Meia couldn't get over how strange the masked woman's sword was.

A sword could be used to stab with a thrust, strike with a slash or cut with a draw. Thrust, strike and draw were the basic execution. Thrust, slash and cut were the results. Cutting did not mean how a blade drives itself into a material by force, but how a blade eats into a material by pulling or pushing.

As far as swordsmanship was concerned, one should not cling too tightly to individual terminology. A thrust was also a stab. A strike was also a blow. Every blade in motion cuts. So any thrust could also end in a cut. For some people, it wasn't even a thrust and a slash, but a shot and a chop. Guards were not always Guards either, but sometimes called Hut or even Leger. It was different from place to place. There were certainly general preferences, but there were no universal rules.

Thrusting, slashing, cutting - a bladed weapon was usually best at one of these three things. Among other factors, the center of gravity determined this. The closer the center of gravity was to the lead hand, the easier it was to align a blade tip with accuracy for a thrust and the less force was required to wield it, but the smaller the lever that acted on the physical force applied. The further the center of gravity was from the lead hand, the less accurate and more strenuous, but the more powerful a hit from a strike.

At one extreme were thrusting weapons such as the rapier:

With a rapier, the center of gravity was not far from the hand. Fencing was a feeling-out game. A fight between two fencers could last a long time. Stamina and precision were important, but physical strength was almost irrelevant. Meia's instructor had once said: "The rapier is the cat among swords." Above all, this meant that a sword was not particularly interested in what happened to its wielder. A sword with a broad blade compensated for mistakes and protected its wearer. A rapier did not. One wrong glance and you were dead.

Meia had never learned how to wield a rapier. She had no interest in learning either. For many reasons, the rapier was mainly a sporting weapon these days. A rapier did not require much physical strength, but fencing was not automatically a good sport for women. Muscle strength was speed. If you weren't fit, even an rapier couldn't make you fast. In fencing, it was often the reach that decided the fight, in other words height, which again gave the advantage to the men.

At the other extreme were chopping weapons such as axes:

With an axe, the point of the sword was in the head. The leverage on your own physical strength was enormous. If you only had a rapier, you didn't want to attack someone with a two-handed long axe, because even with a very good hit, the axe would still come down. In general, you didn't want to face someone who voluntarily carried a long axe. But that was certainly a different topic.

All swords were between the extremes, but where exactly depended on the requirements of the sword. The longer a sword was, the further away the center of gravity was usually from the hand. With a one-handed sword, the center of gravity was often a little more than a hand's width in front of the crossguard on the blade side, but that was only from Meia's own experience and not a general rule. In the best case, the center of gravity of a sword was set according to its wielder, the fighting style and the area of use.

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If you were to ask Meia to categorize the masked woman's tachi... That wasn't a sword. That was an axe.

Sure, it certainly was a sword, but it at least had the feel of an axe. The center of gravity was so far away from the hand that the tip wanted towards the ground.

~How is she planning to defend herself with that?~

Such weight distribution was a strong disadvantage in defense, as the leverage of a sword could be used against its wielder. In a last-minute and therefore rather static defense, it was better to try to defend low on the blade. With the masked woman's tachi, it was a must. But it didn't even have a crossguard to protect the hands. Even just holding it straight up was already difficult. The only thing this sword really allowed in defense were absolute parries.

An [Absolute Parry] meant that you broke through your opponent's attack and stance with an even stronger attack.

That sounded much easier than it was. And it didn't even sound that easy. Meia had never seen an absolute parry before. In fact, she had only heard about it in theory. You had to be much faster than your opponent. Your own attack had to be much more powerful than your opponent's. The masked woman's tachi was still a sword and not an axe. She didn't seem overly strong. It was a two-handed sword and she only had one arm. A wide attack with a lot of momentum was easy to predict and took forever. A walking closet, like Mr. Francis Monet, might be able to defend himself with an absolute parry against the masked woman, but the other way around - that was rather unlikely.

Ironically, Mr. Franic's Monet had the last time a relatively tiny falchion. Judging by their height, the two should swap. At this occasion: As Meia had learned from the beauties of the queen's personal guard, Mr. Franics Monet was often involved in warfare in Ceramare, mostly in house-to-house combat. At the moment, he was in charge of the palace. The upper floors of the palace were all wide and large, but the palace also had many basement floors with narrow corridors and narrow staircases. That was probably why he only had a small one-handed sword.

Modern swords were made from different layers of material with different properties to compensate for weaknesses. 'Hard on the outside, soft on the inside, doesn't break that easily'. However, this was a great simplification. Hardly any sword had only a core and mantle. Forging was a high art. Entire books were written about the structure of blades alone. Sharpened steel with a handle was not really true for a tachi either. Tachi were no less complex than other swords. This was also evident from the fact that the edge of the masked woman's tachi was darker than the rest of the blade. These were two different alloys that could be seen. Away from the edge, the outside of the tachi was made of hard silver steel. The blade had the typical sound and shine of silver steel and this was another reason why Meia knew that the tachi was expensive.

Meia called it silver steel, but she didn't particularly like the name. Alloys were compounds with metallic properties made of at least two elements, of which at least one was a metal. Steel was an alloy that, by definition, consisted mainly of iron and carbon, with the carbon content usually being less than 2%. But high-quality silver steel contained no iron at all. It consisted mainly of a metal called sireum. Accordingly, it was an alloy and not steel. However, the general public had never been interested in what the professionals had determined. Over time, the name silver steel became established for the sireum alloy in reference to popular weapon steels, so much so that it was even sold under this name nowadays. Meia only submitted to the general public because she didn't want to be a know-it-all.

Sireum was one of the most expensive weapon metals. The price was higher than that of silver. If the tachi had been made of simple sword steel, the bevel would not have been so steep because the durability would have been too low. But sireum made it possible. The tachi might have been heavy, but that was certainly due to its inner values. Sireum was hard and light. If you wanted a large weapon with a low weight that still had a certain durability despite its high sharpness, there was usually no way around sireum.

.../ End Part