those of up to a rank less than you in Swordsinging, KO'ing those 3 ranks less. 2 ranks less and 4 ranks less respectively if they have Swordsinging ranks. Range of killing-intent-aura is equal to half your range of sensing killing intent.

Rank 5

Master your Blade Hymn & Blade Dancing. Infusing weapons with your resonance greatly reinforces them. Turn a butterknife as sharp as a razor and as durable as a steel beam. The tangible edge is only a reference on which you build the true edge formed of your resonance, still contributes but pales in comparison to your resonance itself. Turn playing cards into deadly bolts. Your Blade Dancing melds with your Blade Hymn to imbue your resonances with your intentions to create effect such as ranged slashes of resonance that curve or boomerang, or initiate some pre-set pattern, and you can "Charge" resonance by imbuing an effect with a pause, allowing you to do something such as creating an X slash with the first slash waiting for you to complete the second, and then the full X travels forward as you preprogrammed. When you preprogram a slash it can have a range of up to 5 miles of movement, whatever its path. With this advancement in mind, you gain the ability to imbue yourself with the same manner of resonance to allow you to execute similar "preprogrammed" movements and techniques at a far faster speed than you would be capable of doing so yourself, and with a potentially more exact level of precision and timing. To the average person, this may look like teleportation but the skilled or perceptive may react, and is countered by other Swordsingers with an advanced Edge Song keeping Swordsingers on par with each other. For reference, a Blade Dancing preprogrammed technique can make you flicker across a football field in 1 second.