Alright, I finished Trigun. [It rules, people should read it]
TRIGUN SPEED BREAKDOWN
Trigun is interesting in that it doesn't really function like a traditional shonen power curve. It is actually closer to the work I've done previously on One Punch Man where the purpose of the proposed curve is more to indicate the minimum capacities of the highest tier characters - in this instance Knives and Vash are operating as our Saitama.
Breakdown - Vash the Stampede at a glance
Base Vash has a large number of feats of high end bullet timing:
- Kicks a cannon shell out of the air when it is fired at him.
- Reacting to and countering a blitz attempt by a guy who, at base, is cutting bullets out of the air with a sword.
- When attacked from all sides by 27 puppets, who themselves are fast enough to catch handfuls of machine gun fire, Vash quickdraws and shoots all of them down such that they all are dropped apparently simultaneously.
- When he starts using his plant powers a bit, Vash can manifest tendrils/blades that have multiple feats of catching, blocking and deflecting even full auto bullets without issue.
At a glance,
an obvious high end bullet timer.But we'll check in later for his more high end stuff.
The Breakdown of Humans
So, our first yardstick is Nicholas "The Punisher" Wolfwood. Wolfwood is a member of an assassination guild - The Eyes of Michael - and was genetically modified to be beyond human. Beyond superhuman strength, regeneration and precision, he has superhuman speed.
- Wolfwood has feats of dodging bullets at point blank range, at one point he's literally lying across of a barrel of a particularly large gun and he dodges the bullet after it has been fired.
- He's able to track Rai-Dei the Blade (who has feats of cutting bullets out of the air and who makes a spirited attempt at blitzing Vash when on his rocket shoes) when he's using his secret technique to rush a distracted Vash and guns him down. Their presentation is generally that they are in the same ballpark with Rai-Dei being a bit quicker as he has the higher feats.
>
He's generally a sort of a solid mid-high tier bullet timer.
Now, the Eyes of Michael are also capable genetically engineered to undergo rapid adaptation when facing an opponent and can further enhance that growth via dosing themselves with a a vial of serum. When the previously established Wolfwood faces off against Livio the Double Fang and his stronger split personality Razlo the Tripunisher, who is/are also a product of the Eyes of Michael training programme. While Wolfwood can just about hang with Livio, once the stronger personality comes out, he cannot keep up with them in terms of speed.
It's worth noting that Razlo has supplementary feats of catching bullets at point blank range as well as, at first, treating Wolfwood like a chump.
> We have our first jump from mid-high bullet to high end bullet timer
Wolfwood dopes himself twice in this fight, something noted as highly dangerous because his boy won't be able to handle the stress, and, despite initially being firmly surpassed by Razlo, he swiftly becomes capable of dueling evenly with him at point blank range with their Punishers. An image I will post here because it's rad:
Razlo also notes that Wolfwood is getting faster and this is cemented when Wolfwood largely finishes the fight through a pretty complex blitz where he wraps Razlo up in ammo belts from his Punisher faster than he can react and detonates them. The key point here is that, when they are focusing on it, the Eyes of Michael can experience some pretty explosive adaptation.
Moving on, Livio gets some neat feats like actual flashstepping around the environment, literally blitzing through an army of like 100 dudes and the like and then comes up against Elindira the Crimson Nail.
Elindira is the second strongest human character in the series. She is initially capable of blitzing Livio with impunity, impaling him with eight gigantic nails faster than he could react.
> So we're clearly back at that high tier bullet timer+ level that Doped Wolfwood achieved, via Elindira.
Livio begins adapting and becomes able to match her speed somewhat consistently. Elindira then reveals she's been wearing a suit designed to restrain her strength and speed this whole time and removes her limiters. She goes back to being firmly beyond even Adapted Livio's ability to handle.
Razlo then comes out, presumably benefiting from a boost from the adaptation Livio went through, and is somewhat closer to Elindira but still cannot reach her speed.
> To clarify, we are at a full order of magnitude beyond high tier bullet timer+ with Released Elindira. I would put this at edging into actual superspeed/multimach levels.
Livio and Razlo then begin sharing the mental load of fighting Elindira, Razlo handling the reflexes and Livio handling their physical movement. This allows them to effectively counter Elindira's sheer speed, albeit they are still mostly on the defensive. I'm aware this doesn't make much sense in terms of how brains and bodies work but it's what's in the text.
Elindira then announces, "Alright, I'm not holding back any more," and literally tears Livio/Razlo to pieces in an instant. They manage to get a few hits in as she's doing this but it's quite one-side as they end up largely dismembered.
> Serious Released Elindira, given how she's blitzing someone who was on par with her Released self, which was an order of magnitude beyond high-end bullet timing, is clearly some flavour of multimach.
All of which is to say, presentation-wise Elindira is still firmly beneath the level of the plants (Vash/Knives).
So, this leaves us with the question of how far beneath the plants are we?
High End Plants Feats
Things get a bit tricky here as the top end feats for the plants tend to be a bit exclusionary, as in they only seriously fight each other or other similarly isolated people. However, here's what we are working with:
- As noted earlier, Vash has feats of deflecting streams of sustained fully automatic gunfire with his tendrils and even stuff where his tendrils actively seek and chase down and catch bullets in flight.
- Base Knives has a ridiculous feat where he dices up an entire town in an instant using apparently just one of his tendrils. We see this from a young Legato's perspective wherein suddenly, from his perspective everyone and everything in the town except him just fall into fragments. This is an absurd speed feat, also really difficult to quantify.
Later in the series, Knives fuses with several other plants and grants himself massively enhanced powers. One of these is the sheer range and speed of tendrils. In one instance he is able to launch a tendril with speed and precision that it reaches a spaceship in reasonably high orbit in an indeterminate number of seconds. It's hard to say exactly how quick but the implication from that scale and rough time frame is that
his tendrils are clearly capable of moving at high levels of multimach.
When Vash faces down Knives in their final confrontation; he is able to quickdraw and shoot down these same tendrils with his plant-derived warp bullets. So Vash is ridiculous quick in terms of his reactions,
reacting to multiple high level multimach attacks coming at him and gunning them down quite easily.
So, plants, when they are going all out,
easily in the high level [hundred+] realm of multimach for their attacks and reactions.
Legato is Ridiculous
As a closer on this entry to the thread; it's worth noting that Legato Bluesummers, after reforging his body into a living puppet and is stated by Elindira (for all her power) as "having gone beyond human," and he initially does things like instantaneously cut down an entire swarm of mosquitoes, stitching significant chunks of his body with his threads mid combat and playing afterimage tricks on people.
He fights with Vash and forces him to assume his "Black Vash," state wherein Vash actually makes full use of his plant abilities and manifests tendrils to go on offense rather than purely playing reactionary defense. The speed of these tendrils moving is superheating the air to the point Legato can feel his skin burning just from being nearby, it is causing a localised hurricane around Vash's body and it, again, blocks hundreds of bullets fired simultaneously when the guns are literally on top of Vash and he is completely unhurt.
And yet. At his peak, using a web of monomolecular wire, puppeting his body wildly beyond human limits and through sheer psychotic determination, Legato is able to dodge and even move at a similar speed to Vash's tendril. He can't win, Vash is very clear that this isn't a really a fight that he can hope to win but he makes a go of it.
So, Legato Bluesummers is arguably the fastest "human" in the series.
So that's it for my look at Trigun. I vaguely recalled them being in the high multimach level but had forgotten some of the particulars, especially how ridiculous Legato ended up being. People should read Trigun, it's really good and a lot better than the anime.
Next breakdown will be Dragonball Strength. Maybe. I really don't enjoy reading Dragonball so I might do something else to avoid it.