The Shrike vs. DBZ characters

[The Arbiter]

Dan Simmon's Shrike creature from Hyperion.

1v1 fights with the major characters of the Cell and Buu arcs. How do they go? Arena.

[big_adventure]

Shrike can win most of these by time and space dumping them somewhere, like, say, the big crunch. None are remotely fast enough to hit it or to even react to it.

Buuuuuuuut...

There is a potentially valid argument that Shrike can't dump someone without ringing itself out. It's not conclusive, if I recall from our last discussions on this. Shrike lacks the feats for hurting any of the high-end characters, since it's not a planet-buster and even that's not enough to scratch the paint on Buu Saga people at least.

[Captain Morgan]

The Z crew's durability isn't quite as universal as other bricks though. Doesn't Shrike have some weird age you to death moves?

[big_adventure]

The Z crew's durability isn't quite as universal as other bricks though. Doesn't Shrike have some weird age you to death moves?

It does. It can also reverse the flow of time, work outside of it, all kinds of nonsense. I mean, just space tossing any of the humans/saiyans would likely end them, as they die in a vacuum.

It also isn't written with feats AT ALL in mind: the whole point of the thing is that it's a walking slicing plot device. It does what it has to do for it's own (or it's masters') semi-inscrutable reasons. It can't be permantly hurt, it ALWAYS has another level to step up to when it needs to, etc.

Example: in the first fight between the Shrike and Nemes, she was fighting the thing pretty evenly, even doing better. She was doing damage, was just as fast, was no-selling the thing's spikes and strikes and such. She eventually resorted to the Merlin trap to get the breathing room for her kills of the protagonists (stopped by other forces), but she was pretty clearly at least a physical equal. The next couple of encounters between Vatborn and the Shrike however showed the thing flat out ripping them to shreds, OSKOing them through forcefields that no-sell overcharged starship weapons explicitly written as significantly hotter than stars, even blitzing them mid-phase-shift (something should pretty explicitly be impossible). All of those things should not be possible based on the first tussle. Then the final encounter between them showed a few of them somehow getting the drop on it and dragging it off the platform down into the acid clouds below. But of course that's stupid when you remember that the thing is capable of blitzing them and ripping them to shreds. And of course that the thing can teleport.