Arkhalis

There is no blade to time and no arc to read. Holding the button parks a whirl of damage in the direction of your cursor, and that whirl covers a wide spread plus a short stretch behind you. Anything inside it gets hit far more often than the listed use time suggests, because the hit rate is governed by the invincibility frames it grants rather than by the swing. You do not aim this so much as decide which side of yourself the damage sits on.

Because it strikes constantly and wraps around you, it destroys enemy shots before they reach you. Goblin Sorcerers and Goblin Warlocks stop being a threat at all, and the same applies to anything else throwing destructible projectiles. In fights where the danger is incoming fire rather than bodies, holding this up is a defensive ability that happens to also deal damage.

The zone only pays out while the target stays inside it, so pushing things away costs you damage. Ruthless is the right call against pre-Hardmode enemies where the low base damage needs help, and Godly or Demonic once you are into Hardmode and want a little control back. Size and speed modifiers do nothing whatsoever, since the attack is not a real swing. With the push kept down you can hold most single enemies in place until they die, and things like Unicorns get locked in the air permanently.

The base damage is small but it carries flat armor penetration, which matters disproportionately on a weapon that lands this many hits, since armor is subtracted from every one of them. That combination is also why it feeds Titanium armor better than almost anything else: the shard burst triggers on hits, not on damage, so you get a near constant screen of shards adding damage and knockback of their own. Its wide angle makes it decent into worms as well.

It no longer comes out of Enchanted Sword Shrines. Those give the Terragrim instead, which is the same idea built for earlier in a run, and any world generated before that change will not produce either from its shrines. This one appears in Hardmode Treasure Bags in Expert worlds, Queen Slime excepted, so it needs the difficulty setting and a boss whose bag you have not opened yet.

Named after Arkhayla, who was a quality director at Re-Logic before she left, and modeled in both look and behavior on the Crissaegrim from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, her favorite sword. The tooltip about not getting it off a Schmoo refers to the enemy that dropped the Crissaegrim in that game. Wearing the matching bodice recolors the blur to your undershirt and widens it visually, though the hitbox is unchanged.