Blade the Marten

“Finally… these mere distractions are gone. Now prepare yourself! Hedgehog, I shall slice you in two, and release the darkness from your heart.” - Blade the Marten, Sonic Runaways: STOLEN

## Blade the Marten

### Aliases

Blade the Japanese Marten
Commander Blade

Knives

### Relatives

Slinger the Squid
Dark Gaia's minions

Dark Gaia

## Appearances

### Appears in

Sonic Runaways: STOLENSonic Runaways: MANIPULATED

### Debut

Sonic Runaways: STOLEN

Blade the Marten is a fictional character in the Sonic Runaways series. She is a large piece of Dark Gaia, giving her all the same physical and cognitive capabilities as the average Erian. Her legs are actually real knives, hence her name.

## Concept and Creation

Blade was originally a character created for Nat Quin's fan-made sequel to the video game Sonic Unleashed, named Sonic Unveiled. It would have taken place in the Sonic's Hourglass timeline some time after the ill-fated Sonic Rift, a canceled serialized book also by Nat Quin. All of these projects began the writing process before the Sonic Runaways series was even conceptualized, with Sonic Rift never being completed and Sonic Unveiled never even debuting. Because Sonic would have been turned by into a vampire-like creature known as Sonic the Hexhog, the idea for Blade was that she was part of a monster hunter guild hunting her down, (at this point in the series, Sonic was going to have transitioned from male to female.) By the end of the book, Blade would exchange her metallic knife legs for wooden stake legs for their effectiveness against vampires.

Early on, Blade was supposed to be a hybrid between the chupacabra and the tanuki, both being mythological creatures from the Americas and Japan respectively. She would have been from an undersea country on the planet Mobius that combined elements of real-world Mexican and Japanese architecture and culture. Though she was originally designed with a diving regulator mouthpiece featuring fangs (like those of a chupacabra), no concept art of this exists, and it was dropped before Sonic Unveiled entered the writing process. She would have been able to harness ninja techniques such as disappearing into smoke to flee, similar to how she dissolves into Dark Gaia Force upon death in the Sonic Runaways series.

When the Sonic's Hourglass series was scrapped, Sonic Runaways eventually integrated Blade into the story as a piece of Dark Gaia, turning her into a Japanese Marten. Her intentions are ambiguous at first in Sonic Runaways: STOLEN, but become more clear around the beginning of Sonic Runaways: MANIPULATED. Fit with a new design but similar motives, she is the third character to be brought into Sonic Runaways from the Sonic's Hourglass series (the first being Penumbra the Spider, and the second being Pico the Wooly Mammoth.)

Her design was not finalized for Runaways for a while after her first written appearance. Nat Quin struggled to create anything she was content with, so another character designer had to be brought in. SoftieShadow was shown the concept art above, and got to work making a new design for Blade. Blade was given star eyes, a scar down her face, and spikier hair. From there, the Blade known today was created and promptly redrawn by Nat Quin in the main Sonic Runaways art style.

Blade is said to have exchanged her ordinary knife legs for Swiss army knives after forcing her way into GUN with Slinger in MANIPULATED, though no concept art of this exists yet and is purely in written material.