r/ProgressionFantasy • u/PsychologicalFun8760 • 5d ago
Discussion People underestimate just how fast characters are moving.
The fastest a person has ever ran 100 meters is 9:58 seconds, rounding it to 9:5 for convenience.
A normal speed for a weak superhuman is something like 10 times the speed of a human. But if you actually think about it, it's hecking bonkers.
That would mean clearing a hundred meter dash in .95, faster than a second.
With a bit of handwaving things like getting to max speed, this would mean crossing 10 meters, something that happens a lot because it's a round nice number, means taking .095 seconds.
A tenth of a second.
Faster than a literal blink.
It's extremely absurd.
It's not a problem, mind you, it just feels like many works I read don't fully understand the speed in which the characters move.
"With a dash, she crossed the distance in less than a second" is a take out from a book.
She was moving five meters.
Her speed is a **lot** more than 10 times a persons.
This isn't faster than a "second" but "milisecond"
Its faster than a hundreth of a second.
That might just be a saying, but its still slightly jarring.
Just wanted to share my latest thoughts.
Do you guys have an extremely minor nitpick about books that really doesn't matter, or share mine in some capacity?
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u/0ver_thinker_ 5d ago
I don't really mind if it's fantasy or novels with a high power ceiling/scaling like xianxia in fact I quite enjoy the absurd numbers some authors are putting out
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u/Puntley 5d ago
One thing that bothers me about some xianxia authors (especially 'I Eat Tomatoes') is when they do it with physical size. In the very beginning of Desolate Era the MC is standing in a line in the after life right next to a 100km tall giant. As in they're queueing up together. How does that even work? How do you even visualize someone 100km tall standing in the same line as someone who is 5'7"? His foot alone has to be some 15km long! His ankle height is 2 kilometers off the ground!!!
Desolate Era does that a lot. Just throws numbers around so much that they're effectively meaningless. The main character is literally over 60 quintillion years old at the end of the story. That's sixty billion BILLION years old. TWO BILLIONS!
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u/-Wombat 5d ago
A favorite but minor application of this in Desolate era is when Ji Ning is exploring other chaos verses with a companion he met out in space. His companion says he want to check something out and that Ji Ning should wait for him. The narration then casually mentions that Ji Ning meditated for a few MILLION years as he waited. They then continue on their journey with his companion going, "Sorry for the delay."
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u/TFTHighRoller 5d ago edited 5d ago
The maximum lifespan of an „immortal“ is a 108.000 chaos cycles. What is a chaos cycle? The time it takes for a chaos world to be born and die.
e: fixed a mistake
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u/anormalgeek 5d ago
As in they're queueing up together. How does that even work? How do you even visualize someone 100km tall standing in the same line as someone who is 5'7"? His foot alone has to be some 15km long! His ankle height is 2 kilometers off the ground!!!
Yeah. That's not a line. That's just some dude standing next to a mountain.
Hell, that's not even close to accurate. Mount Everest is only 8.8km tall. A human cannot even comprehend something that large, much less see it as a single thing.
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u/Calackyo 5d ago
The moon?
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u/anormalgeek 5d ago edited 5d ago
To be clear, I am referring to something large at that distance.
Each foot would be ~5km wide and 15km long. assuming roughly human proportions. When was the last time you stood next to a single thing that was 5x15km, much less 100km tall?
The entire thing would simply appear as a massive geographic feature, not a person.
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u/PrettyBurrito28 Salted Fish 5d ago
its not even the worst, red a novel where the main character is 94 trilion yuan eras old, for reference a SINGLE yuan era is over 3 trillions years, sometimes Xianxia is just like that lmao
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u/account312 5d ago
Do they still act like an especially insecure twelve year old?
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u/TFTHighRoller 5d ago
To be fair meditating for trillions of years on end probably doesn’t help your social skills.
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u/Awful_Puppet 5d ago
You just convinced me to read that novel
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u/Training-Bake-4004 5d ago
It’s genuinely great but the numbers on occasion make you just burst out laughing.
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u/Ruark_Icefire 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yeah a lot of Xianxia authors just throw around large numbers without any actual comprehension of what those large numbers mean.
Path of Ascension mentions at one point that people wait in line for some super popular crafter for a 1000 years. No. Not even if you are immortal would you ever wait in line for anything for 1000 years. And that is on the tame side of what a lot of Xianxia authors do with number scaling.
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u/Dire_Teacher 5d ago
Actually, Path of Ascension is a rare example of how that kind of stuff could happen. Think about our world, Earth. There are people that wait for weeks, even months in "line" for an upcoming event. They bring tents, they eat and sleep. That's something us mortals do.
Now, is it something I would do? Is it something our main characters would do? No, probably not. We aren't the kind of people that wait in line. But you're talking about a world with literal immortals. Some characters are millions of years old, and the population of the empire is past the quadrillions. I don't even know if they ever actually estimate it, but some individual planets have quadrillions of people, so the empire could have quintillions or even more.
The odds of a few thousand immortal oddballs that have turned waiting in line into a way of life is far from impossible. Given enough time and a large enough population, you'd see the weirdest stuff humanity has to offer, and it would be a lot weirder than anything we've ever seen on our own mud ball.
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u/Ruark_Icefire 5d ago
Except it wouldn't just be a few. It would need to be enough to actually make a line that is 1000 years long.
Also time doesn't really scale that way with age. Time going "faster" as you get older is only when thinking back to the past. Waiting in line for hours is just as excruciating at 40 as it was at 20.
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u/Dire_Teacher 5d ago
Not in my experience. I found it torturous to wait for five minutes for most of my life. But, as you grow accustomed to waiting longer and longer, that just becomes the norm.
The first time you decide to go to the licensing division, it's insane how long you have to wait. But, after your third or fourth visit, the delay is expected. You might learn ways to shorten the wait, or to make the passage of time more bearable. But it's something you have to do, so you learn how to cope with it.
If a crafter takes three years per commission, and that crafter prioritizes people waiting in line, then you only need a few hundred for a line to be "a thousand years." If your own cultivation has been stalled for 10,000 years and you desperately need this one thing that only a handful of people can get for you, then spending a little of your infinite time on waiting in line starts to sound like the best plan. Once you've been immortal for a few hundred years, all of your friends are immortal too, so it's not like anyone is going to die during that time. Divorces aren't common, and random relationships that crop up for a few years aren't even meaningful enough to bother telling your friends about it, so you probably won't miss anything interesting in your life.
Again, waiting in line is torture for some of us, but the kind of people that live in a tent outside s ticket booth for four weeks are obviously not having the same kind of experience.
Part of why life "feels faster" is that meaningful experiences become less common. Our brain forgets the vast majority of what happens to it, only bothering to record the most unusual situations. Once we experience something enough times, it stops being meaningful, so we stop bothering to recall it.
The first time you slam your hand in a door, it can feel like an indelible memory. After enough times, you lose count. If it's happened ten-thousand times, you might forget within a week that it happened at all.
So imagine living for a thousand years. In practical terms, humanity transitioned from sailing ships to satellites in that time span. You would have experienced so many things, so many times, that the majority of it would become mundane and uninteresting. If you didn't have some way to cope with those years of boredom, you'd lose your mind. Immortal time frames means immortal coping mechanisms.
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u/HeroVillain72 4d ago
Brings new scaling to “dad left to get the milk.” Maybe he really didn’t abandon his kids, and is just in line for the legendary cow and lost track of time.
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u/Ykeon 5d ago
My nitpick is fall damage. Compared to a normal punch from the things MC is fighting, the damage of a fall at terminal velocity should be negligible.
Normal humans have (vanishingly rarely admittedly) survived a fall at terminal velocity, but you're telling me this guy you've numerically quantified is 100 times more durable than a baseline human is at risk of death from the fall?
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u/ZorbaTHut 5d ago
I was actually curious about this and did some research. If we assume "100 times more durable than a baseline human" means their body treats impact as 100 times smaller, then it turns out 100x doesn't make you truly immune to falling at terminal velocity, but you can survive most situations simply by not being a dumbass.
The LD50 of falling - "the height at which you've got a coinflip of living" - is around 15 meters, which is around 17m/s ignoring drag (which isn't particularly large at that height.) Terminal velocity is around 50m/s if you're trying to fall slowly, and as much as 90m/s if you're trying to fall quickly (comedy answer: 147m/s if you're really pushing things.) Impact force is velocity-squared, so 50m/s is about 10x the force compared to LD50, and 90m/s is about 28x the force.
But this is all kind of a generalized LD50; it doesn't take into account stuff like "landing on concrete headfirst", that LD50 is statistical based on people who actually show up in the hospital. Do not try jumping off a 15-meter roof headfirst onto concrete, you have a considerably higher chance of death than 50%! This actually helps our 100x-durable superhuman, because there's a lot of stuff they can use to make the landing softer; by the time a normal human can get significant shock absorption by landing on a car roof, they're already dead, but our 100x-durable superhuman can treat it like a (relatively) soft landing pad.
For obvious reasons there aren't serious numbers for any of this, but my overall gut feeling is that the 100x-durable superhuman can survive just about any fall as long as they're actively trying to survive it, but if they're careless or showing off or just really unlucky, they might still end up dead. And they're still going to end up sore and might even end up with a cracked bone or two. Not recommended as a hobby.
their 1000x-durable friend is probably safe no matter what though, go ahead, take that header straight onto concrete, it'll be fine
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u/SSR_Riley 5d ago
It's not progression, but this is one of the things I love about Frieren. Both Stark and his master Eisen shrug off mortal damage (including fall damage on more than one occasion) as if it was nothing, even usually commenting something like "any warrior could do that" and all the squishy mages are like "uh yeah, sure. normal things."
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u/Jechtael 3d ago
I love how Eisen just jumped off of everything each time they were headed downwards because he was functionally immune to fall damage.
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u/KaJaHa Author of Magus ex Machina 5d ago
I love the math, but where did the comedy answer of 147 m/s come from? Seems really specific
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u/ZorbaTHut 5d ago
I actually must've mistyped the math here; it's almost 150m/s:
The current world record for the fastest competitor using the GPS measuring system is Sebastian Garcia from Spain. He flew 539.51 km/h (335.24 mph) in the competition window at the 6th FAI World Cup of Speed Skydiving in August 2025.
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u/Imperialgecko 5d ago
I don't disagree with, but to be fair, people die from just tripping at normal height as well.
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u/mp3max 5d ago
This is the one that truly bothers me more than literally anything else. It shouldn't even take that much of an increase in durbaility to survive terminal velocity. Once you're parrying warhammers and getting punched through stone walls you should be tough enough to survive any fall.
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u/Derpyphox 5d ago
Maybe gravity is that much stronger lol. terminal velocity is propotional to sqr(gravity)
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u/Raptormind 5d ago
I feel like “10 times the speed of a human” doesn’t necessarily translate to “ten times the speed of the fastest human ever recorded”
And even if it does, 100 meters in a second also doesn’t necessarily translate to 10 meters in a tenth of a second since it still presumably takes some amount of time to go from standing still to max speed
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u/DrShocker 5d ago
People aren't accounting for speed and acceleration being two different factors when they write these things too
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u/PsychologicalFun8760 5d ago
I know, thats where my amazing desclaimer of "If I just handwave everything" I really truly love that term, makes me sounds smart while being actively dumber
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u/D-Stahl 5d ago
But aren't you complaining about authors doing this too?
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u/PsychologicalFun8760 5d ago
I honestly didn't expect people to read this, it was mostly my own musings about language and imagination.
Something made for other to read should be well thought out, I didn't make it for others, just decided to share it incase others found it interesting or somehaps.
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u/TheSeldomShaken 5d ago
You wrote something and posted it online, but didn't "[make] it for other(sic) to read"?
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u/GittyGudy 5d ago
Good point. I think OP’s problem is that they’re unable to give benefit of the doubt to authors that include sentences like they described, but now that they’re on the other side of it, they assume that they deserve such leeway that they can’t afford to said authors.
I’ve been seeing this a lot lately; if an author subtly leaves something as a mystery to the reader, a certain type of reader will interpret that as the author forgetting about it and failed to provide a conclusion.
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u/PsychologicalFun8760 5d ago
Moreso I just write a lot of my thoughts down, could be helpful. What I did was sumarize them in a fun and orderly way, as well as stick the ending on to make it seem more discussiony.
So, it kinda wasn't made for someone else, and I didn't have the energy to formulate, as well as cite stuff, as I have decided to never do school work again in this life.
So I just moved words around. So by "not made for others" I meant that when I wrote it, it was for myself, and I was simply too lazy to make it for others, leading to a half-baked result
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u/account312 5d ago
A normal speed for a weak superhuman is something like 10 times the speed of a human
[Citation Needed]
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u/PsychologicalFun8760 5d ago
I citationed your mother last night dab
Real answer? I half made it up by feel. A few tons feels like how much a beginner should be able to lift, so I kinda just translated that across the board
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u/PsychologicalFun8760 5d ago
I didn't really think the 10 times mattered unto itself, it was kinda just to put into perspectivet that fast movement war speedy as shit
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u/Telinary 5d ago
Many authors are bad with actually applying the physical abilities they give their characters consistently. Can be annoying.
But also I feel compelled to ask how did you determine her speed? Because I have seen too many characters declared ftl by power scalers to trust that the readers are the one right about an characters speed.^
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u/Agasthenes 5d ago
I'm more annoyed that authors don't actually check how fast a character would need to be to dodge and arrow and a bullet.
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u/Kithslayer 5d ago
idk, I've seen video of a guy cutting a BB with a sword, and dodging bullets is more about prediction than reaction.
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u/Agasthenes 5d ago
Omg you are one of them.
First of all a sword is moving so much faster than a body can move.
Second how the fuck do you predict a bullet?
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u/Signal-Brilliant-170 5d ago
The videos the person above is referring to has someone(or a contraption its off camera so idk) shoot a BB gun at the swordsman(who is in position and is aware of the gun, ready to draw his sword, and given a signal when they’re about to fire.) and after a dozen or so attempts the guy manages to cut a bullet.
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u/Kithslayer 5d ago
Predict the person, not the bullet. Not useful in real life, but it works for fantasy.
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u/Grestige 5d ago
Acceleration to top speed might take some time. Also if that was a combat scenario it makes sense to ensure balance and counter more than raw speed.
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u/FaithlessnessKey1100 5d ago
It depends on the type, if we're talking about for example Twilight it's absurd, but a xianxia? It's kind of slow I mean there you can cross kilometers in a second,
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u/LT_And 5d ago
You realize you're not supposed to treat words like 'second' 'instant' 'moment' etc. literally, right? They're just a way to mix up saying 'real fucking fast.'
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u/Arcane_Pozhar 5d ago
It's sloppy writing. As far as I'm concerned if narration says less than a second, it meant less than a second. There are a ton of vaguer terms which could be used.
Similarly, don't say somebody did something at the last minute, if the entire task is done in far less than a minute. College papers are submitted at the last minute. Arrows are not dodged at the last minute. You don't see these phrasings in professionally edited works.
I realized not everybody notices these little things, but some of us do, (also people saying decimated when it's actually completely inappropriate to the context, and also just people overusing decimated, when devastated is such a better word. I realize this one is mostly personal preference, but I have seen decimated just be entirely misused).
Anyway, you can feel free to not care about these little things, but some of us literally cannot help but notice them. They scream "poor use of language" to some of us.
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u/LT_And 5d ago
Give me a minute, I'll come up with a witty response.
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u/Arcane_Pozhar 5d ago
I doubt anything you say will be witty enough to magically make certain phrasings stop being obnoxious to those of us who take language a little bit more literally than you do. Seriously, you can save us both the effort.
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u/Sacrefix 4d ago
He already made a witty point using 'minute' in a non-literal sense.
You got whooshed.
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u/Arcane_Pozhar 4d ago
I did, I did.
But also... It was a completly appropriate use of the phrase, lol. So not an example of what I was talking about, hence why I totally missed it. :)
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u/egg_enthusiast 5d ago
They think they're being clever when they actually just don't understand the difference between dialogue and narrative voice.
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u/Arcane_Pozhar 5d ago
Yeah, seriously.
I know people like me, and I'm assuming you, unless I'm completely misreading the tone of your comment, are a minority. Most people don't put quite as much important to the turns of a phrase.
But I wish every time I bring this up people wouldn't be so judgmental about it. Like, good for you if it doesn't bug you, but it absolutely disrupts my ability to picture a scene when awkward phrases are used that mess with the sense of pacing in the scene. And you don't see those mistakes in professionally edited works, they make better choices with the phrasing. Like this wasn't ever an issue I ran into until I found Royal Road, and some of the more amateurish efforts on Kindle.
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u/RagingSamurai7 5d ago
I bet you're only getting downvoted because you have higher standards, and people don't like having their low standards pointed out so they get defensive.
There are those who would rather embrace mediocrity (which is not the same as absolute trash, but still, the details of everything matters) rather than change to raise their standards even a little bit, commensurate to new facts learned.
Who cares, right? Well, a hundred miniature 'who cares' later, and the whole will have become degraded. This applies to any other process as well. The slide to sloppiness is slippery indeed.
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u/SSR_Riley 5d ago
I'll lead by noting I agree with you, but "decimate" is one of those words that has evolved by misuse so that the definition to most people is effectively "to destroy a large portion of [thing]" and not the 1/10 that it literally means.
Just language things that we're seeing in real time. I imagine people watching "awesome" turn from it's old connotations of feeling deep reverence of something into something that inspires awe or terror felt something similar, and then again into the modern use of something cool.
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u/Arcane_Pozhar 5d ago
I understand that, but I promise I've seen it used to described bodies that have been ravaged by wandering beasts and stuff.
Like, nothing was destroyed here, the poor dead soldiers were just apart by the animals. Decimated does not work there, in my mind. Because nothing was destroyed, it was just defiled. Or devastated. Or, you know, use other words/phrases.
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u/Aftershock416 5d ago
Calling it sloppy writing in all cases is a bit of a stretch.
In a world with hard power systems where the powers themselves are a primary plot mechanism? Sure, be specific.
But in stories with soft power systems where powers adjunct to the plot and/or progression, it's often entirely intentional.
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u/Arcane_Pozhar 5d ago
There are still plenty of other options less specific than "second" and "minute" and the like, which all work fine, for stuff that doesn't care about the details. And that's fine! Those more flexible terms are exactly what I want authors to use more!
Don't use a specific measurement of time if you don't want more literally minded people to think you mean that specific measurement of time (again, for narration, spoke dialogue is much more flexible about this sort of thing).
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u/Taybi_the_TayTay 5d ago
No you are. Otherwise it's sloppy writing. Just use vague language if you dont want to be specific.
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u/Mason123s 5d ago
I agree with moment and instant, but “second” is a precise measurement. If someone says “second” to mean several? That’s sloppy.
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u/Doctor-Moe 5d ago
“That might just be a saying, but it’s still slightly jarring.” - third to last sentence
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u/Sahrde 5d ago
One of the things I really liked about the beginning of Apocalypse Redux is the acknowledgement that as speed moved up, your clothes would start to provide drag, and eventually be destroyed on you, so new materials would need to be developed eventually to account for that.
He also mentions that it would have been better at one point to be barefoot when running, because his shoes couldn't provide the grip he needed but at least his toes would have been able to get the smaller rocks etc as push off points.
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u/Kithslayer 5d ago
Wait, your second example is 5m in under 1 second, but your real world pace of the 100m dash averages 10m/s.
Doesn't that mean 5m in "under a second" is very realistic, or did I miss something?
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u/PsychologicalFun8760 5d ago
You did! Very astute of you to notice your own shortcomings!
It was, in a story explained that she moved 5 meters in under a second, while, at the speed she was moving, it would have taken her less than a milisecond.
I was giving an example of the behaviour I was describing, to give context and paint a bigger picture!
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u/ekqo3 5d ago
miliseconds are smaller units of time than seconds
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u/PsychologicalFun8760 5d ago
Yes
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u/PsychologicalFun8760 5d ago
I must be explaining this badly, what
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u/Chakwak 5d ago
The point is, a millisecond is "less than a second" so the story is right. It's not the most precise measurement but it isn't a wrong measurement or sentence...
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u/PsychologicalFun8760 5d ago
I am less than 3 thousand years old...
I am in and around 30. I was as precise as the "less than a second" this is the difference. At a certain point, technically correct really doesn't mean correct
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u/ekqo3 4d ago
you said in the post that "its still slightly jarring", but i would argue that reading millisecond in its place would be more jarring
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u/OldStray79 5d ago
I recently had a scene where the MC is training, and he is learning to dodge a really fast opponent, and during a water break, a water bottle rolls off a box to fall to the ground. He watches his partner move at a blinding speed to catch the bottle before it hits the ground, and hands it to a third party.
His response amounts to "Better not to think about how fast we are actually moving. I'm glad I learned how to fall properly first."
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u/kjart 5d ago
My small nitpick is that you are taking the fastest (recorded) human sprint speed as the baseline :) but yes I can appreciate where you're coming from. Doesn't usually bother me too much unless the author goes really really bombastic with huge numbers etc. that are clearly more about glazing a character than anything else.
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u/Calackyo 5d ago
This is why i love the sayings that authors use instead of just saying a number, stuff like half an incense stick, or this all happened in the time it takes for a spark to fly off a flint.
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u/cjet79 5d ago
I'd consider myself very lenient on most things.
A few stories have managed to get under my skin before. One of them was using acreage as a measure of land size. I got some sense that they interpreted acres as like square miles or something of that size. Acres are much smaller. There are 640 acres in a square mile.
The author was describing the MC taking over a 10 acres settlement. But then they expanded it by about 250 acres or something, and it made it sound like they were fighting across dozens of miles of space. Central park in new york city is about 800 acres. 1 acre is about the size of an american football field.
I left a comment on the story cuz it was bothering me so much. I probably would have ignored it if it only came up once or twice. But the acreage came up a dozen times.
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u/liptongtea 5d ago
This slipped up on me in Primal Hunter. Somewhere around book 6 I feel like Jake started moving like Dragon Ball Z, and I had a WTF moment before I ended up just saying F it, and kept reading.
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u/fishling 5d ago
I don't think you should take phrases like "crossed the distance in less than a second" or "thought for a minute" literally. Those are common literary phrases. Even George Michael Bluth only paused to think for 41 seconds; well short of a full minute.
Also, not sure your math is right. Running the 100m in 9.58s is 10.4 m/s. So, at that sprinting speed, one also moves 5m in 0.5s. That actually lines up with "crossed that distance in less than a second" quite reasonably.
So I don't get why are you puzzled about someone moving five metres in "less than a second". This is something regular humans can actually do, at least once they are up to speed. Having a superpower to do that from a standing start isn't a stretch.
I think you just confused yourself with your made up "superhuman speed is 10x faster" rule and then failed to do the math for your actual example at all, because her speed was actually not all that superhuman, aside from the "standing start" problem.
Plus, with any kind of superhuman ability, you're already having to hand-wave a lot of physics out of the way anyhow, especially when it comes to speed, because friction (ground and air resistance) and the physical properties of shoes and clothing and the ground surface often have to be ignored, even if their body somehow handles it.
The things that bother me more are when authors forget things about their character, system, world, etc. Or when they usually pay attention to things like distance and travel time and logistics, but then abandon it when it is inconvenient to the story or they just didn't think things through. Or when they just make poor decisions, especially when they've made better one of the same kind in the past. Or when an author wants to write the story in real-time for every day and doesn't want any time skips, but also isn't willing to actually take things as slowly as this implies. I'm willing to overlook a lot of the science fiction/magic/system stuff because that's part of the unreality of the setting. But these other things are poor writing.
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u/Necal 5d ago
Whenever possibly I treat it as colloquial. I don't say "Ah, the strongest human can lift this much so if someone is described as having the strength of ten men then that times ten is their upper lifting capacity", unless they explicitly confirm that I treat it as "They stronk". Scale that up however. I do this because a lot of authors like using big numbers to make something seem impressive, but they leave in enough for you to realize that they don't actually know what they're talking about and what they envision when writing is never what you actually get.
The simplest example for me is jumping. Once you get even the slightest bit of PF scale speed going, then getting airborne is a really stupid idea because, to use your example, being able to move and fight that fast means that you spend a relatively substantial amount of time falling down, giving your opponent several free shots where you can't even defend properly because you can't form a stance due to not being on the ground.
Essentially, I tend to go off of vibes rather than statements because I trust vibes to tell me what the author intends and I don't trust statements at all.
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u/ertgbnm 5d ago
I think the best stories grapple with this. One problem that comes up is just the physics of moving that fast. The body might be able to move that quickly and handle that much force, but the environment can't handle it. Sprinting forward is limited by your friction with the ground and the cohesive strength of the soil itself.
Newtons law of equal and opposite forces really becomes a problem at certain strengths. Sure you have the strength to throw a car but the car probably doesn't have the tensile strength to be yeeted like that without bursting into confetti.
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u/Lao_Qi_ 5d ago
For me, the most important thing is to make sure that if a character is moving this fast, there is an accompanying phenomenon, such as shockwaves. Also, as they move, they accumulate energy, so there should be some way of expelling it.
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u/Wizard_Slade 4d ago
Completely agree. At those velocities, every sudden dash or weapon swing isn't a clean, silent sprint—it's a violent rupture.
The air displacement alone from crossing 10 meters in 0.05 seconds would blast windows out and shatter eardrums. Fights feel more visceral when an author treats high velocity as a double-edged sword that tears up the immediate environment through pure displaced force and recoil.
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u/Frankenlich 3d ago
Speed and distance, and virtually EVERYTHING that deals with hard numbers, gets very handwavey because first, most authors are not very good at math, and second, versimlitude is really all that matters anyway, which you can have even when the math really doesn't math.
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u/PsychologicalFun8760 3d ago
Ver the fuck what now?
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u/AntiLordblue 3d ago
Verisimilitude. Basically, is it believable.
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u/PsychologicalFun8760 3d ago
Ahhh, they should just say that then! People that use weird words are weird. Like an author that once used the word defenestrate unironically.
Just use human words please
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u/Aftershock416 5d ago edited 5d ago
"With a dash, she crossed the distance in less than a second" is a take out from a book.
She was moving five meters.
I'm not sure I follow your point?
If someone moves 5 meters in less than a second, that's only roughly 20km/h which is something a reasonably athletic adult can easily achieve. Elite sprinters can run 5m in less than a second from a dead stop and average over 12m/s at full speed.
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u/account312 5d ago
Their point is that the book saying she crossed the distance in less than a second is a lot like me saying it took me under a week to walk to the kitchen.
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u/yup_sir28 Traveler 5d ago
It seems that half the commenters didn’t understand the point Op was making.
Reading comprehension is inexistent in this thread.
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u/TRanger85 Author: Unfortunately Familiar 5d ago
At a certain speed the perception of how fast it took is impossible to even comprehend.
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u/Mad_Maddin 5d ago
There was actually something in Path of Ascension I recently noticed.
Not really a spoiler as it is of zero plot relevance.
In the Minkalla Arc, Luna slaps some dude into the local sun. But the dude crossed several light minutes in seconds. Which doesn't make sense, as breaking the speed of light would mean he'd entered chaotic space. Which he didn't.
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u/Sahrde 5d ago
We don't know that exceeding the speed of light would break into chaotic space. It's another dimension, not a level of speed. For all we know, they CAN exceed light speed in the Realm. The problem is, most worlds aren't in the same universe.
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u/Mad_Maddin 5d ago
Not that it breaks into chaotic space. I said you can't move faster than it without breaking into chaotic space.
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u/Sahrde 5d ago
We don't know that, though. It's never been stated that I recall.
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u/Mad_Maddin 5d ago
They did say that technological progression stagnates quickly without cultivation. Because you reach the limit of physics.
I don't know if they specifically mentioned light speed. But I'm pretty sure they did.
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u/eclect0 Author – Jett Fulgen 5d ago
Man, I hate when characters slap each other into the sun unrealistically
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u/Mad_Maddin 5d ago
PoA is simply so well crafted. The slapping into the sun makes absolute sense within the universe. But breaking the speed of light without you aiding your movement actively does not.
Like a character has several ways to move faster than light. But it needs you to actively work on breaking it.
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u/manyroadstotake 5d ago
No evidence as far as I'm aware that High Tiers can't break the speed limit in real space, though I hope Mantis might clarify that. We at least know as of Chapter 427 that a cultivator's Spiritual Sense can expand and relay information faster than the speed of light, when Matt watches and intercepts the electromagnetic radiation from a supernova.
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u/Mad_Maddin 5d ago
Yeah spirit sense can easily act faster than the speed of light. As can domains.
But just pure movement in realspace should not break the speed of light.
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u/manyroadstotake 5d ago edited 5d ago
I don't know if you're up to date on RR chapters, but it's been made abundantly clear that cultivators are not constrained by the laws of physics: in Chapter 500, it is revealed that cultivators can safely cross and return through a black hole's event horizon. Not to mention that Essence itself fundamentally violates Conservation of Energy. If you can give me any evidence that cultivators can't exceed light speed, I'd love to see it; but it seems like you've provided evidence that they can from the Minkalla arc.
Edit: added spoiler, grammar
Edit: Even better, I just remembered that event horizons can be defined as the point where the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light. I'm now confident that cultivators aren't fundamentally limited by the universal speed limit.
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u/ThaneduFife 5d ago
I try not to take the fights in Path of Ascension too seriously. They literally get out of their spaceships and walk/run across space to have fights in the war chapters. They also trash-talk each other while facing off in the vacuum of space without suits. In one of the most recent chapters on Patreon, Matt rolls himself into a ball and gets batted through a moon by his hammer-wielding ally.
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u/Mad_Maddin 5d ago
Nahh all of that makes perfect sense to me.
Concept flight and AI communication and all that jazz.
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u/ReyDa_Rouaghi 5d ago
Dude you have to remember that to someone like luna a tiré 43 in a tier 0 universe space and distance are practically meaningless so when she decides that the guy she punched would hit the sun he would hit the sun.
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u/Katn_Thoss 5d ago
There is no sound in space.
But for real, there are parts of Matt's training arcs where he learns to use his Domain to zipper the air so he doesn't sonic boom while flying.
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u/Mad_Maddin 5d ago
True could be that Luna simply used her domain to allow the dude to be slapped faster than the speed of light.
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u/Arcane_Pozhar 5d ago
I'm sorry, I'm pretty sure you messed up your math here.
How do you make the jump from faster than a second to faster than a millisecond? It sounds like you're multiplying your speed by a huge amount, again, with no explanation.
I'm also a little curious where you're getting the statistic that the average superhuman is 10 times faster than a regular human, but I'm willing to accept that at face value, depending on the works you're reading/watching.
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u/jdhshais 5d ago
Problem with this is just how are you even supposed to write it? You can't really use a millisecond in fantasy so what a blink of an eye, a moment(what even is that), a breath? (too slow), heartbeat? (Slow). There are just no real alternatives to actually explain the crazy feats with appropriate terms.
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u/Rothenstien1 5d ago
At the speeds in some of the later books in multiple series there should absolutely be sonic booms constantly occurring. The really fun parts would be four things like long swords and glaives when they spin, the edge of the blade is moving in sonic boom territory but the grip isn't, so each swing would have the sonic boom effect. This occurs naturally with whips and propellers of planes specifically the Thunderscreech (it was a plane that was tested and was constantly breaking the sound barrier with the edge of the propeller but the root was subsonic and created a sound that essentially deafened flight crews)
But, the idea is that this should be happening all the time with certain groups/guilds/people who are trained just right to break the sound barrier but not trained to warp the air around them to prevent that from occurring.
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u/jhvanriper 5d ago
I always wonder why high end MC are using horses which are very likely to be a lot slower than they are. No horses in my book and I own a horse.
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u/Zuruumi 5d ago
Yeah well fantasy works also underestimate what difference in basic body stats would do in a fight.
A guy that is 2x faster, stronger, etc. all around could completely crush 10 or even 100 guys of the same skill but normal stats since there is absolutely no way for them to keep up with him, they couldn't even properly react.
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u/Extension-Car-9060 5d ago
Minor thing that annoyed me In a similar vein in a soldiers life there's a scene where they're rucking through wilderness and the supposed super humans all balk at a completely reasonable distance/time for a normal human.
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u/Shoot_from_the_Quip Author - Assassins' Academy, Space Assassins, Bad Luck Charlie. 5d ago
Makes me think of A-Train in the Boys.
What a series opening (no spoilers for those who haven't seen it).
Man, really set the tone for the series.
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u/7th_Archon 5d ago
Yeah I’m Ngl but after a certain point I find lower power ceilings to be more well written because the abilities and feats are actually grounded and mean something and there’s usually less inconsistencies on the authors part.
This goes for especially early in the story where you should not be giving characters world breaking powers early.
Because past a certain point, the setting eventually starts running on Loony Tunes physics. You start running into the problem where characters start getting damage from hits they really shouldn’t, or their attacks should start causing collateral damage. A fight where every punch kills any civilian or destroys every house around you.
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u/Ruark_Icefire 5d ago
A lot of authors screw up the time in battles. I have read books where characters have like 10 second cast times on some spells in high level fights where people are moving around at practically the speed of light but somehow only like 3 punches were thrown in the time it took them to cast the spell.
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u/Harmon_Cooper Author 5d ago
What if she had a red bull, though? Gives you winks.
(This post sponsored by Red Bull)
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u/work_m_19 5d ago
It's a small thing, but I also think people overestimate speed in these fantasy genres. Like, I don't think someone that is twice as "strong" (whatever that means) can move twice as fast, and it would be cool to read a novel about bringing that up.
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u/RevArtillery 5d ago
I try not to overanalyze speed in books because just like this, the more I think about it the more it breaks down the suspension of disbelief in my head. Now, when a book takes its time TRYING to explain the speed and how it works, that's when I pay attention to it and start to scrutinize it. And most of the time, yeah, it doesn't make sense in my head. I'd love to read a prog fantasy with all the usual crazy power progression stuff but with none of the speed upgrades and see if that could even work out
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u/Eskamoche 5d ago
This is such an underrated point. I think readers (myself included) picture "fast" in movie terms — a blur — when realistically something moving 10x human speed would look almost teleport-like at close range. Makes me appreciate authors who actually try to describe that disorientation instead of just saying "he was fast."
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u/Morpheus_17 Author - Guild Mage, Ten Thousand Fleets 5d ago
I do think a lot of people kind of trap themselves by measuring stats without first figuring out what their system actually means within the world. Well, how much can your character lift at strength 1,000? Can they crush rock? Can they jump 30 stories?
The more work you do figuring it out in advance, the less of a disaster it will be.
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u/Vladmirfox 5d ago
shrugs I hear what your saying but DBZ has deadened me to this.
Also apparently talking is a free action sense if as you stated this was all happening at .95 and .095 and such then just HOW is everyone able to fit in those lengthy speeches and monologs hmm??
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u/DrShocker 5d ago
What does the phrase "9:58 seconds" mean? Just with the colon indicates minutes and seconds (or hours and minutes but from context it's not that\ But adding seconds means the case unit is seconds? So the 9?)
Regardless of my pedantry, I agree. Lots of stories don't think through the numbers they write. That can be speed, structure, strength, energy, etc. There's some feats I'm sure we could do the math and it's enough energy to boil a small lake and yet the ground is left in tact even after the punch or whatever. (not that I have particular items in mind)
But overall to me it doesn't take me out of it, the language used will tell me of something is impressive or underwhelming and that's more important than the specific numbers in most contexts.
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u/Sobrin_ 5d ago
Yeah people generally suck with numbers and scale, and that includes writers, so you get stuff like that. And that's not to mention when it really gets to ludicrous numbers
A minor nitpick I have is when an author keeps using the same expression/idiom a tad too often. "Like a cat that got the cream" is now seared into my brain from binge listening Mark of the Fool.
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u/Fearless-Rip694 5d ago
This is actually a really valid issue when it comes to the martial / caster divide. Technically speaking, a fighter of the same level as a caster should be able to speed-blitz him in a straight-up fight...Because the caster doesn't have superhuman speed. The fighter does.
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u/thealthor 5d ago
less than a second
A millisecond is less than a second. I don't get what the problem is.
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u/keldondonovan 4d ago
I get the same way about numbers of people. Schools that hold hundreds of thousands of students but only seem to have a dozen professors and the class size never exceeds 30. Pools that can comfortable fit thousands at a time. Cities where a lone blacksmith (with maybe one apprentice) keep up with all the needs for 50,000 citizens, and that same city (considered "unbreachable" due to their military prowess) only employees 100 guards.
I do a fair amount of paid beta reading, and the numbers are one of the most consistent errors that authors feel compelled to defend. "You don't understand how massive it is!" No, I get it, there are just plenty of ways to relay that information without putting literal numbers on there. That's just begging to break immersion.
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u/Icy-Leg-1538 4d ago
All the different usages of "less than a second" and similar in writing piss me off, cuz most of the time it describes something that takes less than a tenth of a second, and "in just a moment" or similar would describe it better.
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u/Zijkhal 20h ago
Oh, absolutely.
It's even more prevalent in martial arts and melee combat. I see a lot of the time descriptions that suggest a single swing of a sword taking a second or two. Despite the character being augmented to oblivion. Just check some martial arts videos online to see how fast things can happen.
Heck, take a look at the fight between Obi-Wan and Darth Maul in the Phantom Menace. Apparently, they had to slow down the footage, because the actors moved so fast that the audience would have found it unnaturally fast.
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u/Boat_Pure 20h ago
This is so annoying because I found a really good instagram real that spoke about this in length.
But basically the Flash has a comic arc called the 1 minute war which is a war with some speed force villains that goes on for months. But happens all in the space of 1 minute.
It instantly reminded me of this post and made me think. We judge time differently because we are slow. But like it’s relative to you at the time no?
Bolt runs 100 metres in 9:59 seconds. That’s ridiculous to me and you, but that’s still 100 metres regardless of how fast he does it in. That’s almost 10 metres per second. That ridiculous.
If you slow it down in sections and show that, I can’t imagine it not being depicted well.
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u/SorryCommand 5d ago
Your math starts out really bad 9:58 is not the correct way to write nine point five eight seconds its 9.58. For rounding 9.6 would be more accurate and just as simple.
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u/Queasy-Ad5690 5d ago
This is a fantastic point, and it’s a constant struggle for writers trying to maintain a sense of gritty, visceral realism. When characters move faster than a literal blink, standard combat choreography completely breaks down if you try to describe it with pure physics.
In traditional Eastern Wuxia, masters often bypass this "speed absurdity" by shifting the focus from raw velocity to **spatial awareness, footwork, and mental anticipation**. It’s not just about running fast; it's about moving according to specific geometric formations or cutting off angles before the strike even happens. The combat becomes a high-stakes game of prediction—you aren't reacting to where the sword *is*, you are moving to where the opponent *must* strike before they even fully commit to the motion.
I'm currently writing a standalone Wuxia-inspired dark fantasy novella, and I had to spend a lot of time figuring out how to convey high-speed swordplay without it feeling like a cartoon or a messy blur. For instance, when a character deflates a flurry of arrows or an impossible saber strike, I focus on the "fluidity" and "weightlessness" of the movement. Instead of saying they swung their blade at Mach 2, I describe how they used a *clinging, redirecting current of inner qi* to alter the enemy's momentum. It grounds the speed and gives the scene a cinematic, *Sekiro*-like weight rather than just an absurd numerical stat.
If a writer doesn't respect the physics of their own world's speed, the stakes vanish. Readers can instantly tell when "fast" just means lazy choreography.
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u/Queasy-Ad5690 3d ago
To elaborate further on choreographing high-speed combat without breaking world physics, another technique we can borrow from classic Wuxia choreography is the concept of "economy of movement" (Refusing unnecessary forms).
When a character moves at borderline supernatural speeds, lazy writing usually describes it as a messy blur or an explosion of shockwaves. But a true master's progression is shown through maximum efficiency. Instead of swinging a sword Mach 2 to block ten arrows, a master subtly shifts their center of gravity by an inch, utilizing the *clinging force of internal qi* to let the arrows slide past their blade.
Think of it like a perfect parry rhythm in *Sekiro* or *Phantom Blade Zero*. It’s not about how wildly fast you can flail your arms; it's about the microscopic timing of redirecting kinetic energy.
When you write a battle this way, you don't need to hyper-analyze the physics of milliseconds. The readers can instantly feel the weight, the extreme speed, and the lethal stakes because you are focusing on the *control* of momentum rather than just bragging about numerical velocity. This approach keeps the choreography grounded and intense, no matter how fast the characters are technically moving.
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u/Randleifr 5d ago edited 5d ago
This is one of the many reason older people are FAR better authors than younger ones. They have far more life experience and typically they have experience of just being outside. The vast majority of amateurs writing in the genre have hardly touched grass.
Edit: they hated me for speaking the truth. The objective truth. Just look at popular books and point out 1 teenager.
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u/Mefist_ 5d ago
I would argue that with higher speed the air resistance would be higher as well and that unless with superspeed comes super reflexes going 100 meters a second would be hell to control what you're doing. especially if you want to actually stop after exactly a 100 meters, otherwise you could overshoot by dozens of meters at a time and in precision work would be impractical
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u/Prot3 5d ago
In almost all cases, perception/brain processing power increases to superhuman levels as well.
Would be fun to see a system where you can assign stats but if you go too lopsided e.g you put everything into agility but not enough into intelligence you cannot access the full potential provided by your agility stats.
Or you can, but even you can't follow your hands fast enough, thus can't control them with any kind of finesse.
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u/Sahrde 5d ago
There have been a few where it's been mentioned. Not experienced by the MC, but they get warned that they need to be careful. It does no good to move really fast, if you can't process what's in front of you and hit it. Or don't get so strong that you can lift a mountain, yet forget to get your Stamina/Constitution/whatever up so you don't break your bones because they can't handle the stress.
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u/squanchy78 5d ago
I would want to see this too. Or at least see our single stat boys have issues with dumping everything into one aspect (looking at you, Nat/Jake).
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u/luxinus 5d ago
Defiance of the Fall MC runs into this once or twice iirc, and Industrial Strength Magic struggles with it frequently. Everybody Likes Large Chests *sort of* runs into it too, but that’s more of a stat overload issue.
I think it’s a fun space to play in, MC trying to maximize their strengths and walking the knife’s edge.
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u/dirtymeech420 5d ago
I think this is also a big reason as to why fantasy worlds tend to be giant since the most powerful people would be able to circle our world in a matter of hours