Verse Challenge: Could the Super Young Team stop Ozymandias

 

The Super Young Team are a superhero team of sorts from Prime Earth, the main DC Earth. While the Prime Earth is the strongest and most important Earth in the Multiverse, the Super Young Team are relatively very small timers. The Super Young team is a group of 5 Japanese Teens with mostly cosmetic or weak abilities and while they did a few small good deeds here and there, were mostly trying to get the fame and fortune associated with being superheroes. They were bemoaned by elder Japanese superheroes as an example of what was wrong with modern society, the trivialization of what it means to be a superhero. Despite their incredibly low status and power level they became instrumental in the saving of the multiverse during Final Crisis making the thematic point that even the small and seemingly unimportant can have a huge impact.

In another one of DC's multiverses, apparently on the Earth-4 of that multiverse is the watchmen universe, a universe with only 1 metahuman (Dr. Manhattan) whose presence threatens to cause nuclear war. To stop this, the veteran vigilante and most likely strongest man on the planet (save Dr. Manhattan) created a desperate plan to unite humanity in the face of a greater threat. This was the plan of Ozymandias; to kill millions to save billions and in fact he succeeded. 

However, what if things were different? What if instead of Rorschach and Nite Owl, the Super Young Team attempted to stop Ozymandias. Nearly the strongest being from a world almost devoid of superpowers vs some of the weakest beings from the Prime Earth. The youthful and inexperienced looking for fame and power through heroic deeds who saved the world vs the old veteran who tried to save the world via an atrocity. Would they be able to stop him? This feels particularly fitting as Final Crisis was meant to be a defense of the idea of the superhero from specifically the era brought on by Watchmen. 

The Super Young Team has a roster of 5 members. Their leader is Heino Okata or "Most Excellet Superbat", a teen with a massive wealth and intellect who paid to have an island built whereupon he built the "most serene sanctuary"

He's actually rich enough to buy whole nations

In combat, Most Excellent Superbat mostly functions by being prepared for many scenarios such as pulling out of nowhere a fireproof cape or a hardlight armor

Most Excellent Superbat is a supergenius intellect able to create all the tech shown here as well as a form of social media service that functions by directly translating brainwaves to text

which is suggestive of him being a Type 1 intellect. He can access computers with the Superbat special and can access the unified data base of his sanctuary via meditation

Physically, Most Excellent Superbat is tough enough to withstand freefall at 300 mph (~134 meters per second) and fast enough to dodge bullets

The Super Young Team's second member is Shy Crazy Lolita Canary, a tiny flying woman with the power of sonic screams. Her screams are strong enough to effect many soldiers or her own team members

and was able to withstand a telepathic attack

The third member of the Super Young Team is Big Atomic Lantern Guy. Big Atomic Lantern Guy can emanate different beams from his chest, most often an offensive radiation beam with which he was able to defeat a large robot in one blast

He can adjust these to a frequency to nullify a forcefield

He's also shown the ability to create holograms and full body scans from his chest

He's also quite durable, being able to take an attack from veteran superhero Rising Sun without issue

The fourth team member is Kim Kumura the Shiny Happy Aquazon. Shiny Happy Aquazon has the ability to control water, able to at least control all the water in the room

which she can channel into either an offensive blast or a defensive bubble

She is also tough enough to withstand a point blank explosion and can swim fast enough to keep up with dolphins

The final member of the Super Young Team is Keigo, Well-Spoken Sonic Lightning Flash, a young speedster. It's stated he can move up to 500 mph (~223 meters per second) although this seems like quite the lowball given his speed feats. Well-Spoken Sonic Lightning Flash has numerous feats of searching large areas in moments, including a convention center and the team's satelite, which would likely require hypersonic speed.

He also has fast enough speed and reactions to dodge numerous lasers at once

He can also do the DC speedster trick of making small tornados by moving his hands quickly

Ozymandias has a simpler powerset then the Super Young Team. Ozymandias was born was an inhuman intellect and filled with ambition he trained his body and mind to superhuman degrees. 

Early on in his training Ozymandias was able to break stone and support his body on one finger

After his training Ozymandias is easily the strongest person in the watchmen universe besides Dr. Manhattan, able to casually beat Rorscharch and Nite Owl

with Rorschach being able to tank a long fall after jumping out a window and Nite Owl being able to break walls

Ozymandias due to the training of his body and his sheer intellectual capacity can move at vastly superhuman speeds. He considers a fraction of a second a long time

He has dodged rounds from an M16 from behind

blocked a bullet at point blank

and most infamously can catch a bullet with his bare hands

Ozymandias is an extremely skilled fighter due to a combination of decades of experience and training his body, learning numerous martial arts. Even as a child Ozymandias became a master at kung fu faster then any one at the school ever had to cripple a bully that was harrassing him

and as an adult not only is he clearly more skilled then the other veteran vigilantes of his world but he was skilled enough to plug the Comedian's gun barrel with a thin stiletto knife

He is directly stated to have decades of martial arts training

Overall Ozymandias should be a Mid B tier in terms of skill, a master tier fighter due to having graduated from numerous martial arts schools and performing extremely difficult skill feat as well as easily outskilling individuals with decades of experience.

Ozymandias' strongest assesst is his brain. Ozymandias's intellect was apparent by age 2 and by age 4 he had read 24 volumes of his fathers encyclopedias

At the age of 6, Ozymandias took an aptitude test and got a score that was so high it was considered "impossible" and was taught to conceal his intelligence level so the world would not hate him as a freak

As an adult he has feats of supergenius intellect such as mastering the stock exchange just by reading the newspapers 

and the creation of genetic engineering to create his animal companion Bubastis

both of which would qualify for a type 1 intellect. However his greatest intelligence feat in my opinion is his creation of a device that would remove the intrisic field of an object, which temporarily disassembled Doctor Manhattan

Given Dr. Manhattan is a being beyond even Mr. Mxyzptlk 

This might be vastly superior, that said the verse seems to have already had that technology somehow, so I'm not sure how much credit this actually gives Ozymandias.

Ozymandias uses his intelligence in combat to plot every possible scenario mid-fight so he can plan out and implement the best possible strategy to pursue showing his reaction speed and intelligence.

In terms of resources, the Super Young Team have all the money and technology of Most Excellent Superbat as well as the wonder wagon, a mobile vehicle that can smash through walls and is capable of supersonic flight

and their own satelite headquarters

Ozymandias also has all the technology mentioned earlier including again a machine that can dismantle a multiversal entity like Dr. Manhattan as well as enough liquid assets to purchase several smaller countries

In terms of weaknesses, The Super Young Team's weakness is basically they aren't very skilled or experienced combatants. They're basically children and tend to act immature, tempermental and impulsive, lacking the years of training or experience or discipline.

Conversely Ozymandias doesn't have any notable weaknesses save possibly for the fact that he comes from a universe where almost no one has superpowers and being thrust into a battle with beings of bizarre abilities will be something his hypergenius brain has never encountered.

The Super Young Team are for some reason in the Watchmen Universe and their satelite picks up something suspicious going on in Antarctica and, hoping it's a dastardly supervillain plot they can thwart for fame and fortune head off in the wonder wagon to go stop it. Ozymandias in this timeline instead of seeing Nite Owl's ship heading towards his base seeings the Wonder Wagon and knows that whoever this is obviously may attack him for his attempt to save the Earth, already underway, and prepares to face them. 

What happens?

In a direct comparison of the stats what we find is that Ozymandias is physically stronger and equally durable to almost the entire team save for Big Atomic Lantern Guy. Most of the Super Young Team scale to having wall level durability from things like surviving freefall or an explosion but Ozymandias can fodderize people with lower level wall level feats and so they're probably fairly similar. In a melee a few strikes from Ozymandias should be able to put down any member of the Super Young Team espeically given his skill. In contrast if the Super Young Team tried to melee him, he would be able to basically tank their attacks. However they crucially have ranged attacks. Things like Aquazon' s water attack, Canary's sonic attack or Lightning Flash's hand tornados should have enough force to harm him and a blast from Big Atomic Lantern Guy would likely be able to put down in one shot. As such a key to this fight will be actually gettings hits off, and the Super Young Team keeping Ozymandias at range.

In terms of speed, Ozymandias is faster then anyone save for Well-Spoken Sonic Lightning Flash. While the Super Young Team struggles with bullets, Ozymandias can catch a bullet showing a signifigant speed advantage is in play, however Lightning Flash is hypersonic and this could cause problems for Ozymandias.

That's not to say it's an insurmountable problem; Ozymandias reactions are very fast, mixed with his ability to plan out every possibility in combat, his skill and agility, as well as Lightning Flash's lack of highly damaging offense and impulsive personality it's very plausible Ozymandias could catch him in some way and quickly put him down. That said it's an immediate and large advantage for the Super Young Team to have this character Ozymandias would struggle to see, let alone put down running around.

The other big advantage they have is that their abilities are things that are super outside context problems for Ozymandias. Ozymandias planned for Dr. Manhattan and normal vigilantes to stop him, not these children who throw around water, radiation beams, holograms, and such. While none of them individually are that big a problem and he can hypothetically think his way arouond most of their powers; the numbers and the chaos that would be caused is definitely a large advantage for the Super Young Team.

However this advantage may be their undoing as one of Ozymandias' biggest advantages here is he has the experience, skill and seriousness that the Super Young Team don't and if they don't realize how much of a threat he is they very well could take it too lax only to find 2-3 of them are downed before they realize what's going on. In terms of intelligence a more modest interpretation of both Superbat and Ozymandias put them at around the same intelligence. However the difference is that Superbat is an impulsive teenager and Ozymandias is a hyperfocused practical adult.

Another possible problem for the Super Young Team is the possibility of Ozymandias deploying stealth. If Ozymandias sees them first and knows they pose an unknown threat, likely given Canary is a tiny winged human and the Super Young Team aren't exactly prone to holding back on their powers. This could also give him an upperhand early on especially if he takes out Lightning Flash before he can start to blitz.

However when they get serious, he might find himself more quickly overwhelmed by the Super Young Team's area control in particular using Canary using her sonic scream to stun him or being thrown around via tornados, water and unknown enemy beam attacks, let alone whatever Superbat tries to throw at him. Thus brings the paradox of the fight of area.

An enclosed space seems to favor Ozymandias and discover the Super Young Team because he can more easily get into melee. However it's also much harder to dodge attacks in an enclosed area, meaning it might favor the Super Young Team and not Ozymandias.

While you could thus say either might advantage one side or the other assuming this fight takes place in Ozymandia's antarctic base, the rooms in there seemed for the most part to be relatively spacious so it seems like that the Super Young Team will get more area to stay out of melee but also it will be harder to hit Ozymandias. That's definitely not to say it's impossible. Lightning Flash basically pushing Ozymandias into one of Atomic Lantern's Attacks or Canary flying while he's distracted by one of her teammates to distract him with a sudden sonic attack are very possible win cons if the Super Young Team work coordinated and seriously, but therein lies the trick of the question which is how serious would they take the fight before realizing it's seriousness and how much teamwork would they employ even after.

This actually leads to another paradox where the better the Super Young Team do at first, the worse they might do later in the fight. This is because the more they realize Ozymandias is a threat the more intensely they will fight and thus the better they will do. As such it becomes incumbent on Ozymandias basically to let them think they are doing better then they are, making sub-par moves early on so the Super Young Team don't understand how well he could be doing. Possibly the most realisitc scenario is that the Super Young Team get there and Ozymandias basically manipulates them into thinking he's a fellow hero and doing nothing they would find wrong, something that wouldn't be hard to demonstrate given the world still viewed him as a great hero at this point and the Super Young Team would have no reason to doubt that. Howeven even assuming they do fight, I still think it's very possible Ozymandias could manipulate the Super Young Team during their fight even just things as basic as taunting them into acting overconfident.

That said he may be too worried about the sudden appears of superpowered individuals to try something like that, and in fairness that's a good thing to worry about because by far the power variety and versatility of the Super Young Team is another solid advantage they have. The Super Young Team have access to things like holograms, creating defensive water bubbles, creating hardlight armor; things that Ozymandias has no context for and which give them a lot more options then he does, as he is limited to basically getting in close somehow and physically striking them to knock them out or kill them. This isn't even taking into consideration the possibility they just try to ram him with the Wonder Wagon at supersonic speeds. From Ozymandias perspective this is basically an adult fighting a bunch of toddlers with guns; they have extremely dangerous capabilities he doesn't have and his only real chance is contained with the fact that they can't use them to their utmost capacity.

I think what would likely happen assuming that for some reason they have to fight is the Wonder Wagon would crash into Ozymandias base, and Ozymandias would observe that these 5 teens have superhuman abilities and would try to use stealth and skill to get in close. He may be able to knock unconcious one of them, before they can mount a defense however the problem for him is there are two massive threats, Lightning Flash due to his ability to push Ozymandias over and over retreating out of the way each time or pushing him into an attack, and Atomic Lantern who can shoot a radiation beam to kill him and whichever one he doesn't target first causes him signifigant problems afterwards. If he takes out Atomic Lantern assuming he doesn't do much more the other 4 launch somewhat of a counter offense and while he can avoid Canary and Aquazon's attacks, he's having trouble just hitting Lightning Flash or getting through Superbat's armor. As he tries to deal with the 3 he can propely see, Lightning Flash continues to toy with him and he has to at the same time come up with a plan to beat Lightning Flash. If he takes out Lightning Flash instead, he is forced to be much more defensive, trying to avoid Atomic Lantern's radiation beam especially as the other 3 have ways of forcing him into position although given his speed advantage mixed with skill and agility, I can see him sort of outmanuevering them into doing things like hitting each other. That said he would be in serious danger the entire time given 3 people there have credible offenses to hurt him.

While Ozymandias would be a major threat, and he could easily win via skill and due to being a far more serious skilled fighter, and at best several members of the Super Young Team would still be knocked out or dead, I think the Super Young Team can probably beat Ozymandias. I can't see him beating so many outside context problems, 3 of which are threats and 2 of which are somewhat relative to the point of being able to help the first 3 without manipulating them as a group.