Gonna go against the grain here a bit and throw in a vote for the number man.
From first glance, paralysis won't work since they don't have pressure points, and biology as a whole.
This just means there's no commotio cordis bullshit where you get hit in the chest at a really bad time and your heart stops and you die. Machine still absolutely have points of failure, especially a humanoid one. Joints are still very at risk here, given that Number Man and worse versions of Number Man have done this sort of shit to people who are more durable than Connor.
They moved fluidly as the animals lunged, snapping and biting. Confident movements. Two caught Huntress' head, wrenched it to the side, while the others avoided snapping jaws to catch Bastard's forelimbs, bodily hauling him up and then throwing him to the ground.
The two animals were brought down in as many seconds. Pinned, as inexplicably as Lung was pinned. Except this wasn't sheer strength. They were strategic, targeting body parts, one of the young men leveraging his whole body between Bastard's forelimbs, forcing them apart in a way that the dog's musculature couldn't combat.
It was like holding a crocodile's mouth shut. Jaw strength aside, the crocodile wasn't built to force it's mouth
open. The wolf wasn't built to draw its legs together against its chest, but couldn't get feet under it to stand without dislodging the offending attacker. The other had his head caught and twisted to one side. -
Venom 29.7
The characters in question:
Lung and
Bastard. Neither of these guys are soft targets, and yet abuse of leverage and weak point targeting lets them be taken down and restrained by worse versions of Number Man. Connor being a robot only saves him from the silly stuff that's taken from Dripfeed.
Let's also not forget the skull shattering stuff via weak points.
“You’ll miss,” the Number Man said. “And I’ll close in and strike you, using my pen and my hand. I can see the stress points of your body, clear as day. I can shatter your skull like a glass, and it would be an exceptionally painful way to die.” -
Excerpt from
Interlude 21.x
Pound for pound, bone's stronger than steel.
Another bit where worse versions of number man are able to counter and throw around people decked out in full power armor. These power armor guys have their own prediction software which shouldn't really be worse than the shit that
Armsmaster used to deal the most damage to
Leviathan that had ever been done to an endbringer, because their stuff is just a slightly toned down version of Armsmaster's and he's had two years of development since then. DT prediction software even let them dodge blasts from
Scion until Scion let loose with something that was just physically impossible to dodge.
The Dragon’s Teeth aimed containment foam at the three Harbingers. The clones pulled off their flowing jackets with sleeves that almost covered their hands, catching the foam, then landed. One swept the bundle of foam to try to knock a D.T. officer off his feet. The officer hopped up, then struck out at the Harbinger clone.
No use, Golem thought.
A mistake. Harbinger caught the arm, almost effortlessly turned around, pulling him in the direction of the turn. A little push, and the soldier fell.
Interlude 26a
A surprising number of wounded, in the end. Twenty or so injured from an aircraft that had been partially obliterated, eighteen more people who’d had their legs sliced off. Nearly forty Dragon’s Teeth with mild injuries, their armor melted to their faces, chests, arms and legs. Scion had tried his usual assortment of attacks, and they’d evaded them. Enhanced strength from the costumes, predictive technology from the onboard artificial intelligences.
So he’d used a power they couldn’t dodge, a power they couldn’t block. A light that radiated outward and melted the materials of their costumes.
Venom 29.3
Here's a bit on how the armor is the exact sort of thing to counter this pressure point abuse, talking about how it has extra protection around vulnerable areas like joints and necks. Didn't save them.
I also saw the Dragon’s Teeth.
Soldiers was the wrong word, but it was close.
Each wore armor in gun-metal and black, with parallels to the standard PRT uniforms I was more familiar with. Their helmets, however, had three eyeholes, with blue lenses glowing faintly from beneath. Two lenses for their eyes, a third for a camera. The armor was bulky, offering thick protection around the neck and joints, with a heavy pack on the back for both oxygen and for the computers they wore.
They were, in large part, wearing stripped-down versions of Defiant’s outfit. Sacrifices had been made to account for the fact that their suits didn’t render them seven and a half feet tall. Each carried a sword and a laser pistol. -
Excerpt from
Sting 26.2
So yeah, all in all, despite not having to deal with the CO2 embolism or the nerve damage paralysis, he still sorta gets ****** by that.
I don't know how comparable are they on their precognition, but to me Connor's simulation ability looks more impressive.
Yeah I don't really know where that's coming from. I'll post three examples I think demonstrate that Number Man is just ridiculous.
1: Uses math to deduce that someone's invisible attack is them leveraging every possible version of themselves into roughly the same area, which is ~10^90 versions of themselves.
Three-zero-one-six manifested the strike as though his arm were exponentially larger, the attack repeated in almost infinite variations through the space in front of him, as though he were leveraging every
possible version of himself that could have been here, in this basement, drawing them together in one coordinated strike.
Concrete and steel were obliterated, and the blow carved divots into floor and ceiling both, disintegrated layers of stainless steel that sat behind and beneath the concrete of floor and wall.
Interlude 21.x
2: Thought to be capable of fixing Dragon by
Tattletale, who has a power that allows her access to just free information at hand. Dragon is an impossibly advanced Tinker AI, with Tinker technology by default being physically impossible for normal people to handle. The other candidates for fixing Dragon was an army of thousands of brainwashed Tinkers working in concert, and Dragon herself. Note that Dragon is by far the best Tinker alive.
Saint took in a deep breath, then sighed loudly. “I set up the encryption with Dragon’s time locks. I memorized the codes appropriate to key dates. Outside of those key moments, the numbers and calculations are so long and complex you couldn’t hope to decipher it before the encryption shifted to the next phase.”
“When’s the next date?” I asked.
“September twentieth, twenty-thirteen.”
Months from now.
“
That was clever,” Imp said.
“What if we used the Number Man?” I suggested.
“Possible,” Tattletale said.
“Yes,” Saint said. “It’s possible. But so is Teacher deciphering it with a cabal of his custom-made thinkers.”
“
Shit,” Tattletale said. “Narwhal? May I?”
“Do it.”
“Door me,” Tattletale said. “I need to talk to Number.”
Cockroaches 28.2
3: When he was 12, he's able to guide someone else's power up
King's nose to snipe his corona, disabling his power and killing him. If this didn't work immedately, King's power would activate, the damage would be shunted elsewhere, and they'd be out of luck. This is already quite something on its own, but where it gets to truly ridiculous levels is when you factor in
Bonesaw's statement that the corona's too small and inconsistent for brain surgeons to be able to find and lobotomize this way with any consistency, in a context where they have a brain right in front of them free to just pick apart.
Panda: So Jack and Harbinger just stopped giving ***** and stabbed him over and over until all of his pawns died, huh?
Panda: Only way I could see him being taken out like that.
Wildbow: Jack's power up King's nose, to strike the same 'sweet spot' that snipers aim for.
Panda: Oh. Oh wow.
Wildbow: Using Harbinger's power to aim. Followed by stabby aftermath to guarantee it was over..
Panda: That's gruesome and impressive. -
Conversation with Wildbow on the IRC, Archived on Spaccebattles.
Bonesaw's statements:
“See, there’s this part of the brain that people who study parahumans call the Corona Pollentia, not to be confused with the Corona Radiata. It’s a part of the brain that’s different in parahumans, and it’s the part that’s used to manage powers, when the powers can be managed. More specifically, there’s this part of the Corona they call the
Gemma, that controls the
active use of the power, the same way there are parts of the brain that allow us to coordinate and move our hands.”
She ran her fingers over my exposed scalp, massaging it, as if she were feeling the shape of my head. “The size, shape and location of the Corona and the Gemma changes from parahuman to parahuman, but it tends to sit between the frontal and the parietal lobe. Beneath the ‘crown’ of the head, if you will. They can’t really lobotomize the Corona in criminals. Some of that’s because the location and shape of the Corona depends on the powers and how they work, and trial and error doesn’t work with the scary bad guys who can melt flesh or breathe lasers.”
She tilted my head back and felt around the edges of my mask, trying to find the part where she could pull it off. “I’m
really good at figuring out where the Corona and the Gemma are. I can even guess most of the time, if I know what powers the person has. And I can pry it wide open, make it so the powers can’t be turned off, or I can temporarily disable it, or modify it. The powder I blew into your face? It has the same prions I put in the darts I shot your friends with. Cripples the Gemma, but it leaves your powers intact. Can’t experiment with your abilities if I’ve fried your whole Corona Pollentia, right? Right.”
Snare 13.9
So the worse version of himself is capable of directing someone else's hands to do something on the fly in a high stress situation that non tinker brain surgeons can't do in a controlled environment.
Regardless, if it'll be an equal battle, Connor will outlast Kurt because of superior stamina.
That's all well and nice but it isn't an equal battle and it's not going to be a battle of attrition.
Connor can do stuff thats impossible to humans perception wise like
this, couple that with his precog and he should be able to dodge.
You can't really link a 12 minute long scene with no elaboration, but impossible perceptions is literally number man's entire superpower.
And from what I've read sniper rifle's move subsonic speeds so connor may or may not be able to dodge that, and even if he does get hit bullets don't **** up his system that bad, he was able to move fine after a couple shots from the android in the rooftop, and only needed to be repaired once he fell from a skyscraper.
Yeah I don't know what you're reading, but no. Sniper rifles
can fire subsonic rounds if you want them to, but just like any other rifle, they're going to default to supersonic. Them being specced for range means they're generally tuned to have higher muzzle velocities than normal guns as is. Number Man's explicitly better at range than in melee, he's already got the stupid melee weak point abuse stuff, Connor clearly has joints and vital components, he'd just be gunned down if OP didn't ban guns.
Connor also has the LS advantage so he can grapple.
Not only are all the feats he has listed peak human and not superhuman, but number man out grapples explicitly superhuman people. See above where I mention Lung, Bastard, and the Dragon's Teeth officers.
and I think connor might be stronger, breaking metal should be superior to breaking bones.
Apparently not. Even without that, here, have a 9-A who's sure that she'd die to a worse version of Number Man despite him ostensibly only being armed with a pistol and a slingshot, somehow.
She paused.
“How far are you going? What are you
really doing here?” she ventured, still not turning around. If there was a gun, there would be no chance. If she dropped and there was something to hold on to, she could-
-probably not live. The boy was Number Man, writ small.
Dying 15.x
So yeah. Voting the less metallic nerd.
