Grrl Power #1486 – And pause for the not-surprise attack…
Maybe she went to go eat some spinach, or took a Proton Energy Pills which gives her the power of 10,000 atomic bombs for ten seconds? Look, all things being equal, I’d rather have the power of 1,000 atom bombs for 100 seconds, or maybe even 100 a-bombs for 1,000 seconds. What I wouldn’t want is the power of 1 a-bomb for 10,000 seconds, because it seems like you’d wrap up most adventures pretty quickly with that kind of chutzpah, and you’d be standing around for 7,000 seconds waiting for the pill to wear off so you can go get lunch without accidentally blowing up the diner.
The tournament is supposed to be no-holds barred, but they’ve slowly introduced rules over the years to keep things moving along. Did you guys ever see the earliest UFC matches? They hadn’t refined the rules, and so a lot of matches turned into “grappler takes a few hits while diving in to grab at someone’s midsection, they go down, and the grappler spends the next 25 minutes trying to force the other guy to tap out. I only ever watched a few matches in the early days, and after that, I’ve seen the occasional highlight on reddit or wherever, but I’m pretty sure if you get grappled, you’ve got less than 25 minutes to get out of it these days. Or maybe not. Maybe all the grapplers have had to learn that almost-hyperextend-your-elbow hold to force people to tap out.
I’ve peppered in the rules for the UCBA, and I’ll try and remember and list them all here. It is a deathmatch, meaning you can kill, but if someone yields, it’s pretty bad form to keep pounding on them. Fighting at this level means someone can launch an ICBM, causing the target to yield, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the guy who launched it can abort it in the two seconds before it hits. It comes down to a call by judges, though it’s rare that anyone gets removed from the tournament for ignoring yields.
Only a single entity can enter the tournament. In the case of something like a space ship or a gunship, the ship itself is considered the entrant. Crew can man exosuits and fly around outside of the ship and attack other competitors, because a mage could just as easily summon a phantom army or the like, but if the mage goes down, the phantom army would probably disperse, and even if they don’t, they can’t win that round of the tournament in the mage’s place. Similarly, when the space ship goes down, the round is lost for the crew as well. Someone could pilot a mecha-godzilla while wearing Iron Man armor, and when the mega-mech gets destroyed, the guy in the suit can eject and keep fighting, but only if he is the registered entrant and not the mega-mech.
You can’t endanger non-combatants. There’s almost never a case where that can happen, since the matches take place 100 kilometers from any other sapient life form (and there’s reasonable effort taken to not hold matches in or near national parks or endangered wetlands or nature preserves and the like) but if you have an ability to open a portal to redirect that meteor swarm attack, and the exit portal opens over Times Square, you will be disqualified at best.
You can leave the combat area for up to 30 seconds. That’s generally a bad idea though, because if you step out of the ring for ten seconds to catch your breath, another competitor might try and pin you for 20 seconds, then jump back in bounds once you’re ringed out. Also, when you leave the arena, you “spend” those 30 seconds. You can earn more out-of-bounds time at the rate of 1 second for every ten spent in-bounds. This is to keep competitors from jumping in and out of bounds and skirting the edge of the arena. The matches are much more interesting when everyone is battle-royaling in the middle.
No off-table support. You can bring a bag of holding or your very own mass-fabricator, but you can’t bring a laser designator and call down tungsten rods from geostationary orbit or artillery from a land-battleship parked just out of bounds.
You can possess other competitors. It is advised that all competitors have reasonable mental defenses. If you win the match with someone else’s body, you can’t ride them into the next match. If possessing someone destroys your original body, or at least the body you entered with, you and your host are out of the tournament.
Hmm. I think that’s it. I’ve probably mentioned a few things in the comments that I’ve left out, but I think that’s the bulk of it.
Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. And a not-quite-yet-but-it’s-coming NSFW version over at Patreon.
Vote incentive and Patreon updated with some shading. Not finished yet, but progress.
I think she would get in trouble for doing this. She’d mess up the… floor of the waterfall? Is that what it’s called? The receiving pool? No, probably not that. Anyway, she’d churn things up and cause a ton of weird erosion.
Since you might be wondering, Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high, so Babezilla obviously doesn’t have to be full sized. I’d say she’s about 175-180 feet tall here?
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Gail does wear that outfit well, doesn’t she?
Just noticed: that outfit is from The Fifth Element.
Yup, it sure is. Watching Leeloo wear it was … disconcerting, though. It’s better suited to Gail.
It certainly does sit differently on a character with Dave’s typical proportions it did on Mila, who is more like Sydney in body shape.
It’s one of the great examples of the Theiss Titillation Theory (the sexyness of the outfit is proportional to how much it looks like one wrong move will make it fall off).
This is the first time we’ve seen the full view of the 5th Element outfit. I checked. I was afraid I was stupid for not noticing sooner, but the most we have previously seen is https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1469-semi-finals-roster/
We have seen more of it here: https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-1477-skewer-a-golem-like-build-a-bear-but-the-opposite/
yup
You really aren’t “Just noticing.” It’s the first shot of her in more than ‘chest up’ since this ark started what must be at least five or six months ago.
(blinks) huh? whu? What outfit? Who watches the commontaters? Sheesh, I got the last of the EXO-beer and the last bowl of chicken wings. (looks at screen) oh, who are the sci-fi convention escapees? Because dude is rockin’ that outfit but giving away his age with the matching mustache.
And Bluce is wearing an Earth Defense Directorate uniform.
The brain is wild. I was autocorrecting that to Bruce until I saw your comment.
Space Bucks… get it…
yup.
Got to love those thermal bandages! 5th Element is one of my favorites!
What are the chances of a racy sci-fi cosplay contest for a vote incentive?
Leeloo and Stitch
Leelo and not-a-stitch…
I want to note that Gail’s outfit has shrunken considerably in the last 58 seconds.
First seen in full glory in #1469; now her cleavage has eaten the middle strip.
Also, the entire match appears to be over rather quick, I envy her work day. Unless she does post-interviews with all contestants… oh wait. Most of them are now (brain-)dead. Better do pre-fight interviews.
She did pre-fight interviews on the page where we first met her(p1426), not counting an appearance on a sidebar screen when Sydney’s causeway to Fracture Station got detected and traced (p981). (Working on the fan wiki has made all sorts of trivia stick in my head…)
Also, at the time she was first introduced she was wearing a full shirt, albeit sheer.
Though Bluce was wearing the Zardoz speedo at that time. Maybe there is a contractual minimum amount of skin to be shown between the two of them?
Maybe she’s sweating, and the thermal bandage has soaked through, making it more pliant than before.
Gail and Bluce could be wearing hard light generators that strategically change their outfits to promote optimal audience engagement.
Huh, I really thought the arena would be large enough and expansive enough to include a column of geostationary orbit above it specifically for the purposes of allowing exclusively non-atmospheric spacefaring ships to compete. Maybe even that the arena would be the entire (otherwise already mined out) planet up to the distance of the furthest moon.
If someone’s defensive strategy is “be in orbit” and the other entrants can’t defeat someone in orbit, that really is on them in this scale – if you can only defeat planetbound threats you’re not very unlimited in a science fiction setting, you’re a glorified Planetary Defence Force that can potentially be dispatched by orbital bombardment at the enemy fleet’s leisure.
Or maybe it does include a column of geostationary orbit but you can’t call in help from other ships that aren’t entered into the arena?
Also how would the entry count for things like “Distributed Artificial Intelligence running on a swarm of 5 quadrillion nano- to milli-bots”? Would they only count as defeated once an opponent had destroyed every last nanobot? Maybe once the General AI can no longer operate at a sentient level, even though their subsentient body’s automatic functions are still in the process of rebuilding them to sentient and then sapient? Maybe a 30 second time limit to become sapient? Then again, given that remote-controlled opponents are a thing, maybe the AGI is just remotely controlling their swarm and their primary server clusters are out of bounds and thus there is no smallest number of nanobots needed to stay sentient.
Would they need to make themselves known?
Would “currently infesting opponents bodies and disintegrating their bone marrow” count as “making themselves known”, or would that still be considered ‘in hiding’ if the other opponents can’t find them and forgot to search their own bonemarrow for nanoscale infection?
See, these are proper thoughts.
What if I’m a mathematical equation like that one Green Lantern, Dkrtzy Rrr? I’m still true in bounds and sentient, but if an opponent can’t regulate logic itself that’s on them – right? If it’s unlimited, can I win by agelessness in ten thousand years?
What happens if I’m bigger than the battlefield, like Ego the Living Planet or that other Green Lantern Mogo? Am I automatically ‘out of bounds’? What happens when there is no battlefield because my mere presence consumed it? Or something else that would destroy the battlefield with my presence – there was a living explosion but not on the order of a blue giant solar flare or blackhole gamma ray burst.
Another Green Lantern is a virus, Leezle Pon. Sure, I can’t infect anyone and ‘win’ because I’m destroyed in the process of co-opting their cells to replicate me. But am I ‘hidden’ enough to be automatically out of bounds? What if I’m a poltregheist that can’t be perceived by an opponent anyway? Or a chaos construct like some versions of a gremlin or computer bug? Or the afore mentioned mathematical equation? Or a weather pattern or something else that another remaining competitor can’t recognize as me cognitively?
Henry, you’re a troublemaker.
But let me take a guess what Dave B. might say…
1. An entrant must be a single entity.
I would analogize a swarm of nanobots or drones to carried weapons. Today’s blog names a ship’s crew and a phantom army as examples of things that can be used as weapons by a single entity, not so different from magazines of spare bullets. If a swarm was entered as a whole or built from one copy in bounds and there was no larger carrier, I would rule that only 1 copy would have to be registered as the entrant. If copies were built during the round, the entrant would have to be the original.
An AI controlling a swarm from out of bounds does not qualify as an entrant any more than any other remote pilot. So a swarm without an obvious carrier would be able to rely on hiding the entrant in a cloud, but the referees must be able to detect whether the entrant is in or out of bounds. That brings us to…
2. An entrant that leaves the arena for more than 30 seconds at one time has forfeited.
Does an entrant have to make itself known?
Hell yes, what are you thinking? This is an entertainment venue. The audience is entitled to know who or what the contestants are. Is invisibility or stealth allowed? Hell yes, but: In round one all contestants were visible before the opening bell, even the fae, although she was very small. If you want to enter a nanobot swarm it might be effectively invisible to the naked eye. But there are 8 starting spaces. If one is obviously empty, the other contestants will at least know where the swarm began the round. And Dave B. has never said that the contestants have been kept ignorant of what they will face in the coming round.
In the case of Ryzyl, he must come out of hiding within 30 seconds or forfeit. But that is because there are only 2 contenders left in this round. However he is concealing himself the commentators don’t know where he is, but I can’t believe that the referees (who Dave B. has not shown) don’t know where Ryzyl is. The same would have to be true of the Invisible Man or a nanobot swarm, or they would never have been allowed to enter the tournament. If the entrant nanobot was to move out of bounds during the round, the referees would at least inform the commentators and audience, if not the other contestants. It does appear that contestants are responsible for detecting invisible opponents on their own within these parameters.
As far as the limits of the arena, imo the UCBA began as a ground bound battle royale. It occurs in a gravity well and has a large enough radius to accomodate aerospace craft while having a reachable boundary for contestants on foot. But aerospace entrants will find the arena very confining, and getting nuked from orbit is not competitive. Trying to combine ground and aerospace contestants in a single sport is not entertaining. I would not be surprised to find that the UCBA has or had aero, space, and even hydro divisions, all subject to achieving successful viewership ratings. And Dave B. hasn’t mentioned what “limited class” battle sports might exist in the ☢️Grrlverse, apart from some dueling.
I appreciate your thoughts on the questions.
I would argue that in an unlomited class arena, nuking someone (from orbit or any other position) ought to be both par for the course and “tuesday”. If you cannot avoid or shrug off a nuke or a thoroughly irradiated and slagged environment you aren’t really thinking big enough for an unlimited class arena – even a small unarmed mining corvette might be able to toss out some cee-sabots for nuke-equivalent firepower.
I would even argue that the necessary firepower to be able to handle (by avoiding or tanking or neutralizing) to even be taken seriously as an entrant in the arena starts in the low kilotons of TNT and I am not sure I dare claim that it ends in the gigatons. Then again if they threw around megatons on the regular I imagine that our blue skinned captain wouldn’t have been nearly as certain of Maxima’s status as a ringer – we haven’t seen her tank even a kiloton unscratched yet
It’s a bit uncertain how much force was necessary to pierce the Fel Battleship’s shields and narrowing the contact area of the beam seemed to be a factor (as opposed to just raw power).
I think Dave also previously brought up the possibility of entering a ship captain or battleship as the entrant but boarding was a problem in the Unlimited Class meta of such entrants, which might also be true for the giant robot we saw in the beginning.
Countdown clock yay.
Was hoping I wasn’t the only one that noticed!
If someone wins eight rounds of UCBA, do they get invited to an underground octo-winners club and the opportunity to compete in “Street UCBA”?
im pretty sure that “street UCBA” is frowned upon by the general galactic community… you know… because of the collateral damage… thats a quick was to get curbstomped by the xevoarchy
I look forward to the episode of Countdown when someone scores 18 for XEVOARCHY.
More likely happen on “8 Cats does Countdown”
The teapot we all crave, you crave it too! Your eyes betray you. He has spirit this one! But do you have the spirit to become the ultimate champion? I wonder…
This needs more crosshatching, maybe some dramatic glute-grimacing. (that’s like dramatic face grimaces but with the glutes and hamstrings) And yeah, this finish move will rock.
> Only a single entity can enter the tournament. In the case of something like a space ship or a gunship, the ship itself is considered the entrant. Crew can man exosuits and fly around outside of the ship and attack other competitors, because a mage could just as easily summon a phantom army or the like, but if the mage goes down, the phantom army would
Didn’t you say before that if a ship entered, it could only have a single crew member?
*checks*
Yeah, in the #1427 commentary:
> Can you enter a starship? Like a Galactic Dreadnought? Sure, but with only a single crew member. Or a single A.I. (A proper A.I., not the shit we have now.) However, in a relatively close-range fight against 7 other Unlimited Class opponents, it’s a pretty good way to get boarded and lose your ship. There have been a few instances in the past where people tried to cheat by entering a powerful ship or mecha and another powerful entrant shanghaied it to double up their fighting power, but it’s a stupid tactic, because you can just enter Goku wearing Iron Man’s armor piloting a Warhammer 40K Titan in the first place. The only thing “cheating” like that would do is it would let you “beat” an otherwise difficult opponent because they’re really on your side to begin with.
Backstabbing seems like a dumb move after seeing someone take out Eat Chicken. Not Mt. Atrocitus who was obviously a scrub anyone could defeat. Eat Chicken was the beyond omega level threat. I’d forfeit if I were Ryzlyl.
Depends on whether there’s a prize purse for the runner-up of this round. If so, then definitely. If not … Well, then he might open up his bag of tricks.
Now, I wonder if Ixah and the rest of her team are going to forfeit the next round (just like Ixah almost did, here), and are already betting accordingly. You know, insider trading.
That would also really track with the most typical business decisions of the US government.
I’m not one for betting, but I assume your payout is based on the odds provided by the bookies at the moment you make the bet. In that case I would further assume the winning play for Cora and co. is to put in a fuck ton of money on Max before her first match while she’s still a complete unknown and thus presumably has longer odds. I would also assume having her throw the match during the grand finals would draw a lot more scrutiny from whoever as to who exactly was backing her and could convince her to throw and would profit from said throwing.
Well, the current IRL one anyways. They did start a war to do it.
Man, the early UFC stuff could be super boring. Hoyce Gracie, Ken Shamrock, Oleg Taktarof. Bunch of skilled fighters, but so many matches would end up just a grapple.
Early UFC fights were great. Hour and a half long chess matches testing the limits of endurance.
The original marketing of it as a blood sport was what ruined a great era, where regulation banned it until it was bought by the current guy and marketed as a sport. But calling something a sport when it’s a blood/combat sport is just taking out more and more of the combat.
Original UFC was no biting, no eye gouging, no kicks to the throat…and I think no groin blows (you could still try to break someone’s tail bone/coccyx). There were some other implied rules like male-ness/isity and a towel being thrown in / cutman calling it. But now there’s stuff like ‘no position change’ so you can’t try to python someone by compressing their rib cage until the lack of motion in their lungs doesn’t allow enough oxygen exchange for them to stay conscious.
In an unlimited class, there’s got to be a system for attacks like that. “I’m Asgardian. Since they can’t defeat me and I can’t defeat them, I’m going to wait a few millenia until I grow into my true power as the God of Staredowns from staring them down for thousands of years and then I’ll be able to smite them.” Is “I snatched the aura off of them and now they’re a philosophical zombie, so they aren’t sentient they’re only acting sentient.” actually a defeat because their sentient behavior is still in the ring and is that what they registered as themselves risking mind control as a defeat?
Panel 3 text: Off-site supercharge IS permitted. How could anyone be sure that that’s the same contestant?
Now we know that there are referees somewhere.
I wonder if taking down Babezilla would count as endangering non-combatants.
No, because that had nothing to do with the match
It happened during the match and if pressured to act too quickly and Ixah/Max could make mistakes and hypothetically whoever is running the UCBA could be legally liable.
Yes, but it didn’t happen in the match, and, the ones running this show don’t know anything about it (for Maxi’s sake, that had better remain that way)
If they had said what happened with the Pixie Princess sending Maxi to her Castle, that would be different
They don’t know about that, but since that rule’s adjudicated by judges I think they’d debate it then find it acceptable. While technically an attack on someone outside the match, it was not done to assist Ixah in the match and was even carefully controlled to minimise lasting damage. I expect that rule exists to stop moves like “yield or my deathstar blows up your planet”, so nipping out of the ring to handle a personal matter doesn’t seem like something they’d bother penalising (unless being forced to as pawns in the race to control superpowers).
As for the fey castle, I’m still not sure who would be blamed if there are found to have been people in it. Ixah for blowing it up, the fairie for using them as human shields in the way of an Unlimited class combatant, or even both.
If anyone is familiar with those “space operas” of the 1950s, how would certain characters look in the uniforms of those shows?
Honestly, they’d probably be dressed more modestly than they are now, save for maybe Sydney, who’d stay about the same. The occasional short skirt (not yet a true mini-skirt) and high heels, MAYBE a bikini-like top if she’s dressed as the villain. But most often, they’d be in a bodysuit-plus-glass-helmet spacesuit.
Remind me, who is Ryzel?
“Ryzyl is an Umbral Elf who specializes in being a slippery assassin type.”
Pedantic nit-pick: ICBM stands for “Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile”. Meaning it has a range that carries it to a different continent. So the launcher would be outside the arena, which violates the same rules as “no orbital bombardments”. Also, even if allowed, they wouldn’t be very smart here. They are very fast, but after the launch vehicle disconnects (a rocket or similar) the warhead follows an unguided ballistic path. Great for large stationary targets (military bases, population centers, industrial parks), but not so great for moving combatants.
“Inter-continental” refers to its potential range, meaning that it’s capable or reaching other continents. A Topol-M launched from Irkutsk Oblast is an ICBM whether its target is San Diego or Shanghai
Agree that it doesn’t have to actually go to another continent to be called an ICBM, but to be called an ICBM it has to have a minimum range of 5,500 km (3,400 miles). A missile with that range would travel very far in the boost phase before the ballistic phase. Yes, they could shoot it mostly upwards for the boost phase and/or play with planet rotation (trade high altitude / short range vs. max horizontal range), but the time it would take to get up there, slow down and arch over ballistically, then get all the way back to the planet would be massive. If one had been launched at the beginning of this specific fight it would probably still be going up. This is a guestimate based on the timeline of Max leaving/returning (30 seconds) plus the time while back (28 seconds) plus whatever time was spent sparing with Ryzyl before she left.
Again, it’s totally pedantic nit-picking, but an ICBM (as least as defined on earth) would not be a practical or even a plausible weapon for this type of arena / fight. I think Dave was thinking simply “massive bomb on a missile”, which could work.
Even a pre -startegic – final warning missile “Ultime avertissement” in original version – medium range nuclear missile is out of the bound of this contest an ASMPA has about 500 km range ( 300 milles) but a 300 kt warhead
A 300-kiloton (kT) nuclear warhead—equivalent to 300,000 tons of TNT or roughly 20 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb—creates a total destructive and lethal area of effect (AoE) spanning roughly 18 square kilometers (7 square miles) of heavy damage, with thermal and secondary effects stretching much further
Fireball and Vaporization ZoneRadius: ~0.6 to 0.8 kilometers (~0.4 to 0.5 miles)Effect: Total vaporization of everything directly at ground zero, creating a massive luminous core with temperatures hotter than the sun.
Heavy Blast and Severe Damage (20 psi overpressure)Radius: ~1.2 to 1.5 kilometers (~0.7 to 0.9 miles)Effect: Complete demolition of heavily built reinforced concrete and commercial buildings; mortality rates approach 100%.
Moderate to Heavy Residential Collapse (5 psi overpressure)Radius: ~4.5 to 4.7 kilometers (~2.8 to 2.9 miles)Effect: Most residential and standard commercial buildings collapse entirely, injuries are universal, and fatalities from structural trauma and flying debris are widespread.
Thermal Radiation and Severe Burns (3rd-degree burns)Radius: ~7 to 8 kilometers (~4.3 to 5.0 miles)Effect: Unprotected individuals suffer severe 3rd-degree burns across skin layers, and intense radiant energy instantaneously ignites flammable materials, setting off widespread secondary fires and potential firestorms.
It will wipe out the arena and it’s a 840 kg (about 1852 lbs) missille launched by a figther aircraft smaller than a Superhornet
An ICBM doesn’t have to be nuclear. It can be a conventional or chemical weapon (or weapons in the case of a MIRV). In reality, though, if someone is going to the expense (both the cost of the missile and the cost of the ensuing global war) of launching an ICBM, they’re going to put as big a weapon on it as possible… so nuclear.
Either way, the range / delay time between launch and impact is totally impractical for the arena sizes that have been mentioned for these fights.
Back to nuclear, an AI-piloted mech that is sufficiently hardened against the radiation, shockwave, heat, and EMP could absolutely try lobbing a nuclear bomb into the center of the arena. It is quite possibly what happened back in 1427.
In this case, it is not necessarily a dangerous weapon to wield. We had a fairy that created a black hole, and a sapient being that could DEFLECT the said black hole. These two feats alone dwarf anything current tech humanity can do.
Or you could just swing it like a club
Assuming it can even Launch. Russia’s not exactly known for being great on maintenance.
Maxima getting bored is such a hilarious thought. But I don’t think that’s the case. I think she ended it quickly because of her military training. I mean, after the Vehemence battle she ordered literally everybody to practice quick take-downs. So overall I assume that she’s one of the few combatants with a professional attitude towards fighting. She doesn’t boast like villains, she doesn’t show craving for fighting like the Saiyans, just cold hard calculating professionalism.
When there’s a crash in NASCAR, they usually make a couple of cuts to the wreck being hauled off while the caution runs. Can’t we see a little of the guy being carried out?
I’m curious to see how Max handles this:
– Full armor, just tank whatever he throws at her (risky, but no chance of catching her off guard)
– Full speed, react and dodge whatever he throws at her (there’s a high risk of being caught off guard, he is sneaky assassin, I have to imagine he has some super stealth ability that conceals any sign of his presence)
– “Can’t touch this”, Max should know she is likely too fast for him to keep up. Just fly around the arena at Mach 3 or whatever for 30 seconds until he is forced to reveal himself. This seems like the safest option.
– The “Maxima” option, use some insanely powerful AOE attack to hit him wherever he is. The ground explosion she used before was pretty effective. He might have some phase ability that lets him dodge though
Personally, I recall Ryzyl thinking (or saying?) that he was going to let everyone else tire themselves out and be injured and then finish of the exhausted/injured ‘victor’.
However Ixah (Maxima) does not seem even slightly tired at this point.
Ryzyl has to be thinking that he is potentially outclassed, and does not have the advantage(s) he was counting on.
He might still decide to try to pull off an attack, but probably suspects it will not go well unless he can find some sort of advantage that is not yet apparent.
My guess is he will still try /something/ but will be ready to yield the second it goes sideways.
Can’t Believe I just noticed Bruce is wearing a Buck Rogers Uniform.
Dude! You get a “Noprize” for that call.
Performance enhancing drugs being allowed, even mid combat, makes sense to be allowed.
The fighters just need to make sure they don’t overdose or get a crippling addiction afterwards.
Gail’s rockin’ Leeloo’s bandage wrap style. Imma vote for her showing up in a future vote incentive. So, if Max still has one unseen opponent left, she should dial up her invulnerability and gain some elevation, the maximum that the arena allows. Her blinding reaction speed should also prevent any backstabbing. Looking forward to Dave’s next page, he never fails to deliver a surprise.
“Astro-Coke!”, all the buzz plus a time release antidote to head off that unpleasant overdose/addiction afterward. What’s the point of having space drugs if they cant be consequence free.
I read Bluce’s reference to doing a hundred-meter line, and more or less my first thought was “NOSEDIVE!” Which probably shows my age more than it does anything else.
That was some good nyborg.
Turns out Ryzl was hit by a pathetically small piece of debris from Mt. Atrocitous. Or possibly squashed when he fell down and they’ll find him on the backside after towing him off.
I suspect that after the first few tournaments the rule book would be voluminous. Because there is always that guy. In the pro-world you where big money is involved up front you get guys like Smokey Yunick in auto racing. Finding loopholes and workarounds is expected and part of the game. In the amateur world the rule book invariably grows because of people who cant just have fun, they have to WIN. I’ve been a part of activities that started off fun and then fell apart because no one wanted to deal with Bob getting pissy because he couldn’t run his “Rule Dodger 9000”.
There is a chance that Ryzyl was caught in the area of effect when Mount Atrocitus collapsed. This is the UCBA so I’d expect him to be able to survive the crush. It’s hard to get out from under a hundred thousand tons of rock in thirty seconds, and even harder to remain stealthy while doing it. But who knows, maybe he can turn to gas or something and rise through the rubble.
After the speed Ixah demonstrated when she Julienned Eat Chicken, Ryzyl had to re-evaluate the odds of a successful surprise attack. After the strength Ixah demonstrated by one-punching Mt. Atrocitus, Ryzyl had to re-evaluate the odds of surviving the attempt. But this is the UCBA, so he probably wouldn’t be here if he weren’t rocking something really surprising.
He’s effectively limited to attacks he can make in hopes of remaining invisible (AT LEAST to Ixah) while making them, or if he has to reveal himself to make them then attacks he can make in the hopes of remaining invulnerable to Ixah while making them. The same kind of “turn into gas” he could use to escape the fallen mountain could provide the kind of non-solidity that would give him hope of surviving the attack.
In most games attacking from invisibility without becoming visible, or attacking while remaining in a non-solid/unhittable form are strictly banned. But this is UCBA so I guess it just depends on what he brings to the table.
The thing is we don’t really know what Ryzyl can do, so we can’t say much about the odds of it being successful.
Since Dave mentioned spaceships as possible entrants, I’d been imagining that the boundaries of the arena must be a cone extending some distance (maybe five planetary radiuses to allow for maneuvering) from a point in the planet directly under the center of the boundary marked on the planetary surface. The point of the cone would need to be less than ten arena diameters deep to make a solid angle more than about ten degrees wide through the surface boundary marks.
I imagine it to be very likely that he have some kind of void stealth that nearly perfectly conceals him. With magic and space tech, an assassin who decided to join the unlimited class is very likely to be capable of landing a hit before even the fastest characters can react. Maxima can catch bullets, but if she can’t even perceive the attack, she probably can’t react to it.
Although her shield is stated to act like a forcefield with 4th power strength decay, so it’s possible she can use that as a method of “perception” to react to an otherwise imperceptible attack, by feeling it penetrating the weaker outer layers of her shield. That would actually be an unbelievably cool application of that power. And would be a really interesting way to allow Ryzyl to be a real threat with an otherwise unavoidable attack, and potentially a one-shot capable of penetrating Max’s armor and actually harming her (doesn’t seem unlikely that an assassin would have a special setup assassination technic like that)
Ixah(Maxima) can clearly move faster than human nerve impulses (~200-300 miles per hour for nerve impulses). Due to Maxima’s training, we know she can perceive that speed. Any attack that can harm her may transmit at such a pace that she _would_ react to attacks that she can’t perceive incoming. There’s likely a scenario where one attackers sword is pushed away because Maxima literally can’t pay attention to it because of her armor because she’s dodging a sword that _could_ cut her but is at the surface of her skin.
She can’t do the move at superspeed thing, because any form of timesighting/prescience/true Striking could just strike at where she is going to be, and then it would be her own speed killing her.
No, her best option is maximum speed, maximum armor on top of that, and waiting for him to strike, counting on her speed to avoid a lethal blow with even microseconds of time even if it is from ‘surprise’.
Dave, you will have to explain Maxima’s reverse grip on a sword. Which is, in case you didn’t know, stupidest thing ever.
To be fair, there is a fairly limited set of applications for Backstab Surprise Prevention Sword Gripping Technique.
I agree.
This is more using the sword as a shield for a potential blind spot.
How else is she to hold when not actually in combat?
Resting on her shoulder? Across her shoulders with one hand holding the blade? Tip of the blade planted in the ground in front of her?
You sound like an expert swordsperson… or an idiot, not sure which
SellswordArts has a whole set of videos explaining exactly that, and all other aspects of why reverse grip was never and will never ever be used in or out of combat by actual fighters. I suppose that top HEMA swordsmen will convince you more than I ever could.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKFeF26-GBI
Again, she’s not using it to fight with, simply holding it because it’s longer than she is
The stupidist thing is, looking at some drawings of sword fighters and coming up with fencing
Holding a sword conveniently out of your way while moving around happens to be on the very short list of things reverse grip is decent for. If she’s not planning to sword-fight the assassin with it, then I think it’s ok.
That’s the explanation I was hoping for, but… the next page is up now, and it’s not the case. Ouch.
Here’s a question for the rulebook… Can a competitor force an opponent to yield (or throw) through an action that takes place entirely outside the arena, e.g. placing an invasion force in orbit over the planet their opponent is from and threatening orbital bombardment if they lose? Would that be covered under the Portal to Times Square (endangerment of non-combatants) and Bombardment from Orbit (outside action) prohibitions? Or is the fact that it happens entirely outside the arena a loophole that hasn’t been closed yet because no one’s tried it on account of potential retaliation?
I think it is mandatory that this is covered.
Because otherwise the strongest combatant would have to stand behind, to guard the planet. Thus only allowing the second or third strongest to participate.
> “You can’t endanger non-combatants.”
In the case of the pixie opening the portal and trapping Max in her realm, Max made sure to verify there were no sentient/sapient creatures in the castle before blowing it. But Max has ethics. What if the pixie had trapped the robot or Rambo-Barney and they had just started blowing things up without verifying. If there had been loss of civilian life, would that be blamed on the one trapped, or on the one who sent them there (pixie)?
If the castle is empty that’s not a problem.
Fairly sure, that rule covers the actual combat area itself, maybe a certain distance beyond it to account for Big Badda Boom-Boom’s
As for what happened with Pixie Trix, believe she did get into trouble with the local Fae Lord for her stunt
Battle Royale games had the right idea by making the arena shrink over time. It forces people into conflict, until it becomes really hard for anyone to hide.
I think Dragonball Multiverse also has a “you lose if the organizers can’t see you for 30 seconds” rule. It is a sensible compromise to allow stealth and unconventional ringouts (one guy was send to another dimension), without allowing a stealthy character to drag this out forever.
A big missed opportunity there. She could have made bank betting on the backstab attempt!
No, she knows that it’s a no-bet because that’s almost certainly what he is planning, and no one would bet against it
He called dibs on the “yes backstab”.
She could only bet “no backstab”.
Which is not a bet she was willing to take.
Odd that nobody has commented on the puny 100 kilometer distance from other sapient life forms yet. It seems excessively short distance considering how much larger scale armaments are being wielded here than what earth currently has access to: if you took the biggest bomb humanity has detonated (Tsar Bomba) then standing 100 kilometers away would be ill adviced, and if you took the biggest bomb that was not actually built (Sundial) you’d be having a *very* bad day standing even 200 kilometers away.
For those of us that are more familiar with imperial units, 100km is about 62 miles. Longer distance than what a rifle bullet can carry sure, but not a particularly long road trip and manageable as a commuting distance; also far too short safety distance if we’re talking about intergalactic weapons of mass destruction.
Yes, that’s peculiar. They’re throwing around black holes, radiation, adaptive bioweopons, giant explosions, and that’s just in what we’ve seen. They encourage all kinds of stuff you don’t want near people. I just assumed they used an uninhabited planet. Maybe 100km is the minimum distance to the (heavily shielded and well payed) event staff: the medics and cameras and so on.
And who wants to bet she’s standing there dramatically because she’s putting full power into armor just to bait him out (win/win for her).
Something about Gail’s expressions, poses, and phrasing makes me expect her to say “space cowboy” at any moment.
Referring up-thread to ICBMs: Many of them have a minimum range, the closest they can drop to the launch point.
Has anyone else mentiond that “Ixah” is just “Hax!” spelled backwards yet?
“Haxi” also language barrier makes it so only the ones with Sydney likely know that even if it was true (and likely only the humans of the group). Reminder all this is being translated.
Maybe she fills a secret compartment in her ring with an Underdog Super Vitamin Pill?
(Have to love the 60s…a cartoon superhero who gets his powers literally from popping pills….)
And there was also 8th Man with his power cigarettes:
https://www.straightdope.com/21342527/did-one-60-s-superhero-get-his-power-from-smoking
…Now about those cigarettes: While most doctors will tell you to *quit* smoking if you want to be able to continue participating in any sort of strenuous activity such as beating up criminals, 8-Man/Brady/Tobor was advised the opposite: Feeling rundown? Light up! When in need of a burst of energy, 8-Man recharged his atomic energy supply with tiny strength pills, which were in the form of cigarettes. After a few drags on his special smokes, 8-Man was as alive with pleasure as any of the playful subjects in a typical Newport ad, and once again ready to battle his nefarious foes….
If any attacks are allowed, that includes things that would be planet-destroying. Maybe the battlefield is hundreds of kilometers from civilization, but that civilization kind of depends on having their planet still existing. So having the battle happen on an inhabited planet bars some moves.