Why would the charm against physical attacks work against a silver knife? Did it only look silver in the moonlight, while being made out of regular steel?
Or maybe the handle was wrapped in wood or leather and that was enough to activate the charm, so it was the handle that was deflected, naturally taking the connected blade with it?
What if it measured the movements of the user to determine if an impact occured.
Example modern smart watches can determine if someone has fallen and call emergency services with an accelerometer.
Maybe the logic was
- impact detected
- hostile intent detected (maybe via mana sense or some other mechanism) – counter atack to hostile intent.
Idk if this would work. Just a shower thought 🙃
A silver knife is simply a knife made out of a material only available in LN which lacks any mana. The charm against physical attacks blocks well… Physical attacks, this is anything between a spear created by a schtappe to a boulder filling on your head, so I don’t see why it wouldnt’t work with a silver knife
First of all there is the test that Bonifatius did. The piece of cloth he tried to cut with his transformed schtappe completely nullified the attack, rather than just refusing to be cut. WIth his monstrous strength, the stand the cloth had been lying on, should by all means have been broken, but wasn’t harmed… which strongly indicates that mana based attacks and items should not be able to even move silver cloth.
Second, we’ve seen Detlinde being hit by explosions from Ferdinand’s magic tools and not only not suffering the direct effect, but also not being thrown across the entire room into the next wall, which again quite strongly suggests that magical effects do not work on silver equipment.
Third is the ease with which the Lanzenavians are able to carve through the Ahrensbach knights. Granted, it is not impossible that they used exclusively poison and the three that attacked Eckhart and Angelica just so happened to have run out of poison and thus had to fall back on their weapons to attack them, but that seems quite unlikely.
And finally, even the guy who threw the knife was surprised it didn’t work. And while I can buy Rozemyne’s assumption that the attacker wasn’t aware that magic charms of this specific type existed, I doubt that with the proliferation of magic tools in Yurgenschmidt, especially rich greater duchies like Ahrensbach, he’d be completely oblivious about defensive magic tools existing in general. And yet he seemed quite sure that the silver weapons would be able to overcome whatever magical defenses the Yurgenschmidt nobles could throw at them.
None of the points is definite proof, but they do make a pretty strong case that silver equipment should not be affected by magical effects.
Now if Angelica had deflected it by hitting the flying knife out of the way with her hand, I would have no issue. She’s fast and precise enough to hit the flat side and thus get away without injury, even if it can go right through her armour. Likewise knocking it aside with Stenluke should be fine, since a mana blade has a physical core and is not just pure magic given form. But the charm activating seems a bit odd to me. It’s nothing that breaks the story or anything, but I would really like to have some answers here. Maybe one of the Fanbooks will have those in the Q&A section.
And Spoiler for the current pre-pub (3/8):
The silver needles go straight through any and all defenses, that the Dunkelfelger knights have, charms, highbeasts and mana armour alike.
That leads me to believe that either, the knife had only a silver blade, but non-silver handle and was never meant to be thrown, it wasn’t silver at all and just looked like that in the light of the moon, or the author made a little guff.
