Grrl Power #1487 – It takes two to backstab
Sure it takes two to backstab, but a storm of mirror images certainly helps.
The neat part is, Final Blade is always a backstab, no matter which way the target is facing. If the target happens to know that, and they put their back to a jet of plasma, (and presumably aren’t incinerated by that) it can be a problem for the backstabber.
Max isn’t arrogant enough to think that she’ll come out of the tournament unscathed. She reviewed all the quarterfinalist and above winners of previous U.C.B.A’s, and the earliest events usually favored the guy with the biggest cannons and most armor, be they mech or bioroid kaiju. But as the tournaments went on, being tough as shit became the minimum credentials for winning, and increasingly, having some flex skill or crazy hail mary or clinch ability determined the winner. So Max is definitely on the lookout for the Word of Death spell, or Petrify, or Electron Inversion or whatever.
What she’s more worried about is leaving DNA on the field. The Holo-Not-Latex-But-Basically-Print-On-Latex (which is a fair bit stronger than latex) outfit she’s wearing will prevent that, assuming attacks never get past her body reinforcement force field thingy. Now you may ask yourself, does Max have DNA at this point? Well, she has something. Human scientists haven’t mapped it yet, but it is, as far as anyone can tell, unique to her. The alien law enforcement database of “Protein Encoding Instructions Found in Crime Scene Goo” is vast, but sticking some of her blood or “skin” or whatever in there and have it come back with “Unknown Unique Sample EFX-13025a95” would still be easy enough to match to her if any alien Galaxy Rangers thought to sneak into her quarters and make off with her pillowcase.
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.
Can that guy even fly? If I were Maxima, I’d have been hovering about 200 feet up, tapping my foot on the air, waiting for him to show himself. Even if he CAN fly, it would be a lot harder to sneak up on her in midair, unless he has an invisibility spell.
Flying is useful.
Flying is useful, but it’s SO useful that any adventurer style combatant at this level can be assumed to have it. Presuming be has both flight and invisibility there’ll be less dust to be disturbed by his passage while in the sky, making him harder to detect. That might be her reasoning.
It is thinking like that which ruins plot. One must be vulnerable in some way or the plot fails.
The core truth behind your statement is that stakes must remain at risk for writing to be good, but I disagree that this fight is the stakes.
Characters with a defense should use it to the best of their abilities. Characters jobbing it is just as destructive to plots as invincible characters fighting when fighting is the only stakes. We saw Ryzyl trying stuff earlier and was generally ineffective, there are no stakes in this fight. Maxima wins fights, that is basically granted.
Combine this with the big stakes elsewhere. But Max doesn’t always win socially or in spycraft. The stakes are tied with the idea of what winning means. Earth gets space bucks, but does it anger or concern some bigger player like? Like whoever calls the shots in the Xevoarchy? Does Max’s identity get leaked creating actual problems? Do any of these competitors get angry or suspicious and follow Max home? Tom and Deus are both suspicious what will they do with that? Learn more? Blackmail? Sell information?
Imagine if the second paragraph of the author commentary were instead rewritten to be in the first person from Max’s perspective, and placed in yellow rectangular thought boxes in the panels of this comic.
Waiting for the dramatic reveal and dude’s sword is just crumpled like cardboard because Maxima, knowing his only option was a sneak attack, just put ALL available power into toughness to bait him into an attack confident she could just tank anything he had.
And that he managed to damage her disguise suit and reveal her. Who wanna bet?
These are the real stakes of this fight. Does the disguise fail?
No bet. It could fail here, when Deus and Thothogoth talk, when space rangers look into the footage, when one of the UCBA competitors tries some espionage, or in a million other ways.
I would be incredibly surprised if the blade actually penetrated her armor/skin/protective skintight shield, let alone the disguise suit which her field covers. Even if it does, I doubt it’ll do anything to her skin. It would be interesting to the story if it does, but I doubt it will.
That being said, we do know there are certain people who can, and have, fought Maxima to a standstill, and one of those people is NOT from Earth (Dabbler), so it’s likely there are others who can as well.
Again, we don’t know if the Dabbles ‘fight’ was just a sparring match or if it was a ‘for realsies’ fight (probably just a sparring match, doubt Dabbles would get so lucky a second time)
We have seen what happens when someone tries to put Maxi into stasis… so doubt even ‘sticky air’ would truly slow her down for long
Maxima literally said, and I quote:
“In fact, there are only two individuals who have ever even fought me to a standstill. One of them is dead (as far as we know)” – this was almost definitely Darude – “… “and the other is on this team.” (at which point Dabbler started nudging Sydney to let her know that it’s HER.
She didn’t say it was a spar. She said ‘fought her to a standstill.’ Given Maxima’s penchant for minimizing any weaknesses on her part, she would have said that it was in a spar, so as to imply that she wasnt going all out in that one anyway.
Also, Dabbler’s bag of tricks is a lot more than just ‘sticky air’ like Lapha’s stasis gun had. She has hundreds of other methods to use, in ADDITION to that. And when Maxima puts all her power into speed, that means she doesn’t put her power into other stuff, which makes her vulnerable in another area even more (for example, when she had to put most of her power into armor, which meant she couldn’t put enough into speed, strength, or anything else to break away from Vehemence or attack back… until Sydney and Dabbler provided a distraction so that she could switch from Armor to Strength).
There’s also the fact that she’s been shown to be vulnerable to things like mesmerism (such as against the super mannekiller), and might be vulnerable to mind control, although that latter one was a what if guest art.
And magical effects, like the ‘weakening field’ did affect her. The problem being that 5% of her max strength was still enough to easily take down that golem in the Black Reliquiry. But if something else had a weakening field, and was stronger/tougher than that golem, or something was able to have a more intensive weakening field, that would also make her vulnreable. Even the Fel ship’s shield was able to, at least for a while, hold off her plasma blast, until she went all in on it. And the Fel ship’s problem was it did not or was not capable of capitalizing on that, since when Maxima pours all her energy into one thing, it weakens her other areas (although in that case, she was being protected by Cora’s ship’s force field as well).
A sparring match is still a match, just not a serious one
And, again, doesn’t matter how many tricks or spells Dabbles has up her non-existent sleeve if Maxi kills her before she uses any of them
Almost forgot to give the link to what I was referring:
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-150-not-sure-where-max-stencils-her-kill-marks/
For that matter, Vehemence and Supermassive each managed to hold her to a standstill (however, she had allies in those battles to tip the battle in her favor).
Actually she was definitely losing with Vehemence, if not for Sydney and Dabbler. Probably was losing to the Supermannekiller too if not for Hiro.
I wouldn’t be that surprised, if she loses on purpose, so not to rouse to many suspicions (and to Maximize her crews bets).
Maxima is not an idiot, so she either had super speed up, to be able to react almost the instant an attack was made, or super defense up, to be as immune as possible to any attack. Yes, a blend could work, but we are talking about someone that had a reasonable chance against others in this group, so a half defense, is half assed protection, so if you are vulnerable, even half defense is not worth anything more than no defense, so it becomes an all or nothing strategy. So his attack might be knocking her forward, but not necessarily cutting her open, though the suit might receive damage. I repeat Maxima is not stupid, if she done anything but defense or speed, that indicates lack of thought, something her military and super battle experience would have cured long before now.
Stabbity stab stab!
Oh that poor blade… Someone take it to a smithy after this and get it fixed… If he jabbed it hard enough for her to react, it’s gotta be horribly mangled…. He probably got that itch she couldn’t reach to scratch though, so maybe she won’t knock him into orbit.
I think she looks surprised because he managed to hit the holoprojector and she’ll have to skedaddle superfast to the ship and hopefully get another one.
Ok , been following this comic for a long time. even went back and read from comic #1. What i am trying to glean is CAN she be hurt and be backstabbed by this guy. Everything i have read and remember, if she ha turned her invulnerable all the way up, NOTHING can get thru. Now i am not saying the blow would not hurt, BUT…. can it penetrate at ALL? can i get a yes or no on this one please….
Remember Max is a ringer. She is expected to win this fight by someone who knows what kind of competition this fight usually brings to the table. Expected to win it, in fact, “so handily that she might scare the Xevoarchy.”
Nobody here is likely to be on her level or even really close to it, barring some completely unexpected development. She got a cracked rib the first time out, which was an unexpected development. But it was one they’d prepared for so it wasn’t completely out of left field.
I’m betting Ryzyl has just used his best attack. He’d be an idiot if he hadn’t because whatever the results are they’re going to happen within the next 0.01 seconds. He doesn’t get a second chance.
I’m also betting Max didn’t get hurt much worse than that cracked rib. At worst she might have taken what to a normal person would be a knife to the kidneys. That would be substantially worse than I expect and it would be very bad. But even that would leave her at least a minute of free action which is all she needs to finish this fight and get to medical care.
So plot-relevant things, as I see them, will not come in the form of Max outright losing. They might come in the form of her disguise slipping, or in the form of consequences after the match. But she’s still the ringer in what’s expected to be a thoroughly unfair competition.