Board Thread:Battles/@comment-14415732-20150716161616/@comment-26385698-20150727062048

I know my opinion doesn't get tallied for obvious reasons, but here's my analysis:

What makes Ceres (as Dark Tenacity) a difficult opponent is that she can hard-counter a lot of abilities used against her. Physical damage doesn't work because she's incorporeal, most forms of magic or direct manipulation don't work because she overrides them with willpower, she can teleport, and on the chance that she does get destroyed, she can come back on the other side of the continent. In comparison, her actual offensive output is limited--she gets a continent-scale attack once a day, sure, but if that doesn't work, she's relying on town-level attacks, or possibly higher if she tries hard--which she's good at. Due to these attacks being darkness-based, it's also difficult to tell exactly where she is if you rely on vision, and good luck hearing something that has no physical presence.

On the other hand...Kain doesn't actually care about attacks weaker than country+ level. Tectonic is a huge step up in scale from Nuclear! The limit of Ceres's darkness manipulation isn't fully explored in the context of putting her willpower behind it, but it is stated that she only gets one continent-scale event per day. Everything else is going to be weaker no matter what. Therefore, Ceres only gets one shot at Kain, physically. After that, she has to attack Kain mentally or on some other level...but he's already a totally insane manipulator of chaos and logic. I'm pretty sure that no matter what her voice does to him, he's already learned to function in that emotional state.

It might be possible to outlast him, since she has no physical needs as Dark Tenacity...but since Kain can fight for a week continuously at the least, even a slight power difference will resolve that more quickly. So, unless Ceres can one-shot Kain, she can't win. Draw, maybe, but not win.

So, it's hard for Ceres to kill Kain, but can Kain kill Ceres? Maybe. None of his physical attacks will actually do anything, because of her incorporeality, so he must rely on his manipulation abilities, chaos being the big one. Hellfire might work, but since it's undefined, I'm not sure. Fire is a light source, so it could have some effect on her due to her weakness against light-based magic, but hellfire itself is not strict light-based. I'd imagine that they could have a Beam War with darkness and hellfire, based on how hellfire is only a footnote in Kain's island-level arsenal, and darkness manipulation is Ceres's central usually-town-level ability. Nether manipulation would probably work roughly the same way. Soul manipulation is more likely to be no-sold via Ceres's willpower; her soul will obviously resist. Minor manipulation of reality, causality, and probability...those could work. Chaos is his best shot, particularly with Chaos Method.

Having control over logic, probability, and reality is a HUGE deal; it calls under what we call 'hax' around here. It does run into how Ceres can just 'nope' magic with her willpower, but since Chaos Method also stops mind powers, that's going to be diminished or ignored outright if it's online at the time. It might take a bit for Kain to try that, but that's okay; Kain has time. Plus, Ceres can still be affected by extremely powerful magics, and an actual rip in spacetime is 'extremely powerful' by my standards. True Chaos will just delete her and Chaos Method will make her vulnerable enough that Kain could just smash through her nominal Wall-level durability with hellfire/nether.

Essentially, Ceres only wins if she can get her one continent-level darkness blast to work. Otherwise, Kain wins. So the question is, will Ceres be able to hit Kain dead-on? Well...she can control darkness, teleport, and her speed is Hypersonic in comparison to Kain's Supersonic. It's really easy to set up positioning when the opponent can't detect you and you're mobile. Still, Kain has a light source: hellfire, which I bet is going to be the first thing he tries when he stops being able to see, for obvious reasons. His reactions are also Massively Hypersonic+. Darkness attacks are going to be limited to around Ceres's actual speed, since it's not actually light and thus isn't by default going to go at lightspeed. (I know darkness is just the absence of light, but if the attack using it has some physical ability to actually do something, it's not going to be defined that simply and exploitably.) This means that, chances are, Kain can dodge if Ceres gets it wrong. Will she get it wrong? Ceres is indeed smarter than the average person, but so is Kain, though he's reckless with his own safety.

It's tough to call when broken down like this, but the other possible advantages of Kain's hax abilities have not been factored in. Eventually, illogic/probability/chaos/reality-warping is going to poke a hole of some conceptual variety in Ceres's defenses, and Kain's guerrilla tactician skills mean that he's going to abuse the bejeezus out of that. And, again, Ceres's durability is Wall-level against stuff that incorporeality doesn't no-sell; Kain can do a lot more than that.

Ceres's only saving grace, at that point, will be Continental Rejuvenation. But what with how True Chaos could erase her entirely, and how nether/hellfire manipulations will likely keep her dead because of how they are tied in with death and all, I don't see her actually being able to come back to haunt him once he kills her.

I vote Kain wins.