Mage_914

Thanks for the welcome. I didn't mean that a charged hemalurgic spike would act as a shardblade. What I meant was, could you take an ordinary sword, or really any piece of metal (looking at you ballpoint pen), and use it to tear off someones soul, thus killing them. I was thinking either as a way of taking care of people with healing factors or as a way of making normally non-lethal weapons suddenly lethal. My reference to shardblades was more that shardblades cut the soul and any piece of metal, with the right intent can rip and tear a soul. Basically the thought was could hemalurgy turn any random metal object into a soul ripping magic weapon with only a little bit of mental gymnastics to justify your intent to make a spike. Like say you're in the middle of a battle and the other guy won't go down. You decide that he needs to die now so you use your spear to cut a small nick on his arm and while you do that you concentrate on making a spike. As you cut the spear absorbs part of his soul, killing him. I wouldn't expect it to make a viable spike but I assume given Ruin's intent that it wouldn't be good for the victim.

Thanks for the welcome. Personally the dart thing hadn't really occurred to me. I was thinking more along the lines of making normally trivial wounds suddenly deadly by using the hemalurgy to suck out someones soul. Basically turning a ballpoint pen into a makeshift shardblade minus the armor penetration. I don't think it's ever been said that you need a fatal wound to make hemalurgy happen, just that you draw blood. Like I said in the opening post though, it would depend on whether hitting the wrong bind point, or no bind point at all, would still result in Ruining the soul but a no good spike or if you actually need a bind point for anything to happen. Personally I feel like a magic system governed by the laws of Ruin would err on the side of destruction in almost everything, so it would make sense to me that spiking the wrong bind point would still kill the person, just not give you a spike.

I had a thought the other day and after looking around online I didn't find anything so I figured I'd ask here. Would it be possible to use hemalurgy in combat? I don't mean stealing someones powers and fighting with those, I mean carrying around a belt of disposable spikes that you stab people with to tear off pieces of their soul mid-fight. It would essentially be a more messy version of a shardblade but with the upside that if you hit the right point, either through luck or training, your just created a viable hemalurgic spike. The other bit upside being that you can use literally any piece of metal you get your hands on since the main ingredients to make a spike are just the metal and the intent to make the spike. I guess the real question up in the air on this is whether or not making a spike without hitting the right bind point will still tear a person's soul or if it will not work at all and simply stab them. If the former is the case then you essentially have disposable one use shard blades. If the latter is true then you could still potentially have a train hemalurgist martial artist who knows the bind points making spikes mid-battle and using them on themselves to power new stuff on the fly. It seems like theres some untapped potential here. As a P.S. can you guys think of any other unorthodox uses for Cosmere magic?