Limelight > Steelheart?

[+robardin he/him]

We never see Prof really using his forcefield abilities until Firefight. He gifts it in the form of "jackets" to the Reckoners, and rarely created walls with it to hold people/things back, but when he "poses" as Limelight in the duel with Steelheart at Soldier Field, he still only uses his healing and his "tensor" powers to fight. He makes physical daggers, spears, and swords out of the omnipresent steel that he KNOWS won't do anything against Steelheart's invulnerability.

He doesn't make forcefield flying discs, or forcefield spears, or those forcefield containment globes we see him use once he's "pushed over the edge" at the end of Firefight.

So it would seem that this particular power was the MOST seductive for Prof? And therefore, using it would be the most open to letting Calamity's "taint" fully into him?

Prof held back from using his forcefields as a weapon until he went Full Epic, whereupon it was the FIRST thing he did (do the shrinking globe squishy-crush murders of Val and Exel). And then started making flying discs and steps/pathways in the air with them. He'd always been fully aware that that's actually his most dangerous and flexible power.

This made me wonder: well, what if Limelight Unleashed had faced off against Steelheart?

Assume that his "forcefield spears" would not have penetrated Steelheart's invulnerable skin.

But what about those shrinking globes? Steelheart didn't have a healing power, otherwise that scar on his chin from David's father's shot would have disappeared. And his being invulnerable was really about being impenetrable or impervious to external forces.

Could forcing his own body in on itself that way (being squished in a globe to the volume of a basketball) be interpreted as him doing unintended damage to himself, in the same vein as how he ultimately "killed himself" through his own unintended action, firing a gun that sent a bullet into a hidden detonator trigger button?

Counterpoint: could Steelheart not have just punched through that forcefield globe? -- Maybe? But we never saw anything break through one of Prof's forcefields, and they were strong enough to contain an Obliteration detonation that would have wiped out an entire city... But I suppose if anything could, it might be Steelheart's strength.

Alternatively, could Prof create a forcefield globe around just Steelheart's head, small enough to suffocate him into unconsciousness?  And then, if Steelheart COULD "punch through" a forcefield, hold that globe until he's punching really, really hard, then vanish it. Quit hitting yourself, Steelheart! Oh, you pulped your own head? Too bad!

Even if that wasn't enough to kill him outright (an extension of the invulnerability power, perhaps), seeing him go down  unconscious might dissipate Prof's fear of him enough to disable his invulnerability. I think one of the reasons Steelheart was so paranoid about where he slept, changing it every night from dozens of bedrooms, would be because someone seeing him asleep might not be afraid of him any more. (Especially if they didn't even realize it was him, like someone armed with instructions to "just go into that room and put a bullet into the head of the slontze sleeping there").

In fact, what could Steelheart have done to kill Limelight? We saw Prof get his head smashed in, and just heal from it; and even the "gifted" version of his healing allowed David to survive a blast from Obliteration trying to Obliterate him that overcame the gifted forcefield shield remaining to him. Making full use of his healing, I suppose Limelight could also heal from a power blast from Steelheart, if his forcefield shields didn't suffice.

It might take a long time, but the longer a stalemate battle goes on, the less Steelheart's opponent would fear him, I would think. Since we see that "neutering effects" of an Epic's weakness are often on a sliding scale, like how Kool-Aid weakened or shorted out Sourcefield's effects but didn't render her fully powerless until she ingested some, gradually fearing Steelheart less and less in a fight might have a cascading effect, too.

Edited June 11, 2025 by robardin

[Keke They/he]

Mm these are all good points. 

We know that to hurt Steelheart you have to not be scared of him and objectively speaking prof would have had some fear of steelheart because if killing him meant pushing himself over (which is what hes scared of) then yeah. 

And really if prof had gone evil epic against steelheart then yeah i think he could have easily killed him because evil prof knows the full extent of his powers and that no matter what steelheart does he cant event get close to killing prof. 

[Duxredux he/him]

On 6/11/2025 at 7:36 AM, robardin said:

This made me wonder: well, what if Limelight Unleashed had faced off against Steelheart?

This is a great line of inquiry because it directly leads into Prof's internal conflicts - and why David's push for fighting Epics with Epics was so dangerous. The avoidance of the force fields I think also nods to why he didn't use them - because it made it too easy to kill with his powers and that was skating very close to the edge. The easy answer is that Limelight would have dismantled Steelheart because Prof himself is just that dangerous and still operates like a Reckoner on top of his powerset. The more nuanced answer is that it's tricky because it's dependent on what Prof considers his failure mode.

If we're looking at powers... then it depends on the exact mechanism of both sides. We see this not infrequently where the mechanics of how a Epic's power operates defines viable counter measures. Unfortunately for anything conclusive, to me at least they are both belief based and seem to ignore physics applied to them.

Looking at the Coppermind article, Steelheart can't be suffocated, shot, exploded, and trashes High Epics. David apparently explicitly gets Steelheart's power profile and caught a falling space station. Pretty sure that just... doesn't work any more than Superman casually lifting a skyscraper with each hand because that's not how those structurally are meant to be supported. Even if he converts the ISS to steel, I think he should have punched through the hull when trying to land the thing if operating with normal Newtonian physics (ignoring flight). I'm not sure if Steelheart's power profile is "super strength, invulnerability, and casual flight" or "Steelheart narratively trumps all that fear him, including gravity" not just in his invulnerability but also his personal attributes. 

Prof's power profile explicitly ignores certain aspects of physics, starting with how the amount of dust the Tensors make don't match what would be expected, then over to how when he compressed Exel and Val, that should have superheated the material in the process. I didn't see an explosion when he released his force fields. We see Prof's forcefields fail him in two main cases - when confronted with his own powers either in the Tensors or Tavi, or when Megan rewrites reality and shifts the location of the forcefield - so they can be trumped if we're going full reality manipulation. I'm not sure if they follow physics either with what they do, along with his forcefields and regeneration. I'm gonna lean towards on par with Steelheart invulnerability just because they both operate on belief rules.

 

Back to the orginal question, the battle of attrition is entirely dependent on Prof's mental state. That's the crux of the matter: does he get less afraid of Steelheart as nothing works but he can't get killed either, or does the collateral damage as Steelheart does everything he can to make Prof fear him tip him towards believing he failed? The more I look at it, I suspect that Prof couldn't or wouldn't have beaten Steelheart directly. Steelheart's abilities are much larger scale than Limelight, and he doesn't care about collateral damage - if anything it serves Steelheart to cause as much devastation as possible. For Prof who builds teams and has plans, directly engaging Steelheart risks Steelheart going on a rampage and upending whatever objective Prof is working towards. Add in that Prof's profile doesn't preclude him from pain, and getting a skull crushed repeatedly can't be good for the psyche. Short of psychological break through, Prof can't really do anything externally to activate Steelheart's weakness, but Steelheart can wreck stuff that Prof cares about. This actually looks to be in Steelheart's favor because his modus operandi naturally preys upon Prof's weakness, barring Prof as a Reckoner simply figuring out Steelheart.

 

Actually... this begs the question of if Prof would have died if David hadn't figured out the checkmate and the team including Tia got wiped out? He failed going toe-to-toe with Steelheart. Got his head crushed and David should have died. Actually... makes me wonder if this brush with failure when he did use the forcefield to contain the blast that killed Steelheart is why he didn't snap.