Blade-bound

**Blade-bound** are warriors whose training and link to their weapon grants them superhuman abilities. Although not bound by conventional physics, they are not considered magic, instead being classified as pseudomagic, like the Elon Garr or Void.

## Social Role

Blade-bound are relatively common. A blade-bound is typically included on five-person fireteams teleporting into dangerous situations such as Fireteam Blackheart. They are also the only (pseudo)mages sometimes found in the ranks of the Golden Cete.

Quills claimed of his fellow blade-bound that "our oath is our word".

As part of their graduation, a blade-bound must go up against a group of archers, deflecting their arrows until you reach them. However, they are allowed to choose how many archers to test themselves against.

## Abilities

Blade-bound can enhance their blade to display abilities such as slicing through steel with seemingly mundane weapons and slicing people in half. A sufficiently advanced blade-bound can render their bound blade infinitely sharp, allowing it to cut through inviolable materials and parry other infinitely sharp blades, although not rendering the blade itself entirely inviolable. Cutting through metal requires a blade-bound to be exceptionally skilled.

Absurdly skilled parrying is a signature of the blade-bound, including deflecting at least moderate numbers of arrows with ease, and parrying bullets even at low-to-mid levels. Sufficiently skilled blade-bound can fend off entire armies of skilled archers, and their parries can cause enough wind to deflect clouds of arrows. Liquids, gasses, and explosions are known to present a weakness of this technique, even at the highest levels.

They can only bond to a single blade at a time, but it is possible to bond to an entad blade which splits into multiple blades.

As pseudomagic rather than true magic, blade-bound abilities are available in the Hells.

## Game Mechanics

Within the Game layer, there are a series of Virtues tied to the Parry and Two-Handed Weapons skills that emulate the abilities of the blade-bound:

* **Nascent Blade-bound (Two-Handed Weapons lvl 10 + Parry lvl 10):** Unknown effect.
* **Neophyte Blade-bound (Two-Handed Weapons lvl 20 + Parry lvl 20):** You have unlocked the ability to bond with a melee weapon, given a few minutes of meditation. You may only bond with one weapon at a time. When wielding a bonded weapon, double your effective skill with it, double your chance to parry, and you may cut with it as though it were twice as sharp.  The Neophyte Blade-Bound Virtue's promise to "double your effective skill" with your bonded weapon does not appear to grant Virtues.
* **Combo Virtue, Journeyman Blade-Bound:** You have double the effective attributes for the purposes of skills or checks related to using your bonded weapon. If your bonded weapon is a rate-limited entad, double its rate; otherwise, double the entad effects, if beneficial.
* **Combo Virtue, Master Blade-Bound:** While using your bound weapon, you gain a multiplier to speed equal to one twentieth your skill with it, to a maximum of five times faster. You can be one degree less reasonable when determining what you can do with your bonded weapon, including entad effects or properties, if it’s an entad.
* **Combo Virtue, Grandmaster Blade-Bound:** Your bonded weapon is infinitely sharp (unless it is sheathed). It is capable of cutting as though it were a two-dimensional plane for the purposes of friction, but as though it were any acute angle of blade for the purposes of separating cut material. Your bonded weapon can cut inviolable materials.

Also relevant are the Parry, Two-Handed Weapons, and possibly One-Handed Weapons virtues. Whether the Game Layer allows for blade-bound with one-handed weapons is unknown. Juniper speculated that there were at least three or four skills tied into the blade-bound "package".

* **Parry 20, Prescient Blade:** You take half the normal penalty to parry bullets, arrows, or other missile weapons. These attacks still do damage to your blade as normal.
* **Parry 40, Prophetic Blade:** For the purposes of parrying, any weapon you have accessible is considered drawn, even when it’s sheathed. This includes improvised weapons. You can parry even attacks that you are not aware of. Once parried, you are aware of them.
* **Parry 60, Mass Parry:** You suffer no penalties for parrying multiple projectiles or attacks, no matter how many of them there are or how many directions they’re coming from, no matter how unreasonable this would be.
* **Parry 80, Reflective Parry:** When you parry a projectile, you can redirect it back at the attacker or source. Use half your parry skill as the attack bonus. The redirected projectile travels at half the original speed.
* **Parry 100, Godly Deflection:** You no longer suffer size penalties for parrying projectiles, objects, or attacks. For the purposes of parrying, what you consider to be a projectile, object, or attack is expanded by two degrees of reasonableness. Parrying never damages your weapon.

* **Two-Handed Weapons 20, Lunge Striker:** Eliminates the maneuverability penalty for all reach weapons. Eliminates the penalty for striking at close range with reach weapons. Allows you to more quickly cover ground when moving in short bursts and in a fighting stance.
* **Two-Handed Weapons 40, Heavy Swings:** Your attacks with two-handed weapons generate twice as much force, multiplying the energy put into them. This does not always mean that they will do twice as much damage, depending on the circumstances of the attack.
* **Two-Handed Weapons 60, Weapon Shield:** When using a two-handed weapon, you may block with it as though it were a shield, using either your skill in Shields or half of your Two-Handed Weapons skill, whichever is higher. This shield is not considered a parry, and does not interfere with normal use of the weapon.
* **Two-Handed Weapons 80, Thaum Breaker:**  Any two-handed weapon you wield is wardproof. When you attack a creature or object with magical defenses using a two-handed weapon, ignore those defenses.
* **Two-Handed Weapons 100, Total Commitment:** When wielding a two-handed weapon, you can choose to not use two hands, but rather, your entire body, spirit, and soul. If you choose to do so, you can take no other actions (including talking) aside from using your two-handed weapon (you can parry, but not dodge, and weapon shield, but not shield). If you stay in this state for two minutes of combat, you may make an attack that automatically succeeds, with maximum possible damage, and your selection of injuries from the injury chart. The two minutes must be continuous. You may leave the state at any time. If you attack in this way, you must wait one week to enter this state again.

* **One-Handed Weapons 20, Monkey Grip:** Eliminates the penalty for using a weapon of a larger than usual size, to within one degree of reasonableness. This applies to N-handed weapons as well, so long as N >= 1.
* **One-Handed Weapons 40, Riposter:** When you successfully parry an attack using a one-handed weapon, you can immediately make an attack without the usual combat penalties, and in half the time the original attack took, if that’s faster than your normal attack.
* **One-Handed Weapons 60, Off-handed:** When wielding a one-handed weapon, using non-weapon items in your off-hand(s) can be done as easily as if you had both (or all) hands available, even when this is unreasonable. This applies to shields. For the purposes of this virtue, pistols and other one-handed ranged weapons are considered one-handed weapons.
* **One-Handed Weapons 80, Diamond Blade:** One-handed weapons you wield never break or dull, even if they would do so due to magic, magical effects, entads, or entad effects, though they may still suffer other conditions and effects. Your one-handed weapons do twice as much damage when they hit.
* **One-Handed Weapons 100, One With the Blade:** Using a one-handed weapon, including moving while using one, never fatigues you. While holding a one-handed weapon, you will not feel hunger, thirst, or the need to sleep, though you may still accrue afflictions. While in a fight where you are using a one-handed weapon, you do not suffer the maluses for any physical injuries sustained, even if they would otherwise be fatal (though these attacks still do damage, and you can still die by dropping to 0 HP).

## Notable Blade-Bound

* Quills
* Juniper Smith
* Gemma Tails
* Onion Penndraig
* Uther Penndraig

## References

1. ↑ Participants were allowed pretty much whatever weapons and armor they wanted, but no magic aside from two entads of their choosing, a rule that would be enforced by wards and warders. The trial was to the death. Pseudomagic, like being blade-bound, was fine to use. - Chapter 189: B-Side
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 I took a few deep breaths to calm myself and went to work meditating on the spirit blade. Blade-bound, and the rest of the pseudomagics, worked in the hells, and I was going to take every advantage that I could get. With the spirit blade bound, which took some time, I was able to summon and dismiss it with a little more ease, and having it in hand meant that at least I had *something.* - Chapter 231: Hellfall
3. ↑ They had rifles and pistols for the most part, but one was carrying a sword, and he had a stance that let me know he was proficient. Blade-bound were relatively common, and his sword had the look of an entad - Chapter 159: The Dome Away From Home
4. ↑ “Assuming that you’d found the money in the budget to retrieve the key, what would that have looked like?” I asked.

Amaryllis frowned and knit her eyebrows. “There would be a series of advisors to develop the plan,” she said. “However, in lieu of that, and with the caveat that I might be missing something major … it would likely have been a team of five or ten, because that’s the increment the teleportation key applies to, three casters of different flavors among them in order to provide redundancy in getting back, plus one brute, possibly a caster himself, linked through the soul in order to take the hits himself, plus at least a single blade-bound warrior to scythe through lesser threats. They would have cleared forward to the facility, attempting to identify the threat and prepared to teleport back out if things exceeded their abilities, then depending on what they found there, they would have gone in and done their best to find the key based on the facility floorplans that they would have acquired ahead of time.” - Chapter 9: Making Magic
5. ↑ “Amaryllis, you’re certain that they’re all Golden Cete, there won’t be any surprises?”

“They sometimes have blade-bound in their ranks,” she replied. “We’ve seen how Fenn deals with them.”
- [Chapter 50]: Copse and Robbers
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 I hadn’t gotten any updates from the game about what was going on there, but those had all just been along the lines of the Golden Cete being defeated. There had been two about Golden Cete blade-bound, which was comforting, but we didn’t have a solid enough count of their numbers that I was confident they were all gone …

[...]
]“Where’s Fenn,” I asked, or maybe shouted.

“She was cut in half,” Solace said, resting her head against the rock. I felt a chill go down my spine. “Shoulder to hip, clean through, that made putting her back together easier.”

“Is she okay?” I said through gritted teeth.

“No,” said Solace. She coughed lightly. “I had to kill that blade-bound on my own. It cost me time. She’s lost blood, probably too much. I pulled her into the bottle, I’m more powerful there, but he cut through her shoulder blade, across half her ribs, narrowly missed the heart, through the hip, it was … not the worst thing that I’ve ever tried to bring someone back from, but if she survives it …” - Chapter 51: Blood in the Water
7. ↑ “You’ll stay with us, for now,” Quills said to me. “I am blade-bound; our oath is our word. But the caution you received, that we would make no special effort to keep you alive, that is also true.” - Chapter 13: Time Out
8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 “I can handle Fenn,” said Quills. He spoke loud enough that everyone would be able to hear him. “Graduation for the blade-bound involves advancing upon a number of archers, deflecting their arrows until you’ve reached them. I chose to go against five and made it through unscathed. Fenn, you know it’s in your best interest to see this play out. You gain nothing by wasting arrows I can easily turn aside.” - Chapter 14: ELEVATOR facts
9. ↑ Quills made the first cut by the weak light of Aarde’s Touch, slicing through the roof of the elevator. So far as I could tell, either blade-bound had absurdly sharp and durable blades, or they found conventional physics to be terribly unexciting. When a second cut followed the first, metal began to creak, and when his third cut came, the elevator lurched down. The section of metal we were standing on was peeled back by the tension of the cables pulling at their mounts now. Quills drew a sharp breath and aimed his blade. - Chapter 14: ELEVATOR facts
10. ↑ Once or twice I saw my probability blade take an actual shape, clashing against his to parry him, and that really shouldn’t have happened, because my blade was infinitely sharp. The obvious conclusion was that *his* blade was infinitely sharp as well, and the scrap of mind I had, which was lagging behind the actual combat I was doing, could see that was true from the way the blades slid against each other for those fractions of moments that they touched. [...] Onion’s sword could cut my inviolable armor, which meant that he had the capstone blade-bound perk, or something like it. - [Chapter 190]: To Know One's Onions
11. ↑ I had other swords in Sable, of course I did, but I wasn’t bonded to them, which meant that I wouldn’t get the benefits, which meant that if we went sword-to-sword, I would almost certainly die. The place where he’d cut into my armor showed no rust at all, and I swore at what complete bullshit it was that my sword wasn’t actually inviolable like my armor was. - Chapter 191: Overwhelming Violence
12. ↑  As a normal blade-bound, my sword wasn’t sharp enough to cut straight through metal, which meant that it was only good for the parry. - [Chapter 193]: Coda I
13. ↑ I had blade-bound quality parrying and at least relatively high dodge. - [Chapter 172]: Respec
14. ↑ “I guess we’ll find out,” said Fenn. Quill’s stance changed, his sword swung around to meet her arrow, and I ducked down behind him (whether through luck or some inkling of what was going to happen, I don’t know).

I guess Quill’s plan had been to bat the arrow out of the air and continue on, or simply outlast whatever was left in her quiver. Using a sword to hit an arrow in mid-flight was apparently part of his suite of bullshit sword magic, so that wasn’t as stupid as it might have sounded.

But when the arrow was ten feet from her bow, it split in two, and then in two again, and again, and by the time the arrows reached him there were five hundred of them. I was down on the floor, not being a lookie loo, so I didn’t actually see it, but in my mind’s eye his pupils dilated in dawning recognition of what was coming at him, enough that he could recognize what was happening but not enough that he could actually do anything about it. More likely, the arrows were going something like 150 mph and his synapses literally wouldn’t have had time to register it, even if his blade-bound powers might have been able to deflect it.

He collapsed to the ground, stuffed full of arrows, and I screamed out in pain, because you don’t fire five hundred arrows at a guy and not also hit the person ducking behind him. - Chapter 14: ELEVATOR facts
15. ↑ Simuryllis quirked her lips into a small frown, then moved her gloved hand slightly and made a gun appear in her hand. She shot me almost the instant it was there, but my blade was out of its sheath and up to parry, just in the nick of time, aided by the fact that the probability blade took the shape of the perfect weapon for the parry.

“Well, pistols are straight out, even with Sable,” said Simuryllis. “Was it the hand shape that gave it away?”

“Just instinct, I think,” I replied. “Otherwise we could hook up a prosthetic to a gun that would disguise what was coming out of Sable. But I’m a middling blade-bound right now, and I saw it coming, so … yeah, probably a no-go. There are other surprises to pull out though, and we might be able to put him on the back foot, just because he won’t know for sure what might come out.” I didn’t complain that she’d tried to shoot me, because even if she’d hit, I could pretty easily recover from a bullet to the chest. - [Chapter 189]: B-Side
16. ↑  There are also a wide variety of mages who are immune or resistant to gunfire, including pseudo-mages like the blade-bound. - [Chapter 145]: Freshman
17. ↑ The next attack from the darkness was with multiple blades, which I frankly found insulting, because a bladebound could parry bullets pretty much as a novice. - Chapter 191: Overwhelming Violence
18. ↑ “I’m talking about your skill as a blade-bound against my skill as an archer, so long as we’re not standing right next to each other, but maybe even then. My arrows are considerably faster than bullets. I’ve got the fire rate of an AK-47.”

“I’ve fended off entire platoons of archers,” replied Uther, giving her a skeptical look. “And these were skilled archers, not an army of fresh recruits.”

[...]

She drew again, let out a breath, then released, and this time, the magic of her bow multiplied the arrows as they went along, until they were a cloud of arrows by the time they reached Uther. From my perspective, it was happening pretty much all at once, and I only saw the end of Uther’s sword stroke, which had caused a burst of wind which knocked the arrows aside. He was still unscathed, but he was regarding Fenn more carefully now.

[...]

Fenn drew three arrows from her quiver and held two of them between her fingers as she nocked one. I had some sense of what she was trying to do, but didn’t see how it would be much better than the volley shot. She fired in quick succession, moving so quickly that I began to wonder what her punches must be like, if she was capable of using her muscles like that. Uther parried still, but not with a single big swipe. Instead, he just moved the blade very quickly, parrying one, then the other, and dodging the last with a motion that he’d started in the middle of the first parry. [...] “I was hoping that doing them like that they’d be fast enough that he’d miss one. The first arrow was slow but the others were faster, so they should have gotten to him at the same time. His big swing of the sword was slow too, so he couldn’t use it, and no matter how fast he can parry, he shouldn’t be able to use his sword to block all the arrows if it’s physically impossible for the blade to get in the way of all of them.”

[...]

Whatever she was doing, what I saw was rapid shooting, two volley shots speeding at Uther and three arrows, one between the volley shots, and the other two after.

Uther swept his sword through the oncoming arrows, against both volleys, and I could immediately see what Fenn had been trying. If the duplication slowed her arrows down, she was hoping to hide a fast arrow among the slow ones, camouflaging it. It was the kind of thing that made me think maybe she *was* the best archer in the world, if that’s what she was capable of.

It also seemed like some anime bullshit.

And still, Uther was standing there, surrounded by duplicated arrows, most of them cut in half, without a scratch on him.

“Turn around, so they can see,” Fenn called to him.

Uther frowned, but did as he was told. I was shocked to see an arrow sticking in his left calf, especially because it must have entered from exactly the opposite direction from where she’d been shooting.

“How’d you do it?” he asked as he limped over. “I haven’t been hit by an arrow in a decade.”

“I bounced it off the back wall,” said Fenn.

- [Chapter 241]: Long Shot
19. ↑ “We could put in a cup of acid to throw at him,” said Simuryllis. “Liquids, gasses, and explosions are supposed to be difficult for blade-bound to parry.” - [Chapter 189]: B-Side
20. ↑ Both of the Onions saw the weapon just as it came out, and moved away from the nozzle as I held it down, ducking away from the chlorine trifluoride. I managed to get both of them in the spray though, their parries ineffective (thank the gods), and the one on the right burst into flames straight away, then melted and dissolved into mud. The one on my left, the real one, made a change to his sword, causing it to be wreathed in shimmering frost, which attacked the fire on him. - Chapter 191: Overwhelming Violence
21. ↑ Gemma was the only one of them I hadn’t met, and the mystery of which of the fox Animalia’s weapons was blade-bound was resolved when I saw her smash them together, causing them to shift and warp before forming a long blade. - Chapter 112: Egress
22. ↑ Chapter 19: Montage!
23. ↑ Chapter 56: Vacation Vocations
24. ↑ The wording on Soul Symbiote was the same as on Blade-Bound, ‘effective skill’, which didn’t appear to grant new virtues - Chapter 80: The Princess and the Pea
25. ↑  I didn’t know how many skills were part of the blade-bound package, but two was the minimum, and it seemed likely that it was more on the order of three or four, based on what I knew blade-bound could do. - Chapter 56: Vacation Vocations