User blog:Monarch Laciel/Speed Feat: Erebus escapes the Gigantic Hydra

In the story Erebus, the main character Erebus manages to escape a mouth of the Gigantic Hydra by flying out at high speeds. Let's work out just how fast he is.

To give context to the scene, the Hydra has just effectively teleported one of its heads around Erebus (and the rest of the city he is in) by moving through higher dimensional spaces and approaching from an "angle" that they cannot comprehend.

Here's the sequence of events:

The head apears around the evacuated city (and Erebus within it) -> Erebus looks around to see why everything has gone dark, and realises he's in the cavernous mouth of a giant creature, with the rest of the world still visible beyond its teeth -> He sees the mouth is closing -> He flies for it, and manages to get out just as the mouth snaps close.

According to the narration, it took a single millisecond for the Hydra to close its mouth. The head appeared with its mouth already closing. So all of the above happened in a single millisecond. That's 0.001 seconds. And he flew in slightly less than that seeing as he took a moment to see what was happening.

So, we have a timeframe. Now we work out how large the Hydra's mouth is.

The Hydra's head is large enough to completely engulf the entire city, so it's obviously pretty big.

"But Monarch! This is a semi-medieval fantasy world! Wouldn't a city only be couple a hundred acres (about a square kilometre) or so?!?"

Well you might think so. Except earlier, we were told that the city's outer walls were only just visible on the horizon. This is from the perspective of Erebus standing on the tallest tower of his palace, which is located in the centre of the city.

From this source, we find out that to a person standing at ground level would see the horizon as 5km away. As Erebus is standing on top of a tower, it's probably further, but we'll lowball it.

So, from the centre of the city, it's at least 5km to the outer walls in all directions. 10km radius city. Assume it's circular (which we probably can based on the description), city has an area of at least 78.54 square kilometres. That's larger than the area of Manhattan by the way.

Erebus was standing on the tower watching for Gigantic Hydra to come over the horizon when it teleported its head over, so if it fully enclosed the city, then he's got to fly at least at least 5km from the tower to the mouth exit.

He flies this. In a millisecond or less.

So:

5km/1 millisecond

= 5000m/0.001 seconds

= 5000,000 m/s

= 14577.25 Mach

Wow.

Massively Hypersonic+ for Erebus

He's dodged lightning before btw, this is consistent.

Also, I'm beginning to question how large the planet this takes place on seeing as he's taken several minutes to hours to fly places before, but we'll work that out later.