Sword Swallowing Thug?

[FireflyGuardian he/him]

I was having a conversation with a friend when he came up with an interesting idea, so I came here.

Could a Thug make a very successful career as a sword eater?

Say he makes custom, long but thin blades out of Pewter. As he swallows the sword, he actually flares and burns the sword as it enters his body, allowing him to stick ridiculously long swords down his throat. When the Thug pulls the sword up, the audience is astonished to see only the hilt remains.

I picked Pewter because it burns very quickly, but he would have to lower the sword down his throat slowly regardless, and because he might survive a slipup. A Mistborn would have a better chance with Duralumin, allowing them to burn the blade much quicker.

This is of course ridiculous, but would it work, even inefficiently?

[PanLin they/he]

13 hours ago, FireflyGuardian said:

This is of course ridiculous, but would it work, even inefficiently?

Yes it is, and yes it would, technically. As you say, someone burning duralumin could do it faster, but if you're a Mistborn I'd actually recommend you burn aluminum instead; the goal is just to get rid of the metal, and using duralumin to burn that much of anything repeatedly is a sure-fire way to get yourself hurt by becoming a pewter savant (and losing your sense of pain so much that you don't notice potentialy life-threatening wounds).

As for the technicalities, I don't have the Mistborn Adventure Game myself, but someone shared burn times in this Reddit thread, which states that a gram of Pewter burns in 5 minutes (and duralumin and aluminum are both instant, of course).

Some quick (and wildly speculative) maths:

• Swords for sword swallowing tend to be made of stainless steel and weigh between 600 to 900 grams
• Pewter is roughly 0.928 times as heavy as stainless steel
• If we assume a 600 gram stainless steel sword (taking a low estimate to account for the handle), an equivalent-sized pewter one would weigh 556.8 grams
• At 5 mins per gram, that would take 2,784 minutes (or 46 hours and 24 minutes) without flaring

The adventure game doesn't handle flaring in a linear way, so there isn't really a way to calculate that. It never seems to use metals more than twice as quickly though, so we can assume a maximum of 23 hours and 12 minutes (though it may be longer).

Disclaimer: I'm not a professional sword swallower; if anyone has any more accurate numbers, I'd be happy to rerun the math.

Second disclaimer: A lot of this gritty math probably wouldn't hold in a book, but it's fun to speculate.

Third disclaimer (whoops): For my first run of this, I wildly underestimated the weight of a sword.

Edited March 5 by PanLin
Redid the maths after further calcs below

[Treamayne]

3 hours ago, PanLin said:

(and duralumin and aluminum are both instant, of course).

They are not instant.
They burn fast (very fast) and cause other metals to burn at the same rate - but that rate is not "instanteous". We see that the very first time Vin burned Duralumin - multiple heatbeats of Duralumin+Tin occured before her Duralumin and Tin (and Pewter and Bronze) expired. It's even possible to not run out of metals when burning them, if the other metal reserve(s) is|are large enough - WoB: 

Spoiler

Kaymyth (paraphrased)

I asked the question about chromium vs a Compounder with both Invested and un-Invested metals in both their stomach and piercings.

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

What it boils down to is this:

1) Yes, the piercings will get burned off.

2) The non-Invested metals go before the Invested ones. He said that because Invested metals are harder to affect, it takes a little extra time and effort to get them to burn off. So a Leecher trying to clean out a Compounder would have to get a good grip and hang on for a few seconds.

3) Chromium burns about as quickly as duralumin, so if you're trying to burn off a lot of metals, it is possible to run out of chromium before your target is clean. This would probably only be an issue when dealing with larger pieces (like jewelry) rather than your standard metal-flakes-in-the-stomach deal.

ConQuest 46 (May 22, 2015)

Hope that helps

[PanLin they/he]

1 minute ago, Treamayne said:

They are not instant.

Sorry, I should've clarified—the RPG resource classes them as instant, which is game logic and doesn't necessarily translate.

You're absolutely correct, thanks for clarifying!

[Treamayne]

4 minutes ago, PanLin said:

I should've clarified—the RPG resource classes them as instant, which is game logic and doesn't necessarily translate

Yeah - MAG got a lot wrong. 

But, then, it started around WoA and was released with HoA timeframe so they did not have much canon material to work with.
At least it's not as bad as the AoL supplement where they "tried" a list of twinborn (that looks more like a committee with zero communication skills)

Also - House of Ashes . . . (shudder)

[Qianweilian He/him]

3 hours ago, PanLin said:

As for the technicalities, I don't have the Mistborn Adventure Game myself, but someone shared burn times in this Reddit thread, which states that a gram of Pewter burns in 5 minutes (and duralumin and aluminum are both instant, of course).

That doesn’t make a ton of sense. I don’t have TFE right now, but as far as I recall, the pewter drag Vin and Kel did was around 20 hours of continuous burning. Given the average density of most pewter alloys, that’s about 33 cm^3 of pewter. 33 cm is about a foot, so Vin and Kel would have had to consume a 1 ft^3 of pewter. It makes even less sense when you consider most allomancers use vials with some metal flakes in them. Pewter would be near useless considering its fast burn time.

[PanLin they/he]

9 hours ago, Qianweilian said:

That doesn’t make a ton of sense. I don’t have TFE right now, but as far as I recall, the pewter drag Vin and Kel did was around 20 hours of continuous burning. Given the average density of most pewter alloys, that’s about 33 cm^3 of pewter. 33 cm is about a foot, so Vin and Kel would have had to consume a 1 ft^3 of pewter. It makes even less sense when you consider most allomancers use vials with some metal flakes in them. Pewter would be near useless considering its fast burn time.

Well I'm going to start with a disclaimer that the books obviously trump everything else. I'm using a few different sources to try and answer a very hypothetical question.

That said, 1g of Pewter (for a 5 minute burn), at a density of 7.2 g/ml, is about 0.14 ml, which can very easily be stirred through a small vial of liquid for easy consumption.

To burn for 20 hours, one would need 1 * (60 / 5) * 20 or 240g, which comes to 33 ml.

Even if we assume flaring doubles that usage and they flared the whole time, that's still only 66 ml of metal.

Vin and Kel had backpacks full of Pewter for that run iirc, so that's easily doable.

Actually, now I'm running the numbers, it feels like the RPG doesn't make Pewter burn fast enough 

Edited March 5 by PanLin

[Duxredux he/him]

Really, what you want is an Aluminum Gnat. Burns all reserves away, including the Aluminum (according to the Coppermind), and the sword looks right. Even the Savantism doesn't look too problematic.

Spoiler

Douglas

What benefit does an aluminum savant get? Yes, I know this would normally never happen because aluminum burns itself up. Suppose a mad scientist with a willing Mistborn test subject shoved a feeding tube down the Mistborn's throat to pump in a continuous stream of aluminum, replenishing it steadily so there's always a new unburned supply. Add another tube to pump out excess water if necessary. What would he discover? Alternatively, what would Sazed with his Shard-granted knowledge know?

Brandon Sanderson

Ha, that IS a little silly of a method. However, on the extreme end of aluminum, I have in the notes the possibility of cleansing the spirit of unwanted effects of other Investitures. You'd get really good at this, and maybe even be able to cleanse the body of other impurities.

17th Shard Forum Q&A (Sept. 27, 2012)

Whoops. @PanLin already suggested Aluminum but not in detail.

Edited March 5 by Duxredux
Reread earlier posts

[Clarkmon22 He/Him]

On 3/5/2026 at 5:10 PM, Duxredux said:

Really, what you want is an Aluminum Gnat. Burns all reserves away, including the Aluminum (according to the Coppermind), and the sword looks right. Even the Savantism doesn't look too problematic.

  Hide contents

Douglas

What benefit does an aluminum savant get? Yes, I know this would normally never happen because aluminum burns itself up. Suppose a mad scientist with a willing Mistborn test subject shoved a feeding tube down the Mistborn's throat to pump in a continuous stream of aluminum, replenishing it steadily so there's always a new unburned supply. Add another tube to pump out excess water if necessary. What would he discover? Alternatively, what would Sazed with his Shard-granted knowledge know?

Brandon Sanderson

Ha, that IS a little silly of a method. However, on the extreme end of aluminum, I have in the notes the possibility of cleansing the spirit of unwanted effects of other Investitures. You'd get really good at this, and maybe even be able to cleanse the body of other impurities.

17th Shard Forum Q&A (Sept. 27, 2012)

Whoops. @PanLin already suggested Aluminum but not in detail.

If I had a nickel for every time this WoB came up in conversation... I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's strange that it's happened twice.

[First of the Tide He/him]

On 3/4/2026 at 9:57 AM, Qianweilian said:

That doesn’t make a ton of sense. I don’t have TFE right now, but as far as I recall, the pewter drag Vin and Kel did was around 20 hours of continuous burning. Given the average density of most pewter alloys, that’s about 33 cm^3 of pewter. 33 cm is about a foot, so Vin and Kel would have had to consume a 1 ft^3 of pewter. It makes even less sense when you consider most allomancers use vials with some metal flakes in them. Pewter would be near useless considering its fast burn time.

Erm actually  33 cubic centimeters to cubic feet does not have the same conversion scale as centimeters to feet linearly. 33 cubic centimeters is only 0.00116538 cubic feet(2 cubic inches). Significantly more reasonable if I say so myself

(33 square cm to sq feet: 0.0355209) (33 linear cm to linear ft: 1.08268)

Edited April 9 by First of the Tide

[Nitpicking]

To visualize, 33 cm^3 is a stick 1 cm x 1cm x 33 cm. 1 cubic foot is a cube 1 foot by 1 foot by one foot. Visualize that and you'll see how much bigger the latter is.

[Deception He/Him]

Idk if I can post this in the Mistborn forum but it relates to the topic so i'm just going to hope I can.

 

You would make a much more successful career as a Radiant from Roshar, you could stab yourself full of swords and then heal from them while nobody looks, or LITERALLY CUT YOUR ARM OFF and be FINE.

[Frustration]

10 hours ago, Deception said:

Idk if I can post this in the Mistborn forum but it relates to the topic so i'm just going to hope I can.

While not technically spoilers, it's not a great idea to talk about other books here