April 2026 ~ <3 h0l
The vikings used to think engraving runes on their weapons would grant them magical properties. Whether that's true or not, it's clearly badass.
Perhaps the owner of this Sw0rd felt like it deserved a good backstory.
Hint 1
The sword contains a hidden message in the blade pattern.
Hint 2
The blade is 15 pixels wide... but notice the column of dark pixels in the middle. If we work from the dark pixels at the left edge of the blade we'll get a blade width of 16 pixels.
Interestingly enough, ASCII characters fit into a byte, with only the bottom 7 least significant bits populated.
Hint 3
When byte-aligned as described in Hint 2, the first 5 populated rows decode as : 'Spr8 RGB'. Hmm.
Solution
Separating the image into RGB channels in your favourite image editor, we get the following three images.
Decoding the remainder of the blade in each channel as per Hint 3, then appending these messages to each other, we get:
"Delved his hand into the mass of swirling voxels yelping in pain but persisting until the hilt had been gripped. The ensemble chanting of The Core avatars increased tenfold. 'With this you smite them, champion us. Free yourself.' The opalescent blade emerged with a shrill binary shriek."