Shikkaku Mon no Saikyou Kenja - Sekai Saikyou no Kenja ga Sara ni Tsuyoku naru Tame ni Tensei Shimashita - Vol. 6 Ch. 18 - The Strongest Sage, Traini…

[mahtan]

Wasn't it said that it was common to have 20 enchants in a sword in the Gaia period?
How come it is impossible to have 8 in one sword now?

 

[alannondarklord]

Iris is the cutest but Serious Ruri is seriously cute too.

 

[Kidawesome55]

@mahtan It was most likely a method they used in the past that allowed them to attach that many. It not said here but there's a limit to how many enchantments you can place on something depending on the material and magic stone. If you tried to go over the limit the material could withstand it would break. So most likely they had some kind of material that could hold 20 enchantments.

 

[flannan]

@GaryMahmud - The choice of weapon seems to be based on rate of fire. Second Crest mages like Alma's magic ability is most similar to bow. Use a crossbow, and it's too slow. Use a gun, and you can't enchant every bullet. And in this world, a user's personal magic power accounts for most
According to the novel,

Spoiler

guns were used only by low-powered combatants back in the old world, because they don't benefit from magic much. Of course, it's Gaias' idea of "low-powered", which is probably more powerful than what they are now, but the important part is, Gaias considers them not worth the time.

 

[Jinyo]

"Unlike swords you just need to swing the spear to attack."
This is the dumbest thing I have read this week.

 

[SotiCoto]

Enchantment, Enchantment...

ENCHANTMENT!

 

[definitionofinsanity]

@flannan

Use a gun, and you can't enchant every bullet

...Oh? Is that so?

Spoiler

Talk about a blast from the past, I remember watching this on Toonami. Back when it was new. Basically, Gene Starwind there with the fuckhuge gun that looks more like a grenade launcher is called a "Caster." And not because it casts something like plasma. No, no. It actually shoots (casts) magical bullets. Each bullet is enchanted with a spell and can be... ridiculously powerful. It's basically like writing a magic spell or circle and bitchslapping your target with it. At muzzle velocity. And doing so very, very expensively. (It was a running joke in the series how much the ammo cost to buy.)

 

[flannan]

@definitionofinsanity - those bullets were so expensive, the protagonist used, like, 1 per episode. Bow offers better rate of fire.
Apparently, each bullet was a hand-crafted enchanted object or something. You would not get far with expenses like that.

What I meant, was enchanting bullets as they fly out of a gun, like they do with arrows.

 

[definitionofinsanity]

@flannan

those bullets were so expensive, the protagonist used, like, 1 per episode

No, he used multiple ones. Including ones so powerful that they could kill you if you fired too many.

Apparently, each bullet was a hand-crafted enchanted object or something.

Yes, in their universe. Where spellcasters were RARE AF and making them was extremely difficult. Literally every person in this universe has magic, and 1/4 of them are dedicated solely towards the use of creation/production magic.

You would not get far with expenses like that

This dude in this manga is mining precious metals that are the kingdom's treasures and worth more than gold from what people that was an unbreakable substance with the help of a girl that makes swords out of the rarest and most valuable material on their planet for fun.

What I meant, was enchanting bullets as they fly out of a gun, like they do with arrows.

Isn't necessary to do so, as the manga has helpfully shown us:

Spoiler

Here Ruri magically enchants a whole QUIVER of arrows at once and then hands them off to Alma to use. You don't need to enchant something as it's moving out. And as for pouring mana into it when you use, which is what Alma does to enhance it, there's absolutely no reason you can't do that with a "Gun Like Object."

Bow offers better rate of fire.

Meh..
Not really...
Also? Firearms are easier to pick up and learn with than bows. Bows, even magical bows, require time to learn how to hit things with. And bows, especially non-magical real-world bows, require a ton of human energy and muscles to use that is very fatiguing after time. Alma said something about her bow being "light" so we can assume she meant draw weight, but that's still a very repetitive motion requiring muscles and she's currently the only one with a magical "superbow" like that.

At least with a gun, it would be relatively inexpensive and easy to make by comparison. It's just that the ammunition would be more difficult to manufacture. Which the bow ALSO has to deal with with arrows.

There is literally no way the gun doesn't come out on top of this. Well, except by the lack of imagination on part of the author/MC, anyways.

 

[Kaarme]

Even orc swords have a full tang. But then again, the fact this author presented only a stub tang in a sword shouldn't surprise anyone. Perhaps this highlights the incoherent situation in Japan in general: On one hand they worship their katana, yet on the other hand you need a bloody government granted permission to even own a sword. This undoubtedly contributes to a situation where, despite their love of swords, the Japanese people don't actually know anything about swords.

 

[Vincentius]

@Kaarme Oof. It's you who doesn't know anything about swords, my dude. Among those who actually know a thing or two about swords, "full tang" is the style of tang you find most commonly on kitchen or fixed-blade hunting knives, where the tang is the full width of the grip, conforming to its shape. A sword doesn't actually need that kind of tang; in fact, it can really screw up the balance and harmonics of the sword to have that much additional weight in the hilt. It's great for thrusting swords, such as the rapier or the earlier Oakeshott Type XV, but not so much for swords that need their balance point further towards the tip for the added acceleration in order to deliver the kinds of cut that can sever limbs. On these kinds of swords, it's really not necessary to have a tang more than half the width of the blade, tapering to about a quarter of that width where the pommel slots on.

Of course, that's primarily for European style swords. For Middle Eastern swords, it's actually fairly common for the tangs to be fairly stubby, as the hilts are more often than not made of cast iron or steel, with the tang being held in place by a medieval form of resin epoxy (the same stuff they used to make composite bows). Even the katana doesn't have a "full tang", even though its tang is almost as wide as the blade, and there's even evidence of older blades (15-16th century or so) have a tang that only extended for half the length of the tsuka (so anywhere from 4-6 inches for an 8-12 inch hilt).

Oh, and as a parting food for thought: the diagram shown on Page 20 is almost identical to the Japanese lamination method known as Soshu Kitae, albeit adapted to suit a double-edged sword rather than the single-edged katana. This is information that is freely available on multiple websites and easily searchable; hell, that particular diagram shows up on the Wikipedia page for Japanese Swordsmithing.

 

[Kaarme]

@Vincentius I'm not talking about the width but the length of the tang.

 

[Vincentius]

@Kaarme And that's my point: you have little idea of what you're actually talking about. Perhaps a visual aid will help. You seem to be referring to a hidden tang as a full tang, which refers to an entirely different style of tang. The overwhelming majority of swords throughout history have utilized a hidden tang and have been perfectly fine with it; an actual full tang is just overkill in most cases (though some, like the German langes messer, were constructed like that for legal reasons, since it meant the knife-makers guild could muscle in on the sword-makers guild's business without the latter having much recourse since, legally, they were selling knives).

More to the point, when it comes to the strength of the blade and sword itself, tang construction only matters because of how the sword itself is constructed: the guard slips over the tang and is held in place by the shoulders, the grip forces the guard to snug up more firmly against the blade shoulders, and the pommel locks it all in place... For European swords, anyway; others, such as the katana, use pins or epoxy in place of a pommel. Thing is, though, as long as the blade is securely attached to the hilt, you could actually get away with not having a tang at all, and there's some evidence for this among early Bronze Age swords of, I think, Celtic origin, but I could be wrong about that.

 

[Kaarme]

@Vincentius In the chapter the tang is so short that with the guard in place, there would hardly be even enough metal left for a pin to be used, Japanese style. The blade would fly on its merry way after a few strikes or the weapon would become some kind of weird sword flail. But sure, I can admit I did use the wrong word "full" there. That was my only mistake, however. I guess using one incorrect word means I know nothing in this black and white world of 2020. Such a sad era.

 

[Vincentius]

@Kaarme You must have also missed the part where I not only said there's evidence of early bronze swords being riveted to the "guard" and lacking a tang altogether, but also that a good number of Middle Eastern swords have push tangs held in by a form of epoxy; depending on hilt construction, a tang isn't strictly necessary. Is it better? Yes. If constructed properly, a tang also acts as a type of shock absorber, minimizing the hand shock associated with striking a solid object (and something most production swords get wrong, as I can personally attest several times over).

But it's not actually necessary if the sword is constructed with a smaller, or even non-existant, tang in mind. Rat-tail tangs are only as reviled as they are because they're constructed like normal swords, so all the normal stresses of the sword are placed directly on a thin, often shoddily welded on, piece of metal (I'd hesitate to even call it steel, half the time); you can definitely make a fully functioning, securely fastened sword with a rat-tail tang if you design it that way. Pop a pin through the guard and the base of the blade and the strength of the tang doesn't really matter overmuch anymore; it's just far more effort than it's worth to do it that way when it's far easier to draw out of the material of the blade into a tang during the forging.

I do apologize for coming across as aggressive as I did (aspiring blacksmith with 8-odd years of doing research and designing my own swords, so it's like calling a magazine a clip around a firearms enthusiast), the topic is more complex than "tang too short, Japanese are idiots who don't know swords". Of course, this whole topic is rendered moot by the fantastic existence of magic. With the kind of shit he demonstrates on a regular basis, Matthias could just as easily fuse each part together and not even bother with a tang at all... Which, considering his description is effectively magical forge welding, is probably exactly what he did.

 

[Kaarme]

@Vincentius I only attacked Japan because I pity them. They have such a rich swordfighting history, now known all over the world thanks to cultural exports, yet a bread knife is the best a Japanese person can reasonably own legally, since the permits are only granted for genuine Japanese swords of cultural worth. I mean, a random Japanese person who was visiting a friend of mine held a katana in her hand for the first time when I happened to offer her the chance. She had photos of herself taken holding it, no doubt sending them back home. How sad is that? But since Japan is a democracy, they could change that any day (or rather election day) they wanted to. But they don't, which is why I badmouth them in this one specific thing. Sure, it's out of the line (and I imagine if I stopped a random person from the street in my own home town, chances are they wouldn't even know what a tang is), but I just find the situation in Japan annoying and in contrast to how much attention swords get in Japanese media. The Japanese were also the ones who came up with the idea that a sword beats a gun.

Early bronze swords would be early swords in general, plus metal was extremely precious back then, so no doubt there would have been early smiths who thought putting metal inside the grip is a huge waste. They would still have also been affected by the culture of non-metal composite weapons. Who can say what such ancient people really thought?

You are right about magical means, of course. It's just hard to keep in mind.

 

[Vincentius]

@Kaarme I mean, it's not really different from the situation in England: rich history with swords that they pissed away to their government that one day decided it was illegal to own a katana without special licenses because some numpty attacked a lawmaker with one. And last I heard, they were contemplating banning and confiscating all knives because of how common they're used in crime.

I specified early bronze swords to differentiate from later bronze swords, which were typically cast as a (mostly) complete weapon, such as the Egyptian khopesh and later Greek falcata that really only needed grip scales to be complete. With earlier bronze swords, the mindset probably wasn't that different from working with copper and stone tools, when they would have just glued and/or lashed the blade to the length of wood they used for a handle.

One thing I think both of us also forgot to keep in mind is that manga's a visual media, so any mishaps would likely be on the artist, who probably has a deadline and could likely careless about how accurately drawn their sword is; it's something that makes trying to get an accurate representation of its dimensions a right pain in the ass, since it's a minor hobby of mine to take ridiculous anime swords (and movie swords) and redesign them into something functional while remaining as true to the original design as possible.

 

[gagegageha]

Filler, n idk why the hundreds of years old dragon is stupid 😅

And why spear??? Why????

There is this thing called Great Sword, Hammer, or Meteor Hammer, or Giant Club......... Why the heck spear????

 

[ExecutiveDirector]

This manga is just a series of ass pulls. No matter what, the MC just explains either how to win or why he won. It’s like YuGiOh before the game had rules.

It’s boring.