Ways to avoid a speedblitz

Ah, Speed. The notorious stat. It seems like nothing unbalances matches more then speed. However, I think people shouldn’t assume that speed advantage means a fight will necessarily be a speedblitz. There ARE ways to avoid a speedblitz without comparable speed.

0: Just tank it:

Ok this is sort of the obvious one so I’m not including that in the actual list. Obviously if your opponent can’t do any damage at all to you, then being massively faster isn’t going to help them. Often this is not so much physical durability, as it is having a non-physical form meaning your opponent literally can not affect you at all.

1: Passive Powers:

If you passively emanate the heat of the sun then it doesn’t matter if your opponent is faster if they don’t have the requisite durability, they can’t get close. Generally, such forms of passive powers are actually sub-optimal though since generally the speedster will notice and figure out some kind of ranged attack (if they don’t have one handy). Better are passive haxes, like passive mental manipulation. If you brainwash everyone in a planetary diameter passively, then an opponent with no knowledge but much faster will likely dash in and get trapped by your passive hax.

Perhaps most famously is passive spacetime warping, as such warping depending on the potency compared to the speedster’s speed advantage could allow the slower fighter to fight as if on a relatively even speed basis, allowing them to use their active abilities.

2: Pre-Cog

Pre-Cog is more of a partial counter, as if the speed gap is massive it can’t really compensate. That said a highly developed pre-cog can provide a counter to a lower level speed blitz by giving information on how to move to avoid strikes. Even greater then this would be knowing the future or being given information by your future self.

On a related note, a cosmic level intellect capable of knowing every possible scenario or most of them would act like a pre-cog by alerting the slower combatant of the probability of success of every course of action

3: Existing in multiple places at once

This isn’t a speed, but it does certainly help against speed. Some character exists in multiple universes at the same time meaning if one of them, or perhaps more accurately one part of them is blitzed, the others can still act and the faster character would not be aware of their existence until relatively too late. Duplication in general, as an activated ability, while it can’t initially stop a speedblitz, can quickly overwhelm the faster character depending on the potency of the duplication and the degree speed difference.

4: Time Travel + Acausality

If a character is unaffected by past actions and is able to time travel then it is wholly possible for them to go back in time and help their younger self resist a blitz, essentially duplicating across time. This can be done to any arbitrary space and time, meaning it can be used to protect pre-emptively against a speedblitz.

5: Existing outside spacetime

Complex one. Speed is (Change in Space)/(Change in Time). Characters that do not exist in spacetime functionally don’t have a speed, as neither can change and a speedster would not theoretically be able to blitz an entity that does not exist in any place of space or any moment of time. Not this only applies if the character is currently outside space and time. If they manifest physically in spacetime, then they would spontaneously gain speed by necessity.

Note, most verses that claim a character is outside spacetime unfortunately contradict this by depicting the character experiencing a change between a relative past, present and future which requires a time. One could theoretically resolve this contradiction by positing multiple temporal dimensions, though this is just speculation. So long as a character can experience change as opposed to a timeline existence where all things are, then it is possible for them to be blitzed though it can be much harder if said entity can exist when they wish obviously.

Perhaps it would be most accurate to say, that a character that physically exists outside spacetime, but whose consciousness exists within spacetime is essentially like the first point, while characters who both physically and consciousness wise are outside spacetime don’t have a speed and so therefore can not be lower speedwise then any character.