Crystal Weapon

The kind of diamond you should be afraid of being a girl's best friend.

Crystal is a popular material in fiction. Maybe because it's exotic, maybe because it's mysterious... or maybe just because it looks really cool.

Whatever the reason, it's common for important or magical items to be made out of crystal, and for these items to be used as normal despite crystals being essentially very pretty giant rocks. (And yes, we know that the scientific definition of crystal is broader than that and that among other things, snowflakes are also technically crystals, but the word colloquially only refers to the varieties of rock and 99% of the time the rocks are what are pictured when something is described as crystal.)

This leads to odd situations like a character swinging around a crystal sword without a care for its logically enormous weight or of the fact that there's a reason that rock weapons are very uncommon: they can be snapped very easily if pressure is put on their sides. Chalk the prevalence of these sorts of weapons made up to Rule of Cool (and don't even get us started on crystal bows...)

Compare Glass Weapon for another type of unrealistic weapon material, and Gemstone Assault for when the crystals aren't shaped into weapons but are still used as them.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Tenchi in Tokyo: Tenchi is given a crystal sword with six magical gems embedded in it. As he just wants to be normal, he takes the gems out and just gives them to his harem.

Comic Books

• Rat Queens: Facing the Flesher orcs whose skin is too strong for steel, Dee conjures God-tier crystal weapons to take them out.
• The Saga of Crystar, Crystal Warrior: Crystar and Warbow use a crystal sword and crossbow, respectively.

Fan Works

• Infinity Train: Seeker of Crocus: Yuri obtains a crystal sword after obtaining a crystal from the Crystal Car and having Blacksmith Pratt in the Toy Brick Car turn it into his weapon.
• The Rigel Black Chronicles: Leo owns a crystal blade that he uses when he's in a serious fight — and when he's really serious, he keeps his wand inside it. The crystal is enchanted for strength, and it even amplifies spells cast through it. However, since it's not a regular knife shape, but instead a triangular prism with a handle, it requires specific training to use effectively.

Films — Animation

• Kung Fu Panda 3: Kai uses jade to make both knives and "jombies" in the forms of dead kung fu masters. Thematically, this emphasizes his blasphemous nature, as in Chinese culture, jade is a sacred material and should not be used in combat.

Gamebooks

• Fighting Fantasy:
  • Creature of Havoc includes a crystal club that can defeat any enemy with one blow but shatters after being used. It happens to be the only way to defeat the Big Bad by destroying the portal to his Pocket Dimension.
  • One of the weapons you can obtain in Stormslayer is a magic Crystal Mace that does extra damage to enemies.
  • Downplayed in Sorcery!, you can obtain a Crystal Ball which is useful for players assuming the role of wizards, since crystal balls can be used for a spell to see into the future. But if you're playing as a warrior, you can instead use the crystal ball as a throwing weapon.

Literature

• Dune: The Fremen wield "crysknives" ground from the crystal teeth of Sandworms. Each is considered a holy weapon that shouldn't be shown to outsiders and mustn't be sheathed without drawing blood — and is an Absurdly Sharp Blade to boot. Curiously, crysknives will disintegrate when separated from a living being's presence unless "fixed" to prevent that.
• The Elric Saga: In the story "To Rescue Tanelorn", the Olab are reptilian creatures that wield large clubs. The clubs have discs a foot in diameter made of crystalline rock embedded in them. The Olab swing their clubs to fling the crystal discs at opponents.
• Liaden Universe: Val Con has a crystal knife made on an alien world by the Knife Clan of Middle River, which is nearly indestructible and has an Absurdly Sharp Blade. The Knife Clan is said to grow the blades in caves over a period of decades, with considerable care and attention required for them to come out with the required characteristics.
• The Lost Metal: Prasanva's Symbiotic Possession as an Aetherbound lets him create crystal items from the bud in his hand, including weapons — or, with enough power to call on, a twelve-foot suit of heavily-armed Powered Armor.
• Old Kingdom: Spirit-glass is the crystallized remains of powerful Free magic spirits. The shards are extraordinarily precious as single-use arrowheads or daggers, not for their edge but because they contain enough Wild Magic to destroy almost anything they strike, including creatures that are Immune to Bullets.
• Silver on the Tree: Will Stanton and Bran journey to the Lost Land to retrieve the crystal sword Eirias, which is necessary to fulfill the prophecy of the destruction of the Dark.
  "And where the Midsummer Tree grows tall, by Pendragon's sword the Dark shall fall."
• A Song of Ice and Fire: The Others, fae beings that embody Evil Is Deathly Cold, wield Absurdly Sharp crystalline blades that hold a faint blue glow and can shatter steel with their chill. Word of God is that they're transmuted ice.
• The Wheel of Time: The crystal sword Callandor is a major symbol of the Dragon Reborn, and is an indestructible Amplifier Artifact of terrifying power for good measure. Oddly, its design was deliberately flawed in ways that make it dangerous to wield and enable it to channel the Dark One's own power against him.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Weapons can be forged from "deep crystal" that's as hard as steel and can channel the user's Psychic Powers to deal extra damage.
  • The Thri-Kreen (or Mantis Warriors) are known to use thrown weapons and polearms with the blades made from a crystalline substance called dasl. Its origin is closely guarded secret, and a mystery for other races. The Dark Sun supplement Thri-Kreen of Athas reveals that dasl is created by mixing the thri-kreen's venomous saliva with sand.
• Stormbringer: Olab throw crystal disks at their opponents using a club-like launcher.
• Talislanta: The Gnomekin warriors wield shortswords made of crystal.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Crystalline weapons are fairly common among the various eldar factions.
    • Drastanta's Celestial Lance is a weapon of shining crystal that is nonetheless powerful enough to shatter the soul of its target.
    • One of the weapons used by Drukhari Wych cults is the Hydra Gauntlet, which goes on the forearm and contains a strange, semi-sentient extraplanar crystal. On the mental command of the user, they extend profusions of extremely sharp crystalline shards that can viscerally shred armour and flesh alike.
    • Harlequins use a number of weapons that incorporate psychically-reactive crystals in their designs. Prismatic cannons are centered around a shaped shard of psychocrystal surrounded by laser arrays, which produce and shape a powerful energy beam, while neuro disruptors consist of a gun's handle and trigger with a large piece of psychocrystal entirely replacing the barrel, which fires beams that bypass armor entirely and instantly burn out their targets' nervous systems.
  • Necromunda: Jakara and Matriarch Spyrer hunter rigs are equipped with sophisticated swords that have blades made from living crystal that are only a single molecule thick and constantly renew their edges when blunted.

Toys

• The Remco line of Crystar toys features the heroic Prince Crystar and his fellow crystalline heroes with appropriate crystal weapons versus Crystar's evil brother, Moltar, and his molten minions.

Video Games

• 9 Monkeys of Shaolin: Late into the game you can obtain a powerful jade-tipped mace called the Jade Cliff, which deals devastating damage on ghost enemies. It's also one of the strongest weapons in the game.
• Avencast: Rise of the Mage: Magic Staves come in a wide variety of materials, including solid diamond. Given that one of the magical disciplines uses the staff extensively as a melee weapon, it's fortunate that the game uses Unbreakable Weapons.
• The Bard's Tale Trilogy: Diamond weapons are the strongest equipment you can buy from a store. While they'll be outclassed by enchanted items you might find, because of class-based equipment restrictions they continue to be useful to the end of the game.
• Bravium has the Crystal Sword, the Emerald Sword, Emerald Axe and Crystal Hammer: all of them have less durability than the other weapons, but have nice bonuses: the first boosts your mana and mana regeneration, the Axe curses enemies and the hammer, while doing no actual physical damage, deals magic damage to a spread area, hitting multiple enemies and dealing massive damage to armored enemies and ghosts. The Weapon + Ice combo nets you a set of shield and hammer made of transparent diamond.
• Dark Souls: Crystal weapons are extremely powerful but have low durability and cannot be repaired by any means. Like most things crystal in the game, they are ultimately products of Duke Seath the Scaleless' research, who also invented several sorceries that temporarily turn regular weapons into crystals.
• Diablo II: A Crystal Sword is a fairly basic, low-leveled weapon that's rather frail. It's one of the first weapons that has six sockets available for buffs or other magical effects to be added on to it though, making it somewhat popular for strategies involving magic or runes.
• Dungeons & Dragons Online has a two-handed crystal sword named Terror, which can cast a spell three times a day, has the ability to inflict the "Nightmare" status condition on enemies, and forces opponents to roll a save against fear when it's used against them.
• Dungeon Siege has a set of mid-high-level crystal equipment that includes plate armor, greaves, gauntlets, and a helmet, as seen in this image◊. There is also a much lower-leveled crystal bow.
• The Bloodmoon expansion for The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and the Dragonborn extension of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (both set in the same place, two centuries apart) include a form of enchanted ice called "stahlrim". This can be used to create very strong armor and weapons. Since stahlrim is a form of ice, weapons and armor made from it have a special affinity for frost-based enchantments.
• Final Fantasy has various Crystal armaments and armour throughout the series, typically as a sword but sometimes as other weapons.
• Minecraft: You can make diamond weaponry and armor, which is quite powerful.
• Prayer of the Faithless: The Crystal Rapier:
  Rapier made of crystal. Adds an extra strike to basic attacks.
• Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale has a Crystal Sword, which is "forged of pure crystallized energy".
• RuneScape: The elves make pretty much everything out of crystal (probably because their goddess Seren is crystalline in nature), including weaponry. The page image is concept art for several crystal weapons, which, in-game, are powerful (and in the case of bows, do not need ammunition) but will eventually degrade back into the crystal seed they were made from, and will have to be repaired using the elvish art of crystal singing.
• Skylanders: The fourth game, Trap Team, introduces the Trap Masters, who all wield weapons that are made from pure Traptanium, the strongest material in Skylands.
• Space Empires V uses a sci-fi variant; accessing the Crystallurgy branch of the Tech Tree will allow you to build spacecraft fitted with crystalline armor and armed with crystal shard torpedoes.
• Tibia has the Crystalline Axe, which is made of red crystal for a blade and is one of the strongest one-handed axes, the Crystal Wand, which is obtained via quest, the Crystal Sword, a weak weapon for beginner knights, the Crystal Crossbow (and Crystal Arrows), a powerful weapon for high-leveled paladins, and the non-usable quest item the Crystal Cannon.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky may have crystal weapons with its Saecelium series of weaponry. Saecelium is known as a type of crystal, but the weapon's themselves are never physically described, and there's an official Shrug of God as to whether they're pure crystal or just be metal with Saecelium incorporated into it or something.

Webcomics

• Grrl Power: Dabbler uses a sword made of "Auracite. Crystallized Aether taken from an Aetheon throne'',^note "Not the one in New Jersey... Old Jersey, obviously. which is very good at letting her channel magic during fights.
• Awful Hospital: Fern's trusty weapon for nearly the entire comic is made of a more...unconventional crystal. It's the crystallized remains of a giant kidney stone she killed, formed around a wooden stick.

Western Animation

• Loonatics Unleashed: In "Going Underground", Doctor Thaddeus Dare steals the Jade Serpent crystal, with which he pulls entire precincts of Acmetropolis into his subterranean domain. At one point, he draws raw power from the crystal into his Boom Stick, from which he launches a Death Ray at the heroes.
• Steven Universe: The main character, many of the protagonists and all of the antagonists are living crystal beings who, besides using crystal-based technology and weaponry, can also be considered living weapons themselves.

Real Life

• An archaeological dig in southern Spain has discovered real-life crystal knives in burial sites, though from all appearances they were more for Conspicuous Consumption for the elites and symbolic of the spirit world than they were ever intended to be used as weapons.
• While not technically a weapon, Obsidian is being used to make scalpel blades which may be approved for use on humans later. Obsidian being Mafic Lava that has instantly solidified upon contact with ocean water, before minerals can form basalt, where the internal minerals are around 1mm across. As Obsidian is also known as Volcanic Glass, this also counts as a Glass Weapon.

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