- Location
- Australia
The wyvern would keep the Butchers in line, and Taylor would get to use their powers in a whole new range of Wyvern forms.
Tisaku
Head Chief Thinkomancer
-odd phrasing, not the kind of thing comonly used.-
Crazael
Rehydrated Demon King
- Location
- Lost to the vagaries of time.
That just means you need bigger bullets, not that bullets don't work.
Edit: Also, that armor doesn't cover everywhere, so even smaller bullets will do damage if they hit the right areas.
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- Location
- Australia
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Tinkertech bullshit 'armour means there's absolutely no effect on the meat under the armour', knowing Wildbows Excuses for the Nine.
Doesn't matter. "bullet proof" isn't a real thing. And even if it was, we figured this trick out 600 years ago. A Mace.
Doesn't matter how big and hard your armor is, turns out blunt force trauma isn't something you can cheat.
Think of it this way, wearing a vest can protect you from a lucky shot, but if somebody empties the whole magazine into you, you're goin down.
Even if you're wearing a vest, broken ribs are common. Sure you don't have holes poked in vital organs which is good, but you can't magic away that much kinetic energy. You're alive, but getting shot still is capital B Bad. Taylor Varga even spells it out with their "Good Stuff" as armor material when the cops are testing it. Sure it ignores a 20mm AP cannon round..... but that's enough power to put the bulletproof plate through YOU anyway so you're still very dead.
So sure, Jack isn't gonna die from an infection from a panicked shot to the leg, but your average SWAT team is still gonna have good odds against most of The Nine, and fuck if they in town already you don't got much to lose.
As the Marines teach; Ammo is cheap, if its worth shooting, its worth shooting twice.
All subdermal armor is going to do is insure the corpse stays intact.
- Location
- Australia
1. It's a saying where I come from.
2. BB is a port city. Pretty sure nautical terms aren't uncommon there.
Until Taylor got involved. Then all bets were off.
Ashkari
(Verified Ink-slinger)
- Location
- United States
Oh man. This made me laugh so hard, because I've actually had this kind of thing happen in my favor during a hearing. That is to say, a judge choosing to contradict someone (in my case, expert 'advice') based on personal experience on the part of the judge. It totally happens.
Crazael
Rehydrated Demon King
- Location
- Lost to the vagaries of time.
Well, luckily, this isn't being written by Wildbow.
Raved Thrad
Your Friendly Neighborhood Curmudgeon
- Location
- The Other Side of the Screen
If things continue as they have, the next scene will have Armsbastard appearing and attempting to arrest Wyvern for the murder of the Slaughterhouse Seven.
Armsbastard: "Wards, now, or Birdcage! Soon you will call me MASTER!"
Photon Mom: "What the hell are you even doing here?"
Armsbastard: "I have a personal Dragontech teleporter tuned to Wyvern. So, as I was saying, you will join the Wards or aaaaaaaaaAAAAAARGGGHHHH!!"
Photon Mom: "Interesting. I didn't know people could scream that way while their faces were on fire."
I've also seen fics take the route that other groups The Nine have humiliated come looking for their own revenge/redemption.
Losing to The Nine is no shame, they're basically boogeymen. Siberian is thought to be straight up invincible, Crawler unkillable, they've kicked the Triumvirate's face in.
But if one Ward takes down The Nine while you didn't, now you look like chumps, so will go pick a fight with that Ward to prove you're badass by taking them down.
- Location
- Launceston, Tasmania
It's also used for Aircraft...
I've heard it used a fair bit in relation to ships and aircraft. Occasionally for people running like the devil himself was behind them.
Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
- Location
- In transition
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Look, I know that we as a fandom have a generally poor view of Armsmaster's general intelligence, but come on, there's literally no evidence for him being this stupid.
Raved Thrad
Your Friendly Neighborhood Curmudgeon
- Location
- The Other Side of the Screen
You'll have to pardon me if you think I'm being excessively harsh, but anyone who thinks the most effective and efficient way to assess an unknown situation, with a potentially hostile Parahuman with unknown capabilities, said Parahuman standing over a downed Lung, is to act in an aggressive manner and ask, "are you going to fight me?" is exactly that stupid.
- Location
- leiden (NL)
Agreed. If the parahuman did not know Armsmaster appearance, it sounds like he is Lung's henchman, coming to rescue his boss. That always bothered me.
Now I want to see a story where an Altpower Taylor, upon hearing that, one-shots Armsmaster unconscious and then report him to the PRT for being a secret Vilain or being Mastered.
Napdragon
Fire from Heat
That same person then tried to 1v1 an ENDBRINGER. Namely, the fastest one there is. I'm astounded he only lost one limb.
EDIT: These two chapters also display something I really like about Ack fics. Namely, how outrageously fast the S9 are dealt with. Like, I think they're some of the shortest in all of Worm, aside from like Taylor Varga, Scaling Up, and others like them which just have them get removed by someone else (One dude with a death wish and too many explosives, and a retired time-shifted Scion respectively) before ever entering the main plot. Like, I fucking hate the S9, because they're just stupid. It's entirely unrealistic that Jacob hasn't gotten a rifle round through his head before the story even starts. And before anyone says Bonesaw, I'm talking like 2000 early. Just after Gray Boy exited pursued by Faerie Queen, before they got Siberian, I call bullshit on someone not taking a potshot at his annoying face. Hell, as strong as subdermal armour can get, there's a certain point where you have to sacrifice flexibility and that's way before you can take a .50cal to the face. So fics which draaaaaaaaag the S9 out into an entire arc annoy the crap out of me, because none of them can, in the wise words of a thicc russian man, "outsmart boolet." The only challenge is finding them. Like Burnscar and Shatterbird are reasonably hard to take out, because Burnscar constantly employs Hit-and-Run tactics, and Shatterbird could be anywhere in the city, and Crawler and the Siberian are both immune to bullets, but Mannequin, Jacob, Bonesaw, Cherish, and Hatchet Face really really are not. And even then Jacob's subconscious back door into every parahuman doesn't (or at least shouldn't) make him immortal. Like, you could know that a bullet was shot at you from 100 metres away, you could know exactly how fast it's going, exactly where it's going to land, but you cannot physically move fast enough to dodge it, because it's a fucking bullet, and you are slow fleshly person.
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Hestia&theCourt
Turns out we're plural too.
- Location
- In transition
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You'll notice that in canon, he stopped those (admittedly very stupid) courses of action after he'd been bitten hard enough. He's been bitten very hard twice in this fic. He's not the brightest banana in the bunch, but even he's capable of basic pattern recognition at this point.
- Location
- Australia
He's already been spanked about this one.
At most, we would have a scene of him drinking morosely (Gatorade, for the electrolytes) and complaining how even the rookies are showing him up, and Assault patting him comfortingly on the shoulder.
Raved Thrad
Your Friendly Neighborhood Curmudgeon
- Location
- The Other Side of the Screen
"And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those pesky New Wave kids."
It Gets Worse might have the greatest S9 downing, that's not also just quick.
There's a fine balance between the cannon boogeyman, and just treating them like chumps. These people are still very scary customers. They are dangerous certainly, but the ability to terrorize a city by reputation alone? One like Brockton Bay even? Brockton Bay is already so far gone even the cops admit the gangs run the place with impunity. The city has to have enough guns in it to make an arms dealer blush. Walking through Empire or ABB turf is tantamount to walking into a killbox.
I personally think the dude with nothing left except far too much explosives is one of the more realistic takedowns though. It highlights the fact that as much as parahumans are able to pull out a lot of offensive powers, most of them are still pretty squishy.
Raved Thrad
Your Friendly Neighborhood Curmudgeon
- Location
- The Other Side of the Screen
I like how the S9 get taken out in "Mutant Deviations." Jack, in particular, dies so very ignobly, killed by a normal, raving about the unfairness of it all and how he wished he'd never heard of Brockton Bay.
Garreon
Paldean Top Champion
- Location
- Mesagoza, Paldea
No, she would turn into a bickering Tiamat
Wasn't the normal
Madison
Shaper's Butterfly Avatar
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Raved Thrad
Your Friendly Neighborhood Curmudgeon
- Location
- The Other Side of the Screen
Why yes, it was. Jack made the mistake of hitting the normal's berserk button, so she and the mini-entity went and nickel-and-dimed him to death. And since she wasn't a parahuman, his network backdoor couldn't predict her actions and she kept pumping him full of lead.
Hmmm. I suspect that the "mini trigger" thing messed with Jack's "cape intuition". Either by the information from Broadcast getting suddenly rendered obsolete, or by her power deciding to trigger with a "Lie to Broadcast" aspect.
EDIT: Also, once she Changes back to human long enough to fully mentally exit Wyvern-mode, she's probably going to freak out a bit over having eaten somebody.
Hope Through Overwhelming Firepower had a good fast S9 extermination. Bonesaw got her head smooshed, Crawler got disintegrated, and the rest got energy blasted. It was a bit of a mismatch by design; even the Siberian just got "popped" whenever she attacked.
"Did she just glare the Siberian to death?"
EDIT: Also, once she Changes back to human long enough to fully mentally exit Wyvern-mode, she's probably going to freak out a bit over having eaten somebody.
Hope Through Overwhelming Firepower had a good fast S9 extermination. Bonesaw got her head smooshed, Crawler got disintegrated, and the rest got energy blasted. It was a bit of a mismatch by design; even the Siberian just got "popped" whenever she attacked.
"Did she just glare the Siberian to death?"
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Garreon
Paldean Top Champion
- Location
- Mesagoza, Paldea
Director Piggot to Tagg: "By all means Tagg do tell me, how do I make someone who can turn into a dragon, adapt to anything we throw at her, killed the Nine and "Glared" the Siberian to death, fall in line with the Goverment and become a part of the Protectorate?
If we try anything against her, or those she loves, then all I have to say is that she ate and killed Crawler, and she didn't need ketchup for that.
I don't want her going Full Endbringer Tagg, do you?
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What does Rachel have to do with this?
Treating them like chumps can be fun too. I liked how they went down in "Hope through Overwhelming Firepower" by Border42. Taylor see's Bonesaw performing an atrocity and loses it, and her victims are the S9.