The Realm of the Dark Blade

Welcome to another edition of Phyreblades Beleive It Or Not!! A Black Widow Spider. Born with steel knives for legs!! You don’t ever want to be caught in this spiders stainless steel and super glue web!!

OK, ok, so it’s not a real spider. But it does have knife legs. Today we have an interesting example of something that simply makes no sense… unless it is purely intended to be a conversation piece, which (I’m guessing) it is. While perusing my usual blade haunts I came across this dark arachnoid beauty.

Black Widow

Now this is a weird piece because I could see no real reason to substitute blades for leg segments. It would make for a difficult weapon to wield, unless used as a last resort, but only because it would be still be better than nothing. But it seems to be excellently suited as a conversation starter, as it is indeed a well crafted and beautiful piece, and the leg blades do look very menacing.

Now if this were an autonomous combat robot, this design would make perfect sense, as it would have it’s quite formidable weapons ready at all times. I’d also sharpen it’s mandibles. Or have it secrete venom. Or climb walls. Or swing from the rafters like spidey! OK, that’s just wishful thinking. I suppose it would have the weakness that you could hear it coming from miles away on hard surfaces. And it would certainly leave some nasty divots in your mom’s hardwood floors. But it still looks good as a faux lethal ornament…

The Black Widow – [True Swords]

Today we get to visit the realm of a sword intended to battle a rather unconventional foe. A sword that I initially believed was so named because it could be used to battle… Demons!

Demons, you say! “Uh huh.” All righty then! What kind of demons? “I dunno.” Probably your garden variety human hating kind, but who cares? Doesn’t make much difference to me, I just like it because it looks cool. From the mystical halls of Q-Branch, Demon Weapons division, I bring you:

Dark Demon Slayer

Now this is a fairly interesting design, consisting of a very broad sword that comes to a fairly convincing point, especially if you happened to be on it’s receiving end. The design features of note on this sword are the two smaller sub blades, that seem to have no purpose but to add to the menacing appearance of the sword. Perhaps they serve as a guard of some sort, though they seem a little small to do that job very well. Either way, they do add to the over aggression of the blade.

Now this sword design has actually been floating around for a long time. I’ve always thought it was a cool sword, and having run into it again since starting this blog, I thought I’d share it with you. But there is another reason why I bring up this sword.

Regarding the idea about this being a demon killing weapon, after following up on a hunch, I decided later on that my interpretation might be mistaken. As an interesting side note, I found that it has an uncanny resemblance to another fictional dark blade, one that I mentioned on one of my very first posts, the Stormbringer:

Stormbringer

Can you see the resemblance? Remove the sub blades, add a traditional cross-guard and Voila! It’s the Stormbringer! Now the fact that the Stormbringer in the Michael Moorcock series of fantasy books was in fact a demonic weapon kinda makes me wonder wonder if there is more than coincidence to this all so subtle resemblance.

The truth of the matter, (as far as fictional novels can be truth) was that Stormbringer was sentient, a transformed Demon with an innate evil intelligence and will, that could cut everything and anything not protected by the most powerful of spells, which also just so happened to “feed” on the souls of those it killed. I found out however that Stormbringer did indeed slay other demons without remorse, making it a demonic demon slaying demon.

Methinks perhaps that maybe, this sword was not a “demon slayer” at all, but rather a sword demon that just enjoyed slaying. Period. Rather indiscriminately, I might add. Things that to make you go “Hmmmmmm”…

Perplexing? Indeed. Scary? Most certainly. Do I want one? You betcha!

The Dark Demon Slayer – [True Swords]

OOOOKKKK…. I ran into this little gem while looking at some other ninja swords. And boy, this is an unusual one. Now if the title of this post confuses you, there is a reason; it is actually in homage to the typo that exists on the product page of the website I found this on, describing it as a “Ninja Blade Wipe” instead of a “Ninja Blade Whip”, but although I subsequently corrected all of the references in this post to correctly describe the weapon, in the interest of humor, I decided to leave the heading as is.

(OK. This would be an appropriate point for a chuckle. If you don’t you are a cold hearted fish. And you live in a dark muddy pond. With mutant bull frogs. Fine. Be that way.) I’ve seen similar weapons twice, once in a move and once in a video game, just never in real life. But in essence, somewhere between the vast expanse that should theoretically exist between the designs for a whip and a sword, you may run across this:

Ninja Blade Whip

Now to be honest, I’m not quite sure what to make of this. The idea is certainly compelling in theory though. Basically, chain a bunch of smaller blades together into a freakishly long whip of blades. Got it. Only thing is, this freak of weapon nature is 46.5″ all told, and it seems like the hinges, and attachment point reinforcement, etc. would add all kinds of weight to the blade. A regular 46″ sword would probably weigh considerably less that this. It’s weight is not listed so I can’t be sure.

A 96″ or even 120″ weighted whip would almost certainly be lighter. But unless it weighs a lot less than it looks, this is not something that a ninja would want to lug around all the time. A kusarigama or manrikigusari would give a ninja the same reach without all the extra weight. Yet Another victim of over-enthusiastic weapons marketing.

But over optimistic ninja labeling aside, you could probably get some great velocity and power out of that, and with the sheer number of cutting edges on it, you could probably do a lot of damage. So from an intimidation and effectiveness standpoint, this might make for a great weapon for a person trained to use heavy/long swords or whips. Oh, and don’t get me wrong, I’m sure a ninja could use one quite effectively. They are masters of all weapons after all.

It just probably wouldn’t be the first weapon they’d pick up going out the door…

Ninja Blade Whip – [True Swords]