Mercenary Tao VS MCU

[Kuro]

Mercenary Tao learns of the existence of the infinity gauntlet and hunts his way across the MCU for it.

How does he do against the MCU, heroes and villain?

He fights starting from the weakest character all the way up to the strongest.

Most powerful version of Tao

Infinity gems not allowed

[big_adventure]

Well, given that this is a scenario of sorts, and thus the MCU folks won't screw around, I'd say Tao doesn't get past Stark (tech prep, due to him knowing Tao is coming), Strange (magic prep from knowing Tao is coming) or Vision (lack of ability to counteract Vision's phasing and lack of ability to hurt vibranium).

I'm leery on him hurting Hulk, but that won't matter as Hulk will never buy the guy and doesn't have notable prep feats. I don't think he can seriously hurt Thor either, though Thor does have the AoE chops to hurt Tao.

[BitVyper]

The only real chance anything here has against Tao is Strange getting the drop on him and chucking him into the mirror dimension (and while I never saw Dr. Strange, it kind of seemed like that wasn't an especially instantaneous thing? If it takes even a microsecond to work, it will fail against Tao). So it depends on how much of a scenario this is, since you mentioned fights taking place in a certain order, which makes things a little weird. We also have to consider then, with Tao's speed, conflicts only have to happen *at all* if Tao wants them to. He could recover most of the gems without ever being seen or giving anyone the slightest chance to figure out what's going on. Obviously if it's a strict progression of arena matches, he can pretty much dominate.

Tao's strongest, unless there's been more canon Tao Pai Pai stuff that I'm unaware of, would be his early stuff (basically a better/stronger/faster/harder 21st Budokai Goku but also with the pillar throws informing his strength) combined with the fact that when he shows up in the 23rd Budokai, he's upgraded at least enough to casually destroy someone at least roughly on par with 22nd Budokai Krillin.

Strengthwise, Thor opening the big space iris is pretty much the only thing on par with or beating Tao's perfectly controlled and targetted supersonic intercontinental pillar throws. Maybe ABC logic puts Captain Marvel and Thanos up there too, but eeeh, that feat is already kind of an outlier. Naturally, literally everyone in the MCU is a statue to Tao as far as reactive speed goes, so like 90% of his fights can just be "Tao throws them into space before they know what's happening." We're well past genuine mountain busting by Tao's first appearance where the Dodonpa is absolutely devastating, so nothing's too likely to stand up to that. Vision's only move in a fight with Tao is going intangible, which may not even protect him from a ki blast IF he has a chance to do it at all, and then his options are basically "stay intangible forever" or "die." The only reason that's a problem is because he has a gem, but there were at the very least weapons that could hurt him, and if this is a scenario, entirely possible for Tao to get one eventually, or just use one of the infinity gems (if he can, which who knows). After that, even if he couldn't hurt vibranium (honestly not seeing the feats for it to hold up here though), all he needs to do is pull the mind gem out of Vision's head, which we've seen is perfectly possible. Tony has shown absolutely nothing that has the remotest chance of eliminating Tao, and there's no amount of trickery that's going to overcome the massive speed disparity.

So there's a couple things in here that, in a scenario, can potentially stop Tao, but the odds don't seem to great.

[big_adventure]

Tao's skills are great, and his speed is too fast for anyone except MCU Quicksilver, but here, he's got a few issues:

1. He doesn't have the feats to support space tossing. So he has to be able to physically hurt people.

1a. Even if he could do it, space toss isn't working on Thor or Strange or Iron Man.

2. This scenario specifically hurts him, in that he starts with on MCU Earth and has to start fighting people. He's going to slaughter the easier folks, but eventually, he's going to have to come up against people who have the ability to plan for him, and because he's started a slaughter path, they WILL plan for him. Notably, with warning, Stark and Strange will come up with passive defenses that can stop him. Thor will be able to take literally any attack Tao can dish, and can respond with AoE's and autotargetting attacks that don't require him to hit a guy that he otherwise can't hit.

3. There's another issue: given that he can't travel through space, he's screwed when it comes to getting at the very least two of the stones. Power and Soul only ever come to earth with Thanos. Reality was briefly on Earth, but Reality wasn't really stealable - it was bonded to Jane, and it defended her and itself from attack. Tao trying to go for it is just going to get him annihilated.

4. He's got no way at all to deal with Vision, who's integrally connected to the mind stone for a while. He needs to get access to it before it's on Vision's forehead, but nobody even knew it was an infinity stone until Ultron ripped it from the GSOD and stuck it to Vision.

In a rumble, in Khazan, Tao can take down any of them except probably Thor and Vision.

[The Drunkard Kid]

Casually throwing stone pillars intercontinental distances at hypersonic speeds should probably allow him to space toss if he aimed straight up instead of at an angle. The major roadblock for him is that he has no way whatsoever of locating any of the Infinity Stones or the base gauntlet, especially the ones that are in space (unless he ends up running into Yondu and hitting it off with him, or something like that, I guess).

That said, if he's lucky enough to be on the scene when Thanos gets the final stone, or during Endgame's endgame, then he can casually steal the completed gauntlet off of anyone who has it and then mount it on his mantle or something. Maybe smack anyone who annoys him with the Power Gem portion without ever actually trying to wear the gauntlet just in case he isn't as resistant to the gamma burst generated by a completed gauntlet as Thanos was.

[big_adventure]

Eh, maaaaaybe, but "hypersonic speeds" is most definitely NOT getting someone into orbit. Gravity's a bitch: you need a hell of a lot more speed than that in non-powered flight just to make orbital insertion (like 17000mph iirc), to say nothing of getting further into space.

[grampagen]

All these Tao feats are really impressive.

Shame he initially got taken out by a hand grenade filled to burst with PIS.

[Cleric of Hell’s Brigade]

All these Tao feats are really impressive.

Shame he initially got taken out by a hand grenade filled to burst with PIS.

To be fair, that grenade was one Tao himself had on him IIRC. Dude was probably rocking a serious grenade.

[The Drunkard Kid]

To be fair, that grenade was one Tao himself had on him IIRC. Dude was probably rocking a serious grenade.

Especially since we know that he has contacts who can into a cyborg that is significantly stronger than his vanilla form. Hell, for all we know, Dr. Gero was the guy who passed along his contact info to the Red Ribbon Army's higher ups.

[Yun Lao]

Tao once killed a man with his tongue.

Not sure if he can win, but just wanted to remind people that this feat existed.

[The Drunkard Kid]

Tao once killed a man with his tongue.

Not sure if he can win, but just wanted to remind people that this feat existed.

To clarify, he killed a notably superhumanly durable guy with just his tongue. Like, after being caught in an underwater cave-in, the guy walked out of the ocean like he was the terminator, and survived relatively unharmed after being smacked from Penguin Village to wherever the Dragon Ball equivalent of Egypt is.

[The Drunkard Kid]

Eh, maaaaaybe, but "hypersonic speeds" is most definitely NOT getting someone into orbit. Gravity's a bitch: you need a hell of a lot more speed than that in non-powered flight just to make orbital insertion (like 17000mph iirc), to say nothing of getting further into space.

I will point out that a lot of people who are capable of space tossing in fiction don't have anywhere near that speed of throwing things because most fiction writers don't understand gravity wells.

That said, Tao's first stone toss was 2300 kms (and completely casual) and he expected to make a round trip in 30 minutes, so assuming that he didn't thought that he wouldn't need to search for the dragonballs that he was going there to retrieve once he arrived, that would give him a throwing speed of around Mach 7.4 without even straining himself, in his weakest form. That's a bit over a fifth of the speed needed to escape Earth's gravity, but throwing Hulk to France (or Iron Man into the ground, repeatedly) should work just fine if he that ends up being his maximum throwing speed.

Now he just needs to have any way of actually tracking an Infinity Stone, otherwise he's stuck waiting for some sort of supervillain-related disaster to occur and then surfing/jumping over to murder everyone and loot anything that looks like a stone or gauntlet from their corpses.

[The Drunkard Kid]

Actually, when in the MCU timeline is Tao Pai Pai appearing and where? This could just end up with Tao Pai Pai running into Wakanda, chucking Thanos to Italy, then trying to determine what color scheme would beat compliment his new accessory as he surfs a confused and disarmed Mad Titan to a precision face plant in front of Tao Pai Pai's favorite tailor.

[wjowski]

Stark pays him off.

Hey, he *is* a mercenary.

[grampagen]

Especially since we know that he has contacts who can into a cyborg that is significantly stronger than his vanilla form. Hell, for all we know, Dr. Gero was the guy who passed along his contact info to the Red Ribbon Army's higher ups.

The thought of Dr. Gero giving Tao Pai Pai a bomb specifically tailored for this purpose is amusing, like Wile. E and his Acme dynamite.

...the Android Saga might have been a lot shorter if Gero mailed out bunch of Android 16, "Destroy Cell" caliber bombs. Suppose he never found out where Goku lived, though.