Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-27404492-20170417075739/@comment-26397825-20170508024810

PisceanWaterbender wrote:

Actually, now that I just thought of it, I have a weird question...Adam's sword did give Blake a horrible injury, and it didn't take long for him to dismember Yang before Blake jumped to defend her. And when she defended Yang, she somehow was able to use her Semblance, even though if Adam had badly injured her, her Aura likely wouldn't be able to come back up as quickly as it did. So, did she just recover her Aura super quickly so she could use her Semblance, or can Adam's sword really bypass Aura? Either way, it's a pertinent question I just thought of that has no easy answer. I was curious about the same thing, so I went and checked the length of visible sword from when Adam stabs Blake to when he's just holding it normally. It's actually only 'inside' Blake by a miniscule amount - just the tip basically. Given that the stomach is a fleshy part of the body which can be depressed easily when poked with something, I don't think the sword actually pierced her body at all. It felt like it did, and it pushed the skin of her stomach down so it looked like it did from our point of view, but it actually didn't.

As for why she cried out as though she had been stabbed - aura stops the wound but not the pain. She legitimately felt like she had just been stabbed in the gut.

This explains how she was able to use her semblance immediately after and carry Yang's dead weight without being crippled by the pain such lifting would cause when you have a hole in your gut.

Also, we have been told Semblance uses Aura as fuel by Miles. But - and this is pure headcanon here - I think that you can use your semblance at the level you are used to so long as you have aura. So like Sun - he's used to creating 3 clones who last a limited amount of time. My theory is that he can spam these 3 limited time clones as much as he likes so long as he has aura left. However, trying to push himself beyond what he was used to - such as creating 4 clones for an extended period of time to pin down Ilia - drained his aura.

I'm basically equating semblances to a muscle; if you learn to walk and have decent fitness (nothing amazing but nothing terrible) you can walk for ages without getting tired. But then if you try to sprint, you get tired really quickly because you're not used to it. It takes training, practise and perseverance to be able to get up to sprinting without collapsing after you've gone 50 metres.