A Finely Honed Blade is a Worm fanfic, crossing over with The Garden of Sinners. In this universe, Taylor dies during her trigger event, but the Queen Administrator isn't so willing to give up its host so easily, and she revives with the power of the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception, allowing her to kill pretty much anything.
What would you do if you could see death? If you'd touched emptiness itself, had it invade your soul, infest your mind, and whisper in your ear, telling you how to kill anything? How would you handle knowing you could never not see, never not comprehend the end of everything?
Because for Taylor, that's reality, and there are no easy answers.
Available on FF.Net
, Sufficient Velocity, and Ao3.
Tropes:
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Any blade becomes this in Taylor's hands.
- Adaptational Sexuality: In canon Taylor is straight, here according to Tattletale's powers, she is bisexual.
- Bad Powers, Good People: Taylor is fairly nice for someone whose powers revolve entirely around killing, to the point of being able to render someone Deader than Dead.
- Berserk Button: Hurt the people Taylor cares about, and she becomes absolutely ruthless in seeking revenge.
- Brown Note: Tattletale can read Taylor just fine, for the most part, but something about the way the MEoDP interacts with the Root means she has trouble looking at it.
- Combat Clairvoyance: Lisa's powers confirm that Taylor has this.
- Contrived Coincidence: Taylor, unable to sleep due to bad dreams, goes out jogging... and runs into Lung, who's chasing the Undersiders, and starts going after her, forcing her to kill him in self-defense.
- Curb-Stomp Battle:
- After escaping the Grey Boy loop Bakuda had trapped her in, she easily kills Oni Lee, kills Bakuda's connections to her bombs, and renders her Deader than Dead.
- Later she kills her way through Coil's base, only getting grazed by a single shot, and takes out Coil before he can try and talk his way out of things.
- Deader than Dead: If Taylor uses their dot to kill someone, it destroys their very soul. Lung, Bakuda, and Trickster find this out the hard way.
- It even seems to have killed Coil in both the timeline Taylor was in and any other he had up.
- Didn't See That Coming: Lisa didn't know about Echidna until after Taylor killed Coil.
- The Empath: Taylor naturally gets a read on a person's emotions and mental state, allowing her to subconsciously feel how to gain someone's loyalty or prompt another reaction.
Word of God is that this is her actual parahuman power. - Eye Color Change: Taylor's eyes change color when activating her powers.
- Healing Factor: Taylor apparently has one, as Panacea assumes her burns are days old when she had only got them less than 24 hours previously.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Taylor does not want to be a cape, and actively despises her powers. Even after Bakuda forces her to accept them, she's not exactly happy about having to ascribe to cape traditions like hiding her face after taking over the ABB and going after Coil, though she relents when Lisa points out the practical value of a helmet.
- Living Emotional Crutch: After they're raped and Trigger as a result, Saya and Aya latch onto Taylor once Lisa finds them and calls her there.
- Flashback interludes imply that Taylor was this, even before then.
- Magnetic Hero: Taylor, with one character even describing it as a kind of personal gravity. Word of God is that it's the Queen Administrator's doing.
- More than Mind Control: The Queen Administrator works this way, with a combination of providing Taylor with information on the mental state of others, how to use that knowledge to encourage loyalty or another desired reaction, and subtly altering hormones and endorphins, and can even twist the conditioning of other Masters to Taylor's advantage. It's so subtle that Taylor herself is unaware of it.
- Mythology Gag:
- The powers the twins get are energy-based Blaster abilities, but share deliberate similarities to Fujino Asagami's powers.
- Tattletale at one point all but refers to the MEoDP by name, though Taylor thinks said name is stupid.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Bakuda trying to give Taylor a Fate Worse than Death via Grey Boy Bubble simply forces her to accept her powers, allowing her to escape and kill Bakuda.
- Not Enough to Bury: Noelle's fate. What little of her that isn't vaporized by the twins disintegrates quickly afterward.
- Rape as Drama: Sayaka and Ayame are raped by their captors when they're kidnapped. It's traumatic enough that they suffer a simultaneous Trigger and promptly fry their captors with their new Blaster power.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Saya and Aya being raped is rightly treated as a horrifying experience, easily enough to make them Trigger, and they are clearly traumatized and latching onto Taylor afterwards.
- Roofhopping: Taylor does this when hunting down Bakuda.
- Sanity Slippage: Tattletale finds out from her power that Taylor is extremely unsuited for the Wards, and if she's forced to join, she'd eventually snap and go on a murder rampage.
- Semantic Superpower: Taylor eventually moves on from killing just physical objects to things like Grey Boy loops or the connections between bombs and their detonators.
- Shrouded in Myth: The PRT are left grasping at straws trying to figure out Taylor and her abilities. Even after she kills Bakuda, they're not sure if "Switchblade" is male or female.
- Spider-Sense: Taylor has an ability to sense the presences of others. Word of God is that it's the Queen Administrator.
- Stable Time Loop: Bakuda manages to create a bomb that mimics Gray Boy's powers and traps Taylor in it. This only prompts her to figure out how to kill it and escape.
- Super-Reflexes: Taylor has instantaneous reaction times.
- Super-Speed: Taylor is granted a Mover/Brute 6 rating for outrunning Bakuda's explosive traps, some of which would have been expanding at Mach 22 at least.
- The Stations of the Canon: Taylor fights Lung when he's chasing the Undersiders... and kills him.
- Villain Ball: Taylor lampshades that, even if she was planning to come back for it, and thought Taylor was going to be trapped in the Grey Boy Loop forever, leaving that tablet behind was not a bright move for Bakuda.
- Wound That Will Not Heal: Any wounds that Taylor uses the lines to inflict will not heal, even by parahuman regeneration.
- You Kill It, You Bought It: After killing Bakuda and Oni Lee, Taylor is forced to take control of the ABB when Tattletale points out that the Empire will try to take over their territory if she doesn't.
