A/N: I'm going to start doing the footnote thing that the real Death Battle does, which should allow me to impart way more information without overwhelming you (hopefully). Keep a lookout for numbers like these: [1], [2], [3]. When you find one, feel free to scroll down to the "Special Notes" section of that particular analysis (just below "Weaknesses") to find out what more there is to be said about the topic that was just mentioned!
Episode 18: Hiccup (DreamWorks Dragons) vs. Nausicaä (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind)
Humans are extremely adaptable creatures, capable of handling any problem thrown their way, be it weather, terrain, or giant flying monsters that utterly destroy all in their path. However, although humans long assumed monsters to be just that, what if they weren't? What if humans and their natural predators could live together in harmony? And what if all they needed to figure that out was an initially-disappointing heir to the chief's throne who flies on the wind, swordfights with the best of them, and continually inspires friend and foe alike to join their side, even without meaning to?
Hiccup, the Dragon Master, and Nausicaä, the Blue-Clad One.
I'm LittleZbot, and it's my hobby to analyze their weapons, armor, and skills to find out who would win a Death Battle.
Hiccup:
This is Berk. A village twelve days north of hopeless and a few degrees south of freezing to death, located solidly on the Meridian of Misery. In a word? Sturdy. It's been there for seven generations, but every single building is new. They have fishing, hunting, and a charming view of the sunsets. The only problems are the pests. You see, most places have mice, or mosquitoes. They have...dragons.
Thousands of years ago, vikings used to inspire fear in entire countries as sailors who answered to nobody and pillaged everybody. In the world of DreamWorks, though, things are a little different. Most Vikings have settled down, claimed their own land, and started villages and trading routes. The thing they're most well-known for is pure, unadulterated, stubbornness. No matter what the issue they're tackling is and how big of a problem it presents, a viking will throw themselves at it over and over until it falls before them. So, when the isle of Berk began to get consistently attacked by dragons, the Hooligan Tribe made the worst decision possible and decided to start a war. With dragons. Remember how stubbornness is their most well-known trait? Yeah, well, stupidity is second.[1]
To be fair, if any island in the archipelago would be one to win a war against aerial fire-breathing monsters than can effortlessly wipe cities off the map, it'd be the one led by Stoick the Vast. This guy was a legend even among the vikings. I mean, how many men can claim to have pulled the head off a full-grown dragon as a baby, be able to catch enormous boulders flung by catapults with his bare hands and throw them back twice as fast, and defeat a Monstrous Nightmare, one of the most powerful known dragons, in less than a minute? Naturally, one would think that his progeny's accomplishments would match the father's. They'd be wrong.
They're actually far greater.
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III is a lot like his name; pathetic and laughable at first glance, but impressive to the utmost degree when taken in full. Hiccup was a pale, weak, stick of a kid who did absolutely nothing to live up to his father's accomplishments. Not that he didn't want to, he often dreamed of the day he'd take down the fiercest of dragons on his own, but his small frame and clumsy demeanor meant he was never allowed anywhere near the fighting. But when the opportunity came, he went forth anyway, and then…
Hiccup aims his net launcher into an apparently empty sky, swiveling and staring. He hears a noise, moves, then again, and moves again. Suddenly he launches the net and stumbles backwards. A few seconds later, a sharp cry of pain is heard roaring in the night. Hiccup has taken down his first dragon.
Yeah, maybe they should've reconsidered. Hiccup didn't have the brawn of the average Viking, but in return, he had the brain they all lacked, and he caught a dragon his first time out! To be more specific, he caught a Night Fury, actually, the only known one left on the planet. Night Furies are fast, nearly invisible dragons who attack with plasma energy. The fact that he actually took one down is either extremely impressive…or just luck. But his skills wouldn't remain just luck forever, as he joined the Hooligan Tribe's dragon training program almost immediately afterwards, where he would fight several kinds of dragons and learn to be a real warrior. Or, at least try. He was still kind of a failure when it came to actually killing anything, a truth he learned all too well mere hours after his first outing.
So, turns out that the fall didn't kill the Night Fury. It just trapped it and made it incapable of flight on its own. When Hiccup found his prey, he pulled out a knife, raised it up…and cut the ropes. Hiccup realized that, despite his heritage and dreams, he just couldn't kill another living, intelligent creature. A good thing, too; after that, he slowly developed a forbidden friendship with the downed dragon, eventually crafting a new tail for him to fly with and actually ended up riding atop the Night Fury himself! This was Toothless, and he would become Hiccup's best friend and bodyguard, as well as an example to all other vikings and dragons.
Over time, Hiccup and Toothless managed to convince the islanders that dragons were naturally intelligent and loving creatures who hardly had a grudge with humanity. In fact, the batch of dragons that had been attacking Berk for so long were actually under the thumb of the enormous Red Death, a four-hundred-foot dragon that would eat anyone who failed to pay it tribute. So, after defeating it, losing his leg, and replacing it with a rudimentary mechanical one, Hiccup led the way towards Berk becoming a true home for dragons and vikings alike.
But he had to take a lot of steps to get it that far, including leading the newly-formed Dragon Riders into the unknown world and leading the battle against both other viking tribes and Dragon Hunters. Luckily, he had the skills and strength to do it.
Hiccup flies Toothless away from Outcast Island once again, leaving destruction in his wake and dodging all attacks the warriors send his way.
Alvin the Treacherous snorts in anger and disgust. "How does that 90-pound boy repeatedly defeat an entire army of bloodthirsty savages?!"
Savage pipes up. "Would, ah, you like me to answer that?"
Alvin snarls. "I know the answer!"
Hiccup may have been initially weak and unskilled, but with time and practice, that changed dramatically. He had training from all of Berk's best warriors in fighting styles, weaponry, and tactics, after all. Berkians are trained with swords, maces, warhammers, crossbows, spears, battleaxes, throwing knives, well, basically every medieval weapon there is, and can even fight unarmed with a style based on grappling and offense, taking inspiration from Judo and Boxing, among other arts. It's based on aggression and taking out every opponent with one or two potent hits. Hiccup studied all of this, and has even held his own against Astrid, Berk's greatest warrior.
His weapon of choice is the Dragon Blade, a sword he crafted himself for the purpose of training dragons, intimidating foes, and tactically overpowering his enemies. This is kind of like a medieval lightsaber, with a collapsible blade that lights on fire and melts through even rock and steel. The blade is made of Gronckle Iron, a dragonborn metal that's as light as plastic and way stronger than steel. A Gronckle Iron sword will cleave through a steel one without issue, and even steel weapons will break against the metal before doing any sort of damage. And that's saying something when Berkian steel is already strong enough to smash through solid iron without damage or stress. The Dragon Blade also contains two compartments in its hilt that release Zippleback Gas and Smokebreath Smoke, respectively.[2] The smoke is used for blocking vision and making stealth possible, while the gas can make anyone who breathes it sick for days. Zippleback Gas is also extremely flammable, and a single spark will begin a chain reaction of explosions that can encompass several storm clouds, start avalanches, and is hotter than lava.[3]
The Hooligan Tribe places more emphasis on the shield rather than the sword, however, so, of course, Hiccup has one of equal power to his weapon. Hiccup's shield is coated in Gronckle Iron, making it nigh-indestructible, but light enough to throw and bounce back like a boomerang. Hiccup can even hit projectiles out of the air with it and catch it on its way back. But that's hardly all; Hiccup built it to transform into other weapons and tools as well as a shield: it works as a slingshot and catapult AND as a crossbow that shoots sleeping arrows that put even dragons down (all of which Hiccup has deadly accuracy with), and also houses three bolas and a grappling hook that works as a zipline, rope launcher, and lasso. This rope is tough enough to even restrain Stoick himself! And Hiccup is just as good with his shield as he is with his sword, capable of using it as a weapon even when it's just in its base form, not to mention that it's tough enough to block a full-powered plasma blast from Toothless, the same kind of blast that one-shot-killed that Red Death in a 2 Kiloton explosion!
Aside from those two deadly pieces of machinery, Hiccup also has a Gronckle Iron pocketknife, a megapult (a hand crossbow he designed to shoot ten bolts at once that tear through warships), and several spare mechanical legs, both in case he loses his own and to use for bludgeoning...or stabbing, as they can all change into knives, too. Plus, he has flammable gel, Changewing acid (which can melt through just about anything), goggles that let him see through the brightest days and the murkiest waters, Flightmare gel (which allows him to see tracks and make things glow in the dark) and, of course, all the ridiculous levels of dragon-based knowledge in the world, like how to use a Gronckle to break Dragon-Proof Metal, or how a Changewing's skin can be used as a Harry Potter-style cloak of invisibility.
As if that wasn't enough stuff, Hiccup decided that if he was going to ride dragons into battle, he might as well look cool doing it. So he made himself a set of Dragon Armor, an interlocking lightweight armored suit that masks him almost completely and leaves very few places of his body exposed. This armor is coated in Toothless' scales, and is just as durable as the dragon himself. And Toothless is tough enough to take and shrug off the fire of some of the most powerful dragons around, like Hookfang, whose raging once kickstarted the eruption of a volcano, those hotter-than-lava-starting-avalanches Hideous Zipplebacks, the Shellfire, whose energy blasts can tear apart small mountains, the Bewilderbeast, which once caused a blast with smoke that could be seen from nearly seven miles away, and Deadly Nadders, which have been directly stated many times over to have the hottest fire of all dragons!
This would make a Nadder's fire hotter than, say, the Fireworm Queen, whose fire is so hot a single breath can give another dragon the ability to breathe fire permanently, or the Purple Death, which once used its fire breath underwater and caused massive seaquakes that sent the water level jumping 240 feet higher across six miles. By studying real-life underwater bomb tests, we can tell that the amount of power required to do something like that would take at least 5 Kilotons of TNT![4] But the armor can handle that perfectly well!
The armor is also quite durable against things other than fire; it once stopped the blade of a Razorwhip, which can slice through Gronckle Iron and even weaker sheets of the only known metal superior to it: Dragon-Proof Metal. Once, Toothless was even shot by a Dragon Hunter's arrow, but the arrow just bounced off his scales. And these are arrows that have stabbed into Gronckle Iron and pierced pretty much every dragon you can think of, including the former King of Dragons![5]
But that's not all the armor can do. Installed inside of it is one of Hiccup's many brilliant inventions: the Dragonfly IV. This wingsuit is basically a hang glider attached to Hiccup's own body, with some extra details that give him a huge amount of control over his speed, direction, and general maneuverability. While using this, which, yes, is just as durable as the rest of his armor, he has dodged an armada of heavy firepower, and, while using a lesser version, has perfectly matched and kept up with Wingmaidens (humans that carry baby Razorwhips on their back to let them fly like they have wings). One of these Wingmaidens, Minden, once flew from a certain plateau to the tip of a mountain in only three seconds, reaching, at the very least, 160 MPH. So the Dragonfly IV can at least go that fast, and it can stay in the air for literal hours if need be.
If anything, this should show you the most dangerous thing about Hiccup: his mind. This guy has fought hundreds of battles against foes he didn't understand, with abilities he had no counters for, and almost always prevailed with some on-the-fly genius strategy. He's so smart, at the age of fifteen, he found Berk's legendary treasure in just a couple of hours on a whim. Even with all the same clues, no previous viking had ever managed to find it in more than three hundred years! Viggo Grimborne, Hiccup's personal rival, directly stated that Hiccup was the only man whose mind could match his. And Viggo's a guy who invented and built a functional submarine in an era where the most advanced military weapon was the bow and arrow!
His mind may be the strongest part of his body. But that doesn't mean the rest of his body is lacking. Um, that didn't come out right. What I meant to say is, he reacts fast. After all, he flies Toothless all the time, and Toothless is the fastest dragon in the world. How fast? Well, that's pretty highly debated, but he did once move from sea level to the first cloud layer in a little under one second, reaching speeds over 4,700 MPH. He's also outflown gravity wells Stormfly, who can raise up tornadoes of water with speed alone, couldn't escape from, and consistently outsped Skullcrusher, who flies fast enough to smash through reinforced metal ships like they're made of clay.
But that doesn't mean any of that is Hiccup's fastest, not technically. His reaction speed has been enough to match the arrow-snatching Astrid, dodge supersonic lava blasts, and constantly weave through streams of Deadly Nadder fire even without Toothless. Stormfly, a Nadder herself, once incinerated a crossbolt before it could hit Hiccup from forty feet away. The bolt was only six inches from Hiccup's face, and was travelling a bare minimum of 200 Feet Per Second. Even estimating conservatively, this fireball must have been travelling nearly 8,200 MPH! Can Hiccup really dodge something that fast? It's likely. Toothless has been shown to be capable of dodging actual bolts of lightning when he's by himself, and Hiccup and Toothless together fought and matched the Skrill, a dragon that conducts and fires lightning at its opponents. They dodged dozens of lightning breath attacks, and even physically outsped one. While these probably don't reach the speed of natural lightning, it should at least come at a fraction of that speed. Plus, he was able to dodge arrows from Ryker, which no other person or dragon, including ones that outraced 6,000 MPH explosions, has done. So he's at least close to that level.[6]
Speed isn't enough to land the most prestigious job in the tribe, though. He's dodged a hailstorm of arrows and fireballs on foot, swam at the deepest parts of the ocean, and shoved over a 10 Ton boulder. He's survived lava, acid, poison, and both the coldest and the hottest places on the planet. He's definitely one of the strongest vikings around. For perspective, Snotlout is, for all intents and purposes, a legend among vikings. He took blasts from a Monstrous Nightmare, a Typhoomerang, and a Changewing, defeated an entire warship of hostile, heavily armed and armored enemy warriors with his bare hands, endured the center of a volcano, won every Thawfest (a competition to determine the greatest of vikings) he's ever competed in, and is one of the only humans to ever complete the Three Trials of the Defenders of the Wing. And yet, when he and Hiccup fought, Hiccup knocked him out, left him in great pain for the rest of the day, and popped out three of his teeth. WITH ONE PUNCH.
Considering this and multiple other instances of his equaling people like Krogan, Savage, Astrid, and Viggo in strength and skill, it definitely seems fair to compare him to other vikings lesser than him and assume he can do some of the things they can. Like when Dagur channeled over 25 Billion Volts of electricity through his body, or when Johann survived an explosion way bigger than that Red Death one, or when Fishlegs survived a blast that took out two Scauldrons, or when a random Hunter survived a blow from a Catastrophic Quaken that could slam the ground hard enough to create island-spanning earthquakes, or when Tuffnut dragged around a giant stone statue weighing 76.5 Tons!
And yet Hiccup's greatest power is his unbreakable will and leadership ability. It took a lot, and I mean a lot, to bring out the leader in him, but he's taken complete control of the worst situations and turned them totally around, sometimes with his mind, and sometimes just by getting everyone to believe in him and each other. This guy has had more enemies than pretty much any viking on Berk, and somehow managed to convert half of them over to his side before everything was all said and done. Alvin the Treacherous, Berk's Number One enemy and lifelong bitter rival to Stoick? Try Berk's Number One ally and lifelong friend to Stoick. Dagur the Deranged, a man who killed his own father because he wasn't as insane as his son and blindly seeks to kill all dragons for mere sport? Now he's Hiccup's sworn brother, King of both Beserker Island and the Defenders of the Wing, a trained Dragon Rider who wants nothing more than to protect those around him. Eret, Heather, Mala, and even Viggo at the end, the list of people who changed their entire outlook on life just by meeting this guy is astounding. And when Stoick died (via accidental shot from Toothless in the saddest and yet most hilarious bit of irony this side of the archipelago) Hiccup was more than ready to lead the Hooligan Tribe. He became the greatest Chief they'd ever known.
Not a perfect one, though. He's, uh, anything but. Sure, there are the minor things, he's too kind and unwilling to kill, Gronckle Iron can be melted at high enough temperatures, his armor can be separated and has no protection against blunt force, but there's one pretty massive weakness that hangs above it all.
Hiccup and Dagur look over a set of miniatures Hiccup has built, representing a planned attack on a shipyard for tomorrow.
"We've kept an eye on it for weeks," Hiccup explains. "Viggo doesn't defend it because he doesn't think we know about it."
Dagur sighs, obviously understanding something Hiccup still doesn't. "Let me guess, coordinated attack, using the sea stacks for cover, but staying up out of arrow range?"
Hiccup is taken aback. "Something like that."
Dagur turns to him "You're too gullible, Hiccup. That's your problem. I should know. I tricked you plenty of times!"
Hiccup will fall for any trap you lay out for him. Whether it's the most obvious trap in the world or one dastardly conceived over countless moons, he WILL fall for it. You can straight-up lie to his face and he'll believe you until you give him reason to doubt. Oh, don't get me wrong. He'll predict your moves if he knows you're an enemy. He'll come up with a strategy to defeat you if he knows you're an opponent. And even if you do capture him, he'll find a way to escape in minutes. But if you were to just...lie, he'll believe it. Every time. Hiccup is, quite simply, one of the most gullible people you'll ever meet.
Which is one of the reasons Toothless is so important to him. Toothless covers the areas he lacks, both in physical and mental prowess, and he, in turn, covers Toothless' shortcomings. The two have grown beyond master and servant, or rider and trusted steed. Hiccup and Toothless are best friends on equal footing, and share a bond that can't ever be broken.
Let's put it this way: virtually all dragons have a natural instinct to get away from eels. They can't stand them. They'll physically turn tail and run even from a dead one, and even the loyalest of dragons will turn on their master if they are forced to confront an eel. And yet Toothless once dove into eel-infested waters to save Hiccup of his own free will, physically fighting many eels and even eating one in the process. It's nuts. Toothless has even resisted the effects of mind-control-like abilities, such as the song of a Death Song, the calming of Sagefruit, and the feralistic powers of the Grimora parasite, all from pure willpower to protect Hiccup. At one point, Hiccup was trapped in a container at the bottom of the ocean and was drowning. Toothless couldn't help him, but instead of going back up to the surface and saving himself, he chose to stay down with Hiccup until he died, even though he would almost certainly drown himself. Of course, everything ended up being okay, but wowzers. Their friendship has even allowed Toothless to resist the literal mind-control of a Bewilderbeast, which can take over the stubbornest, most resistant, and most loyal dragons with ease, and command thousands at once!
And Toothless himself is quite the danger in his own right. His power directly equaled the Skrill's, which, again, rides on, conducts, and shoots dozens of bolts of lightning. A casual sniff of a plasma blast was enough to knock out Meatlug, one of the toughest-known Gronckles, which is already one of the toughest dragon species. A sniff of that same power once literally evaporated a heavily-reinforced steel door, and a full-strength blast of the stuff held so much power, it literally made it appear to be daylight for several minutes during the vikings' "Eternal Night" period.[7] He can fly through the worst blizzards and storms, unleash sonic waves to see everything around him even while blind, has hearing good enough to hear Hiccup's call from an entirely different island, is strong enough to bend iron just by turning around, and even while grounded, can just climb the walls and ceilings and run around at speeds approaching the sound barrier! Oh, and he can summon lightning from the sky to strike him and turn him invisible. Yeah.
And it didn't stop there. Remember how I said he resisted the mind-control of a Bewilderbeast? Well, this wasn't just any Bewilderbeast. This was the King of Dragons, the ultimate Alpha Dragon. And Toothless challenged this 500-foot monster to a duel. Luckily, in their fight, Toothless rolled several Natural 20s in a row and somehow unlocked both his Alpha form AND his Titan Wing form TOGETHER. Both are exceedingly rare forms a dragon can theoretically take under extreme circumstances that act kind of like Pokémon Evolutions, and Toothless got both. In his new form, he was able to counter the Bewilderbeast's mind-control and use it for himself, commanding every dragon in the world without question, and got a nice buff in stats. The entire island of Berk had all its dragons attack the Bewilderbeast, and it acted like it didn't even feel them. Then Toothless got one shot in, and it bowed, pledged its service to the new King, and got the frick out of there.
And, as the new King of Dragons, Toothless can bend the minds of other dragons to his whim and can call an entire army to help him out whenever he wants. Some notable dragons he can summon include the Screaming Death, which eats entire islands from the inside, Shellfires, which are the size of small islands and shoot energy balls that blow holes in mountains, Foreverwings, which are docile but the size of large islands, Singetails, which were powerful enough to be known as the apex predator of the ancient world, Dramillions, which can mimic any type of fire from any other dragon it sees, the Submaripper, an underwater dragon that creates massive whirlpools capable of sinking armadas, Death Songs, which coat dragons in an amber that's nigh-impossible to break out of, Slitherwings, which are covered in venom toxic enough to kill any living thing in less than a day, and, of course, Skrills, Changewings, Razorwhips, Red and Purple Deaths, and Bewilderbeasts, among many, many other unique and powerful varieties.
But, ultimately, while their friendship brought their worlds together and created an era unlike anything the vikings had ever known, the hardest challenge either Hiccup or Toothless faced was saying goodbye. In the end, the dragons left, given their blessing from Hiccup and orders from their king to return to the world of the dragons, The Hidden World, until the time came where humans would no longer hunt or hurt them. It was a difficult task, but one that was accomplished with great resolve.
With or without his dragons, Hiccup is a great leader and a masterful warrior. He has the heart of a chief and the soul of a dragon. And if you try to fight him, you'll just end up next on the long, long list of enemies he has bested.
Never underestimate the Dragon Master of Berk.
As Toothless breaks out of his bonds and destroys several minecarts, Hiccup escapes the grasp of his captor and leaps onto his back.
Hiccup turns and addresses his father's former captain. "I'm assuming, Fiske, you've only heard of what a Night Fury can do when it's ticked off. Well, trust me…"
Toothless launches into the air, spits out a stream of fire, and immediately destroys a large part of the mining operation, overturning carts, burning away support structures, and melting through iron with ease.
"…the stories don't come CLOSE to the real deal."
Hiccup:
Name: Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III
Species: Human
Height: 6'1"/185 cm
Weight: 170 lb/77 kg
Age: 21
Occupation: Chief
Notable Allies: Outcasts, Beserkers, Chiblaine Vikings, Dragonvine Island Vikings, Defenders of the Wing, Wingmaidens
Notable Dragons Tamed: Night Fury, Skrill, Death Song, Changewing, Whispering Death, Submaripper, Boneknapper
Gets phantom pains; his mechanical leg actually itches
Gained 80 lbs of weight in only three years, that's almost as fast as I did! Ha ha…*cries*
Abilities:
Superhuman Strength
Superhuman Speed
Superhuman Durability
Extreme Intelligence
War Tactical Training
Martial Arts
~Boxing
~Muay Thai
~Judo
~Tang Soo Doo
Experience with virtually every imaginable medieval weapon
Expert shot
Expert Swordsman
Dragon Taming
Dragon Training
Dragon Riding
Dragon Calls
Arsenal:
Dragon Armor
~20-Piece Set
~Yak Hide, Gronckle Iron, and Night Fury Scales
~Fireproof
~Dragonfly IV built-in
Shield
~Gronckle Iron
~Functions as shield and boomerang
~Contains hidden crossbow, slingshot, catapult, grappling hook, bolas
~Sleep-inducing Arrows
Dragon Blade
~Successor to Inferno
~Gronckle Iron
~Collapsable Gronckle Iron hollow blade
~Scauldron gel injects into the blade
~Zippleback Sparks lights gel on fire
~Handle contains alternating containers for Zippleback gas and Smothering Smokebreath smoke
Pocketknife
~Gronckle Iron
Megapult
~Hand crossbow
~Holds and fires 10 large crossbolts at once
~Each crossbolt powerful enough to pierce the hull of a warship
Changewing Acid
Monstrous Nightmare Gel
Flightmare Gel
Magnifying Glass
Death Song Amber Goggles
Changewing Skin
Dragonberries
Spare Legs
Spare Tail Wings
Many maps
Book of Dragons
Feats:
Comparable to Astrid, who has snapped iron, held onto a log during a raging thunderstorm for twelve hours without food, water, or rest, and physically overpowered Tuffnut, who can drag around a 76 Ton statue. Astrid has also jumped at a training dummy and landed four unique killing blows before touching the floor, and taken out Monstrous Nightmares like Hookfang through pure power, and Hookfang tanked the Purple Death's fire breath and was barely affected
Took rings of fire from a Whispering Death, the same attack that incinerated the legendary Bork the Bold, and was fine
Discovered an outcast fleet in about to invade and, within an hour, came up with three equal and well-developed good plans to defeat them
Blocked Toothless' plasma blast with his shield
Dodged dozens upon dozens of arrows, axes, and throwing knives while weaving through a forest
Tamed a wild Thunderdrum (said to be one of the hardest to tame dragons) in less than ten seconds
Shield stood up against Armorwing fire that can melt steel in an instant
Tuffnut considers a trap that would slice Hiccup in half "not dangerous enough" to kill him
Knocked out Snotlout with a single punch
Dodged Deadly Nadder fire mid-air using Dragonfly II
Saw the launching of an arrow and was able to run around a dragon and get in the projectile's way before it traveled even ten feet
Used his shield to break a Dragon-Proof lock
After being captured and put to work as a dragon stable boy in the Dragon Arenas, he tamed and trained every wild dragon in there in less than two days, and used them all to escape
While suffering from nine days without sleep, studied and defeated a new species of dragon
Resisted the whirlpool of a Submaripper with strength alone, which can inhale armadas and change the weather across a group of islands
Built the Dragon Eye II
The only person to figure out Trader Johann's true nature and goal
Shield's bola restrained a Titan Wing Singetail's mouth, it took it literal hours to get it off
Johann, whom Hiccup equaled in battle, shattered blue ice just by flexing his back and treated an explosion from Barf and Belch (the biggest Hiccup had ever seen) like a bad bug bite
Toothless outraced an electrical explosion
Toothless killed the Red Death with a single shot
Toothless saw and recognized lightning bolts coming from the sky and dodged out of the way of each one
Dragon Root arrow bounced off Toothless' scales
Toothless made a flight that normally takes three days in only around six hours
The flapping of wings between Toothless and Cloudjumper moved clouds
Even a Cavern Crasher, which shrugged off the flames of the Fireworm Queen, required a moment to recover from a Plasma Blast
A single non-charged Toothless plasma blast evaporated a heavily reinforced iron door
Toothless tanked and broke through a full-powered shot from a Bewilderbeast
Every dragon on Berk and from the Dragon's Nest fired at Bewilderbeast at the same time, but he appeared to not even feel them, yet a single blast from newly-formed Titan Wing Toothless caused him to retreat
Toothless's Alpha powers allowed him to nullify the mind-control of the Bewilderbeast and take the creature's army for himself
The combined firepower of all seven primary Dragon Riders destroyed the Dragon Eye, which withstood an exploding volcano
Led Berk anew
Weaknesses:
Overly kind
Plans have failed
Armor ineffective against blunt damage
Armor comes apart easily
Gronckle Iron can be broken or melted
Never did figure out Dragon-Proof Metal
SO GULLIBLE
Toothless:
Name: Toothless
Species: Night Fury
Height: 26 ft/792 cm
Weight: 1776 lb/806 kg
Age: 21
Occupation: King of Dragons
Arsenal: Claws, teeth, sonar, echolocation, animal mind control, plasma energy blasts, flight, invisibility, lightning generation, healing saliva, inhuman strength, durability, speed, senses, and willpower
Weaknesses: dragon root, dragonvine, blue oleander flowers, eels/eelpox, cold weather, pressure points
Can summon an army of dragons to fight alongside him
Special Notes:
[1] We're using the DreamWorks version of Hiccup and the How to Train Your Dragon universe. While this version was based off of a book series, the two franchises share very few similarities, and are far too different to be directly compared, even as supporting material.
[2] Hiccup's original fire sword, Inferno, was non-collapsible, had no gas compartment, and used Monstrous Nightmare gel instead of Scauldron gel to light the blade on fire. It broke during combat against Krogan and Johann. Hiccup designed the Dragon Blade after his rival Viggo's own fire sword, and later switched to Scauldron gel due to its ability to remain lit underwater. As the Dragon Blade was designed to be a direct upgrade to Inferno, it stands to reason that it can do anything its predecessor can.
[3] Near-dead Sentinels, a dragon that heals from heat, were unable to even move after being exposed to lava for hours, but a single Zippleback explosion got them to 100% in an instant. These explosions have also melted through certain glaciers that even lava couldn't penetrate, and canceled out the water blast of a Scauldron, which could "rip the scales right off a Screaming Death," a dragon that Meatlug's lava blasts couldn't damage, and Meatlug's lava blasts can melt steel, which even normal lava isn't hot enough to do.
[4] Stormfly, Astrid's Deadly Nadder, once defeated a Submaripper by heating the entire deep ocean area around it to the point of boiling. Given that the weather-changing Submaripper had just turned it from a sunny day to a cold, extremely misty one, we can estimate the temperature of the water on the surface and in deeper layers to find that, to boil this part of the ocean, Stormfly would have had to release an energy output of 113.15 Billion Calories. That's enough energy to power ALL of DisneyWorld for two days!
[5] Toothless was only ever hit twice by this particular variety of arrows. One time it bounced off of his scales. The other time, he was taken by surprise and had it stab into his tail, which had previously been shown to be weaker than the rest of his body. Regardless, the Hunters that pierced the King of Dragons, a Bewilderbeast, with these weapons were amateurs who were trained for stealth and not combat. There's no real reason to say Hiccup's armor shouldn't block such projectiles.
[6] While the officially released "World of Dragons" is used as research material (and does state that Toothless is faster than a bolt of actual lightning), canon material always takes precedence. World of Dragons has been wrong before: for example, the book states that Scauldrons are 65 feet in length and weigh 1.5 Tons, but the canonical "Cruel to be Kind" graphic novel has Fishlegs reading from the literal Book of Dragons that they grow up to 85 feet long and weigh 80 Tons.
[7] Toothless, like all dragons, has a maximum shot limit before he has to recharge. While this limit is reportedly six, there have been multiple times in the TV shows and movies where he has shot significantly more than that fairly quickly. Either his shot limit is notably higher, or he is capable of recharging his shots every thirty seconds or so. Either way, he's that much more dangerous.
…
Nausicaä:
The Holy One of the Mani Tribe faces down Miralupa, the most powerful man in the world.
He states the truth directly to him. "The ancient prophecies were true. There has come the advent of the angel of light…she who loves the forest, and talks with the insects. She who calls down the wind, and rides upon it like a bird."
Even blind, he stares down the deadly psychic, and even tortured, he speaks his mind. "These blind eyes of mine see her now, in vision as clear as day. I shall not reveal that one's name. When the time is nigh, she will come before you, and you shall know her."
Far in the future, the Earth is in ruins. The planet is rancid with pollution, humanity wars with each other constantly, and the greatest scientific advancements are used to destroy all that is meaningful. As the world quite literally burned, a group of nations managed to band together, invent a method to create life, and set the future in motion. They rebirthed humans as a species who could live and thrive in the polluted air, and created the Sea of Corruption, a forest-like eco-system that would spread and slowly purify the planet, as the plants would suck the toxins from the earth and turn them in harmless crystalline dust. The only issue was that doing so unleashed the miasma, a temporarily toxic fume that permeated the entire forest. Any human caught within would surely die.
To protect the forest from being destroyed by this new world, the insects were made and were set to guard it. The insects are enormous bug-like creatures who are near-invulnerable, speak telepathically, and move in massive swarms that can eat away entire kingdoms. When the old world died and the new one began, humanity consistently attempted to war against the Sea of Corruption, not realizing its purpose. Though they always failed, as the insects would protect what they needed to and crush what they needed to. Nonetheless, powerful psychics predicted an event: the coming of the Blue-Clad One, an angel of light who would save humanity.
Hundreds of years later, Nausicaä (or Naushika in Japan) was born in a small kingdom of only five hundred people known as the Valley of the Wind. As a daughter of the kingdom's king, or chieftain, she was the only one of her parent's eleven children to survive childbirth. Her natural extreme kindness was initially disheartening to her father, especially as he had wished for a boy to carry on his legacy, and notably because she would actively attempt to protect the supposedly vile insects that polluted the planet. However, under training from the greatest fighter in the world and after seeing her fair share of war, she became a hardened and powerful warrior in her own right, without sacrificing any of the compassion she'd been raised with. A born leader, she gained the favor of nearly all she spoke to within mere moments, whether it be through her soft words and meaningful gestures or through her skill in battle and willingness to do what was needed when the time came.
On an enemy gunship, Nausicaä watches carefully over a dying soldier, him having been exposed to the miasma for far too long. Machines pump air into his lungs and attempt to flush the poisonous blood out of his system. Nausicaä stands up suddenly as something goes wrong; the fluids have built up inside his lungs. With a great cough, draughts of blood burst out of his mouth, nose, and ears. He begins to choke on the poison.
Without even hesitating, Nausicaä leans over and places her mouth over his, sucking in sharply, drawing in the poisoned blood from his throat into her mouth, then turning and spitting it out. She does this, again and again, taking all the blood built up in his lungs into her own body.
A few minutes later, the man's breathing evens out.
He survives.
By the time she was sixteen, she was all but ready to accept the title of chieftain from her father. However, she did have one strange "flaw" that many of her people didn't quite understand: she adored and respected the Sea of Corruption. Rather than see it as a menace invading their territory, she saw it as what it was: a life, attempting to better itself and the world around it. This included the insects inside and surrounding the forest. And before you say "what's the big deal, they're just bugs" let me remind you that these aren't the insects of our world. They're giant multi-eyed thick-skinned monsters. A single one of these could take down a combat airship, and multiple ones can easily wipe entire cities off the map. While most war veterans would be lucky to survive a mere encounter with one of these insects, Nausicaä frequently flew alongside and against hundreds, until she was able to understand and even communicate with them to some degree. This came in handy on the day when everything came crashing down.
See, the Valley of the Wind was allied with the much larger kingdom of Torumekia, so when they went to war with the Dorok Principalities, the other big kingdom of the world, they called upon the Valley's singular gunship and its greatest warriors. Naturally, they answered the call and Nausicaä, as the strongest warrior in the kingdom and heiress to the throne, led them into the fight.
Though it's not hard to see why the Torumekian Empire would want someone of Nausicaä's capabilities. Even in a world filled with warriors, she stands out as one of the best, capable of defeating multiple trained combatants at once. As a wind rider, she normally carries only two weapons on her, but over the course of her journey, has gained a few more. All wind riders carry specialized single-shot rifles that use two kinds of shells: Noshiro Shells, which create flame and smoke for an emergency flare, confusing insects, or communication over long distances, and Kabura Shells, which unleash a powerful sonic blast that confuses insects and deafens foes. A single one of these once literally stopped the entire front line of an advancing army and their mounts in its tracks!
The second weapon normally carried by wind riders is a large knife. While it's made for cutting through brush, it cuts through people just as nicely. This knife and her much longer and deadlier sword that was given to her by the Torumekian general herself are both made of Ceramic, a highly-advanced future metal that was used to make spaceships. Modern-day ceramics are twice as strong as steel, but far more brittle. Evidently, we get past that in the future, because these blades can slice through iron and steel alike with no problems, and her own specific ones can even cut other Ceramic weapons![1]
Her final weapon is a simple handgun. It likely shoots Ceramic bullets and works similarly to a modern-day pistol, meaning it carries at least six rounds and can fire bullets at nearly 1,700 MPH. Nausicaä has been firing rifles and handguns for years, and is such a good shot, she can shoot through a moving rope that's only half an inch thick from more than 500 feet away! To put that into perspective, try imagining shooting a person's fingernail from two city blocks away while they're walking across the street, and you'll get an idea of what it takes to pull such a shot off. Aside from that, she also carries a smattering of basic tools, like a spyglass, a lamp, a wormflute (a sound device that calms insects) and strobe grenades (flashbombs).
Weapons aside, she rarely wears armor except for when she's going into battle. In such cases, she dons the armor of her kingdom which, befitting of her legend, has been dyed a deep blue in the blood of an ohmu. Ohmu are the most powerful of the forest insects, capable of smashing apart entire fleets of airships just by running through them. Luckily for Nausicaä, she's friends with every ohmu on the planet, and they dyed her armor in their blood as a sign of respect. While her outerwear dress is of a simple felt made for comfort and keeping out spores, underneath she wears Ohmu Shell Armor, which is armor…well, made out of an ohmu's shell. Don't worry; they're cool with it. Using their enhanced forging techniques, the Ohmu Shell Armor is made exclusively in the Valley of the Wind, and is well-known for its extreme durability. It's so tough, even Ceramic weapons will break before piercing it![2]
She wears this armor around her chest, back, and arms, while her legs are covered in a specialized felt that has Ceramic woven into the fabric, ensuring durability while not restraining her speed or agility. She also often wears a shohki mask, which uses specialized herbs to purify the air around her before she breathes it in. After being modified by Ceraine, it can purify even the deadliest fumes. And, finally, in battle she'll wear an armored flight helmet that not only protects her head, but also keeps out deadly spores and gasses.
All of this she often uses while riding atop Mehve, a small flying machine that she uses to glide through the wind. This entire machine is not all that much bigger than Nausicaä herself, and she rides it by either standing on top of the thing or laying down on it like Superman, depending on what type of flying she's doing. It uses twin jet engines for taking off and for when it needs a quick boost in speed. Plus, Mehve specifically is modified to not just use two control bars for steering, but also a belt, which allows for far more complicated maneuvers. She can read the wind with nothing but a touch of the air, and can use it to travel along specific paths, bounce higher and lower into the air, and basically fly the thing around like it was a small plane.
Mehve is fast, too. It's outraced wingworms that previously kept up with airships moving at 345 MPH, and once raced from the ground to above the clouds in only about ten seconds, moving at speeds certainly over 447 MPH. Nausicaä can pilot and maneuver at these speeds easily, and even greater. She herself has easily piloted a gunship flying at 300 Leagues per Hour, or 1,035 MPH, and has dodged and maneuvered through streams of gatling gun fire numerous times. Even the lower end of the speed of a gatling gun's bullet is approximately 1,840 MPH, and she was dodging dozens with no real effort! Plus, Mehve is tough enough to take a shot from an anti-aircraft gun and keep flying, so she won't be going down very easily.
With tools such as these, of course she was a natural on the battlefield, but even though she fought on the front lines once or twice, she found herself much more concerned by certain other events that were going on at the time. Particularly, she feared the daikaisho, a mass migration of insects that would effectively spell the apocalypse for much of the habitable world. So she left the battlefield in search of answers, both for the meaning behind the forest and how to save humanity. She had many…interesting adventures, but her strong will and love of all life kept her going.
As did her own abilities. In addition to her incredible reactionary speed, she's run a mile in two minutes, killed a heavily-armored man with a single kick, and survived her fair share of falls, explosions, and bullets. She once ran into an absolutely massive airship right before it blew up in her face, and she survived! We don't actually get a good view of the explosion thanks to the angles in these panels, but we DO get a good view of the nuclear smoke pillar as a result of it. Measuring its size comparing to the perspective shot of the characters and Mehve, and comparing it to the pillar left behind by the bomb test that created the Sedan Crater, it seems likely that this explosion was a blast equaling up to almost 7 Kilotons of TNT! Sure, she passed out for a while, but she was up and literally fighting legions of soldiers the next day, so, still, impressive.[3]
Speaking of which, physicality isn't all she has going for her. She was trained by the greatest warrior in the world, after all, and has even been said to have surpassed him. Her quick draw of her sword can outmatch a soldier who's three-fourths of the way through his swing, she took on a small legion of armed soldiers with just a knife and prevailed, her swordplay matched Namulith, who has been fighting for more than a hundred years, and she even outmatched six armed warriors at once without a weapon AFTER spending two full days with no food, no water, and no rest! She's taken on guys with tons of armor before easily, using her skill and agility to exploit available weak points or small slots of uncovered skin. She's almost untouchable.
She even physically held back an ohmu child to prevent it from committing suicide. This is impressive when you consider the fact that a full-grown ohmu can ram through metal airships like they don't even exist. Let's do a little math: many modern metals have a tensile strength of around 80,000 PSI. The average adult male can lift between 135 and 175 lbs, while a five-to-six-year-old child can only lift about 20-25 lbs with considerable effort. Directly scaling for the lowest number, Nausicaä must have been outmatching a force of, at the very least, 9,148 PSI. That's the bite force of a full-grown lion![4] And her reaction speed isn't just enough to dodge the fastest of bullets; at one point, she was able to recognize and react to the beginning of a nuclear explosion before it actually, you know, exploded. Official recordings of the Trinity explosion have shown that, at the beginning of detonation, a nuclear fireball can expand at speeds over 3,700 MPH! Yeah, her abilities are a little bit incredible.[5]
Oh, yeah, and she's psychic.
Various people across the world, typically those of Dorok descent, are naturally able to train their minds to use psychic abilities to sense their surroundings, speak telepathically, and, in extreme cases, even read minds. Nausicaä, however, is a little special. Despite rarely attempting to train or hone her abilities, her natural mental prowess is absurd, and, through plenty of trial by fire, she quickly became one of the most powerful psychics in the world. She can redirect psychic attacks, speak telepathically to hundreds at once, share her thoughts (both words and images) with others, expose souls, communicate with animals and plants, read the minds of the willing, see through hallucinations, talk with the dead, and leave her physical body for an astral one to go on…spirit adventures. While this astral form acts and feels like a physical body, it is not capable of the same feats as her normal body, and leaves it totally unprotected, though her astral form can do battle with other spirits.
However, none of this really matters if she's not fighting an opponent who is also psychic. Her powers are primarily based on latching onto her opponent's abilities and altering them, so if she's fighting someone without said abilities, they really don't come into play. Unless you're an animal, because she doesn't have to worry about any kind of psychic pre-conditions before messing them up. The most useful parts of her powers when it comes to fighting normal people, though, are probably the ability to mentally contact any insect, especially ohmu, and request them to come to her aid, and what's basically a spider sense. She gets a mental warning before she's attacked, and can sense the locations and intentions of sentient life, even when she can't see them.
Still, her psychic abilities are remarkable, to say the least: she's sensed attacks coming from a sentient mold over seven thousand feet away, her psychic powers are powerful enough to outmatch the combined mental powers of literally thousands of others at once, and when Miralupa, a psychic who was feared by the entire continent for his insane level of power, tried to get a glimpse of her telepathically, she exposed his true face and psychically stripped him almost completely of his powers. In fact, her mental fortitude is so insane, she can literally walk through walls constructed with psychic projection. As in, these are literal, physical walls that were made with psychic abilities in a similar manner to how a Green Lantern Ring makes objects out of willpower, and her mental strength is big enough to let her just walk through them! Bottom line: don't mess with her if you have psychic powers.[6]
Or at all, really. Even after all her physical and psychic prowess, Nausicaä still wields the most dangerous power of all: the power of friendship. Yeah, okay, I get it, super cheesy, but look, you try being able to keep yourself sane after seeing babies being baked in ovens to prevent them from becoming infected and then watching them cook until they die. I'd be surprised if you could even console one person after that. But Nausicaä went through that and much worse, and still remained one of the most fiercely compassionate people to ever live. We're talking about a girl who, when informed of her father's passing, took the time to comfort and uphold the people telling her the bad news rather than spend it on herself.
Most of her enemies…well, are no longer her enemies after they meet her. While fighting against the Dorok main forces, she was surrounded by their entire army, and despite them all having received direct orders to kill her, just seconds after meeting her, not a single person was willing to do it. This included Charuka, a Holy One who had literally thought she was a demon! The Dorok Emperor himself seriously gave his entire kingdom to her a couple of minutes after meeting her, convinced that she could do a better job of handling things than him! After just being near her for a number of minutes, the Vai Emporer, who was well-known as the most evil man in the world, had a change of heart and actually sacrificed his life for her! And the strange thing is, she kind of deserves it.
No matter what horrible things she sees, no matter what terrible pain she's in, she refuses to give up. To prevent others' deaths, she's spent entire minutes breathing in miasma that would kill any normal person with one sniff, stepped into a lake of acid that disintegrated a fully-armored man in seconds, and endured radiation poisoning for days on end that she stated would kill other people in moments. To be clear, she has no special resistance to any of these things. She just overcame them with sheer willpower. She's gone through unbelievable pain to get to where she's at, and has become stronger every step of the way. She even awakened a God Warrior, which many considered the essence of evil itself, and successfully trained it to be a good person.
And that God Warrior is NOT to be messed with. Nausicasä can call it anytime she wishes, and, as a child comes to its mother, it will stop at nothing to reach her and ensure that she's safe. This behemoth is named Ohma (don't get it confused with the ohmu, which are totally different things) and is a rotting, demon-esque bio-mechanical being the size of a small mountain that's powered entirely by radiation. It can fly fast enough to cover an entire continent in just a matter of days. Going by the provided map and the amount of time spent flying, this monstrosity was, at its fastest, travelling over 2,300 MPH! It can release a radiated steam to poison the nearby air, effortlessly tear through reinforced steel like Styrofoam, and shoot bullets of light that can nuke entire small cities with a single shot! Measuring directly compared to a later blast that we see clearly, one of his shots would be worth more than 2 Kilotons of TNT!
On top of which, the creature is 300 Meters (984 ft) tall, and survived, albeit barely, a blast from a crypt. This crypt was built by the old ones (us) and used similar nuclear tech to what we had in the mid-1900s. Directly comparing the size of the fireball this created to the size of the fireball created by the Hiroshima bomb, this explosion would be worth over 60 Kilotons of TNT! The only downside is that it can't, you know, survive for long. Ohma can only fly for about two hours at most before collapsing for a full day, and using his spit-wads of death just drains him faster. After a while of this, he will die. But when you can kill everything with one shot…does it really matter? Regardless, he was loved and led by Nausicasä well, and died quite fulfilled.
And, after stopping every war in the country, surviving the daikaisho, and even mentally battling God in a fight of morals, the Blue-Clad One led humanity in the path of living peaceably with the forest and the insects, and eventually took her place as chieftain of the Valley of the Wind at last. Speaking physically, mentally, and spiritually, Nausicaä is stronger than almost anyone else.
She might actually be the very best humanity has to offer.
The spirits of thousands, coalesced as God, glow brightly in a mental battle against Nausicaä's strength of will as she begins erasing them. "You are a dangerous darkness! Life is light!"
Nausicaä replies, punching holes in its spirit with each truthful word. "You are wrong. Life is the light that shines in the darkness. All things are born in darkness and all things return to darkness. …We shall not serve you! We will decide our fate for ourselves."
"You are the enemies of hope!"
Light expels itself from the being. After a quick mental battle, Nausicaä retakes her stance and will.
"Cease, child of darkness! Gah! ...History shall remember you as a devil. The one who destroyed the light of hope!"
"I don't care!" Nausicaä shouts back. "If YOU are light, then we do not need light. We can know the beauty and cruelty of the world without the help of a giant tomb and its servants. Because OUR God inhabits even a single leaf and the smallest insects! …Ohma, return this being to darkness!"
God cries and fades, his essence shattering against the fortitude and righteousness of this teenage girl.
Nausicaä:
Name: Nausicaä, Daughter of Jhil
Species: Human
Height: 4'6/136 cm
Weight: 64 lb/29 kg
Age: 16
Occupation: Chieftain
Ambidextrous
Accidentally became a god to a bunch of people
Possibly the only well-written, interesting, and well-developed Mary Sue in fictional history
Abilities:
Superhuman Strength
Superhuman Durability
Superhuman Speed
Superhuman Senses
Resistance to poisons
Swordsmanship
Excellent aim
Great Intelligence and Battle Tactics
Compassion constantly gains her respect
Wind Riding
Psychic Abilities
~Telepathy
~Can sense incoming attacks
~Can sense the locations of lifeforms
~Can repel and reverse psychic attacks
~Can expose souls
~Can remove psychic abilities
~Can speak with the dead
~Can see through hallucinations
~Can hide her psychic presence
~Can leave her body to go explore with her spirit
~Can talk to animals and plants
~Can ask for help in battle from certain insects
~Can read minds and sense emotions
Arsenal:
Ceramic Knife
Ceramic Sword
Ceramic Pistol
Strobe Grenades
Wind Rifle
~Noshiro Shells
~Kabura Shells
Mehve
~Kite
~Lifespan: 100+ years
~Modified to use two control bars and a belt
Outerwear
~Felt
Leg Guards
~Felt with ceramic sewn in
Gloves
~Felt lined with sewn fur to prevent toxic spores from getting through
Underarmor
~Ohmu Shell
Flight Helmet
~Standard anti-sand helmet
~Ohmu Shell
~Goggle lenses made of ohmu eyes
Shohki Mask
~Ceramic
~Purifies air
~Modified by Ceraine
Feats:
Calmed and led dozens of insects back to the Sea of Corruption without using psychic powers
Tamed a squirrel-fox
Piloted a gunship through a same-sized white-heart jewel at 1035.7 MPH
Aims and shoots her rifle perfectly while flying on Mehve
Swung an Ohmu Shell Sword hard enough to pierce Yupa's Ohmu Shell Gauntlets
Survived minutes in a miasma that could kill a human with one breath
When grabbed by a heavily-armored Dorok soldier, killed him with a single kick
Shot moving half-inch ropes from at least 500 ft away
Dodged constant minigun fire while on Mehve
Stepped into an acid lake that completely dissolved a man in seconds, endured
Held back a child omhu
Using Mehve, rode the streams of a gunship's windtail and landed perfectly in its bay door
Felt the wind and directed the pilot of the massive gunship to land perfectly on a small sandbar, a feat thought impossible
Smelled gunpowder on the ground while above the clouds, at least 6,500 ft away
Siren shell deafened all nearby people even while their ears were plugged
Mehve reached above the clouds in only about ten seconds
Merely glancing at her brought a Dorok Holy One to his knees
Survived the explosion of an airship while she was inside
Mehve survived a shot from an anti-aircraft gun
Siren shell stopped the front line of an entire army in its tracks
Five soldiers broke off from the army with her just to (purposefully) become meat shields, so that she would survive
Outdrew a soldier who was 3/4 through his swing
Miralupa psychically attacked Nausicaä, she reversed it to reveal his true face/soul, and stripped him of his psychic abilities
Psychically sensed mold 7,000 ft down trying to attack them
Defeated six armed warriors at once in hand-to-hand after two days w/o food, water, or rest
Escaped bombardment from gunship bombs
Heard trees sprouting underground
Has the "unprecedented power" to reach the mental abyss of the ohmu soul and stare into it, which would destroy the mind of a fragile person
Obliterated Miralupa's spirit just by saying "begone"
Caught a god warrior heart thrown from the ground 3,000 ft in the air
Matched the Dorok Emperor in swordplay, who has over 100 years of experience
Survived Ohma's radiation for days on end
Sensed the death of Yupa from hundreds of miles away
Reacted to the beginning of one of Ohma's explosions
Destroyed thousands of souls in a psychic battle
Converted the most evil man in the world without even directly speaking to him
Ohma flew thousands of miles through great pain for her sake
Ohma's energy blasts evaporated part of a city
Ohma survived a blast from the Crypt
Led humanity anew
Weaknesses:
Her extreme compassion can often cause her to completely break down
Never trained to use psychic powers offensively
Has required help with many of her greatest feats
Will go on lengthy tangent quests to help even one person, which has nearly killed her
Far too ready to give up her own life for others
Avoids physical conflict at all costs, as such has much less experience than you'd think
Ohma:
Name: Ohma
Species: God Warrior
Height: 984 ft/300 m
Weight: 18,750 tons/17,009,714 kg
Age: 4-7 Days
Occupation: Judge, Jury, and Executioner
Arsenal: Radiated mist, nuclear energy blasts, flight, inhuman strength and durability, immunity to psychic abilities, telepathy
Weaknesses: Will shut down if his "heart" is damaged or removed, gullible, very limited energy resources
Naive disposition, except when dealing with evil
Extra Notes:
[1] Nausicaä once used a blade made of Ohmu Shell, but it was broken by Kushana. Nausicaä only used it once, and uses a Ceramic blade for the rest of the manga. Because of this, it won't be taken into consideration for her analysis. Besides, considering Kushana herself gave her the Ceramic blade as a replacement, it's probably even stronger.
[2] The matriarchs stated that they laid a spell on every scale of her armor to protect her from bullets and explosives. It remains unclear if this is superstition or if it actually benefits her. Regardless, her armor is extremely tough; in some cases, this armor has withstood huge bursts of explosive gunship fire that tore all airships to pieces; such fire would equate to over 11 Kilotons of TNT!
[3] In the Studio Ghibli film, Nausicaä actually survives being run over by the daikaisho and being flung more than sixty feet into the air!
[4] If we take the higher numbers instead, then this ohmu child could theoretically ram through objects with a tensile strength of nearly 15,000 PSI. We lowballed it to account for the wounds the child had sustained. Still, as many of the metals the ohmu effortlessly walked through were Ceramic, and durable enough to have steel and iron break against them, this feat could still be scaled higher.
[5] Nausicaä's physical abilities are recognized as superhuman even in her world, with many displaying shock at her speed, strength, and durability. This includes soldiers who can dodge automatic gunfire and ones who can move a three-ton tank shell!
[6] Many of the foes Nausicaä has bested psychically were capable of using their power offensively in the form of telekinetic attacks. However, Nausicaä has never displayed such abilities herself. The most she's ever done offensively with her psychic powers is knocking back a few slugs. She likely never trained in this area due to her rigid pacifism.
…
All right, the combatants are set. Let's end this debate once and for all. It's time for a Death Battle!
…
A lone isle, hundreds of feet above the ocean's surface, covered in cliffs, with a few grassy plains scattered about, rested in the mists among a group of sea stacks. Small, unassuming, it didn't seem like much, but to an adventurer, it was an undiscovered land, and that alone made it worth its weight in gold.
It wasn't undiscovered for long. Emerging from the mists, Hiccup and Toothless swooped down, circling the locale three times, experimenting with Hiccup's newly-developed eye-scopes. Carefully crafted out of Gronckle Iron and Death Song Amber, the goggles amplified his vision to degrees even greater than a spyglass, and could be worn on the head for convenience. The downside was, he hadn't quite figured out how to adjust their magnification level yet. So, a hundred-foot radius from the plateau it was.
"How about that, bud?" Hiccup spoke to the dragon underneath him. "Only a few hours from where the tribe is, and pretty near a big old waterfall, so we can give everyone a refill before tomorrow."
His tribe was on a search for the legendary home of the dragons, and required multiple resting points in-between, including someplace to get a good night's sleep. This isle looked pretty ideal.
"Lots of berries, mist to hide smoke from a fire, and no on-island water sources, so there probably won't be too many wild dragons." He patted Toothless' head assuringly. "Not that we'd have any trouble with those with you around, bud."
Toothless shook his head and snorted like a horse, a sort of "of course not, you dolt. You've got the King of Dragons with you!"
At least, that's what Hiccup was imagining when he replied "Well, you don't have to be so rude about it. Come on, let's take a closer look."
Toothless straightened out and glided slowly down, giving Hiccup plenty of time to take off his eye-scopes and replace his head armor in case they ran into anything they weren't expecting. Still, it wasn't long before they landed quietly and safely.
Hiccup unhooked himself from the saddle. It still felt strange to fly Toothless without the leg-and-tail stirrup, but the dragon didn't need it anymore, and Hiccup wasn't going to argue. Odin knew how many times Toothless being able to fly on his own would have come in handy against Viggo or Johann.
Hiccup slid down and took a few steps forward. The isle was still, but not necessarily quiet. He heard animals and insects flying around the place, and quite a number of bullfrogs. But no dragons, or anything else that could attack them during the night. He'd have to stay a short while to make sure there weren't any Whispering Deaths, Changewings, or Snaptrappers hiding around, or maybe some dragonvine, dragon root, or blue oleander growing beneath the surface, but he dared not have Toothless check with him; if a wild dragon were to see him, they'd be making a huge amount of noise and fire, whether it was in contest to the Great Alpha, or freaking out because it met a celebrity. Hiccup was sure Grimmel had sent someone to follow them, and he couldn't afford to make any bigger of a show than he had to.
Hiccup rubbed Toothless' left ear. "Hey, bud, I'm going to stay and check out this place for a bit. Go meet up with Astrid and get back to me in an hour, 'kay?" Astrid and Stormfly had gone scouting with the two of them, and had been doing a similar check-up on a nearby waterfall, where the tribe would hopefully be getting its water for the night. They didn't exactly want to find out the water was full of grimora too late and wake up to an island full of now-wild dragons.
Toothless purred worriedly, but Hiccup pushed his head away. "Relax, I'll be fine. Worst comes to worst, I'll just call you, okay?"
Toothless stood up on his haunches and gave Hiccup a look that told him the Night Fury was very much doubting that Hiccup would be true to his word.
Hiccup held up a hand. "Hey, now, I'll call you, okay? On my honor as a viking?"
Toothless tilted his head, appeared to consider for a few seconds, then, with a couple flaps of his wings, was off and out of sight.
…
Nausicaä was tired.
She'd been flying all night and all day long atop Mehve, heading as fast as she could for Shuwa. She didn't know where Ohma was anymore or if he was even pursuing his mother, but she couldn't take the risk. He had been weak when she left him, barely able to stand. In the 26 hours that had followed, he had undoubtedly recovered and tried to seek her out. But she wouldn't respond to his psychic hails. She couldn't. If her mission ended up killing Ohma, she wouldn't have been able to live with herself.
Hence why she was alone, weak, and not so sure where she was. Her compass had pointed her in the right direction only a few hours prior, but a strange thing happened when she entered this mist and these spires of stone. Her compass began pointing in varying directions, rapidly, and she wasn't able to get above the mists to see her way. She assumed the spires held a great amount of magnetic metals within that confused her compass, and was forced to just keep travelling in a straight line, trusting that she would eventually reach the edge of the mists and be fine. But here she was, three hours later, and significantly worse for wear.
She had no choice. She had to put down somewhere.
As she thought this, an isle sitting atop one of the spires caught her eye. Cliffs and plains, many bushes full of berries, and her psychic senses informed her of an underground brook running through a small cave system. A perfect stop to rest and refuel.
Nausicaä found it a little suspicious that such a thing would appear right when she needed it most, but assumed it to be the work of Providence, favoring his chosen one. What an unfortunate deal that had turned out to be. It didn't really matter whether it was Providence or luck; she had to put down somewhere soon, so it may as well be this place.
Nausicaä glided down as the sharp whistle Mehve gave while flying died off. She knew what she needed first: water, and plenty of it. She maneuvered around the isle and parked Mehve perfectly into a cave entrance only a few inches bigger around than the kite. Had anyone else seen her, it would have been one of the most incredible feats of physics and aerodynamics they had ever witnessed, but Nausicaä didn't even take note of it; not only was she too thirsty to take note of much of anything, but she had performed similar maneuvers many times before. All it took was a touch of the wind, and she knew immediately what to do to get where she needed to go and how. This wasn't so impressive.
Nausicaä drank, but not greedily; she was far too experienced to make that mistake. She even tested the water first, finding it to be filled with small, leech-like parasites that she psychically told to get lost. They obeyed without hesitation, swimming out of the brook and leaping into the ocean below. After she had her fill of water, and refilled her pouch, she walked out of the cave, jumped onto the cliff wall, and scaled until she reached one of the plains. There, she foraged and ate for a number of minutes before, at last, lying on the grass, ready to rest and recover properly.
As she laid down, it occurred to her that it might probably be a good idea to know how far this mist still went. Obviously she couldn't send a homing pigeon or some such thing, but maybe she could look ahead with her spirit. Her body would lay still and recover on this uninhabited, non-dangerous location, while her mind scouted ahead and formed a plan to leave. The more she thought it through, the better it sounded. All right, she decided, she'd do it.
She spread herself out on the ground under some shade, just in case the sun came out. She wouldn't be able to wake up until her spirit returned in a few hours, so it would be best that she was out of direct sunlight for fear of sunburn. With everything she was still about to go through, she didn't need to be dealing with such an unnecessary problem at the same time. She pulled all her clothes and armor out of her travelling bag and put it on, just in case she needed to get back in a hurry.
Preparations complete, her spirit left her body and headed into the great unknown.
…
Hiccup was on his second pass around the island before he noticed the dead girl under the tree.
He didn't recognize her armor style or symbol. She must have been a viking native to these waters, far outside of his little archipelago. Why was she here? Had she been a rider, whose dragon had turned on her and dumped her off on this crappy little island? Nah, probably not. Maybe marooned or banished by her tribe? Or maybe she had just climbed the sea stack for fun, to see if she could, before collapsing and dying at the top.
He checked her face, eyes, and pulse. She was definitely dead; there was no breath in her nose, no beat in her heart, and no life in her eyes. But her skin was vibrant and beautiful, she had no smell of death on her, and she definitely didn't look starved or dehydrated. However she died, it'd happened quickly, and within the last few hours.
Eventually, Hiccup settled on the idea that it must have been some form of poison. Maybe there really was some dragonvine on this island, after all.
No matter the case, though, her markings and armor were clearly very specific, and adorned with great love and care. She was a warrior, probably a great one revered by her tribe. He wasn't able to grant her a proper funeral, not this high above the ocean, but could at least simulate one a little, in respect to those who honored her in life.
He gingerly picked up her body, making sure to do it by the clothes only, in case some of the poison was still in her skin or blood, and set it on the edge of the plateau. He uncorked a vase of Monstrous Nightmare gel, and poured it over her still body. This would light on fire as soon as he touched it with his fiery blade. She would burn, fall, and sink - a warrior's death.
He stepped back and pulled out the Dragon Blade from its place on his leg. "There, do I see my father, my mother, and my brothers and my sisters." He activated the sword, hearing its metallic crank as it sprung into full size. "They bid me take my place among them in the halls of Valhalla." He lit his blade, sending an orange glow into the air around him. "Where the brave shall live forever."
He sighed sadly, stepped forward, and lifted the flaming sword, ready to plunge it into her body.
…
When Nausicaä returned from scouting, happily having found that she had been heading the right way the whole time and the edge was only a short distance away, she was met with a shocking sight: a man, having dragged out her physical body from the shade, about to end her life with a sword lit on fire. She didn't recognize him, and felt no psychic power from his presence. But he obviously knew who she was, and had decided to kill her in her "sleep." Panic and determination in her non-corporeal chest, Nausicaä fled back into her body faster than she had ever gone before.
She barely made it in time, activating her body, pulling out her Ceramic sword, and blocking the flaming blade on its way down, inches above her stomach.
…
Hiccup was more shocked than he believed he'd ever been before when this lifeless corpse opened its eyes, stopped the point of his blade with a broadside of a hidden blade, and physically shoved him off his feet and on the ground.
Nausicaä rose, eyes aflame.
Hiccup gurgled. "Gods, I thought you were dead, there!"
Something about how her eyes flared further made him think he'd said the wrong thing.
"Who are you?" she asked, despite everything, willing to hear him out and bear some understanding.
"I'm uh, Hiccup Haddock III, chief of Berk, you know...the dragon place." Hiccup winced. He wasn't that good at introductions. But something caught his eye: how she'd notably reacted when he'd said "Hiccup." Wait...this couldn't be…
Just to test, he threw out his own question. "And you, why are you here, on this island, sleeping hard enough to make someone question your sanity?"
"I was just resting," she replied, though without the defensive tone of voice so many would expect from such a statement. The name "Hiccup" had struck her as odd. It certainly wasn't a normal name she had heard before. It was possible this man was just a local resident, though extremely unlikely, given how he was trying to, you know, kill her. And was wearing a full battlesuit while doing it; a jet-black one at that, meant to terrify his enemies before killing them, she supposed. "I mean no harm to you. I'm Nausicaä, Daughter of Jhil. I come to stop the enemy, by destroying a great, dark power. A being of eternal destruction, said to be borne of death itself. The last of its kind."
Hiccup tensed up. So this was who Grimmel had sent to find him. Well, he'd just have to send her packing with the message that you don't mess with Berk and their dragons.
"Oh, yeah, okay. Funny story: it's actually really, quite hard to kill a Night Fury. You know?" The condescension dripped from his voice.
Nausicaä paused. A Night Fury. This must be what his level of warrior was wherever he came from. It sounded like he wanted to pick a fight with her no matter what chances she gave him. "Actually, I-"
Hiccup interrupted her. "I tried, you know, a long time ago. And when it came down to it, I was stopped. By me. See, the funny thing about this Night Fury, is, to kill him, you have to get through me, first."
Nausicaä squeezed her eyes shut. This man had the most confusing way of speaking she'd ever encountered. "I'm giving you a chance to leave. Please, let me by. Take this chance. We both might never get another one."
"I'm not leaving," Hiccup insisted. He swung his Gronckle Iron shield onto his left arm and steadied the Dragon Blade in his right. "You need to know that. I can't leave."
Nausicaä held her sword up over her shoulder like a dagger. "For both our sakes, I'll try to make this as painless as possible."
-FIGHT!-
Hiccup bent his knees and studied his opponent. Her eyes were calm, yet angry and sorrowful. They didn't dart around, looking for openings, or track his sword or shield to see his movements. But neither did she have any sort look of steely confidence or fright. She was confident. Powerful. Dangerous.
Hiccup got the distinct impression that if he made the first move, he'd be dead in seconds.
So he waited. She moved in an arc that appeared to be leading into a large circle, and he matched her movements. She slowly closed the distance between them, one step every five seconds, and he matched her speed. He took the extra time she was giving him to study her further. She was hesitating. Why? Her stance left her wide open, and even if she struck, he could deflect the stab and pierce her in the stomach with his own weapon. But she held the stance strongly, refusing to consider an alternative. Why? She couldn't see his eyes through his head armor, but her own still stared directly where his would be. Why?
She could have been doing all this to confuse and unnerve him. Maybe get him to leave, or strike first, or mess up on his defenses. But that couldn't be the only reason. There was something specific about her stance and actions, something far more intentional.
She struck first. He'd waited her out.
She struck down, exactly as it seemed she would, and he blocked perfectly, exactly as he had envisioned, and shoved his whole right side forward, Dragon Blade aimed to pierce right through her chest and spinal cord. The fight would be over in just under two seconds.
But his sword pierced her dress, struck something impossible hard underneath, and slid upwards across her unharmed chest. Hiccup, his whole weight having been put into the killing blow, was carried off his feet by his own momentum and fell forwards, but not before Nausicaä slid her blade right underneath one of the edges of his upper arm's armor. The momentum did the work for her; the pins and distributions were undone and the entire set of armor on his right hand's upper arm fell off, leaving the skin underneath dangerously exposed.
Nausicaä didn't hesitate before swinging her blade around again to cut into his arm, but Hiccup, surprised as he'd been by her unusual tactic and quick thinking, saw this coming pretty clearly. He swung his sword up, not to hit her but to make her blade hit his lower armor instead. It bounced off the padding, and Hiccup used the motion to turn his body over, releasing a small stream of Zippleback gas along the way. As soon as he was facing her, he lit his sword, igniting the gas and causing an explosion that warded off the stab she'd tried to sneak in there.
Hiccup turned off the flames. He was ready for this fight to take a while, and knew he needed to keep his supply of Scauldron gel to a limited use. He raised his shield again, getting back into the stance he knew so well, but Nausicaä tried a different one, now. She held her empty arm open across her stomach and layered the one with the blade above it, blade just barely pointing upwards. Hiccup didn't want to give her time to formulate another plan, so he rushed in, readying his own strike.
Nausicaä expected him to slash with his sword, and had readied herself for that. She saw thirteen possible moves for him, and with this stance, eight of those thirteen times she would be able to catch the inside of the hollow sword with her Ceramic blade and quickly disarm him. The other six, she still got out of that skirmish unwounded. But Hiccup didn't strike with his sword. He struck with his shield.
At the moment she predicted for him to begin, she thrust her empty hand up, ready to catch his armor and tear another piece off, but instead it slammed into an extremely hard metal and bounced downwards, slightly bruised. She shook the hand and lifted her eyes to see what she'd hit. A shield made of some sort of glossy metal, glossier than Ceramic, even. This, of course, was the last thing she was able to notice before the shield slammed into her helmet. Although the ohmu shell base of the helmet meant neither the armor nor her were scratched in the slightest, the vibration of the clash sent a ringing into her ears and made her head spin a little. Her hand holding her blade dropped slightly - opening up the opportunity for Hiccup to stab forward with his sword.
Nausicaä mentally jumped and physically shoved her arm up, but was only barely fast enough that the Dragon Blade cut into her sleeve instead of her side. The sleeve gave a little, and the sword's sharpness almost got the best of it, breaking through the first five layers of Ceramic weaving, but was stopped long enough on the sixth one for Nausicaä to kick out one of Hiccup's legs, forcing him to drop to his knee and the sword to part from her sleeve. She herself dropped the Ceramic blade from her right hand and caught it in her left, ducked down, and spun out from under the shield and towards Hiccup's legs. Her tactic itself worked, but the blade nicked off the armor and did no damage outside of a single spark.
Wait... that wasn't armor.
Nausicaä slid backward, dodging Hiccup's attempted shield bash, and rolled across the empty field. She saw the edge of the isle, intentionally fell, then caught herself with her hand and pulled herself up, ending up perfectly standing with a good stance, ready for battle far more quickly than if she had tried to pick herself up with her bruised, blade-carrying hand.
She studied Hiccup for another moment, taking in his whole armor and weapons for the first real time this fight. That sword and shield appeared to be made out of the same material; a refined version of Ceramic, she guessed. The sword could light itself on fire and release small amounts of explosive gas. It was an intimidating weapon, unlike any she had ever seen. Had he studied the ancients to build it? Or maybe it was from the ancients themselves. That gas had looked a lot like miasma.
And then there was his leg. Or, rather, his lack of one. Prosthetic legs weren't exactly uncommon, especially in these times, but this was something else. It didn't even try to look real, instead showing off what appeared to be a large amount of complex mechanisms within. She wouldn't doubt it to be housing a secret weapon in case of an emergency; she'd have to remember to stay on his right side when she could. From how he'd moved already, it was clear that the peg leg gave him no trouble in terms of combat and movement, so forcing him to put his weight on it would be worthless, and might end up pinning her down to a side she wasn't used to fighting on. Add to that the satchel he wore on his back, which could be filled with any number of things, and what appeared to be a toolbelt around his waist, meant she couldn't afford to simply attack anymore. She didn't want to run into a trap just because she was impatient. Wait and see. See and counter. Counter and attack.
Hiccup took a deep breath beneath his mask. Maybe he shouldn't have been so aggressive here. He tended to lose his head and speak his emotions when he was angry; one of the only traits he had inherited from his father, he guessed. If he'd been thinking clearly, he could have let this hunter pass him by, and take the time to set up a trap for them. That would have put him in a way more comfortable position than he was in right now. Nausicaä was fast, smart, and a good fighter. Better than even Astrid, maybe. He wasn't beating her in normal swordplay. Time to change things up.
Hiccup pointed the shield's boss at Nausicaä and fired a bola. This clearly caught her off-guard; it looked like, even though her armor and weapon was top-notch, she didn't have much experience dealing with the sort of machines Hiccup was used to. The bola wrapped around her before she could react, but instead of jumping at her with his sword, Hiccup turned to the side and ran straight off the side of the isle.
Once he'd fallen a good few hundred feet, he positioned himself accordingly and activated the Dragonfly. Instantly, his entire body shot upwards every bit of distance he'd fallen, and after just a couple of seconds of maneuvering, he glided over an updraft he'd noticed on the way in here. This bounced him a few hundred feet higher, and he soared over the isle like a dragon in the air. Glancing down, he noticed Nausicaä still hadn't escaped the bola, but not for lack of trying. She turned, rolled around, and even got to her feet and began hopping. She just wasn't strong enough to break it. This wasn't exactly unusual for Hiccup, but he definitely would have thought she had something up her sleeve for a situation like this. Oh, well.
He brought up the arm carrying his shield and activated the crossbow. The weight of the weapon caused him to tilt to one side, but he'd had hundreds of hours of practice with this; it wasn't a problem. Quickly, he set up the string and notched an arrow. He took aim, and fired.
He saw it in her eyes; she hadn't noticed the projectile spinning through the air until it was halfway to her. Her eyes didn't widen, though; they set. She stared at the rotating arrow and tracked it on its way down, dodging out of the way and to the left perfectly. Hiccup immediately loaded another and shot, but she dodged, too, again to the left. He fired again, and she repeated her action. Hiccup's mind immediately activated: how could he use this to his advantage? Still gliding, he spotted a fallen tree only thirty or so feet away from where Nausicaä was. If he guided his arrows correctly, he might just have her.
Nausicaä dodged and ducked and jumped, dodging every line of Gronckle Iron sent her way, but She was reaching her limit. Her breathing was uneven, drool escaped from her mouth, and she gave a small gasp everytime one of the bolts came close to nicking her. If he kept firing...
He shot once, and she dove to the left, giving a gasp in pain and surprise, but mostly pain, when her body slammed into a fallen tree and didn't reach nearly as far as she wanted it to. She ducked at the last moment and the arrowtip grazed over the side of her neck, drawing blood for the first time in this fight.
I've got her.
Hiccup aimed the last shot, Nausicaä no longer having any place to run to.
By the time he noticed her smile, he had already let go.
Nausicaä spun around, hopped on top of the log, and lowered her body over at a forty-five degree angle. The bolt sung as it raced through the air...and crackled as it snipped the ropes wrapped around her body.
Nausicaä sprang out, and, without hesitation, pulled her Wind Rifle from being her back. She loaded one round from the holster around her chest and shot at the perfect angle. Not where Hiccup was, but where he was headed. It would have been a perfect snipe if Hiccup hadn't seen her pull out the weapon and began slowing his glide as fast as he possibly could.
But he was trapped even as he slowly approached the spot where the shell would have hit him. Because it wasn't a bullet.
An absolutely deafening sound cracked the air and knocked Hiccup out of the sky. It was like hearing the hatching of a thousand Thunderdrum eggs at once. Hiccup covered his ears to block it out, but it was no use; the sound echoed, over and over and over, and somehow only seemed to grow louder each. His head hurt and his ears began to bleed slightly. He felt as though he were spinning, it was so enveloping. Wait, no, he WAS spinning! He was falling out of the air with nothing to catch him on his way down!
Hiccup immediately spread the wings of the Dragonfly out again, trying to regain his mid-air balance. He rocked and his body swam from all the sudden changes in speed and altitude. He spun around and around, the Dragonfly only doing a little to stop it. When he was only twenty feet from the ground, it finally evened out and he dove down, at the exact right angle to dip himself upwards again. He let a sigh of relief escape him.
Then he felt a great, sudden weight.
He looked backwards, and there was Nausicaä, hanging from his legs. She must have grabbed onto him as the Dragonfly was steadying out. The extra weight caused the wings to stumble, and in a second he went from soaring through the air to tumbling over the ground. He and Nausicaä both gave out cries of pain as their bodies were hit at all times as they rolled across the hard, stabbing dirt. They plowed through, reached the edge, and went over. They would have both fallen to their deaths, right then and there, if Hiccup hadn't managed to get out the Dragon Blade and plunge it into a heavy rock on top of the isle. His chest legs dangled from the edge, and Nausicaä dangled from his legs.
Hiccup breathed heavy, short, panicked breaths. He took his free hand, tore his head armor off, cupped his mouth, and screeched out a cry; his Night Fury call. He didn't know how long this rock could support the weight of the two of them.
Then he felt Nausicaä shift her body over to just his mechanical leg.
What if it didn't need to?
Hurriedly, without even looking, Hiccup reached down to his mechanical leg with his free hand. His hand first came into contact with her helmet; a strange, sturdy material. But with both hands hanging onto him for dear life, she couldn't exactly stop him. So he grabbed the helmet right off of her head and chucked it behind them both. Then, giving her no time to get a better hold, he unhooked his mechanical leg.
He heard her gasp and felt all of the weight vanish in an instant. A couple of seconds later, there was a quiet splash.
Hiccup ground his teeth, sighed inwardly at how this had to end, and grasped the handle of the Dragon Blade with both hands, pulling his entire body up and over the edge, finally coming to a rest on top of the isle, safe.
He took a few moments to catch his breath, reached into his bag, and replaced his leg with a new one. He guessed he hadn't needed to call Toothless back, after all. He'd been able to wrap this one up himself. Although, he had to admit, his heart had sunk a little when he heard that splash.
Wait.
His eyes creased.
He'd thrown the helmet down, and then dropped her. Shouldn't there have been two splashes? One for each?
A terrible noise suddenly burned through the air, like rotating wind-blades, but much, much faster. Hiccup jumped to his feet, nearly stumbling over his new leg, and saw a white flying machine break above the edge of the isle, zoom hundreds of feet high, then turn and flip around like the most maneuverable dragon you ever saw.
And riding atop it was Nausicaä.
Nausicaä crossed her eyes and stuttered atop Mehve. Something was wrong. Yes, she was lucky and they had managed to be hanging right above the cave entrance where she had stored Mehve, so even when he felt her shifting around to ge off and dropped his leg, she'd still been able to jump at the last moment, taking herself and his leg into the cave, but the moment she landed, she'd noticed something was off about her. Her movements were sluggish, her vision was slightly blurred and getting blurrier, and even making the simple adjustments required to move Mehve felt like lifting and dropping a wingworm with every move. What was going on?
Her mind flittered back to when she was dodging the arrows from that strange crossbow. One of them had skirted across her neck. She put one hand to the still-bleeding area, pulled it back, and sniffed the blood.
There was a strange smell in the blood. That arrow had been laced with something. Something meant for putting creatures a lot bigger than her to sleep.
She was fading fast. She couldn't even fly the few hours it would take to reach a new, non-hostile island before she would collapse. She needed to deal with Hiccup. Quickly.
So, for the first time in almost thirty hours, she responded to the call in her mind.
I'm here! Ohma, I'm here! Come to me!
Then, a broader message, sent across the planet.
Guardians of the forest, healers and protectors of the miasma, I need your help. I am in gr-
She thought she would have to explain her situation in detail to convince the ohmu of her plight, but before she was even finished with her first thought, she received a reply.
We will come, child of light. Wait for us.
Nausicaä bowed her head and quietly thanked them.
Then she turned Mehve around towards Hiccup. She had to keep him occupied until everyone else got here. If she could finish this before them, all the better. Sleep powder or not, she wouldn't give an inch of her speed or strength to the person standing in front of her. She pulled out her Ceramic Pistol, fully loaded, and took aim.
She wasn't close enough to see the surprise she imagined was on his face, but she did notice he wasn't hobbling. Assumedly he had some replacements for the leg he had dropped. But it sadly didn't matter. She had to strike while he was still at least a little out of sorts. She swerved around, felt the wind in against her cheeks, measured the speed, angle, and turbulence, and fired. A smooth, flawless shot.
That he parried with his shield effortlessly.
Nausicaä began to breathe a little more heavily, and shot three more rounds as fast as she could. But Hiccup parried all three, and then, taking her completely off-guard, his shield's boss flew open and unleashed a lengthy hook-tipped rope, shot at the speed of a cannon, that pierced and held onto Mehve's left wing. The rope began retracting, but rather than bringing Mehve down, it brought Hiccup up. He brought out that sword of his and lit it on fire as he zoomed ahead at speeds that would terrify even Mito, and Nausicaä barely had time to drop her pistol and bring out her own blade before he was on top of her. He struck down before he even touched Mehve, and she barely blocked it, most of her Ceramic blade still in its hilt.
There, weapons locked together, the two finally saw the other's full, exposed face and head for the first time.
Nausicaä felt slightly sick. Oh, by the crypt, he was basically a child. A few years older than her, certainly, but she had been trained and ready for the worst situations since she was very young. Most of her friends, mentors, and even family was dead by this point, and she was quite used to the feeling. She knew the horrors of war and combat, and was prepared to face them.
This man...this boy...he was scared.
For all his talk, for his boasting of being a "Night Fury" and "Chief of Dragons" and other such undoubtedly made-up titles, she saw it in his eyes. He thought he might die here. And that terrified him.
Without thinking, she softly reached up her empty hand to touch his face. To comfort him a little.
But he bolted backwards the moment it drew near.
Of course. They were in a fight to the death. He wouldn't trust her. He probably didn't even trust himself.
And, she reminded herself as she was unexpectedly forced to duck under a flaming sword, he's trying to kill you.
Nausicaä stepped backwards to dodge another attack and almost fell off Mehve, but luckily managed to snatch the control belt in time. She grasped the belt with her bladeless hand, attempting to steady herself. Upon seeing this, Hiccup immediately switched targets, and swung down at the belt.
"NO!" Nausicaä shouted. She dropped her Ceramic blade and reached out with her hand.
And for a moment, everything in Hiccup's mind was black.
Hiccup started. What had just happened? She'd shouted, and he felt something, no, someone, right there. It was like they were at the edge of his peripheral vision. An entity, a force, right on the brink of eyesight, walking forward, but never moving.
What was going on here?
He turned and faced Nausicaä. Her eyes were shut, her hair fluttered wildly, and she was holding onto that belt with all her might. But strangest of all, her blade had fallen to the ground, or, well, to whatever was considered ground on this flying machine. Her hand was empty. And reaching out. Not in a confrontational way, but moreso in a way that might suggest she was waiting for a handshake that wasn't coming. What was she doing?
He had seen her face before, somewhat, when he was about to give her the funeral she deserved (a notion he now inwardly scoffed at, not that he'd ever admit it). But not like this. And not like when they clashed on top of this machine. There, with her hair following the fierce winds, bruises on her face and hands, a look of resolve and yet deep pity in her eyes, she'd looked like an entirely different creature. Not like a human or a viking at all. An angel, maybe? A goddess, even?
No.
She'd looked like a dragon.
And in that moment, just for a second, he no longer wanted to hurt her.
But then she had reached up suddenly with her other hand to hit him with something, and that moment was gone. And now, no more than five seconds later, it was replaced with this one.
What was that, the thing that was trying to break into his line of sight? Wait, not his line of sight. His mind. It was trying to break into his mind.
I guess I can't. You don't have the gift.
A voice spoke to him in his head. He heard it, but not really. Not with his ears.
"Woah, there!" He leapt back, the idea of slicing the belt completely forgotten. "Who is that? What are you doing?!"
But I can show you this. I can show you me.
At that, the landscape around Hiccup changed. Actually, no, it didn't. He knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. If Nausicaä's body were to move, he'd see it instantly and be ready to counterattack. But in his mind, he now also recognized himself as somewhere else. Somewhere he'd never seen.
It was a battlefield. A war-torn battlefield, with bodies piled around by the hundreds. Limbs strewn about spewing fresh blood. Eyes newly sliced open leaking viscous liquid as their owners screamed in agony. Heads being impaled on spikes and dragged out by large birds acting as yaks of a sort, the rider never letting go as the spear hauled a rapidly-decaying body across the battle, organs and various-colored fluids leaving the corpse one after another. All the while the warriors basked in the horrifying gory nature of it all. He saw some pick up bleeding bodies and use them to paint their faces, while others stuck their hands through and used them as meat shields, forcing the other side to attack the bodies of their friends and families.
It was a sickening, disgusting, horrible sight. Worse than the ship filled with the Scourge of Odin. Worse than the bodies of the Chillblain vikings he'd dragged up after their volcano had exploded. Worse than the Bewilderbeast controlling Toothless and forcing him to fire on HIccup's own father. It was the worst thing he had ever seen.
Then, without any warning, it froze in time. Completely and totally. Hiccup jumped slightly, and, when nothing happened for a few seconds, turned about to look for the source. Everywhere he looked, all he saw was war. War, frozen in time. With no cause. And no gain.
"It's sad, isn't it?"
He heard Nausicaä's voice from behind him. When he turned, he saw her, about forty feet away, slowly approaching him.
Hiccup found his voice. "This...is this where you come from?"
Nausicaä stopped for a moment to close the eyes of a carcass, leaving the air silent to the question. When she finished, she straightened up and stared into Hiccup's eyes. He noticed that her outfit was different; there was no armor, only blue trousers and a torn, damaged blue shirt covering her. It was the look of someone who had been in this battle.
She finally answered. "No. I come from worse."
She gestured around her. "I don't know you. I can't unless you choose for me to. But I don't think that this is what you want." She was in front of him, all of a sudden, without appearing to have moved an inch. She was just a few inches away, and for some reason, that felt like the most natural thing in the world.
She grasped his hand, and this time, Hiccup didn't back away.
She shook him emphatically. "But this is what's coming. This is what will happen if we leave things the way they are now."
"You mean," Hiccup couldn't believe his ears. "the world will do all that...to just get their hands on something that powerful?" He'd fought dragon hunters and trappers many times. But for it to go this far in any possible future...
Nausicaä's gaze softened. So he did know about the Crypt. He did know about the thousands within. And he was trying to stop her from ending them. "I know it's terrible. I know it hurts. But it has to be done. We can't let them live any longer. It's...not safe."
"No," Hiccup declared. "There's a better way. I know it. They belong in their world. At least-"
"No," Nausicaä shook her head. "They don't. No matter where they are, or when they are, chaos and evil will always seep out. I- WE can't do anything else."
Hiccup backed away. "I refuse that. I refuse to believe that!"
"So you just want to get out of this with everyone having fought for nothing?!" Nausicaä was shouting at him now. "You think we can do this without killing them?!"
"There's ALWAYS a better way! Why does it have to end in death?!" He was shouting back now, angry and stubborn. A memory of his father entered his mind. It wasn't anything special. He was just sitting down at the evening meal, and Hiccup was sitting with him. They weren't talking about anything special. Just news, basic ideas for the armory, a basic plan for building some Outcast trading posts. But it was precious to him. Because no matter how much he tried, he could never get rid of that memory. And now, in that memory, his father lived on. It gave him the idea that some things never really left.
That some things were immortal.
He was even more fired up now. "Why can't we settle this, all of this, without someone dying?!"
Nausicaä stared back tiredly. "You want to save everyone? You can't. Death happens."
The way she said it wasn't as if she was coaxing in some hard truth, or trying to accept it herself, or even trying to convince Hiccup of her side. She said it like it was a fact. Some everyday fact that everybody should know, especially him.
He hated her for that.
Because he knew it was true.
"I thought if we talked about this, maybe I could convince you. Show you that you're wrong." Hiccup stated, activating the Dragon Blade. "But, I guess I can't do that."
"Stop being naive." Nausicaä's tone was authoritative now, like a mother scolding her child. "All things are born in darkness. You can't stop that. And you can't stop me."
"Yeah, well, let's just add that to the pile of disappointments." The Dragon Blade lit on fire, and with the orange flame, the entire illusionary world around them dissipated. "I'm not dumb enough to think I can change nature. I just wonder if maybe, if I see it in a different way, it won't need to be changed."
Nausicaä opened her eyes now. She spoke with her real body and voice. "You're going to hurt a lot of people, including yourself." She, like a true motherly figure, didn't sound angry. Just disappointed.
"You can talk about the balance of life and death all you want, but you know what? It doesn't matter. Because I'll always fight to protect those around me. If I can save just one life, man or monster, then that's fine. That's all I need to do."
Nausicaä sighed. "Then the only way out-"
"-is through," Hiccup finished her thought. And, with that final word, he sliced the belt in half.
Mehve had been circling in the air the entire time they were talking, but now, without the guiding weight of Nausicaä's hand on its belt, it turned down and began to fall.
Nausicaä jumped at Hiccup with her blade, and the two locked swords once more. This time, though, they both pulled away and struck again. The two didn't seem to care that they were on a falling ship that would crash and burn any second. They only focused on each other. Attack, parry, stab, block, slash, roll, slice, jump. An endless dance of swords, sharp blades, and skill.
Or, well, not so endless, because even with his shield to block a lot of hits, Hiccup still struggled to keep up with the dragon of the wind. Nausicaä never let up. Every move she made was only a small part of a much bigger and intricate series of moves that would lead to her almost hitting Hiccup in a vital area. It was like finding a new puzzle to discover, unravel, and counter every five seconds. He was fast, faster than her, even, but her skill level was on a plane he'd seen very, very rarely. And he was not on that same level. Not even close.
Nausicaä backed him up, further and further, until he was at the edge of the kite. He was being severely pressed in time and space here. If something (preferably not crashing and dying) didn't happen soon, he'd be in real trouble.
Then a black streak swept through the air, snatched Hiccup in its claws, and took off.
Nausicaä physically jumped backward at what she saw. It was like a bat, but bigger, much bigger, with a tail and head formation she'd never seen. And those spikes. It was... it was…
"A dragon?!"
Hiccup only caught the end of the second word, and not the shock or surprise in the question. He smiled. Toothless kicked his body up into the air a little ways, but, after a quick spreading of the Dragonfly, Hiccup landed on his saddle just fine. "Hey, bud. Thanks for coming through. What took so long?"
Toothless turned and scoffed at him before nodding his head behind Hiccup.
Hiccup turned his head and wheezed.
Coming out of the clouds surrounding them were thousands of dragons.
Changewings, Zipplebacks, Scauldrons, Timberjacks, Goregutters, Shockjaws, and he even thought he saw the tusk of a Bewilderbeast slowly approaching. He almost felt sorry for the girl on the crashing pile of metal.
Nausicaä had managed to leap off of Mehve as it fell past a tree. She grabbed a branch and watched as her kite crashed onto the ground, engine sputtering, metal wings heavily damaged. But despite that saddening sight, it was a little bit secondary in her mind to the army of flying monsters that was coming for her.
"Well, bud, you didn't have to go THAT far." Hiccup scratched underneath Toothless' chin, earning a satisfied rumble. "Let's turn around and give 'em a chance to surrender, huh?"
Toothless immediately changed course, back over towards Nausicaä, and, when he was about thirty feet from where she was hugging a branch, stopped and hovered, wings flapping like a hummingbird.
Hiccup stood up in his saddle. "This is Berk. It may not look like much. But it's a home to all those who have been left alone, cast out, or unfairly hurt. It's a safe haven that comes with a lifetime guarantee. They say a chief protects his own, and this chief, he protects…" He paused for emphasis. "Dragons!"
Hiccup sat back down to the sound of hundreds of roars. He mentally patted himself on the back a little; it was one of his better speeches.
Then there was a quaking.
The dragons grew silent.
The waters began to slosh and stir, and the lower sea stacks began to collapse and fall. The ground vibrated, and the smell of the air took on an earthy tone.
Nausicaä looked at the horizon of smoke, then back to Hiccup. "And this... is the real world."
At that, appearing through the clouds and smoke on the exact opposite side, was an entire daikaisho. Thousands of thick, blue-skinned ohmu, eyes red, ready for battle.
Hiccup stumbled over his thoughts for a moment. "What kind of dragons... hey, uh, bud, would you mind, maybe, ordering them to stay back there?"
Toothless barked out an order, but if the ohmu heard it, they didn't respond.
"Well, that's... slightly new." Hiccup mentioned.
Toothless shot a plasma blast at one. The blast dispersed over its body, no visible damage.
The ohmu moved forward.
Hiccup turned to Nausicaä. "Call off your army!"
"You call off yours!"
"How do I know you'll tell them to stop if I do?"
"You don't. You'll just have to trust me."
Hiccup hesitated and glanced between Nausicaä and the encroaching ohmu army. Finally, he made his decision.
"Toothless, let's blast them! Aim to wound!"
Toothless shouted a noise, and every dragon in the vicinity immediately flew to fight the army of insects that awaited them.
Hiccup, for his part, leapt off Toothless and back onto the isle. "One more chance!"
Nausicaä didn't answer. Instead, she pointed at Toothless. "What is that?!"
Hiccup unhooked his wings. "So, I guess you've never seen one in person. Makes sense, he is kind of the last one."
"Last what?!"
"Oh, I'm sorry," his voice held that old condescending tone again. "I just figured you'd recognize a Night Fury. You remember, the unholy offspring of lightning and death itself?"
Nausicaä turned and swallowed. His speech earlier made a little more sense now, but not by much. And to take in and break bread with such a creature, this man would have to be truly willing to accept the evilest powers. His power was far too much for his own good. She had to end it, now.
A massive wave broke against the side of the isle.
The sound of an enormous footstep, combined with the hissing of boiling heat meeting ocean water, stretched across the air.
A rotten stench filled the air.
And a cry of "Mama!" solidified all doubts.
Ohma was here.
Nausicaä waved at the God Warrior as Hiccup fell to the ground in shock. "I'm here!"
Ohma now spoke only in her mind. Are you okay, Mama? Is the man hurting you?
Nausicaä, however, didn't reply psychically. She shouted, at the top of her lungs, while pointing at the hovering Night Fury. "Ohma! Return this being to darkness!"
"WHAT?!" Hiccup jumped to his feet. "No way. Come on, Tooth-"
A bullet cut near the top of his right earlobe at the same time Toothless dove out of the way of a massive hand sliding through the air.
Nausicaä's voice rang out clearly. "We both control one side of this battle. Please, just give up. Don't make me hurt-"
"Why would I care about me?!" Hiccup turned around and screamed at her.
Nausicaä fell back slightly, but her resolve pushed through. Her body was tired beyond belief; it was only through sheer willpower that she was standing at all. "You hit me with something. Earlier. That arrow."
Hiccup was taken aback a little. "Yeah, it's a sleep elixir for wild dragons. I was hoping you'd just fall asleep and the whole thing would be over with. I kind of figured it wasn't effective on humans, since you aren't acting any differently."
Nausicaä stepped forward, the weight of every step in her boots feeling like ten anvils. "And who said those two things would have anything to do with each other?"
"So... you-"
Nausicaä shot with her sixth and final bullet. Despite her sleepy state, it was an excellent shot, and if only Hiccup didn't have a massive impenetrable shield he'd trained for years with, it would have finished the fight. But he did, and so the bullet was blocked.
Nausicaä saw the battle going on behind Hiccup. Ohmu and dragon clashed, with impossible firepower going up against an impenetrable defense. The Night Fury, the real one, flew around and around Ohma, peppering him with blue energy blasts while Ohma began releasing more and more radiation. This fight wasn't going to be decided by their armies. It was going to end here and now.
As she watched him, Hiccup poured an enormous amount of Zippleback Gas out of the Dragon Blade. It began coating everything in less than two seconds, and when it reached Nausicaä, she choked right away from the smell. Without so much as a second thought, she put on her Shohki Mask. The mask had no trouble purifying the gas around her into something breathable. But she was much more concerned with the fact that she had only seen him use this form of the miasma once before, and then he had caused it to explode. She had to leave, right now.
So she ran, jumped, and reached the branch of a small tree, which she used to climb up, further and further, until she was above the gas, then even further, until she was well above it.
And not a second too late, as the gas exploded completely in an enormous ball of fire that rocked the entire surface of the isle and collapsed every tree with the shockwave alone. Including the one Nausicaä was situated in. She jumped and rolled when she hit the newly-horribly-scorched ground, and spun around, eyes hunting for Hiccup.
But he wasn't there.
Then her psychic sense warned her of something.
She waited for a second, and then turned around, stabbing her Ceramic blade out just in time to match an invisible, equally strong weapon. The weapon tried for a slash, but Nausicaä could sense it, and managed to parry the unseen sword. She didn't give Hiccup a chance to keep going and wear out her already-failing mind. She reached out and snatched the Changewing cloak off of his head, turning him and his weapons completely visible again.
But she didn't realize just how many contingencies Hiccup could come up with in only a few minutes.
As she laid eyes on Hiccup, his mop of brown hair was the last thing she ever saw before a splash of green hit her.
And she howled.
"Changewing Acid. It melts through wood, metal, and eyes," Hiccup informed her. He raised the Dragon Blade.
Nausicaä tried to swipe once with her Ceramic blade between cries of pain, but Hiccup easily swatted it out of her hands, then, for good measure, off the edge of the isle. "I'm sorry. I am. I gave you so many chances to gi-"
Nausicaä shouted something incomprehensible at him and threw her empty pistol at his head. Hiccup batted it out of the air with his shield. "Okay, then. I'm sorry it had to end like this." He lit the Dragon Blade up and readied his final stab.
Nausicaä screamed, shouted, and became hysterical at first, but the more she calmed down, the more she saw. Not with her eyes, but with her mind. This was okay. This wasn't hurtful. She could still feel the emotions of others. She could still stop the Crypt of Shuwa. And she could still fight.
Except, she couldn't.
She was tired. So, so tired. Some part of her needed to be put to sleep.
She inhaled slightly.
So that's what she would do.
Hiccup stabbed down.
And without looking, Nausicaä drew her knife and parried it off.
Alarmed, Hiccup pressed the attack, striking over, and over again. And each time, Nausicaä just moved a little further away and made the absolute bare minimum effort required to block his attack and parry it off.
What was this? It was like she could see everything he was doing without using her eyes. No, more than that. Every single strike, Nausicaä's knife was in place to block it before it even began. This was something much bigger. It was as if she could sense whenever he was about to attack, what his attack would be, and how to perfectly counter it. To do something like that would require someone to somehow completely give in to their...
Nausicaä let out a small breath. It was slow, and steady. Her cheeks flushed as they bent inwards and outwards, ever so slightly. Her eyelids twitched; her deadened eyes were moving rapidly under them.
"That's... impossible."
She was sleeping. She had somehow given her entire body over to pure instinct so that she could sleep...and survive.
"Did she...just learn how to do that? Right now, by herself?"
He couldn't hit her like this. He had to wait. He had to wait for her to be capable of making a mistake.
So he sat. And waited.
…
Twenty minutes later, the battle still raged on behind them. A few nuclear warheads had gone off, courtesy of Ohma and Toothless, but otherwise, things were much the same. Minus, of course, a totally still Nausicaä and a sitting, resting Hiccup not ten feet away.
Nausicaä's eyelids opened, the dead eyes behind them moving around, forgetting that they couldn't see. "What happened?"
"You're alive, and I was waiting," Hiccup replied, standing up at last.
"It... worked, then?"
"I gotta be honest, that's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot of amazing things. The ability to rest while maintaining an impenetrable defense. It's incredible!" Hiccup paced a bit. "But there's just one little problem with that strategy."
Nausicaä was frankly relieved to hear it had worked at all. She wasn't sure if even her psychic powers were strong enough to maintain a connection like that. "What do you mean, one problem?"
"When your body starts acting on its own, it usually does a pretty good job of it. Nobody really sleepwalks off a pier. But because it can't think, it only lives in the present. Right here, right now. So if I were to, say, shoot at it, it might dodge or cut the arrow. But what if that arrow were moving really, really slowly?"
It was at this point that Nausicaä tried to get up and discovered she couldn't move at all. "What...what did you do to me?!"
"What, you didn't think I was just going to sit around and wait for you to wake up, did you?"
"Why can't I move?!"
"Oh, that, yeah, that's the Flightmare Gel. Funny thing about Flightmare Gel, when it's superheated, it turns into the same sort of Flightmare breath that paralyzes your body. Of course, it takes hours over a small flame to do it, and around ten minutes to absorb into the skin. Or should we say, five minutes total with the help of high-powered wind engines, the container of an explosive shell, and a gas dispersal device like my Dragon Blade?"
Mehve's engines and the Kabura Shell.
"But actually, you know, that thing you did was so crazy, it even moved under the Flightmare Gas! So... I sort of had to wait until you woke up to finish this?" He phrased that last part as if he was both apologizing for some strange reason and looking for approval for some stranger reason.
Nausicaä silenced herself. If her body had been able to move under the power of the gas, then that gas had to be attached to something she could remove, right? Some part of her psyche?
She breathed in, and out. She rested, and allowed herself to explore her mind.
Inwardly, she pictured a mental image of her body walking across neural pathways, exploring different junctions, places, and purposes. She looked for something, anything, that was way different than normal.
Then she noticed that, despite being unable to move, her entire body was sweating like crazy.
She was afraid. Not her mind, but her nerves. The gas inflicted a state of fear paralysis on them.
So, then, when Hiccup brought down the Dragon Blade, her body moved. It automatically jumped up, drew her knife, blocked the sword-
-and was shot with ten large crossbolts.
Nausicaä's body sank to the ground, bleeding profusely.
"Oh, yeah. It also never stopped me from making traps. A little tripwire goes a long way."
Nausicaä gurgled, choking on her own blood. "I... can still-"
Hiccup threw a canister of Zippleback Gas on top of her barely-moving body. "I'm... sorry."
"No…"
He used the Dragon Blade to light one of the arrows in his crossbow on fire. "There, do I see my father, my mother, and my brothers and my sisters."
"I... don't…"
"They bid me take my place among them in the halls of Valhalla."
He stretched the rope out and took aim.
Against all odds, with only her willpower to support her, Nausicaä lifted her head up and said one last sentence.
"Do you really think their life is sacred?"
Hiccup paused. "I do. Wholeheartedly."
Nausicaä shivered. "Then protect them. All of them."
Hiccup swallowed and re-took his aim.
"Where the brave shall live forever."
He let the arrow loose.
There was a mighty explosion, and when it cleared, the only thing left of the child of prophecy was a few scraps of her blue outfit.
-KO!-
A deep, guttural, horrible roar sounded from Ohma, a roar that was echoed, over and over again, by the daikaisho behind him.
Hiccup turned around, ready to face the consequences of his actions, however justified he thought they were.
Toothless took advantage of Ohma's distress to jump down to Hiccup and invite him onto his back.
Hiccup gladly accepted the offer. "Hey, bud, mind calling out a little more? If we could get the other Riders, maybe, I don't know, everyone else over here, I'd sure feel a lot better about our odds."
He viewed the hundreds of furious insects in front of him and the rotting mechanical creature that stood above them all.
"We're going to need all the help we can get."
Toothless smirked and let out a call, one that was joined in by every single dragon in their procession. With that loud of a call, Hiccup wouldn't have been surprised if they were joined by Dagur and Heather or even some Wingmaidens soon.
What a day this had turned out to be.
…
You know, miscommunication can lead to a lot of problems later in life, including trust issues, unwarranted stress, a decrease in motivation, and brutal murder of someone that probably would have been a lifelong friend.
There was a lot to take into account here, and with so many factors at play, it was quite difficult to see the winner through. It does all end up boiling down to a few points, but to understand those points, we have to remove the clutter and get a lot of questions out of the way first. The meeting of these two characters has a lot of layers, so let's shine a light upon them all, shall we?
First off, yes, if these two ever did meet in a sort of fever dream crossover, they would be good friends and powerful allies. With their similar appreciation of life and wisdom beyond their years, not to mention Hiccup's trusting nature and Nausicaä literally having the ability to distinguish good and evil, they would never, never fight like this. I spent 3,000 words setting them up in the perfect situation where this could MAYBE happen, but it reasonably still wouldn't. But hey, it's a Death Battle. The way the show works is two people meet, fight, and someone dies. It's just my job to figure out who that someone is more times than not. Okay, we good? Then let's talk about dragons and insects.
The fact that both have entire armies on their sides makes things a bit complicated, but the main powerhouses are simple enough. Toothless and Ohma. Ohma may be large, surprisingly fast, and enormously powerful, but Toothless has met, fought, and beaten the crap out of all that before. His own unique abilities allowed him to use senses other than smell or sight (the two Ohma could possibly block with his radiation and blinding mechanisms) to great effect, and while Ohma's spitwads can clear out most enemies without a care, Toothless is different. In his Titan Wing form, he tanked a full-powered death blast from a Bewilderbeast. This beast had fought and matched a previous one that created a massive wall of ice in one shot with his icy breath. By measuring the assumed temperature of the area and the size of the blockage, assuming this was done through nitrogen fusion, we can find that the required energy to create this blast reaches over 13.8 Kilotons of TNT! That's almost seven times anything Ohma can produce, and Toothless just kinda walked through it!
Toothless' own plasma blasts are powerful enough to one-shot kill creatures around half Ohma's size, and would definitely wear Ohma down faster than Ohma could wear him down.[1] And Toothless is way faster, too. Even overhyping Ohma's flight speed and measuring Toothless' quite conservatively, he's more than twice as fast,[2] and nothing Ohma shoots is going to hit when Toothless reliably reacts to natural lightning! Not even Ohma's size would be enough to deter Toothless, since lesser dragons, such as Rumblehorns, have knocked over sea stacks weighing hundreds of thousands or millions of tons. So, yeah, it might be a bit of a long fight, but Toothless has this one in the bag.
The same can't quite be said about the rest of the army, though. The Dragon Army and the daikaisho are actually surprisingly even in power. Yes, it does initially seem like the dragons have a massive advantage, thanks to their slightly greater numbers, enormous variety of types, and with some of them being dangerous enough to wipe whole islands off the map, but that's underselling the strength, durability, and intellect of an ohmu. To put this in a way a true DreamWorks Dragons fan would understand, it's kind of like having Toothless's dragon army fight an equally-sized army of house-sized Cavern Crashers... that's covered head to toe in Dragon-Proof Armor and can act as one cohesive unit with its own thoughts and strategies. It's a lot tougher of a battle than it appears on paper, and could honestly go either way, even with Toothless taking care of Ohma and assisting the others.
So, that's it, then? Ohma's worthless, and the rest of the armies stalemate each other? We can move on? Ha ha, no. There's still one rather enormous detail that needs to be unraveled, one that can decide the tide of the entire battle. Toothless' Mind-Control vs. Nausicaä's Psychic Powers.
Both have the ability to summon, talk to, and control their own armies. Fine. That's good. Makes sense. But... what's to stop Toothless from commanding the ohmu to turn on their friend? What would prevent Nausicaä from waving her hand and forcing a wild Typhoomerang to fire at Hiccup? How much can they control? Who and what can they control? Can they stop each other? Would they even try?
The answer to this kept me busy for a long, long time. A lot of material was revisited, a lot of situations were considered, and a lot of spirited debate was had. But I do believe I have the answers.
First, Toothless very likely wouldn't be able to affect the summoned insects or Ohma with his Alpha abilities. His rule has always been clearly limited to dragons, as have the vast majority of mind-control-like effects throughout the series, and insects and god warriors are obviously very different. It is kind of arguable that they might be labeled dragons if they were to exist in Hiccup's world, but even the official DreamWorks Dragons material has shown that just because something is labeled a dragon doesn't mean it actually is one. Silkspanners, for example, are labeled dragons, but are so distantly related that Toothless' Alpha powers have no effect on them. Plus, these ohmu are vastly intelligent, with each having wisdom that reportedly stretches beyond human capacity. I mean, apparently, a normal person would go insane just by glancing at their mind and soul, so there's little chance that Toothless could just get them to turn on each other or Nausicaä, even if they were dragons.
Now, what about Nausicaä? Could she steal control from Toothless like Toothless did from the Bewilderbeast? Actually, it's surprisingly unlikely for Nausicaä to be able to psychically attack or control Toothless' dragon army, either, as almost every one of them is highly intelligent on a level far above the creatures Nausicaä has manipulated. Most have intelligence rivalling humans, which Nausicaä isn't able to affect unless they already have powers. And all dragons with mind-control-like abilities, such as the Death Song and Screaming Death, seem to prey upon their subjects' senses, rather than any actual mind domination ritual. This is even discussed in the series finale of Race to the Edge: baby dragons are immune to these forms of mind-control, even from the Bewilderbeast, because their senses aren't fully developed yet. What Nausicaä uses is something entirely different, something that the dragons wouldn't even recognize, much less be manipulated by.
Now, could she affect Toothless? His power as the King of Dragons mentally forces all dragons to obey his will. Sounds like psychic power to me, right? Well, his mind-control is, again, very different to what her world knows as psychic powers, and is more based on respect than anything else. And even if this was all wrong and this all did count as psychic powers and the two could engage in psychic combat, Toothless' experience fighting off a great variety of mind-control-like abilities and having the willpower to resist a Bewilderbeast, which has shown similar levels of psychic strength to Nausicaä, means the winner would be unclear at best.[3]
Really, the only reliable way to end one of these two armies would be to take out its head: Hiccup or Nausicaä. The dragons would never let Ohma or the ohmu break in and kill Hiccup for Nausicaä, nor would she want that herself, and the ohmu would likely put all their power into preventing, say, Toothless from helping his best friend.[4] The two armies would fight and match forces for a great, long time, neither being able to be stopped or manipulated by the other.
So, surprisingly, this does end up really being purely a question of who wins in a fight to the death: Hiccup or Nausicaä?
And once you hear that, the winner might seem a little obvious. Hiccup is obviously stronger and faster, has cooler weapons, and isn't a psychic. And you'd be right, to an extent. Nausicaä sort of equaled a pressure of around 9,000 PSI, or, generously scaling, up to 15,000 PSI, but Hiccup scales fairly well to Astrid, who has torn apart iron with her strength alone. That takes a pressure of 78,000 PSI. Yikes. Also, Hiccup kinda swam like normal at the bottom of the ocean, where the pressure reaches 16,000 PSI, so yeah, Nausicaä's strength wasn't doing anything to him. And dodging lots of blasts traveling at a conservative 8,200 MPH is way better than dodging one traveling at 3,700 MPH. Hiccup's weapons and defenses are tough enough to stand up to Nausicaä's and unique enough to give Hiccup more options in combat.
And hey, he's probably more durable than her, too. Although Hiccup lost his leg from only a 2 Kiloton explosion while Nausicaä survived a 7 Kiloton one, this was years ago, when Hiccup looked like a stick and didn't even have any real training to speak of. Much later in the story, he witnessed a Hideous Zippleback create an explosion he directly stated to be possibly the largest ever seen, including by him, making it larger than the Red Death's, er, death, and likely larger than the Purple Death's 5 Kiloton fire breath. Johann, whom Hiccup has fought and matched fairly equally, was in the center of this explosion and shook it off like a bug bite, while Nausicaä passed out and almost died from her airship explosion. Hiccup's durability level, even without the armor, is likely as good or even better than hers. And with the armor, it has to be. The Dragon Armor is certainly stronger than even Nausicaä's Ohmu Shell Armor, and covers way more of his body while being just as light. There just seems to be no way Nausicaä is beating him in a fair fight.[5]
But that's all only on paper. And paper sometimes lies. Because even with all that, Nausicaä was nowhere near out of the running. Hiccup's really strong, yeah, but she has seen and fought beings just as strong as him. He's tough, but her willpower has allowed her to crack the hides of tougher. And even though he has more variable weapons, hers are sharper and more suited to delivering the killing blow. Given their seen performances, it seems pretty fair to assume Gronckle Iron and Ceramic are more or less on an even playing field, but Nausicaä's specialty Ceramic weapons have broken other Ceramic before, with some effort. So even with the weaponry advantage, Hiccup still had to be careful that she didn't land too many hits, especially since all his weapons minus the Dragon Blade were meant for non-lethal encounters, while hers could kill in a touch.
To make things even harder on him, she has way more training under her belt. Hiccup only got around a year of basic dragon-killing knowledge stuffed into his brain, and had to muddle through everything else himself. Nausicaä spent years honing her combat and aerial skills, flying alongside and against all the dangerous things she could find. Before she left for war, she was trained into adapting to any situation and recognizing openings and weaknesses. So even when Hiccup tried to pull one of his tricks, she could keep up with it and figure out how to handle it, and she kept a cool head at all points, while Hiccup's been known to go into fits of mindless emotion while battling.
Her skill at swordsmanship is definitely above his, too. And, since she was trained to fight opponents wearing huge amounts of heavy armor she can't break, the Dragon Armor doesn't offer quite as much protection as you might think. It still has openings, and Nausicaä knows how to exploit them. Sure, her own armor is weaker and covers less, but because of this gap in skill, the two sets make about the same amount of difference in how often they'll protect their wearer's life.
And while you might say that his reaction speed advantage would allow him to press his advantage much further, he can't even do that, because Nausicaä's spidey sense would inform her of his every move. Her psychic ability to sense her opponent's attacks and intentions means that Hiccup's speed advantage doesn't really matter here; no matter how fast his attack, her mental warnings would allow her to time it out and dodge, block or counter it on the same basis as he could block or counter her much slower attacks.
So, Hiccup's theoretically better, but Nausicaä's personal training, advantages, and abilities meant she was able to keep up with him even at his physical best. Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty surprised at how close this turned out to be, too. At this point, it almost feels like I should call the whole thing a stalemate and just go home. But not quite.
Here's the thing: so, Nausicaä can keep up with Hiccup thanks to her experience, skill, and willpower, right? The ability to reach beyond her limits and fight those beyond her reach?
But Hiccup has that, too.
Nausicaä may have had more training, but Hiccup has way more experience. Remember, Nausicaä is a pacifist by nature and almost never engages in battle unless she has to. So she actually has very little combat experience. Hiccup is the same way, except he can't afford to almost never engage in battle. He finds, helps, relocates, and fights off dragons, the most powerful beasts in the known world, and every variety of them, too. Hiccup has been in hundreds of battles where the situation or plan was completely overturned or unlike anything he'd ever seen, and yet he still prevailed virtually every time.
The point is this: yes, Nausicaä could adapt to Hiccup's weapons and tactics, but she couldn't do a single thing to prevent Hiccup from adapting to hers. And once he did, they'd be where they started, with him as her superior. Both have the willpower, strength, and ability to fight foes greater than them and reach their level, but the thing that breaks this match is that Hiccup started out on a higher level. By the time she's reached it, he's already ascended, since he has the same growth capability that she does.
Every one of the tactics and advantages mentioned in those previous paragraphs isn't to prove Nausicaä Hiccup's superior, but to increase her level to his equal. But because he can increase his level in tandem, it turns out that, most of the time, she just will never reach the same rung of the ladder.
Simply put, Nausicaä, through great effort and sheer force of will, powered through great lava-like heat, terrible poisons, and metal-burning acid, because she was mentally strong enough to do what, for her, was previously considered impossible. Hiccup powered through lava-like heat, terrible poisons, and metal-burning acid...because it's a daily occurrence for him. He's already reached the level Nausicaä struggles to get to. And he's not done climbing yet.
Even without all that flowery philosophy and stuff, though, it'd be pretty hard for an evenly-matched Nausicaä to beat Hiccup anyway. His storehouses of experience prepared him for anything she had up her sleeve,[6] his vast array of extra tools and gadgets give him a hundred possibilities at every point while Nausicaä pretty much only ever has less than five, and if things ever got too hairy, he could always just toss a canister of Zippleback gas at her and throw a spark at it. Doing that once ripped a viking-dragon hybrid crazy man in half. Don't think she'd fare much better.
Oh, and if things ever really got out of hand, he was definitely smart enough to come up with a way to win before she did. Hiccup's been in some of the most impossible situations you can think of, and still gets through. Like when he was grounded on a deserted island, while being hunted by a new, unknown, and extremely dangerous species of dragon that hunted in packs spanning the whole island, all after going nine full days without any sleep. And he still managed to form a strategy to trick these super-smart dragons and get out of there.
The human body can only go so long without sleep; after about 72 hours, the mind and body completely begin to break down, and you'll suffer crazy on-and-off bouts of fatigue alongside mood swings, severe problems in your perception of reality, hallucinations, and even entirely false memories springing up. Hiccup went 220 Hours without sleep, and was still able to get himself out of there![7] Nausicaä is definitely a good strategist, but NOWHERE NEAR that level. Oh, and Hiccup's gullibility wouldn't come into play that much. Even if Nausicaä did know about it, she would never lie to his face for a surprise attack or set up a betrayal of some kind. She's way too good a person to do that.
In short, Hiccup was better, Nausicaä could reach that, but Hiccup could reach higher and also had his own variety of advantages. With their armies and guardians locked in a battle of equal might and resistance, this fell upon the two of them to sort out the winner, and Hiccup had the advantages everywhere that mattered.
Ohmagosh, Nausicaä sure looked toothless in that battle, it was no hiccup that the winner didn't let the fight drag-on, and she sure did dai...kaisho.
Don't ever let me do that again.
The winner is Hiccup.
Extra Notes (For the Conclusion):
[1] Toothless' firepower may be much greater than you would at first think. The first Dragon Eye survived an exploding volcano, which would have hit it with at least 7 Megatons of TNT. After this, it was restored and repaired, only to later be obliterated by a single blast of the combined fire of a Gronckle, Hideous Zippleback, Monstrous Nightmare, Deadly Nadder, and Toothless. Even if Toothless's energy only made up 1/6 of that blast, it would have been, at the very least, nearly 600x stronger than Ohma's, and likely powerful enough to kill Ohma with one good shot. And that's a very conservative estimate.
[2] Toothless' speed has been suggested to be much greater than we've measured on a few occasions. He once made what was referred to as a three-day flight in only around six hours. Hiccup was likely referring to the other Riders when mentioning this distance, and most of their dragons are able to at least reach 1,200 MPH, even while casually travelling. Given how the Riders handled previously lengthy flights, we can assume them to travel around 12 Hours per day. This would put Toothless' speed at 7,200 MPH!
[3] Although Toothless required Hiccup's help to initially resist the Bewilderbeast, after he reached his Alpha form, he was able to resist it by himself. Nausicaä, meanwhile, required Selm's aid to hold back the power of the thousands that called themselves God, and was unable to control or counter them alone.
[4] While it doesn't tip the percentages enough to be the deciding factor of the match, if the two armies to focus on killing the opposing humans instead, the Dragon Army would have a much easier time of it thanks to their greater firepower, stealth, unique abilities, consistent attacks at all ranges, and higher maneuverability due to, you know, being able to fly. Even with other insects, like wingworms, helping the ohmu out, the dragons still easily have this advantage.
[5] Nausicaä could potentially use her psychic powers to reveal Hiccup's soul and engage it in a battle of willpower. While such a move would basically be guaranteed victory for Nausicaä, she has never affected non-psychics in such a manner before, even when it would have been quite helpful, and as such it seems that her opponent must have some psychic ability for her to latch onto in order to perform such a move.
[6] Nausicaä's aim is incredible, but nothing Hiccup hasn't seen before. Stormfly is nearly as fast as Toothless and, additionally, is skilled enough to "hit a flea off a yak's tail at 20 yards," and both Hiccup and Toothless have never had any trouble dodging whatever she's thrown at them.
[7] To be clear, this sort of sleep deprivation sickness isn't something vikings are immune to. Back home, Snotlout, Astrid, Heather, Fishlegs, Sven, Ruffnut, Gothi, and Tuffnut, all some of the strongest or smartest vikings around, had similar levels of sleep deprivation and were suffering from severe paranoia, mood swings, and constant hallucinations. It's heavily implied, even in the mannerisms and dialogue of Hiccup at the time, that he was mentally under enormous pressure and was struggling to hold himself together in this situation. The fact that he managed everything he did while that severely sleep-deprived is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
...
Next time, on Death Battle…
The grey, weak body of a primal legend sits in an underground pool of lava, ready to be awakened.
VS.
The fossilized skull of a fiery dinosaur lies deep within caverns, waiting to be found and resurrected.
(Groudon vs. Ignosaurus)