The Shrike (Hyperion) vs Marvel and DC powerhouses

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Tenebrous_Guile

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#1  Edited By Tenebrous_Guile

Everyone's favorite time traveling Slaughterfiend has decided that it wants some superheroes on it's tree. Heroes and villains from both DC and Marvel have gathered in the light of many of their number just flat out dying without warning, being perfectly fine one moment, then dropping dead the next, cut apart at the very basest levels, or even retroactively gutted like fish or kidnapped. After hundreds of such murders, the identity of the killer is known; a creature from another universe known only as the Shrike.

It cannot be reasoned with, it cannot be bargained with, it will not stop until everything it wishes to die has met a gruesome; painful end on it's blades as it buzzes across time and space, killing anything it sees fit. This is their last chance to stop it before the cosmics have to get involved to stop this time traveling menace from the ever mutating future.

No Caption Provided

The Shrike's abilities: The Shrike is capable of instantly teleporting itself anywhere in space and time that it wills through "farcasting". Through this ability, it can both engage in standard "teleportation" or at will time travel, seemingly without limit in it's choice of destination.

Fedmahn Kassad realized that he could kill them all - commandos, assault boat crew, all of them - and they could do nothing about it. He knew that time had not stopped - any more than it stopped while a ship was under Hawking drive - it was merely a matter of varying rates. The bird frozen above them would complete the flap of its wings given enough minutes or hours. The Ouster in front of him would close his eyes in a blink if Kassad had the patience to watch long enough. Meanwhile, Kassad and Moneta and the Shrike could kill all of them without the Ousters realizing they were under attack.

It was not fair, Kassad realized. It was wrong. It was the ultimate violation of the New Bushido, worse in its way than the wanton murder of civilians. The essence of honor lay in the moment of combat between equals. He was about to communicate this to Moneta when she said/thought - Watch.

Time began again with an explosion of sounds not unlike the rush of air into an airlock. The bird soared and circled overhead. A desert breeze threw dust across the static-charged containment field. An Ouster commando rose from one knee, saw the Shrike and the two human shapes, screamed something over his tactical comm channel, and raised his energy weapon.

The Shrike did not seem to move - to Kassad it merely ceased being here and appeared there. The Ouster commando emitted a second, shorter scream, and then looked down in disbelief as the Shrike's arm withdrew with the man's heart in its bladed fist. The Ouster stared, opened his mouth as if to speak, and collapsed.

Kassad turned to his right and found himself face to face with an armored Ouster. The commando ponderously lifted a weapon. Kassad swung his arm, felt the chrome forcefield hum, and saw the flat of his hand cut through body armor, helmet, and neck. The Ouster's head rolled in the dust.

Kassad leaped into a low trench and saw several troopers begin to turn. Time was still out of joint; the enemy moved in extreme slow motion one second, jerked like a damaged holo to four-fifths speed in the next instant. They were never as quick as Kassad. Gone were his thoughts of the New Bushido. These were the barbarians who had tried to kill him. He broke one man's back, stepped aside, jabbed rigid, chrome fingers through the body armor of a second man, crushed the larynx of a third, dodged a knife blade moving in slow motion and kicked the spine out of the knife wielder. He leaped up out of the ditch.

-Kassad!

Kassad ducked as the laser beam crept past his shoulder, burning its way through the air like a slow fuse of ruby light. Kassad smelled ozone as it crackled past. Impossible. I've dodged a laser! He picked up a stone and flung it at the Ouster manning the tank-mounted hellwhip. A sonic boom cracked; the gunner exploded backward.

Behind her, the Shrike moved slowly through the chaos, choosing victims as if he were harvesting. Kassad watched the creature wink in and out of existence and realized that to the Pain Lord he and Moneta would appear to be moving as slowly as the Ousters did to Kassad.

Generally this is put as it going from trillions (low end) to quintillions (high end) times the speed of light depending on just how slow that laser was to Kassad.

The Shrike acts at incredible speeds due to acting in "fast time", where it manipulates the flow of time relative to the rest of the universe to give it the impression of having impossible speed on top of it's teleportation abilities. Most of it's victims are slaughtered before they ever knew the Shrike was there when it doesn't deign to just kill it's enemies backwards in time. Through this ability, the Shrike can also create temporal clones of itself to mob an enemy. The Shrike is known to be able to utterly speedblitz faster than light enemies who can outright laser light, going from merely "blurring" to outright invisible depending on how much it's playing around. An example of it showing these speeds is shown in the above quote from page 166 of Hyperion.

The Shrike's blades are capable of cutting things that are not physically able to even be damaged according to the laws of reality as understood by mankind, such as planar fields; which are otherwise entirely invulnerable to everything thrown at them, even FTL impacts. There's no real describing it's sharpness other than "planck length, maybe sharper", being able to cut through constructs that beings quadrillions of times more intelligent than humans believed to be invulnerable.

The Shrike is next to invulnerable, conventional weapons are known to be entirely useless against it even if they do hit. Starship grade weapons do nothing to it (it doesn't even flinch from these impacts), and it has only been harmed by beings on the same spacetime phase as itself.

It has only ever lost when it was destined to do so, but as it simultaneously exists in all possible timelines, it knows the result of any potential action.

It is going up against the following:

  • Thanos
  • Zoom
  • Flash (Wally West, Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, most recent versions that apply)
  • The heralds of galactus (Surfer, Terrax, Firelord, Air-walker)
  • The earth based green lanterns
  • The Rogues
  • Captain Marvel (current)
  • Shazam and Black Adam
  • The Cull Obsidiax
  • The super family (Superman, Supergirl, Power Girl, Superboy)
  • The Thor corps

Rules:

  • The Shrike is out to kill them all. The Team is out to survive and avoid getting cut into bloody ribbons or stuck on the tree of pain, which means getting rid of the Shrike before it slaughters them.
  • The team is in character, but is fighting to survive, and have identified the Shrike as the murderer of most of what they cared for.
  • The battle starts in Times square, deserted as the Shrike killed everyone in the city before the team arrived, leaving their guts out to see.
  • The team gets a split second to actually see the Shrike before it engages all out murder mode.
  • Thor and the Thor corps have been granted their time manipulation again. Assuming they can react/throw their team mates at the Shrike fast enough to use it.

Round 1: The Shrike feels sporting and is not making time clones of itself.

Round 2: The Shrike isn't feeling merciful and is spamming clones of itself as much as possible.

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Round 1: Team comics.

Round 2: The shrike wins!

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#4  Edited By Tenebrous_Guile
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czarny_samael666

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#5  Edited By czarny_samael666

@tenebrous_guile:

I will try, but I am already telling You it will be hard to compare someone I know only from OP.

1.How fast is he? Because You're saying that he can do all of this through time manipulation. I would assume that to ue his powers he would also need higher reflex.

2.Is he allowed to jump in time to prevent certain events, of his enemies gainning higher power?

3.What was that indestructible object cutted by The Shrike? It needs more than statements, rather feats.

4.What is Shrike's TP resistance? And other durability feats as well.

5.What knowledge of his enemies he has?

Personally, without being allowed to affect Thanos in his past, Shrike won't be able to kill him, since Thanos is banned from Death's realm.

Thor can be cutted through, but if Shrike won't cut of his head, but just cut through his chest, he won't kill Thor and Thor will be able to jump in time or blast him down when he will think that the battle is over.

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#6  Edited By Tenebrous_Guile
@czarny_samael666 said:

@tenebrous_guile:

I will try, but I am already telling You it will be hard to compare someone I know only from OP.

1.How fast is he? Because You're saying that he can do all of this through time manipulation. I would assume that to ue his powers he would also need higher reflex.

2.Is he allowed to jump in time to prevent certain events, of his enemies gainning higher power?

3.What was that indestructible object cutted by The Shrike? It needs more than statements, rather feats.

4.What is Shrike's TP resistance? And other durability feats as well.

5.What knowledge of his enemies he has?

Personally, without being allowed to affect Thanos in his past, Shrike won't be able to kill him, since Thanos is banned from Death's realm.

Thor can be cutted through, but if Shrike won't cut of his head, but just cut through his chest, he won't kill Thor and Thor will be able to jump in time or blast him down when he will think that the battle is over.

1: The shrike perceives light speed objects as motionless according to it's rare PoV scenes in the series (so Picosecond+ reaction times) , but whether this is a factor of it's actual reflexes or it's funky time mumbo jumbo isn't known.

2: Technically he can, but he's hamstrung by there being a rather solid concept of fate and destiny in his universe. There are certain points in time that the Shrike cannot affect, and it seems to be unable to try to avoid fate unlike it's human enemies, rather simply bowing it's head and succumbing to it's destiny, which has lead to some of it's defeats by strictly inferior opponents like Kassad. One of the few times it was totally destroyed was by a woman who unexpectedly developing matter warping powers, the ability to keep up with it, and turned it into crystal and shattered it.

3) A planar field generator, known to be impervious to terajoule handguns (the equivalent of the atomic bomb, concentrated into the small point of a personal weapon), spaceship mounted weapons (continent sterilizers), and generally most everything thrown at them. The thought of them being breakable was inconceivable until the shrike cut through them due to having quantum sharpness on it's claws, which could slip through the very fundamental particles of the field and disrupt it.

4: As far as I can tell the Shrike has never met a TPer, but it is a machine of some sort, built by the Ultimate Intelligence to guard tombs going backwards in time with the ultimate intention of becoming part of an army lead by the Ultimate Intelligence from the end of time that would take on the Judeo-Christian God at the beginning of time. It's not a standard gears and circuits robot, but it is an artificial construct.

5: The Shrike has no real knowledge of it's enemies other than that they're easily the equals or betters of some of it's more dangerous opponents like Kassad (who basically works a little like Zoom with a time limit and power armor). It is known to muck about with trying to inflict pain on it's enemies as it's personality seems to be that of a rank sadist, likely born out of confidence that it's so fast that no one would be quick enough for it's tendency to dilly dally with torturing rather than killing an enemy to make a difference. Something I feel would be a crucial weakness here.

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czarny_samael666

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@tenebrous_guile:

1.It is hard to judge without looking on it.

2.His enemies here are capable of doing the same, which are the same ones that will surviving even being cutted into pieces (Surfer). So I belive that time-jumping isn't really an option.

3.So at best planet level durability I belive. Thanos should take it as I see. Others - considering how this works - possibly won't.

4.Ok. Other durability feats? Energy, matter manipulation, brute strength (shock waves made by hard punches)...

5.It is actually a huge disadvantage, because he won't know that Thor Corps, Heralds and Thanos will survive his cutting.

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He isn't going to defeat Thanos

Btw thas a good profile pic your sporting

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Shrike in combat (Nemes is like a very bad copy of Shrike, so I'l post some of her feats too, since we can use powerscaling in this case)

If the laser carried ten thousand times the amperage it did, Nemes would not be worried.

-

Nemes is bored. She shifts into fast time. The tableau in front of her is frozen. Aenea’s mouth is open, still speaking, but the vibrations in the air do not move. The rushing river is frozen, as if in a photograph with an impossibly high shutter speed. Droplets of spray hang in the air. Another droplet of water hangs suspended a millimeter beneath Raul’s dripping chin.

Nemes strides over and takes the flashlight laser from Raul’s hand. She is tempted to act on her earlier impulse right now and then drop to slow time to watch everyone’s reaction, but she sees Aenea out of the corner of her eye—the girl’s little hand is still molded into a fist—and Nemes realizes that she has work to do before having fun.

She drops her phase-shifted morphic layer long enough to retrieve the specimen bag from her belt and then shifts again. She walks over to the crouching girl, holds the open bag like a waiting basket beneath the child’s chin with her left hand, and rigidifies the edge of her phase-shifted right hand and all of her forearm into a cutting blade not much duller than the monofilament wire still hanging over the river.

Nemes smiles behind her chrome mask. “So long … kiddo,” she says. She had eavesdropped on their conversation when the trio had been kilometers upriver.

She brings her blade-sharp forearm down in a killing arc.

-

She looks down. The sharpened edge of her phase-shifted hand is in the grip of two sets of fingerblades. Her forearm is gripped by two other scalpel-sharp hands. The bulk of the Shrike presses close, the blades on the lower body almost in the frozen girl’s face. The creature’s eyes are bright red.

Nemes is momentarily startled and seriously irritated, but not alarmed. She rips her hand away and jumps back.

The tableau is exactly as it had been a second before—river in freeze time, Raul Endymion’s empty hand outstretched as if pressing the firing stud on the little laser, the android dying on the ground with medpak lights frozen in midblink—only the girl is now overshadowed by the huge bulk of the Shrike.

-

Oh,” says Nemes, “you don’t want her? Then I’ll have to take her back.” Nemes moves faster than fast time, feinting left, circling right, and swinging down. If the space around her had not been warped by displacement, sonic booms would have shattered everything within kilometers.

The Shrike blocks the blow. Sparks leap from chrome, and lightning discharges into the ground. The creature slashes the air where Nemes had been a nanosecond before. She comes around from the rear, kicking at the child’s back with a blow that will drive the girl’s spine and heart out through her chest.

The Shrike deflects the kick and sends Nemes flying. The chromed woman shape is hurled thirty meters into the trees, smashing branches and trunks, which hang in midair after she has passed. The Shrike hurtles through fast time after her.

Nemes strikes a boulder and is embedded five centimeters in solid rock. She senses the Shrike shifting down to slow time as it flies toward her, and she follows the displacement back into noise and motion. The trees snap, break, and burst into flame. The miniclaymores sense no heartbeat or respiration, but they feel the pressure and leap toward it, hundreds exploding in a chain reaction of shaped charges that drive Aenea and the Shrike together like halves of an old imploding uranium bomb.

The Shrike has a long curved blade on its chest. Nemes has heard all the stories about the victims the creature has impaled and dragged off to stick on the longer thorns of its Tree of Pain. She is not impressed. As the two are driven together by the shaped charges exploding all around them, Nemes’s displacement field bends the Shrike’s chest thorn back on itself. The creature opens steam-shovel jaws and roars in the ultrasonic. Nemes swings a bladed forearm into its neck and sends it fifteen meters into the river.

She ignores the Shrike and turns toward Aenea and the others. Raul has thrown himself across the girl. How touching, thinks Nemes, and shifts up into fast time, freezing even the billowing clouds of orange flame that spread from where she stands in the heart of the explosion’s flowering.

She jogs out through the semisolid wall of the shock wave and breaks into a run toward the girl and her friend. She will sever both their heads, keeping the man’s as a memento after delivering the girl’s.

Nemes is within a meter of the brat when the Shrike emerges from the cloud of steam that had been the river and blindsides her from the left. Her swinging arm misses the two human heads by centimeters as she and the Shrike roll away from the river, slicing up turf to bedrock and snapping off trees until they slam into another rock wall. The Shrike’s carapace throws sparks as the huge jaws open, teeth closing on Nemes’s throat.

“You’ve … got … to be … fucking … kidding,” she gasps behind the displacement mask. Being chewed to death by an obsolete time-shifter is not on her itinerary for today. Nemes makes a blade of her hand and drives it deep into the Shrike’s thorax as the rows of teeth throw sparks and lightning from her shielded throat. Nemes grins as she feels the four fingers of her hand penetrate armor and carapace. She grabs a fistful of innards and jerks them out, hoping to remove whatever foul organs keep the beast alive but coming away with only a handful of razor-wire tendons and shards of carapace. But the Shrike staggers backward, four arms swinging like scythes. Its massive jaws are still working as if the creature cannot believe it is not chewing bits of its victim.

“Come on!” says Nemes, stepping toward the thing. “Come on!” She wants to destroy it—her blood is up, as the humans used to say—but she is still calm enough to know that this is not her purpose. She has only to distract it or disable it to the point that she can decapitate the human child. Then the Shrike will be irrelevant forever. Perhaps Nemes and her kind will keep it in a zoo to hunt it when they are bored. “Come on,” she taunts, taking another step forward.

The creature is hurt enough to drop out of fast time without dropping the displacement fields around it. Nemes could have destroyed it at her leisure except for the displacement field; if she walks around it now, it can shift up to fast time behind her. She follows it down to slow time, pleased to conserve energy

-

Nemes is using all her energy fighting off the Shrike’s whirring blades. It is like fighting several spinning propellers at once, she thinks. She has been on worlds with propeller-driven aircraft. Two centuries earlier she had killed the Hegemony Consul on such a world.

Now she bats away whirling arms, never removing her gaze from the glaring red eyes. Your time has passed, she thinks at the Shrike as their displacement-shrouded arms and legs slash and counterslash like invisible scythes. Reaching through the thing’s less-focused field, she seizes a joint on its upper arm and rips thorns and blades away. That arm falls away, but five scalpels on the lower hand dig at her abdomen, trying to disembowel her through the field.

“Uh-uh,” she says, kicking the thing’s right leg out from under it for a split second. “Not so fast.”

The Shrike staggers, and in that instant of vulnerability she slips the Sphinx card from her wristband, slides it through a five-nanosecond gap in her displacement field squarely into the palm of her hand, and slaps it onto a spike rising from the Shrike’s banded neck.

“That’s all,” cries Nemes as she jumps back, shifts to fast time to bat away the Shrike’s attempt to remove the card, and activates it by thinking of a red circle.

She leaps back farther as the hyperentropic field hums into existence, propelling the flailing monster five minutes into the future. It has no way back while the field exists.

-

Aside from speed nothing impressive here IMO. He failed to defeat some bad copy of him.

:

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it sounds unstoppable...don't think anyone in the gauntlet can survive it

zoom would last the longest but even he'll go down

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#11  Edited By Redzkz

@czarny_samael666:

1.How fast is he? Because You're saying that he can do all of this through time manipulation. I would assume that to ue his powers he would also need higher reflex.

Here's the speed feats for Shrike (Shrike was fighting against another time manipulator, so they were just fighting at super speed):

Suddenly the thing was right next to him, centimeters away, at least three meters tall, towering over him.

Impossible, thought Gyges. I would have sensed the phase-shift distortions.

Exploding rockets spilled bloodred light on the chrome carapace. Metal teeth and chrome spikes twisted the expanding flowers of yellow, white and red across quicksilver planes. Gyges caught an instant's look at his own reflection, distorted and startled, and then he phase-shifted.

It took less than a zeptosecond for the shift. Somehow one of the creature's four clawed hands made it into the field before it completely formed. Bladed fingers dug through synflesh and muscle, seeking one of Gyges's hearts.

Gyges paid no heed to the attack but attacked in return, swinging his silvered, phase-shifted arm like a horizontal guillotine. It could have cut through whiskered carbon alloy as if it were wet cardboard. It did not cut through the tall form in front of him. Sparks and thunder exploded as his arm bounced away, fingers numbed, metal radius and ulna shattered.

The clawed hand within him pulled out ropes of intestine, kilometers of microfiber optics. Gyges realized that he had been opened from navel to breastbone. It did not matter. He could still function.

Gyges clenched his right hand into a sharpened bludgeon and thrust it forward into gleaming red eyes. Ite was a killing blow. But the great steam-shovel jaws opened, closed, faster than phase-shifting, and Gyges's right arm suddenly ended above the wrist.

Gyges threw himself at the apparition, trying to merge fields, attempting to get his own teeth within tearing distance. Two huge hands seized him, the bladed fingers sinking through shift field and flesh to hold him tight. The chrome skull in front of him slashed forward: needle-spikes pierced Gyges's right eye and penetrated the right frontal lobe of his brain.

Gyges screamed then - not out of pain, although he felt something similar for the first time in his short life - but out of pure, relentless rage. His teeth snapped and clacked like steel rendering blades as he sought the creature's throat, but he continued being held at three-arm's length.

Then the monster ripped out both of Gyges's hearts and threw them far out over the water. A yoctosecond later, it lunged forward, biting through Gyges's throat and severing his carbon-alloy spinal cord with a single snap of long teeth. Gyges's head was severed from his body. He tried to shift to telemetric control of his still-fighting body, peering through blood and fluid out of his remaining eye and broadcasting over the common band, but the transmitter in his skull had been pierced and the receiver in his spleen had been ripped away.

The world spun - first the corona of the emerging sun around the second moon, then skyrockets, then the color-dappled surface of the river, then the sky again, then darkness. With fading coherence, Gyges realized that his head had been thrown out far into the river. His last retinal image before being submerged in darkness was of his own headless and uselessly spasming body being hugged to the carapace of the creature and being impaled there on spikes and thorns. Then, with a flash, the Shrike phase-shifted out of even fast-time existence and Gyges's head struck the water and sank beneath the dark waves.