Grrl Power #1488 – Unstoppable blade vs the other unstoppable blade
I’m sure no one was surprised that Max wasn’t for real murdered by this attack. But for the record, without ManaVore, Final Blade would have actually been able to pierce her armor, because of the crazy amount of magic behind the attack. It wouldn’t have killed her outright, but it would have hurt.
I read/listen to a lot of LitRPGs, and so many of them have abilities like “This Skill can block any single attack, but has a five minute cooldown.” or “Activating this Skill makes you undetectable for 3 minutes, or until you interact with an object.” The problem with a skill description with an absolute in it is either there’s some fine text The System isn’t telling you about, or those skills are wildly exploitable. I mean, really, ANY attack? You could block the Chaos Titan Gamemaster’s Reality Schism? Zeus’s lightning bolt? The Death Star’s main weapon? A stinging comment? Which is a sort of social attack, but still an attack!
I’m not suggesting using The System should require fine text or a 38 page user agreement or that the most common class should be “Lawyer” because everyone has to initial in triplicate every time they acquire a new skill and store a copy at The System Hall of Records. Just a little clearer wording would be immensely useful, like “This Skill can block any single attack up to three tiers higher than itself. Has a five minute cooldown.” Something like that.
Now, with all that said, “Final Blade” was genuinely supposed to be an unstoppable attack, because it was a skill Ryzyl got way back when he was Bronze Tier, and now he’s S-Tier… or uh, I guess he’s be Platinum tier if the lowest tier was a metal. The skill is also a Platinum Tier attack and is the sort of thing you’d use, pretty much exclusively, on other Platinum Tier adventurers, demi-gods, Armageddon level monsters, that sort of thing.
Originally, I’d planned on Max catching the blade, (because she’s ridiculously fast) but it would keep inching toward her sternum no matter how much strength she put against it, while Ryzyl explained how the attack is unstoppable. In that scenario, Max would have flown into space, dragging Ryzyl along, and wait for him to expire in the hard vacuum. While kind of a cool solution, it didn’t really make sense, since the boundary of the arena is only 5 KM up, and it would take Ryzyl longer than the allowed 30 seconds to expire, since he’s a high-level adventurer, and not a 3rd level Rogue rolling D6/level for his hit points.
The only goofy thing about this result is that ManaVore doesn’t have a fuller, which is the indent that runs down the center of some blades, usually from the cross-guard to halfway or 3/4 of the way up the blade. Supposedly it “reduces its weight and improves balance, handling, and flexibility.” You can see one on Ryzyl’s dagger in panel 6, though I’m not sure how helpful it would be on a ten inch blade. What that means for Ryzyl is that his knife is just pressed against the flat of Max’s sword, and it seems like just a tiny readjustment of the angle or a little twist of the blade could cause it to skid off into her back. But I guess that’s not how Final Blade works. Once activate, it’s just straight in to the heart. (Final Blade has no effect on creatures without hearts.) <- See how easy that is, The System?
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?
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FWIW, I think the flex from “You’re dead meat” to “I’m noping out of this–you win” is very funny and actually realistic–pros know when they are beaten and minimize the damage they take.
So Ryzyl was gleefully going to kill Maxima with even giving her an option to yield but as soon as the tables turned he wants to save his ass by yielding. Too bad Maxima heard him.
Max absolutely had time to kill him before he got the words out if she wanted to
Chibi Ixah makes me unreasonably happy.
Awww, I was going to say that
“The problem with a skill description with an absolute in it is either there’s some fine text The System isn’t telling you about, or those skills are wildly exploitable.”
My pet peeve is “Immunity to fire”. Does that mean immunity to:
Flamethrower/Housefire?
Steel kiln?
Bath in Lava?
Bath in the sun?
Because there are a few orders of magnitude between those, but they would all be “Fire Damage” in my book.
“it would take Ryzyl longer than the allowed 30 seconds to expire, since he’s a high-level adventurer, and not a 3rd level Rogue rolling D6/level for his hit points.”
Between animal tests and accidental exposure, we do have decent information about vacuum exposure.
You actually lose usefull consciousness in about 10 seconds. But not because of oxygen deprivation:
The low pressure means liquids leave your blood stream, meaning your blood becomes to viscious to be properly pumped and not enough oxygen reaches your brain.
Don’t hold your breath – you just rupture the alveoli in your lungs. And Oxygen is not the issue.
After about 90 seconds your heart stops.
Get rescued before it stops and you come out with temporary sight loss.
We never managed to resuscitate someone after the heart stopped.
Of course Ryll probably has a “make sure my body feels like it is under normal pressure” passive/emergency spell. So he would be up to his suffocation timer.
And given the chance of being suffocated, he probably has a small spacesuits air supply on other spells/passives.
Immunity to the heat from all of those, but the latter two probably won’t have any oxygen for you. Possibly the kiln as well.
Also not immune to the crushing gravity from the sun.
In general, past a certain point the different damage types start creating each other, so even absolute immunity to fire doesn’t help you if the fire is hot enough. Most of the listed four are anoxic environments or at least smoke inhalation hazards, and the sun also inflicts radiant damage possibly shading into poison and/or lightning, plus the crushing pressure.
The Sun is all about tons of hard radiation, too. Immunity to heat is not immunity to gamma and x-rays and ultraviolet. Technically, someone immune to Fire could still get a tan or sunburn by being out in UV light. It’d be considered radiant damage instead of fire.
Oh also, sonic damage. I heard once that if sound could travel through space, the sun would be deafeningly loud even from 150 million km away.
Personally, ‘fire damage’ refers to open flames, not just heat
So, someone with fire resistance is still vulnerable to Heat Metal?
Basically, as long as it says ‘fire damage’, regardless of source, Fire resistance works fine against it. So, yeah, can’t hurt someone with Res Fire with the heat from steam or lava, either. Fire Elementals don’t burn from any source.
Umm, no, Heat Metal doesn’t use flames, so not Fire Damage
Tell that to the guys who wrote the spell, they specifically specify it as Fire Damage, which Fire Resistance can negate.
Then… they are idiots who don’t understand the difference
Or the fault is on your end. Because you are trying to invent a difference, where there intentionally was none.
I’d say immunity to fire is immunity to combustion. Fire is a chemical process where a fuel is oxidized, producing heat. So with immunity to fire, you resist heat and your body does not get oxidized more than is healthy for you.
But that won’t necessarily protect you against even more intense heat. If the heat is enough to have atoms break apart into free-floating ions, aka plasma, well good luck trying to keep your molecular structures intact. We’re at a level above mere fire. Only being fully immaterial would help there.
“Fire” is generally combustion. The Sun is not combustion, it’s fusion. Nuclear weapons are also not combustion, whether fusion or fission. Similarly, an electric kiln, or other resistive heat generator like a stove or space heater, are not fire. Lava’s heat also doesn’t come from combustion. There are many sources of heat besides fire. For this reason, I dislike it when systems use “fire” instead of “heat” as a damage type.
Yes, that ^
The character Elaine in Beneath the Dragoneye Moons ends up gaining such a thing. Figuring out the edge cases is something she explicitly has to do, but in her case, Lava and the Sun wouldn’t count, as per the elemental system of the setting, they’re separate elements.
Forget the issues with Final Blade, the real problem here is Max’s final blocking move, which I’m calling flat out impossible without some sort of magical guidance. So far as I know, she doesn’t have a way to see backwards, and have you ever caught the point of an opponent’s blade on the flat of your own? A master would have found this extremely hard, and she only learned how to swordfight a couple of days ago (yes, it was a speedrun, but that only gets you so far).
It’s not that Max in general is a Mary-sue, because she isn’t, but that here she pulled off a nigh-impossible maneuver that she seems to have pulled out of he butt (almost literally) with no plausible set-up within the narrative.
I call shenanigans.
Eh, i’m happy enough handwaving it as “Super speed/thought”. She expected the attack to be behind her so was mentally prepared to twitch a sword attack thataway, and had the super reflexes to get it in there. I mean, if she’s got the precision to catch a bullet with two fingers that doesn’t strike me as any more unreasonable.
If she, Cora and Dabbler have done homework on the other contestants, she might have been expecting Final Blade specifically, and know that it automatically comes from behind and goes straight for the heart.
Rule of cool my man.
I will point out that Final Blade goes in a straight line for the heart. Meaning it can’t actually slip off and go around. So getting an indestructible sword anywhere in front of the tip would stop it (at least until it drained enough mana to get through. Or the sword is mana vore)
Is “Final Blade” a thing outside of this webcomic? If so, where is it from?
I would say not sure if there is a specific mention of “Final Blade” anywhere, but I feel like this a more a reference to abilities that have “Final” are never actually so. Final Flash, Final Fantasy, and Final Countdown all spring to mind.
I’m sure there are multiple moves called something like that, and I know there are more than a few (defense bipass) or (shield breaker) techniques and spells and such across fiction whose whole thing is going through anyone’s defenses, or breaking through even the strongest shields…pretty sure half if not most Isekai protagonist have some version of that and will explain why its not “BS” for ten minutes of the episode.
I’ll also point out that putting your sword at your back is a blocking technique. A bit showy, usually done with a reverse grip, and commits you to doing an underhanded swing or keeping your sword close to your body as a follow up. But it is done.
Sure, I get it, “super something something” – “Nice ass.” Just don’t complain about how broken Final Blade is.
Dude, you were monologue-ing during your ultimate attack. Think there a law of nature that when that happens, its a clear sign you lost.
You might enjoy reading “A Practical Guide to Evil.” Story tropes are basically a force of nature in that story.
Yet again I remember how much I loved reading that.
Story tropes being such a force of nature that awareness of the tropes lets you manipulate them, e.g. “Always be in the first step of a plan.”
One of my favorite lines from 007 movies was when Bond was strapped to a table in a lease was about to bisect him. He asks is this supposed to make me talk? And the villain responds no Mr Bond I expect to die and then leaves. When you leave without seeing the finish that’s almost a sure sign that you’re going to lose
I realize that the Ultimate Authority has already stated the blade does not have a fuller, but from the way it is drawn, it seems that it does have a series of shallow, parallel grooves running lengthwise from near the base of the blade. That might be enough to catch the tip of the dagger…
The fuller is important!
Imagine a cross section of a blade with a fuller– sort of a curvy, thicc I-Beam sort of deal.
That shape cross section handles flexing, twisting, and impact much better than a diamond or rectangular cross section would
Plus, for bonus points, you’d need much less in the way of super reflexes/accuity to catch the point of your opponet’s blade in a divet than on a flat surface (or, gods forbid, a corner), so a fuller would help a silver or gold tier adventurer achieve a Max-like result with less-than-platinum skills.
Whoops, was supposed to be a general comment, not a reply. Coincidentally, your comment was also about the fuller! Huzzah!
I would also point out that some blades have groves called “blood grooves”, and it strikes me that the fuller could serve the same purpose: Allow a stabbed victim to bleed out prior to removing the blade.
“Blood groove” is a misnomer for the fuller. There’s no such thing as a groove making the victim bleed better.
That’s true, but the fuller may have originally happened because some idiot thought it would.
Picture it. The idiot comes in with a bag of money (it has to be a rich idiot or nobody would pay attention to him) and blathers deluded ravings at the smith, and then the smith frowns and thinks, “Hey wait, is this guy actually an idiot? I thought he was an idiot. I’m almost sure he’s an idiot. But that sounds like a good idea….”
And then it becomes part of their bladecraft from that day forward, and other smiths are always on the lookout for opportunities to study the blades of tournament-winning knights and especially effective warriors so the knowledge spreads to the next town, and the next, and then across the kingdom, and inevitably there’s a war and it becomes known in the other party to the war as well, and ….
More of our history is due to idiots with bad ideas than is generally acknowledged.
Yeah, it definitely did not originate from anything of the sort. Fullers have existed for a long time and shown up in multiple cultures, and implement a simple structural concept that has existed for millennia. It would hardly have been some new concept that you could both reduce the material of something and strengthen it by doing so in that way. Fullers have appeared as far back as ~1500 BC, and weren’t even the first instances of the use of structural geometry in metalworking, or possibly even in swords.
It is pretty much a given that the structural aspect came first, and then some moron thought it would work for bloodletting.
There were also, of course, many successful historical sword designs that did not have fullers, including the diamond cross section, as you point out. The advantage is that DCS blades are generally sharper.
I mean in the original scenario, presumably her legs would still be free even if both hands are occupied holding back the dagger. She could employ the ancient and venerable Nad’Kiqq Style while he’s stuck there inching the blade closer to her…
The ‘burp’ takes the cake. Fun fact about fullers, originaly they were beat into the swords and did not lighten them at all. It did make them slightly wider so if you then cut the width yes it reduced weight. It made the spines stronger by making the metal denser and thinner made it more flexible. There is a tradeoff where brittleness wins. This is all with 1000 year old metalurgy and not using anything modern at all. These days sword makers grind the fuller in which is fully just removing materiel. The raw quality of the steel makes up for not doing it the tradional way.
Okay, so given Dave’s mini-rant, I absolutely need to shout out the “Edge Cases” series by Silver Linings (yes that’s the author’s pen name) on Kindle/KU. The whole book is based on a party that are, as you might guess from the title, edge cases in the System that their world runs on, with all the shenanigans that implies. In particular, one of the main characters has one of those “block any attack” skills, and (spoiler alert) she *absolutely* starts exploring (and exploiting) what counts as an “attack”. Thoroughly recommended!
Oh, I read that! It was an absolute blast.
i’m calling it, ManaVore will absolutely develop some kind of sentience by the end of this arc due to the sheer amount of mana it’s eating.
Yeah, that’s a good point. I wonder if it would work on Achilles or if the Final Blade would just push him until he got pinned against something. Or would the blade just phase through him to get to his heart? For that matter, can he be phased through or is he so solid that nothing can go through him?
I suspect he’s “tough all the way through”, not just impenetrable skin. Or some of the things already mentioned would have killed him and left an intact corpse.
No, I think you can only delay Achilles. Assuming he doesn’t have a heel of some sort.
Which might be OK depending on your goal. If it’s just to keep him from stopping your theft of the crown jewels until you get offworld, delay might even work better. Archon might have other priorities than pursuing you, especially since it would take using Halo or asking Cora for a lift.
The sword’s “Burp” is down near Max’s bottom…I bet that’s gonna be clipped and memed to death on Spacebook. Probably with a caption like “Bottom Burp”
“For thy heart, for thy heart, who has wronged me!”
Manavore seems closer to Shieldbreaker than Farslayer…or were you talking about the dagger?
The unstoppable heart-seeking dagger. Though TBH any of the Twelve would make interesting entrants into a no-holds-barred ultimate-tier free-for-all like this one.
Not much you could do with The Sword of Mercy, other than deliberately impaling yourself for that “Unkillability” effect. Townsaver wouldn’t be of much use, since it only works when you’re defending someone else. My money would be on Coinspinner or Shieldbreaker, assuming you had a way to deal with unarmed opponents.
Wayfinder always showing the path to victory or your desire while making it riskier to get there would work, too. The path to winning a duel/taking out an enemy is a totally viable desire.
But yeah, Shieldbreaker would be the ultimate here, cleaving through all defenses and destroying all weapons used against it.
Well, maybe Swords, and not other magic weapons. Who knows?
Depends on how much lore the opponent knows, yeah? Does a walking mountain count as “armed”?
Also I feel like there are at least a couple others that would be tough to counter.
* Doomgiver: Reflects damage onto the attacker
* The Mindsword: Anyone in radius is absolutely loyal to you and you only
* Maybe Soulcutter as well for the “sit down and give up” effect, though the “affects self too” drawback is pretty big.
In the novels, attack spells count as weapons as far as Shieldbreaker is concerned. And it worked against ALL weapons other than bare hands and feet. It’s explicit weakness was an Unarmed opponent. Thus several games of musical weapons (You see your opponent has Shieldbreaker, you disarm yourself, Opponent drops shieldbreaker to avoid the “unarmed people are immune to Shieldbreaker and weaken you if they grapple and you can’t drop Shieldbreaker once you’re in combat” problem) occur.
My favorite OP was the Axe of Contrition. It can only be wielded by someone on a quest to ameliorate the horrible consequences of their own previous actions.
“a little twist of the blade could cause it to skid off into her back.”
Or Manavore is a greedy little slut and refused to let it slip away.
You know, your comment about system disclaimers puts me in mind of Die Trying — it’s a survival/extraction/litRPG where the system is something external to the world it’s being imposed on and, yes, skills have short descriptions that function exactly. as. written.
So if a skill says “A dodge roll will be performed,” it doesn’t matter what inertia says (or even if you’re in contact with a solid surface).
I’m reminded of the Truely Enchanted Sword vs the Mostly Lucky Sword
What I read, decades ago, about fullers is that they make it easier to withdraw the blade after stabbing it into a body.
A body’s muscles tend to grab on to whatever penetrates it and hold it in place (likely an reflexive attempt to not bleed out from punctures).
The fuller creates an uneven surface. So when the muscles contract around the blade and the blade has an uneven surface due to the fuller, the muscles don’t get a good grip on the blade and which makes it much easier for the stabber to pull out the blade (to use it again to either attack or block quickly).
Not really.
You don’t need to stab someone deeply enough that it would work that way in order to kill them. I mean, just how thick do you think someone’s torso is that you need to put a sword in to half its length?
You don’t want to either. That way lies getting hung up on bones. Which a fuller will do absolutely nothing about.
Regarding using absolutes in skills the epic D&D feat (at least for edition 3.5) states “You can deflect any ranged attacks (including spells that require ranged touch attacks) as if they were arrows”. So technically someone with that feat could deflect Death Star’s ion cannon…
Seem to recall there’s even an upgraded version of dodge that’s meant to give the ability to dodge normally undodge-able things like spells and half damage for failed dodges? Or at least DDO has one.
The 1E Scarab of Protection gave you a save for no-save effects at the cost of one charge, IIRC. There’s a few spells around which do the same for specific purposes.
Also, to a person the Death Star’s ion Cannon is a bolt or lance, an Area of Effect line/Burst, not a Ray. It doesn’t make a TH roll. It aims at a general point and then wipes out the surrounding planet.
An Epic person could make a Reflex save to dodge the initial stroke, I guess (it’s probably got at least a 100 foot path to it, so fun…) but the AoE takes out the planet, so even if you don’t die immediately, the planet blowing up probably does for you.
Parrying fall damage. By punching the Earth.
The chibi frames made me laugh out loud; I can’t imagine a better way to end the encounter.
Why are so many commentors mentioning my name here? I’m not even in this webcomic! If you can’t say anything nice, just stop it!
I understand how you feel. My sister is named Karen.
I like how he walks away from the dagger.
Obviously it’s a sure-kill technique, so the quality of the weapon is superfluous. The knife is just an expendable item, not a valuable magical/scientific piece of gear. The power of the technique comes from him, not the weapon.
If the power comes from him, then Manavore is eating *his* mana. Which you would think he’d notice, since I’d guess his mana tank would be down to “none”.
Maybe his metabolism isn’t as magically-dependent as Dabbler’s. She ended up with a hangover. Though that was from guzzling mana potions to keep up the casting which otherwise would have drained her. Maybe that has different results.
It’s only guzzling mana if he’s actively inputting it. That’s like saying I cast a fireball at you and then you eat up every spell in my memory because it hit your sword.
Nope, he executed the technique, it’s powering itself along nicely, and then burp! The swore ate the spell, and everything else ended.
If it worked as you said, he wouldn’t have any mana because it would have devoured all his mana after they fought earlier, and he’d have none left.
Idk, my interpretation of the page is that Manavore ate the Final Blade spell in panels 2 through 5, and then began pulling mana directly from Ryzyl. The dagger hits the ground in panel 6, and we see Ryzyl’s facial reaction in panel 7. In panel 8 I think his hand had gone numb and he’s trying to get some feeling back into it. That’s how I explain dropping the dagger. Either Ryzyl recognized from experience that it would be dangerous to continue holding it, or he got the magic equivalent of an electric shock. And assuming the dagger was a magic blade, it isn’t any more, and just isn’t worth the effort to pick up.
This round was more lethal than round 1, so it’s nice to see a tough, intelligent opponent like Ryzyl yield when he knows he can’t win. I think we have a good recurring character here.
And it strikes me that, in the final round, 1 or more contestants might yield right after it begins. The other 7 finalists will be reviewing the footage of Ixah’s 28 second romp.
Using an attack that will EVENTUALLY kill your opponent within arm’s reach of someone who just punched clean through a mountain? Bold move.
Seconded Geeb.
Ryzyl’s willingness to just plan for an _eventual_ demise of Max from his ultimate attack? Foolish in the extreme. He should have been moving for a secondary attack or to counter Maxes retributive strike. Everyone saw her super speed. Ryzyl has speed too, but since he didn’t try moving his blade after his ultimate attack -either his speed was tapped out or the attack required him to hold still – there was no reason for Max to hold still and not hit HIM a lethal counter-blow, (but she trusted the sword I guess and/or was willing to tank the blow)…
Also he places wayyy to much trust in the attack’s ability to correct for the interference in ambient magic from outside sources.
She’s holding a anti-magic/anti-divine sword I don’t know what the presence of such an object does to the ambient magic, but I don’t think Rzyl does either.
Also she summoned that weapon from a gliph, as a reaction to a previous magic attack. She could be carrying a ton of magical weapons that do all kinds of problematic things to the ambient magic.
I see that Ryzyl was using his left hand. Twas a sinister attack indeed!
That’s looks like a right hand flexing in panel 8 to me…
so ixah is hax1 and the blade hax2
Is this a Highlander 4 reference?
Using a vertical block from behind against an ‘unstoppable’ attack?
Getting vibes of “Book of Swords” series by Fred Saberhagen from the clash of ultimate weapons. Just me being old?
Well good thing for Maxima she learned real quick she needed more just her own power when dealing with very high level magic, magic to counter magic at those levels. That said you’d think she’d have learned that given she apparently stalemated in a fight with Dabbler before…but we assume that wasn’t a death match and she thought she could win against anything by going all out. So good thing round 1 was just a fae trap and not (shield breaker mana blade of guaranteed death) kind of attack.
That said still a bit weird that to make space bucks she is basically in death gladiator competitions where its okay to kill your opponent, voluntarily. As opposed to the usual superhero shenanigans of (I am some random cosmic being or space tyrant and I insist you have to be in my gladiator death games for whatever reason). I mean this is different but does make us question Maxima’s morality even more. Not that we haven’t seen her be a soldier and consider blasting an opponent’s head off before, this just feels a bit even more into the dark side as it were.
That said I wander what Nth guy is doing, feels like he/it/she/xerx/etc.., was surprised to see field access on Earth, I wander if it was their species or another at the same level behind Earth, felt very foreshadowy.
And on another note involving the whoile disguse risk thing, so we know Maxima has a defense aura that extends out far enough to add protection to the disguise so long as it stays skin tight, so no passing through a hologram tail that isn’t really there, but it is her lowest defense point if I am remembering correctly, her actual body being much stronger, and we have seen (years ago from a character that hasn’t shown up since with the explosive energy balls power) someone able to get through the aura at damage her clothes and apparently was enough to also pop her back. So its not unreasonable to think Maxima had to be considering the risk, which this blade also likely had, that someone at this level of combat could hit her with an attack that gets through the defense aura and damages the hologram disguise.
Fairly sure this is NOT a ‘gladiator death game’, because in those, there is only one form of victory: death to all opponents
This is an Unlimited Combat game, where the objective is to simply beat your opponent… if they happen to die (or get eaten) then… ‘oops!’
I think that the very nature of the interaction is what would prevent the dagger from slipping.
The dagger is being propelled forward by converging magical force—the sword is consuming that magical force—it’s like the center of the blade is an “infinite” negative charge the blade is a giant positive charge. Once they make contact, good luck pulling them apart.
That said you would create a magical dead zone where all the local mana got eaten up—and the dagger probably should have been vaporized by being the conduit for it all. Like that seems a natural limitation of such an attack—that the weapon needs to bear the strain of drawing enough energy through it to pierce the opponent—and the material doesn’t exist to channel enough to actually kill Max in a single blow without turning to metallic plasma.
That complaint reminds me of Perfect Defenses from Exalted 2e. When they said “block everything”, they did indeed mean “block everything”. So yes, you could block the Death Star.
Relatedly, a Quest/Story on Sufficient Velocity, Project Prometheus, has a Superheroine called Arc who deflects/reflects any attack/damage to them, usually back to the source to hurt them. And yes, it applies to biting comments as well! She has the notable achievement/status of being the only person to have ever survived contact with “Goldnine”, the “blood” of an extradimensional-alien-god-thing that turns anything organic it touches into more of itself, even (perma-)killing the heroes Steadfast(complete Invulnerability) and Deadman(self-resurrection).
Yes in exalted 2e It’s exact, and a charm coud also grant perfect soak , you could shield a planet wth your body against the death Star , and take no damage.
If I was Max I would have done the blade grab and then spun. Let him hold on to the blade at 20,000 RPM. Whatever passes for blood can just go straight to his feet.