I’m starting over. I will not be directly speaking to Kaantantr for the remainder of this thread since they refused to apologize. And will just focus on debunking his posts that tried to debunk light speed attacks existing within Underworld. Note, I know this will not emphatically “prove” the attacks are lightspeed, but I want to get rid of these blatant downplays, because of how much they just shot down conversation.
So let’s start with a simple one by Kaantantr:
It's a great excerpt particularly because it even states the attack actually collided with the mirror and stayed in a clash for 0.1 seconds.
Now, Kaantantr thankfully does recognize that the narrator is a 3rd person subjective narrator (i.e. it is narrated by someone besides the character which we follow through the story, but the narration is influenced by their perception of the world). However, they seem to fail to recognize that this could apply to the .1 second claim by Eugeo.
Time is relative, or, at least our perception of it is. When we are confronted with stressful or dangerous situations, the result is often an overestimation of the time elapsed.
So while Eugeo might have perceived this ““““clash”””” (I’ll elaborate on this later) as taking .1 seconds, it could easily have taken place over a shorter period of time, as this value could just be an inflated number due to the adrenaline coursing through Eugeo’s body.
Again, the narration is tainted by his perception, so we can’t take such measurements as fact, if there are biasing factors, unless we have reason to believe Eugeo would not be influenced by them.
Now, as for why I put “clash” in quotations, it's because of Kaantantr’s complete misrepresentation of the text through this word.
Eugeo only states that the mirror “held up for a tenth of a second” (again I believe this to be a gross overestimate, and I will address it more later). The mirror has no description of being pushed back, or pushing back against the attack, why would it? As Kaantantr and Eugeo both state, the attack has no mass. Its interactions before this were limited to just piercing through everything it hit, only stopping once it either ran out of energy or hit the marble. F=m*a, since there’s 0 mass, there’s 0 force to push the mirror back. Also, as an aside, when the light pierced Kirito, it actually wasn’t what caused him to be pushed back. Rather, it was the shock of his pierced stomach that threw him off course. The reason the mirror is ultimately destroyed is because the intense heat caused it to melt into a liquefied mixture of glass and metal.
If a clash occurred, which again, make no sense, it would be either one of two equally two stupid scenarios:
1. The tip of the beam comes into contact with the mirror, and at that moment the velocity of the ENTIRE projectile instantly becomes 0. Allowing it to completely retain its shape, for one-tenth of a second. Then, when the mirror melted, the beam suddenly splits into two separate beams, with 20% bouncing back at Fanatio, while the other 80% proceeds towards Kirito.
2. The tip of the beam comes into contact with the mirror, the tip’s velocity reaches 0, while the rest of the beam would be forced to splash around the tip that came in contact with the mirror, and then disperse along the mirror’s surface (Kaantantr says it’s not made of photons, so it shouldn’t be able to occupy the same space or condense down into a single point like a photon is able to, and if it could, one would be able to generate multiple elements upon a single fingers). After 1/10th of a second, the mirror melts, and the beam somehow reforms back into two separate beams, with 80% proceeding toward Kirito, and 20% bouncing back at Fanatio.
I don’t think I should have to explain why either of these interpretations are completely silly. And so now I will offer a quite simple, and easy to follow explanation of what occurred.
The tip of the spear hits the mirror. In the time between that moment and the first 20% of the beam has come into contact of the mirror, the mirror turns orange due to its intense heat, and then melts. The mirror, having melted, and thus no longer existing in the world, means the remaining 80% of the beam is allowed to proceed towards Kirito along its initial path. With the first 20% of the beam having already been reflected back at Fanatio already.
Now, I feel like someone is going to say, “wait, the 20% bouncing back is stated after the 80% that hits Kirito, so it should occur after that”.
And to them I would say you need to work on your writing skills. Describing things in perfect chronological can sometimes kill the pacing and tension of a scene. The main conflict was beam vs the mirror, and whether or not it would be able to stand up to the beam’s might to protect Kirito. The mention of any of it reflecting back before that would kill the tension and add redundant details where they were not necessary, because it will be mentioned again when it is relevant. To give a shocking reveal that not only has Kirito protected himself, but initiated a counterattack.
The 80% of the beam is also going to have to be dodged by Kirito before Fanatio has to dodge the other 20%, so that would be another sudden shift in perspective if the events were to be narrated in perfect chronological order. Multiple actions shifts within a single fight beat completely grinds pacing to a halt, and are annoying to follow, so it's for the best it's written this way. Writing is hard, it’s more than a perfect chronological narration of beats within a story.
And as a bonus,
here's a calc showing that if Eugeo's claim of this event taking one-tenth of a second being completely literal, the beam of light would at max probably be traveling 20 m/s (45 mph). Assuming the beam of light was 10 meters long, which is a pretty gross overestimate, seeing as Eugeo probably would have mentioned its length if it was rather substantial.
