The Shrike (Hyperion) vs Invincibleverse

[Postmania]

Can the Shrike do it?

Bonus: Saint of Killers vs the Invincibleverse. Can SoK repeat a universal killing?

[big_adventure]

Sure, Shrike is much too fast and shouldn't really have any issues killing Viltrumites. Shrike can blitz the entire race before they know the fight has started. It's arguable whether the Shrike is as fast as or faster than Wally West, for example, but that's many orders of magnitude faster than a Viltrumite.

[Nik Hasta]

Yeah, Shrike will definitely be fine.

[big_adventure]

OTOH, I would expect SoK to get blitzed, have his arms ripped off and his body chucked into a sun or while unconscious or, you know, headless. After, perhaps, Conquest violates his corpse. Because that's definitely the kind of thing Conquest would do.

[Dark Soul # 7]

OTOH, I would expect SoK to get blitzed, have his arms ripped off and his body chucked into a sun or while unconscious or, you know, headless. After, perhaps, Conquest violates his corpse. Because that's definitely the kind of thing Conquest would do.

I don't know about that. Conquest loved violence and enjoyed breaking people, but I never got the sense that he would any form corpse desecration. Unless it was to further torment an opponet that is.

[big_adventure]

I don't know about that. Conquest loved violence and enjoyed breaking people, but I never got the sense that he would any form corpse desecration. Unless it was to further torment an opponet that is.

Yeah, I know. But I get the feeling that he'd tell the person he was going to do that just to break them even harder. Not that he'd actually do it.

[Hiromi]

Apparently we need to refresh how powerful the Shrike is

Lempriere clears his throat. “Commander Barnes-Avne is dead. As far as we can tell, about half of the
Swiss Guard in the Valley of the Time Tombs are also dead. Thousands of other casualties are pouring in.
We have medics on the ground setting up mobile surgical centers, and we are ferrying the most severely
wounded here for urgent care. The dead are being recovered and tagged for resurrection upon return to
Renaissance Vector.”

Endymion
Chapter 16


“We don’t know, sir,” answers Lempriere. “It was like the old days … Hegemony Force days when the
jumptroops came in by farcaster portal, sir. I mean, thousands of armored … things … appeared,
everywhere, at the same second, sir. I mean, the battle only lasted five minutes. There were thousands of
them. And then they were gone.”

De Soya is straining to hear this through the gathering darkness and the roaring in his ears, but the
words make no sense. “Thousands? Of what? Gone where?”

Gregorius steps forward and looks down at the father-captain. “Not thousands, sir. Just one. The
Shrike.”

“That’s a legend …,” begins Lempriere.

“Just the Shrike,” continues the huge black man, ignoring the troopship captain. “It killed most of the
Swiss Guard and half the regular Pax troops on Equus, downed all of the Scorpion fighters, took two
torchships of the line out of business, killed everyone aboard the C-three ship, left his calling card here,
and was gone in under thirty seconds. Total. All the rest was our guys shooting each other in panic. The
Shrike.”

Endymion
Chapter 16


“There are—at this moment—more than thirty thousand Pax troops in and around the Valley of the Time
Tombs. At least five thousand of them are Vatican Swiss Guard.”

I whistled at this. The Vatican Swiss Guard was the elite of the elite, the best-trained, best-equipped
military force in the far-flung expanse of the Pax. A dozen Vatican Guard troops in full regalia could have
beaten the entire ten thousand troops of Hyperion’s Home Guard.

Endymion
Chapter 4

Basically that's the Shrike moving so fast it appears to be in thousands of different places at the same time as it slaughters 15,000+ PAX soldiers, the better part of 5,000 Swiss Guards, the entire complement of fighters, put two ships in orbit out of commission, and completely killed the entire crew of another, all in under 30 seconds

[Captain Smith]

It would be amusing to the Shrike take on the pompous dudes of Viltrumite-ville. He takes it. As far as Saint of Killers, I agree that he goes off into space.

[Slade1]

OTOH, I would expect SoK to get blitzed, have his arms ripped off and his body chucked into a sun or while unconscious or, you know, headless. After, perhaps, Conquest violates his corpse. Because that's definitely the kind of thing Conquest would do.

SOK, won't lose consciousness since he's already dead and is the angel of death but he can be blitzed and chucked into the sun or just into space. Or just shredded.

The Invincible universe is doomed before they even know it.

[big_adventure]

To add to the carnage for the Shrike - those 5000 swiss guard troops are each wearing armor with a personal force field. The field AND the armor can each, independantly, no-sell a nuke.

And, of course, it didn't just kill these guys. It took the time to carve every micrometer of the kilometers of cruciform filaments out of each of their bodies. This is a thing that is considered literally impossible (not infeasible - impossible) to do to even one person, over an unlimited time, with their crazy hyper-advanced science. It did this to every crew member of the ships and everybody it killed on the gound - tens of thousands of individual people, on the ground and in space. In less than 30 seconds.

The Shrike is ridiculous.

[Nik Hasta]

To add to the carnage for the Shrike - those 5000 swiss guard troops are each wearing armor with a personal force field. The field AND the armor can each, independantly, no-sell a nuke.

And, of course, it didn't just kill these guys. It took the time to carve every micrometer of the kilometers of cruciform filaments out of each of their bodies. This is a thing that is considered literally impossible (not infeasible - impossible) to do to even one person, over an unlimited time, with their crazy hyper-advanced science. It did this to every crew member of the ships and everybody it killed on the gound - tens of thousands of individual people, on the ground and in space. In less than 30 seconds.

The Shrike is ridiculous.

I think you're conflating feats there.

The cruciform removal was on a specific ship that was found after the fact, as I recall, I don't think the Shrike bothered to remove the Cruciform from the Swiss Guard.

Huh, you and I literally had this exact discussion in 2017. I can actually quote myself here:

I mean, the Shrike destroying the Swiss Troops at the time tombs, while mad impressive, has the stated timeframe of 30 seconds and involved the Shrike using time clones to do it, cruciform technology was not widespread at that point so they didn't get vivisected and it only destroyed 60% of the crew on the ships, downing most of them but not all, and a lot of the guards are mentioned as being killed in the ensuing panicked crossfire once the Shrike left so it's not as insane as it sounds and is very difficult to quantify.

The cruciform stuff didn't happen until the Endymion books which came after. Wherein, the Shrike did vivisect people and remove the 500 metres of cellular nodes and stuff perfectly but it mostly happened offscreen so, as I recall, we don't have a specific timeframe for it. The freighter thing, in the extracts that I've found, have a body count of 67,000 people but only 52 cruciform people. I recall there being a timeframe for that - it all happened faster than the ship's systems could compute but I'd need to check the text directly.

[big_adventure]

I think you're conflating feats there.

The cruciform removal was on a specific ship that was found after the fact, as I recall, I don't think the Shrike bothered to remove the Cruciform from the Swiss Guard.

Huh, you and I literally had this exact discussion in 2017. I can actually quote myself here:

Every single Pax trooper (which obviously includes the Swiss Guard), and over, hmmm, from memory 80% or 85% (I think?) of humans living in Pax times have the cruciform. It's stated by Raul at the beginning of Endymion, before Aenea comes back - which is where we have the slaughter of the swiss guard and pax troops on Hyperion.

In any case, I think then I said I'd go back and read the book again to check the feat and the ensuing discussion, but I think I couldn't find my copy, and didn't want to buy it again. :-)

But I'll do that now, and come back...

[big_adventure]

Just to refer to the presence of the Cruciform among soldiers...

Raul in Chapter 4 of Endymion, page 28:

I had joined the Home Guard with the childish notion of someday belonging to the Pax military and flying between the stars. A foolish notion for a youngster who had already decided not to accept the cruciform.

Also, in chapter 3, prior to his execution, the priest comes and offers to cruciform him, thereby turning the execution into a 3 day vacation (the time for "basic" resurrection of course). He states first off that billions have accepted it. Second they discuss that dying without accepting the cruciform carries an additional penalty of an anonymous burial at sea, and that your name is stricken from the records of everything. So again, cruciforms are VERY widely distributed by the start of the book, and mandatory for all Pax military (and just members in good standing of the Pax).

[Nik Hasta]

Ah, I think I was referencing the time in... erm... Fall Of Hyperion where the Shrike fucks up a bunch of dudes at the Time Tombs which would have been prior to the introduction of the cruciform.

I don't recall the vivisection being noted in the second instance though. The Shrike might have "killed," them albeit they would get up later. It definitely cites soldiers being "killed" in the crossfire so, even if the cruciform is widespread, I don't think we can apply the vivisection to that instance without it being name checked, no?

[Cronus]

So no one in the invincibleverse has speed on par with the Shrike? What about durability feats for invincibleverse? Anything noteworthy?