Bang's Blogs: Cassandra Cain vs X-23

 

“I have pushed virtue to outright brutality.” -Jean Racine

Cassandra Cain, the third Batgirl of DC Comics.

X-23, the all-new Wolverine of Marvel Comics.

There isn’t much room for disagreement when it comes to your birth and the circumstances surrounding it; and these two assassins were made specifically to be a weapon from the day they were born, pushed away from human interaction and emotion in order to fulfill the purposes of their creators, to fight and kill without mercy. However, kindness would eventually find them…they received a glimpse of tenderness, and found a way out, a chance to forego their old ways and help people, while also helping themselves.

Despite being on the hunt for murder and vengeance, they were stopped in their tracks and taken in by two of the greatest fighters on the planet, the Batman and Wolverine, joining a family of people like them, the Bat Family and the X-Men. And down the line they would then take up the mantles of those who came before them, as the Batgirl and the Wolverine. But just because they’re kinder now doesn’t mean their ways are lost, and only one of these ways will win them a DEATH BATTLE!

Before We Start…

Cassandra doesn’t have a Pre-Crisis history, and DC has seemed to solidify her history as being canon despite Post-Crisis and New 52 being vastly different from one another due to the acknowledgment of timelines merging both after Infinite Frontier and before with Superman’s history seemingly acknowledging a merge in history from Action Comics #976.

On the side of X-23, while Marvel’s continuity isn’t as convoluted as DCs, Laura’s history in of itself gets a little confusing a little down the line. As of right now, there are two Laura Kinney's co-existing. Why you may ask? Well, at one point, the sentient island known as Krakoa was made into the official mutant nation/home (this’ll be important later) and a little after this, Laura along with Darwin and Synch were sent on a mission into the Vault, a time capsule where time moves different by several hundred years, and where the Children of the Vault were raised. Laura spent centuries in there, trying to find a way out and along the way being captured by the Children, they broke out of force-field imprisonment, but unfortunately they managed to kill Synch, who telepathically made sure Charles Xavier would pass on all the Vault information to his resurrected form. Everyone assumed Laura had died fighting to buy time for the others to escape, so they resurrected her as well, with a new body and all her memories pre-Vault, but not the ones of her love with Synch within the Vault. Later, it was revealed that the original Laura had not died, but was captured and kept alive by the Children of the Vault. In this new body, Laura was given an adamantium skeleton due to a mistake made by Proteus. 

So what does this mean for Laura? The simple answer is that the clone…is Laura. The process in which Synch was brought back from dying in the Vault was described as being a resurrection, and we see Laura go through a similar type, with the only real difference being that she doesn’t remember falling in love with Synch in the Vault. You may be wondering, what about the old Laura? She’s still alive so why isn’t she the only one taken into account? The reason why is because the old Laura became somewhat separated from the new one due to the difference in Vault memories, and she later became known as Talon and decided to move in with Synch in New York City and forgo being the Wolverine, which at the time, was OG Laura’s status quo. It is hard to wrap around the fact that their existence is shared, but the clone became the new status quo for Laura Kinney/Wolverine for years to come, joining the new line of X-Men and getting tangled up in the Wolverine Family and various events such as the Sabertooth Army arc. Basically, she is Laura Kinney in a new body, with a select few memories removed, sharing an existence with another Laura Kinney that doesn’t want to be Wolverine anymore, so it is something that must be taken into consideration despite the circumstances being weird. Thus, the clone will be used for this fight. Oh and obviously we ain’t using Hell-Mark or Uni-Power.

Now onto the fight!

Background

Cassandra Cain

Cassandra Cain did not have a nice childhood. Born to the world famous ruthless martial artist, and a just as infamous assassin David Cain, she was raised by the latter to become a perfect weapon. Not the first of such experiments by Cain, but surely the only successful one, Cass went through program exercises Batman hasn't even dreamed of. Making a deal with Lady Shiva for their child to have perfect genetics, Cain proceeded to cut off Cassandra from any human language and speech, teaching her the only language she would ever need as a perfect killer - the language of violence. Cass perfected all of Cain’s lessons, and was thought by him to be a success… But when she went on her first mission, to kill a man named Faizul, the experience was extremely traumatic to her, as her body language skills that Cain deprived her of human speech to let her read Faizul’s expression and see his death through her own eyes as he was dying. Not being able to bear such guilt, Cassandra ran away and roamed the world for years, until during the No Man’s Land event in Gotham, where the city was cut off from the rest of the world, she worked as Barbara Gordon’s courier in exchange for speaking lessons. After seeing her father, David Cain, attempting to murder Commissioner Gordon, she stepped in and defeated Cain, shocking him with pronouncing her first spoken word - “stop”.
          

Shortly after this, seeing her skill and her sense of justice, she was taken into the Bat Family and quickly adopted the mantle of Batgirl, which briefly belonged to Helena Bertenneli at that time. She proved herself to be an unsurpassed fighter, easily sweeping through all kinds of criminals with her skill and her instincts, but it was very apparent what kind of a broken person she was. Cassandra obsessively devoted herself to her mission, refusing to lead any sort of a social life, all while being tormented by her inner demons, refusing to forgive herself for the murder she committed when she was seven. After saving a telepath from hired killers, the man “rewired” her brain, making her capable of comprehending human speech and even talking a little more, but as a tradeoff, she lost her body language skills. This caused her effectiveness in battle to drastically drop, but after she encountered the deadly assassin Lady Shiva, Shiva agreed to reteach her the skills she lost, but as a tradeoff, she would fight Shiva in a deathmatch exactly one year later. Cassandra would never kill again, so she agreed to the deal while fully intending to fight crime at her best for a year, and then just let Shiva kill her. Deep down, Cassandra was so broken and guilt-ridden that she developed a death wish. Once the day came, however, something unexpected happened. Shiva did fight and kill Cassandra, only to bring her back to life. As it turns out, she did know what Cass’s problem was, and Shiva’s solution, as crazy as it sounded, did work, as Cass was free of her death wish having actually experienced death. Finally free, Cass proceeded to defeat her mother (of their relation she was not aware at the time) in a rematch and officially become the greatest martial artist in the world

Afterwards, Cass became slightly more relaxed and sociable, trying to go out and make connections in the world, befriending Stephanie Brown and Tim Drake, and even trying herself out in the romance field with… Disappointing results. At the same time, (somewhat) repentant David Cain tried to reach out to her, as the pressure from both Bruce and Barbara increased. After the War Games incident, Stephanie Brown seemingly died and Barbara moved away, as Cass moved to Bludhaven to fight solo. After having her identity and heritage threatened by a new friend she made in Bludhaven, she set out to find her mother. Suspecting it to be Lady Shiva, she infiltrated the League of Assassins, where she was worshiped, and met Shiva once again. After several chaotic events, she faced and defeated Mad Dog, David Cain’s first semi-successful experiment, a boy who gained all the skills, but lost his mind as a result. She was killed during the fight, however, but was resurrected by Lady Shiva again. While dead, she found out that Bludhaven was destroyed, and all of her friends there are dead. Upon waking up, Shiva confirms that Cass is indeed her daughter, and they fight again, with Cass seemingly snapping Shiva’s neck and killing her, but hooking her above the Lazarus Pit so that Shiva can resurrect.

Cass quit being Batgirl for a while, and then a certain arc happened that totally didn’t shit on her legacy and the character assassinated her so hard it would make DCEU blush. She literally became evil because she found out David Cain had other kids he trained beside her, something she found out long ago in her solo. After that embarrassment of an arc ended, the main man Geoff Johns came up with a clumsy retcon that Deathstroke drugged her and made her evil through that, and she went through a redemption arc that still managed to have her extremely OoC. At the end, however, she defeated David Cain once more and got finally officially adopted by Bruce (or at least he said he’s going to, it was never brought up again after that issue). Cass was a part of the outsiders for a while, before giving up the mantle to Stephanie Brown after Bruce’s apparent death and leaving for Hong Kong, where she became the Black Bat. Finally, after so many years of suffering, and pain, and horrible writing, Cassandra Cain found peace…

…Well, and then there was flashpoint, where at first her backstory was completely overhauled, but after the infinite frontier restored most of post crisis, her retcons were essentially retconned out of existence, and it went back to her first origin. At the moment, she continues being Batgirl, mostly being really tight with Stephanie Brown and Barbara and a part of the Birds of Prey.

X-23

The Weapons Plus Project had been shut down, and from its wake came the Facility, another branched-off organization with the same intent of breeding and creating genetically altered weapons from human experimentation. One of the most successful projects to come from this was Weapon X’s Wolverine, successfully binding him with the highly durable metal of Adamantium. Hoping to recreate such a great success, the Facility used Logan’s DNA, hoping to create their own private assassin. Unsuccessfully cloning Wolverine 22 times, geneticist Sarah Kinney was put to the task to create a female subject as a result of damaged Y chromosomes in the genetic pool. What she didn’t realize however is the protege to Dr. Martin Sutter (the director of the project), Dr. Zander Rice had a revenge scheme due to his father being killed by a bloodlusted escapee Wolverine when he escaped the Weapon X Facility, forcing Dr. Kinney to be the surrogate mother of the next clone, contradicting her superiors and giving birth to the next specimen, X-23. 

Despite her best efforts Dr. Kinney could not instill the semblance of humanity in the child as she had hoped, for the purpose of X-23 was to be made into a weapon, and for years she would be subject to experimentations such as radiation poisoning, forcible claw extraction, and then some. All to make sure she was prepared to fulfill her purpose, which involved some…heavy cut-outs of her life, such as killing her best friend or sensei, the only people ever nice to her via being exposed to something called a trigger scent, which caused X-23 to not know friend or foe, and kill anything in her path. It was only at 11 years old that she went on her first mission, to kill presidential candidate Greg Johnson, an advertising ploy to sell X-23 to the highest bidder, and her missions from there would take her all across the world at a young age, eliminating anyone in the path of the Facility. Eventually, X-23’s usage was usurped by Dr. Rice, who revealed to her that she was merely one of many female clones, and a chamber of dozens of incubation pods were exposed before X-23 was fired. But in the shadows, Dr. Kinney gave X-23 one last special mission; destroy the pods and kill Dr. Rice. Prepared for this, Dr. Rice exposed X-23 to the trigger scent once again, and Dr. Kinney was unfortunately killed by X-23. Knowing it wasn’t her fault, Dr. Kinney tells her that she loves her, and gives her the name Laura. 

Having escaped captivity, Laura assumed safety in San Francisco with her cousin Megan and her aunt Debbie, but it turned out the latter’s boyfriend was an agent of the Facility and Laura had to once again go on the run and make sure her relatives left safely, and said she would not see them ever again. Laura now realized she wasn’t safe no matter where she went, and she realized the only solution was to confront the problem herself rather than run from it. She needed to find the man who made her entire existence possible. Laura needed to find…the Wolverine. 

Tracking him down at the mansion of Charles Xavier, Laura wasted no time fighting the Wolverine, trying to kill him upfront and even kill herself after so there could be no more creations like her. Logan of course didn’t want this, having received a letter from her mother about the ordeal, and Laura was quickly arrested and taken into S.H.I.E.L.D., where Captain America and Daredevil interrogated her and her actions. Despite her murders, Matt realized the innocence in Laura due to her circumstances growing up, and Laura was sent on a bus in New York City, with the letter her mother wrote for her to read. This would not be the last time she would cross paths with the X-Men however, as an act of kindness in saving the daughter of a mob boss she had killed caught the attention of the X-Men once more, and when she would return to aid the victims of a car accident, she was enrolled in the X-Men’s Xavier Institute, where she would learn to control and utilize her powers in a place she would be accepted for who she was. 

Experience & Skill

Cassandra Cain

Cassandra is one of the most skilled combatants in DC Comics history, and by far the most powerful attribute of Cassandra Cain. Raised as David Cain’s perfect weapon, with barely any human interaction and no sort of speaking at all, she is a natural killing machine. Despite her refusal to kill she still remains to be the most feared fighter on the planet, being a master of all forms of armed and unarmed combat, being a teacher and combat instructor to various members of the Bat Family and even the Teen Titans.

Cass had extremely rigorous training, which included being shot continuously to gain an immunity to pain, achieving superhuman feats at an extremely young age, and so on. Even as a child, she was capable of taking out world class fighters such as David Cain and Bronze Tiger. She utterly mastered every weapon and every fighting style known to man, such as kung fu, boxing, muay thai, etc., as well as being taught stealth, assassination and many other things. By far her most powerful weapon, however, is her ability to read body language, the weapon that Cain deprived Cass of human language for her to learn. This ability makes Cass capable of predicting anyone’s movements in advance, sensing intention and basically reading thoughts. 

As she grew older, Cass’s skills only increased. Instantly taken into the Bat Family due to her skills and her sense of justice, she has proven herself to such a level that Batman admitted he would lose to her in a fair fight on several occasions and she was stated to be better than him. Batman considers her to be “perfect” as a vigilante, not just due to her skill but also due to her mercy and self limitation on even the lowliest of criminals. Cass proved herself even further when she became the first person in the world to defeat Lady Shiva in a 1v1 fair fight, something that not even Batman had done at the time, and this led to Cass being worshiped by the League of Assassins, being referred to as “The One Who Is All”. She has proven herself superior to the likes of Connor Hawke, Black Canary, Spoiler, Tim Drake and even Deathstroke. Her abilities were claimed by numerous sources to be “unsurpassed” and to contain “no upper limits”. She has taken on hundreds of league of assassin members at the time, who were stated to be the most dangerous fighters on the planet and that Batman himself could only beat one, at most a handful at a time. Cass has defeated Shiva on several other occasions and has even defeated many super powered opponents, despite technically having none of her own. She has kicked around Dick Grayson while only testing him, and took out six colony soldiers, all of whom had training that mimicked Batman’s.

Last but not least, Cass’s learning abilities are similarly unmatched. Seemingly, being raised in such brutal conditions led to her learning instincts being as sharpened as they can be. She has learnt stick fighting on Barbara’s level (ever since she was paralyzed, escrima sticks became her main fighting style) in five minutes, regained her lost body reading abilities in a single night, and copied Shadow Thief’s Koga Ryu techniques just by observing him. What kind of techniques are those? Well, they let her hit Shadow Thief despite his intangibility. Yep, that’s right. She learnt how to punch a bloody shadow through sheer skill. Fuckin’ comic books. And when it comes to learning and general knowledge, initially Cassandra had a rough start, but overtime has shown that she is capable of proper speech, reading, and writing through ESL courses and tutoring. Barbara Gordon considers Cass to be highly intelligent, and in true bat-fashion, Cassandra has shown she is incredibly observant when it comes to detective work, partially due to training from Tim Drake. She was able to deduce that Bruce Wayne was Batman, and has figured out details in murder cases that the likes of Tim Drake, Batgirl, and Nightwing weren’t able to notice. 

X-23

Raised as a weapon rather than a person since birth, Laura has been trained to kill targets with complete and total efficiency. She has mastered several martial arts, stealth, firearms, and several other skills that can help eliminate targets; earning praise as one of the finest assassins on the entire planet to levels unseen by man. Laura’s knowledge in killing is so precise, that she knows that the human body has six quarts of blood, twenty seven ways to kill a person without leaving a trace, and that when making poisons it is best to use chemicals that are already found in the human body. Her records also show that she has applied what she knows, as one report file noted that Laura had killed 27 people with stabs and cuts to the jugular, brainstem, or aorta with extreme precision, and she knows how to skin a person alive like an onion, or fight precisely enough without using lethal force. Her assassination record started off with a perfect score as well, for three years in a row completing her missions faster than the time allowed her too. Her brain automatically starts thinking about the most efficient method to kill everyone in a room.

When Laura was eleven she was considered an equal to Logan when he was with Weapon X, and had even finished trials faster than he could by three minutes and twenty four seconds. This is backed up in their first encounter where even though Logan is holding back he is still completely overwhelmed by Laura. On the New Mutants she was the most skilled on the team (Nimrod considering her the biggest threat), and in a training session was only hit after interference by Emma Frost. When she joined Avengers Academy, seasoned vet Tigra noted that Laura didn't need any lessons in combat as they had nothing to teach her. In the Danger Room, Laura was capable of fighting at the level of ‘Ragnarok’, implying she is fighting at the most difficult level. Thus, Laura has immense experience fighting foes in overwhelming numbers, and in some cases even more powerful than her, such as the combined efforts of Nightcrawler and Ka-Zar, an entire rooms worth of Alchemax gunmen, a horde of Mister Sinister clones, the Purifiers, and even three of her own clones equipped with Venom symbiotes. And with being the new Wolverine, it's no secret she has crossed paths with some of his most experienced foes, like his son Daken (Daken has even admitted Laura’s skill is ‘superb’), and his ol’ pal Sabertooth. Excellent fighters such as the Black Widow have even taken note of Laura’s immense skill. She’s even faced down against Lady Deathstrike when Wolverine couldn’t, enduring a beating but taking note of Deathstrike’s movement in order to know how to weaken her, using her foot claw to cripple her cybernetic right arm, causing bleeding faster then she could heal, stabbing her in the chest to end the fight. Even when fighting far more skilled opponents like Taskmaster, she employs tactics in order to help her get on top, counting on the fact that Taskmaster didn’t know about Laura’s foot claw, using it to incapacitate him. She’s used tactics like this in fights against superior opponents more than once, like when she tricked Captain America into believing she is an injured civilian in the aftermath of one of her killing sprees, or triggering an avalanche to stop an opponent whose skin she cannot cut. During the clone’s fight with diamond form Emma Frost, Laura was able to slice her femoral artery, which will bleed Emma out if she doesn’t stay in her diamond form. On the fly, she comes up with a plan to crash a parade float into the mouth of a leviathon, using Bobby to make a pathing into his mouth while Gambit ignited the parade float with kinetic energy application to make it explode

Laura has also shown a high amount of weapon proficiency, whether by the blade or with long-ranged guns, even if she isn’t particularly skilled with a certain weapon she has shown she can make use of them. She was only 13 when she learned to use a rifle to headshot a helicopter pilot, and could headshot three men with just a pistol. She’s made use of swords in weirder ways, such as throwing one to catch a ninja by his bandana, pinning him to a wall. She was able to casually throw Captain America’s shield around when just picking it up, and performed techniques with Gambit’s bo-staff that impressed him.

Though Laura is nearly perfect when it comes to assassination and direct combat, she was raised to follow orders and be used, anything that isn't directly related to being a killing machine Laura is a little behind on, such as communication and long term planning, over time though she has become more well rounded thanks to her friends and experiences on the X-Men. She has a photographic memory, being able to recite a scolding from her principal right back to him word for word, and shows general knowledge in forensics beyond killing, learned how to make fake IDs, and knows torture techniques. 

Equipment

Cassandra Cain

Batgirl Suit

Cassandra has worn a surprising amount of suits, some of which were home made, but her batgirl suit is the most consistent one. It has no bullet proofing, but is very lightweight and easy to move around in, and most of all, it’s really creepy, fit for a bat vigilante. It also has a camera, communicators, tracking devices, and is insulated to protect her from cold temperatures, even when she’s encased in ice. She has a utility belt just like Batman, but we don’t know if she has nearly as many weapons as the caped crusader carries, except for batarangs and smoked capsules. 

Orphan Armor

Durable body armor used during her run as Orphan, comes with a hood to conceal her identity, the wrist armor is able to block katana strikes.

Spirit World Suit

Clothes made of paper manifested for Cassandra when she was dragged into the Spirit World. Seemingly possess the ability to “dampen her living aura” for other spirits to not notice that she’s still alive

Grappling Hook

Traditional vigilante equipment, a strong cable that latches onto surfaces to winch Cassandra up, is used for a mobility advantage and to reach places such as tall buildings, allowing her to swing around, or catch enemies out of reach.

Smoke Capsules

Cassandra uses smoke capsules, which can be thrown on a surface to create a cloud of smoke, either for a concealed attack or to make a getaway. Commonly uses it against physically superior opponents in order to blind them. 

Batarangs

The signature batman throwing boomerangs. Due to her superb fighting skills, Cass rarely relies on them in combat, but can resort to it if the situation calls for it.  She most commonly uses them to disarm a target, throwing them with great accuracy.

Explosives
       

Despite not being her first option, Cassandra carries handheld explosives. She has simple explosive pellets, booby traps and grenades. 

Lighter

Carries with her a small lighter that can spread fire quickly, and extinguishers to put out the fire.

Bladed Weapons

Again, not her preferred way of fighting, but Cassandra is very handy with a sword. As Kasumi, she uses a pair of katanas and possesses a wide variety of bladed weapons. On top of that, she used swords as Black Bat (no, she didn’t kill Tim here, unfortunately), fought Ravager with her own sword and was shown to possess red sunlight energy katanas during her evil phase.

Smelling Salts

Can make people come to their senses with a smelling salt, often used to snap people out of being under the influence of drugs or toxins.

  Batcycle

Cassandra’s main method of transportation, to make her way around Gotham City.

Dimensiometer

By far Cassandra’s most powerful weapon, the one she used for her The Nothing identity she assumed during her time in the Justice League Elite. This belt used to belong to the Hawkman’s enemy Shadow Thief, but since he got legitimate superpowers of his own, he abandoned the belt. Cass just somehow had it in her possession when she was Kasumi. While Booster Gold briefly took the belt during Infinite Crisis, all the items he used were seemingly returned, so as far as we know, Cass still has it. What does it do? Well, it turns her into a living shadow, totally intangible but still capable of interacting with things and attacking people as normal. She has used it to literally drag people into the shadows, and considering she was shown to be used as a portal in this state, she is likely just teleporting them, and seemingly able to teleport through shadows herself. But that’s not all. Towards the end of the book, she used it to transport herself and Coldcast into the Shadowlands, and used it to get back after Coldcast recharged it. The belt’s only downsides are having a limited charge and the fact that her intangibility doesn’t work in mid air.

X-23

Wolverine Suit

Originally, Laura dawned the classic yellow and blue Wolverine suit, used almost as a trademark for anyone taking up the mantle, with a different cowl palette and an “X” symbol on her belt. Eventually however, Laura gained an upgraded version of the suit now colored black and gray, after her execution of Kimura, but still retaining the “X” inspired from her time in the X-Force. The suit now makes it so Laura is bulletproof, and she now has thermal lenses that can see heat signatures through buildings.

Adamantium Claws

A trademark of any good Wolverine, Laura not only inherited her fathers abilities of healing, enhanced senses and claws but was forced to undergo the same Adamantium infusion as him. Due to her being so young and activating her X-Gene early even to most mutants, she was not given the full treatment and only had her claws replaced with Adamantium not her full skeleton. Laura is a master of nearly every weapon but she is most comfortable using her claws. Adamantium should speak for itself, one of the strongest materials in the marvel universe, and equally deadly when sharpened. Slicing through skin, bone and armor like butter, these blades let Laura hack and slash through people with nearly no resistance. The cutting power of these claws can not be overstated, Laura and her father have been able to pierce and damage characters like the Hulk and Thor who need no elaboration of their power, While she is nowhere near that level of power herself, in conjunction with her skills even cosmic entities like The Collector, Drax the Destroyer, the Wendigo, and the Hulk (or a mix of both) should think twice before being on the receiving end of the claws. 

Foot Claws

One divergent mutation from her father Laura has is her foot claws, on each hand she has a pair of claws unlike his original three, instead she got a blade in each foot. Laced with Adamantium like her hand claws Laura prefers to keep these retracted until the moment reveals itself to make use of it, relying on the opponent not even thinking about the idea that she has one. She’s precise enough to slice through someone's hamstrings with it. They’ve been able to shed the blood of some powerful enemies, such as Sabertooth, Nimrod, the Sentinels or even World War Hulk.

Adamantium Skeleton

After being resurrected on Krakoa, Laura gained an adamantium skeleton, much like all the Wolverines before her, and as such would have all the strengths and limitations that come with having such durable innards. Her skeleton is now virtually indestructible, without inhibiting the biological processes of a bone, and being molecularly bonded makes it hard to rip her apart. 

Murasma Armor/Shield

Created by the demon Murasma, this armor was made to defend Laura against the fragments of the Murasma Blade, forged by portions of the souls of Laura, Wolverine, Daken, and Gabby Kinney. It was able to withstand murasma bullets meant to kill those with a healing factor. 

Gas Mask

Has access to a gas mask meant to resist the effects of various smells from poisons, drugs, and toxins. 

Abilities

Cassandra Cain

Body Reading

By far, Cassandra’s most dangerous and powerful ability is her body language reading. David Cain got the idea from professor Lewis Friedman’s theory of body language as a way of communication, and determined that it would make an unbeatable fighter, as this fighter would see any of their opponents’ moves in advance and be able to react. According to Friedman’s theory, any sort of movement is preceded by thousands of subtle signs in the body, and this would allow the wielder of the ability to even see what the other person is thinking based on their body. Cass has showcased the ability to not only view weak points thanks to it, but also read intentions, see if people are lying and know what they’re going to do right as they’re thinking of doing it. Due to this ability, she is considered to be basically untouchable even by people of stats and skill to her, like Deathstroke. Also, she has repeatedly shown to be capable of borderline thought reading using this ability. She noticed that a man is suicidal just by looking at him, her and Shiva had a full, coherent conversation in the middle of their fight by reading each other’s bodies, she could see that Superboy is horny for her based on his body language, could borderline see other’s feelings and the exact phrases they’re thinking, and so on. It has even worked on aliens and people much faster than Cass is.  It’s pretty much precognition combined with mind reading, with the mind reading not even being able to be resisted by any sort of mental defenses because it’s not really telepathy she’s using.

Nerve Strikes/Pressure Points

One of Cass’s most consistently useful techniques are her pressure point attacks. She has used them to temporarily paralyze Oracle, she was stated to have moves that can disable people, disabled a man’s hand with a nerve attack, to the point where after a year of physical therapy he still can’t pull a trigger with it, she could stop a thug’s heart from beating before restoring it back on, defeated a monster strong enough to toy with Superboy by attacking its insides, put a metahuman to sleep, is one of the only three people in the world to know the Falling Leaf nerve strike, a secret very effective technique that knocks people out known to her, Batman and David Cain. She has also one shot Gemini using a pressure strike, with Gemini being invulnerable to most blunt attacks due to her rubber like body. Oh yeah, she managed to somehow bypass Superboy’s telekinetic force field by tapping him on the face. Hello?

Stealth

Completely unsurprising for a Batman character, but Cassandra’s stealth is similarly impressive. She can pull the Batman disappearing trick on too many occasions to count, broke into a government complex evading 32 security cameras, evaded Renee Montoya and other detectives, casually being in a crowded closed space and not being noticed, acted like a ballerina’s shadow, all while remaining undetected and even stealthed around Wonder Woman. Most impressively perhaps, is that Failsafe, an android created to neutralize Batman, captured 70% of the Bat Family except for Cassandra Cain, showing her stealth allows her to stay out of sight where it counts. On top of that, her stealth should be definitely comparable to the stealth of all other Bat Family members, many of whom, like Batman and Azrael, could get around Superman’s super senses.

Enhanced Senses

Cassandra’s senses are similarly supernatural, likely trained and forged in her training with David Cain. She has shown incredible talent in her heightened spatial awareness, defeating an invisible foe (she couldn’t use her body language on for obvious reasons) using her sense of smell, she picked up the smell of a corpse over the gasoline and the river, she is capable of smelling cyanide and managed to detect a random shapeshifter by her senses alone.

                                                           Pain Tolerance/Endurance                                             

Obviously, David Cain didn’t just teach Cass to dodge bullets, he trained her to shrug them off. She revealed to Tim Drake that Cain played two-for-flinching with her with bullets. Damn, she seriously needs a hug. Similarly, as the section image shows, she once took half a dozen sniper rounds, not attempting to dodge to protect a random goon from friendly fire. On top of that, she has consistently survived heavy beatings from metahuman opponents, shrugged off being rammed by a police car while already having broken ribs, and defeated Mad Dog, essentially her prototype after being stabbed through the heart. On top of that, after receiving an inspirational speech from the ghost of Stephanie (at the time Steph was considered actually dead, but was retconned to be in hiding, so it was essentially just a hallucination) she came back from being essentially beaten to death by the brotherhood of evil.  Her endurance is similarly impressive.  She studied martial arts from a hologram of Batman for a day or two without eating or sleeping, smashed stone mannequins for ten hours straight and fought the League of Assassins after days of no sleep at all. This applies to the amount of effort she exports as well, like defeating hundreds of league of assassin ninjas and still having enough in her to fight and beat Shiva.

Acrobatics

Being a bat and considering her training, Cass is an acrobat unlike any other, using it both in and outside of combat. It was also used to confuse her opponents, outspeed and catch up to people (even people as agile as Catwoman) or even as an attack by itself. Cass is a very good dancer as well.

Non-Physical Interaction

     
As mentioned above, she just copied Shadow Thief’s fighting style by observing him. Which made her capable of punching a bloody shadow. Could also harm spirits

Resistances

• Mind Manipulation: Broke out of a mind controlling machine that made her want to kill.

• Cold Temperatures: Her batsuit protects her from lethal hypothermia

• Poison Manipulation: Survived and quickly recovered from enough poison to kill someone twice her size

• Limited Sleep/Paralyzation Manipulation: Briefly keeps fighting off a paralyzing knock out gas after Tim Drake has long passed out

• Reality/Mind/Memory/Fate Manipulation: Resists the Reality Engine erasing the memory of Batman from all citizens of Gotham. The Reality Engine is an ancient device that works by keeping Gotham in an eternal cycle of the same events happening to it.

• Fire Manipulation: Her suit seemingly protects her from Nora Fries throwing magma at her

• Electricity Manipulation: Tanked Joker’s electric buzzer

• Corruption: Resisted the Spirit World corrupting her due to the love of her friends in the physical world

• Soul Manipulation: Resisted her soul being absorbed

X-23

Regenerative Healing Factor

Due to her being a clone of Wolverine, Laura similarly has the ability of an accelerated healing factor that allows her to heal from wounds at a far faster rate than any normal human, and from injuries that most people would die from on the spot such as bullet wounds, tissue damage, scars and slashes, or any sort of loss of blood no matter how severe, and within minutes or seconds (depending on the severity), she can heal from such injuries. As she grew older and stronger, her healing factor became that of her predecessor, being able to reattach limbs or even grow them back. Though her healing depends on her mental state and how or where she takes punishment, her regeneration has been compared to Wolverine’s in terms of how strong it is, with numerous feats backing her such as:

Original:

• Tanked a blast that reduced her arm and part of her leg/face to bone and healed in moments (shown above).

• Heals up from being shot by 3-4 gunmen at once

• Calls Wolverine’s healing factor is slow compared to hers

• Claims that ripping off her head would be enough to kill her due to the lack of an adamantium skeleton, however this probably isn’t the case now that she has one in her clone body

• (Gwen Stacy in her body) Falls out of a window and onto a car and immediately feels her bones mending and ligaments reattaching

• Accidentally stabs herself in the face with her claws and goes unconscious, and her brain knit itself together during Red Hornet’s monologue

• Casually snaps her arm and leg back into place and her skiing injuries heal up with ease

• Unphased by an alligator biting her arm off and casually reattaches it 

• Was able to come back to life from her beating from the Blob (For reference, the Blob had beaten her down to the ground, stomping on her back and hitting her repeatedly)

• Regenerated from electricity dissipating in her body 

• Implies she’s been eaten by a monster in the past and likely regenerated from the encounter

• Reattaches a severed hand to her body

• Recovers from getting shot in the head, though she went unconscious but her brain began repairing itself

• Snaps her shoulder back into place

• Gets shot by Alchemax gunmen, is said that she was shot about 25 times and still healed

• Unphased by an alligator biting her arm off and casually reattaches it 

• Fixes her leg after it was run over by a train

• Gabby, a clone of her got blasted so bad her intestines started falling out, so she just shoved them back in

• Heals having her throat stabbed

• Implied she was able to heal from being shot by a bazooka

• Got her neck snapped but was able to recover from it in the next comic

• Healed her fractured ankles in moments

• Despite being shot in the head, continued to attack her captors

• Implies she has healed from “almost nothing”, and claims she doesn’t want to be that close to death again

Clone:

• Due to having an adamantium skeleton, her body begins to regenerate from being halfway skeletonized.

• Has her lower jaw ripped off by Savage, but it regenerated back two issues later

• Half her body gets melted by D.K., who can decay things with a touch, and heals it all back a few panels later

• Has her finger bitten off and it instantly regenerates

• Loses an arm but keeps fighting, and it comes back two comic issues later

Enhanced Senses

Laura’s senses are acutely heightened in a comparable way to animals, primarily used for tracking an enemy down or discerning what they are, or being able to detect danger afoot or approaching. Her vision allows her to see at much greater distances than a normal human, being able to see a Nano-Sentinel, an artificial sickness found in cells, and she identifies a sniper on the 10th floor of a building. Her hearing and awareness are also incredibly versatile, being able to detect an invisible opponent to kill them, or being able to detect a person’s presence via their heartbeat, the sound of fighting from far away, or another person behind a door. But most impressively, Laura has a scent so powerful, seldom has she failed to track down an opponent. In a similar manner of a canine, sniffing a childs hat gives them all the information they need to track her down. She tracked the scent of a shooter on the Eiffel Tower and evaded a point-blank gunshot, a scent from inside a building to an underground bunker. She can pick up the scent of incoming obstacles, such as people or an approaching meteorite. Her scent can pick up environmental factors that give her clues on things such as fresh dirt, water, decomposition, and blood, and can even detect types of poison from drugs. Her scent can also detect a change in emotions in an opponent, or reconstruct the events of activities occurring in a location through scent alone. She was able to identify the damage on Hazmat’s body from a distance with her senses, formulates a plan to kill her immediately. She was able to pick up murder and betrayal from Jay, suspecting he would betray the X-Men.

Pain Tolerance

Due to her nature as a Wolverine, Laura has shown enhanced stamina and pain tolerance that allows her to fight through injuries and attacks that would kill a human under any normal circumstances. She can slice humans apart despite being covered in bullet holes, fight on fire, fight while impaled, fight without limbs, and still retain speech despite having half her body burnt to a crisp. She does not fatigue when fighting, being trained as an assassin to fight with peak performance well beyond what the normal human body is capable of, Laura has almost become immune to pain altogether.  

 

Longevity

Due to her healing factor, Laura will also have an extended lifespan that will slow down her aging process, as shown during her mission into the Vault, where she retained her youth there for what seemed like 200 years, possibly half a millennium. 

Acrobatics

Laura is an Olympic level athlete, capable of complex maneuvers and acrobatics that allow her to perform tremendous agile and acrobatic feats, such as jumping from car to car, using a fire truck to jump onto the side of a building, acrobatically jumping onto a Sentinel by using someone as a stepping stool, or jumping from car to car to disable the steering wheel and jump out before it crashes. 

Stealth

Due to her knowledge in top-secret operative missions, Laura has experience in infiltration and stealth, often being able to sneak up on enemies and pop her claws without being detected, or escape enemies without finding a trace of her. She was able to surprise Wolverine with her stealth, and get the drop on Alchemax agents by disappearing into an alleyway then dropping on them from above, and got the drop on Camille Benally by jumping out of the snow.

Trigger Scent

In order to control X-23, the Facility developed a chemical liquid called the Trigger 42, which instantly puts Laura into a mindless killing frenzy that kills anyone in her path, unable to distinguish friend from foe. In this state, she fought Jubilee, Gambit, and Wolverine all at once, and could fight through Hazmat blasting off her flesh despite her weakness towards powerful energy blasts. However, her most recent encounter with the trigger scent in All-New Wolverine #17 implies that she’s been able to resist the effects of the trigger scent, merely electrocuting people at most, implying she has begun to fight back against her feral state.

Resistances

• Heat/Fire: Laura has proven time and time again that she can continue to fight through fire and survive its intensity. She withstood fireballs from Red Hornet, survived having a stream of fire engulf her, and casually walked through a fire to save a fireman. She’s able to survive having her entire skin burned off by molten metal.

• Telepathy: In stubborn Wolverine fashion, Laura has a strong mental fortitude. When she first arrived at the Xavier School, Emma Frost had trouble at first reading her mind and has briefly resisted telepathy from the likes of Cable and Rachel Grey.

• Possession: Laura was able to force Mister Sinister out of her when he attempted to possess her body, and could force a demon out of her body.

• Tracking: Laura doesn’t have a scent to track

Feats

Cassandra Cain

Overall

• Considered the best fighter on the planet, and one of the top martial artists in the world

• The daughter of David Cain and Lady Shiva, two of the best fighters on the planet

• First person in history to defeat Lady Shiva

• Worshiped by the League of Assassins, the army of Ra’s Al Ghul

• Trained the likes of Tim Drake, Stephanie Brown and Black Canary

• Defeated Batman, Red Hood, Nightwing, Deathstroke, David Cain, Stephanie Brown, and Ravager

• Crossed over with Dark Horse Comics’ Ghost

• Trained with every single weapon and fighting style on earth

• Saved Commissioner Gordon’s life when Gotham City was hit by an earthquake

• Took up the mantle of Batgirl with the blessing of Oracle

• Joined the Gotham Knights and Bat Family

• Dinah Lance considers her to be the best fighter out of the Birds of Prey (This incarnation consists of Harley Quinn, Big Barda, Black Canary and Katana)

• Defeated the League of Shadows

• Rejoined the Bat Family during Infinite Frontier to protect the country

• Recovered her lost body reading ability in a single night

Power

• Before any training under Bruce, casually disarms David Cain before he can react and one shots him (doubles as a speed feat)

• Killed a man with a casual attack when she was five

• Smashed stone mannequins for ten hours straight

• Sends a sandbag flying and breaks open another one in a fit of rage

• One-shots Lady Shiva with a broken arm

• Kicks through three-inch quartz

• Defeats a super strong metahuman who overpowered Batman

• Harmed explicit metas on numerous other occasions

• Breaks Towering Chris’s nose. Towering Chris is one of the Ghost’s enemies, a super strong woman described as “six-and-a-half feet of bulletproof muscle”

• Easily hurts Monsieur Mallah

• Broke David Cain’s thumb as an infant

• Destroys a ghost abomination

• Easily defeats Ravager

• Defeated Bronze Tiger as a five year old

• Drew blood from Scarebeast, who himself is much stronger than Batman

• Compared to Killer Croc on amphetamines 

• Shatters Azrael’s helmet

• Easily hurt Batman

• Hurts Clayface with a high five

Speed

• Outran a rocket to save an old man

• Literally outruns a bullet 

• Outpaces Deathstroke, would’ve killed him if she was willing to

• Sees a man about to shoot a woman, throws a batarang to stop him, realizes the batarang won’t get there in time, outruns her own batarang and intercepts the bullet with her head. 

• Dodged bullets after they were fired on many occasions

• Casually dodged attacks from Batman

• Defeats Mr. Zeiss with a kick. Zeiss stated himself to be faster than Batman due to his cybernetic enhancements

• Blitzed over 200 of the best League of Assassins fighters

• Dodges a lightning attack (sub-relativistic)

• Catches shurikens in mid air

• Appeared invisible to a crowd

• Outruns constant machine gun fire from two cybernetic assailants 

• Beats up a crowd of people so fast Tim Drake didn’t even see her

• Blitzes ex-special force agents

• Blitzes a whole room of government agents and views them as frozen statues

• Dodges a weakened Supergirl’s heat vision

• Stops a bullet with her batarang

• Pushes Harper out of a laser’s way

• Puts two bags of money before Batman and David Cain before either has even noticed 

it.

• Appears literally invisible to Tim Drake, beating him up, placing Lynx’s body in her place and getting away before he could even perceive her

• Cassandra’s speed is considered metahuman or cybernetic level by the Government

 

Durability

• Emerges unharmed from a fiery explosion

• Survives an enormous ship explosion

• Unharmed by taking a robot’s self destruction, which takes out a large part of the Gotham Library

• As a child, played two-for-flinching with bullets

• Takes a severe beating from Shiva

• Survived over half a dozen of high caliber sniper rounds, all to protect a random mook

• Basically ignored gunshots on too many occasions

• Takes a heavy beating from The Lost Girls and especially their member Hope, a metahuman

• Shrugged off being hit by a car when her ribs and arm were already broken

• Took hits from bloodlusted Azrael

• Takes hits from Monsieur Mallah

• Takes a hit from Big Barda (she rolled with the punch)

• Survives an electric attack from an out of control Coldcast

X-23

Overall

• An accomplished assassin from her youth, being considered one of the finest assassins on the planet

• Surpassed Wolverine’s records within the bonds of training

• Beat Wolverine in their first encounter

• Fought Daken, Sabertooth, Jubilee, Lady Deathstrike, Captain America, Sentinels, and Taskmaster

• Helped the X-Men win the turf war against the Dark Avengers

• Became the new Wolverine after the events of Secret Wars

• Aided the X-Men in the stand against World War Hulk

• Joined Avengers Academy and sparred Tigra

• Fought the Orphans of X with Daken

• After her resurrection on Krakoa, joined the new X-Men

Power

Original:

• Pulled a Drax the Destroyer on a Tyrannosaurus Rex

• Stabs Big Zero with her gloves, which draws blood

• Draws blood from Alchemist by slicing him across the chest

• Stabs through the shield of Coat of Arms and slices off one of his arms

• Was able to pin and tackle Rockslide, who weighs 482 lbs

• Slices through Siphon’s skin, a life draining monster that can negate healing

• Flips over and destroys a car

• Goes right through the eyeball of a large demon

• Seems confident in her ability to shatter Blob’s knee or tear his achilles tendon, or just stab him through the eye

• Killed a Mister Sinister Daken clone

• Cuts out a Sentinel head in an unknown timeframe with her claws.

• Slices through goblins from Limbo

• Stabs Mister Sinister in the foot but gets blasted by him right after

• Wolverine bets that Laura could kill a room full of mutants

• Her foot claw sliced off Rockslide’s arm

• Punched around Wildside

• Sliced through an alternate Omega Red’s carbonadium tentacles

• Drew blood from Bishop with a punch

• Slashed through an aircraft with her claws while being flung

• Seemingly fought and slashed Devil Dinosaur

• Sliced off Mister Sinister’s hand

Clone:

• Stabs a Beast clone through the neck

• Has sliced through waves of enemies such as biotech abominations, Beast Priests, the super soldiers of Mikhail Rasputin, the Sabertooth army, New Men, Reavers, Brood monsters, and Merlyn’s goblins

• Fights Earth-1912 Sabertooth, slicing off her hand, and eventually ripping out her heart and leaving her as just a head and torso

• Slices through the Mind Weaver, dealing the killing blow

• Punches out an A.I.M. agent

• Foot claws Lady Deathstrike in the abdomen

• Throws Cordyceps Jones across the room

• Pummels the Collector with numerous kicks to the face

• Decapitates Earth-12 Sabertooth

• Foot claws Earth-33441 Sabertooth

Speed

Original:

• Learned how to catch a sword swing at only nine years old

• At age 11, kills a man in the time it takes for a camera's flash to go off

• Can dodge gunfire on a daily basis

• Parries one of Finesse’s battle staves with her claws

• Slices apart helicopter blades while they’re moving to cause a helicopter crash, which rotate 400-500 times a minute

• Speedblitzes numerous Alchemax agents, disarming them

• Sidesteps a bullet (shown above)

• Blocks a punch from a vampirized Jubilee

• Pushes a man out of the way of a bullet

• Wolverine claims she’s never seen anyone move like her before, and calls Laura faster and sharper then himself

• Cuts off Scrambler's hands and eviscerates him before he is able to react

• Saves Magik fast enough to appear as a blur

• While lying on the ground with a broken neck, cuts a crossbow bolt in half before it hits its target

• Removes Captain America's shield then flips over his back, while dodging darts from a team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents

Clone:

• Blocks a strike from Lady Deathstrike

• Reacts to glass projectiles being shot at her

• Avoids numerous attacks from the Collector’s true form

Durability

Original:

• Regularly survives explosions, stab wounds, and gunfire

• Tanks an explosion that turned her sweat into acid, though she went unconscious

• Survives being near a fiery explosion caused by Angel

• Tanks an electrical attack from Black Vortex-amped Beast and gets back up

• Survives a cage falling on her and a couple panels later it appears to have gone right through her

• Tanks a concussive air blast from Chinook

• Gets shot numerous times in the body but gets back up and easily kills 3-4 armed gunmen in seconds

• Unscathed from Sebastian firing a stream of fire at her

• Gets hit with a sentinel palm beam and breaks her arm, but gets up.

• Casually pulls said bullets out of her body, but admits it hurts

• Survives being near a fiery explosion caused by Angel

• Gets blasted with radiation beams from Hazmat and has most of her upper body really burnt, gets staggered but keeps fighting just fine.

• Survives a hug explosion in Mr. Sinister’s base

• Walked off a huge explosion that leveled a coffee shop

• Survives getting stabbed by Aurora at Mach 2

• Endures torture from Kimura and having her arm cut off by a chainsaw

• Not bothered by a shark biting her

• Briefly endures the vacuum of space, although prolonged exposure would’ve killed her

• Fights a group of symbiote monsters

• Unfazed by a mutant babies screams loud enough to shatter glass across multiple buildings

• Tanks an energy blast from Bishop

• Tackled Sabertooth off a plane and cratered into the ground with him

Clone:

• Tanks a punch from Strong Guy

• Claws block a punch from diamond form Emma Frost

• Tanks a hit from Luminous

• Survives being bit in the arm by a large vampire

• Tanks a psi-beam from M.O.D.O.K. that sends her into the water

• Tanks a hit from Omega Wolverine, a Phalanx-enhanced version of the original

• Survives getting launched into space by a Brood-infected Rogue

Scaling

Cassandra Cain

Batman

The Man himself. Cassandra has sparred with Bruce on multiple occasions, often surprising him with her strength, skill and speed, and has been called outright superior to Batman. Slade Wilson once stated Batman couldn’t take her down in a serious fight, even “on his best day”. Batman corroborates this by admitting there is no one is a better fighter than Cass making it pretty clear cut she upscales the Dark Knight in stats and fighting ability.

• Survived shots from Quakemaster’s jackhammer gun, which can create large scale earthquakes on Gotham (26.8 kilotons of TNT) 

• Sees bullets in slow motion.

• Dodges uzis at close range, tanks, machine guns, snipers, and machine guns from police helicopters and military helicopters

• Has grabbed Joker’s arm “with the speed of light” on an occasion.

• Has dodged Doctor Light’s beams of… light.

• Black Canary has fought on par with enemies she considered “almost as good as Batman”, and has been defeated by him as well, making Bruce relative or superior to her.

• Black Canary can perceive nanosecond intervals, and arguably act during them (3.3 - 4.3c)

• Adam Strange has struggled with Gotham thugs, while Batman can handle Adam’s rogues pretty easily, making Batman decisively superior to him.

• Adam Strange has withstood the acceleration of being sent to the sun on a meteor at high speeds (62.89 kilotons of TNT)

• Adam Strange has withstood the acceleration of Earth expanding at high speeds (77.6 kilotons of TNT)

• Has made Black Wind bleed with his attacks, arguably scaling to him in power

• Black Wind can create thunderstorms that reach the horizon (245 - 653 kilotons of TNT, debatable)

Other Bat Family Members

Cassandra is very consistently considered to be the best fighter within the Bat Family, continuously overpowering basically all her peers during sparring sessions, amazing them with her skills and was even directly said to be the “muscle” of the team. She has bested numerous members of the Bat Family such as Batgirl, Stephanie Brown and Tim Drake.

• Stephanie Brown has tanked an explosion that would’ve cratered an entire city block (15 kilotons of TNT) 

• Huntress subdued a skilled mind reader with sheer speed

• Red Hood can cut off the head of a dinosaur and survive getting hit by a bazooka

• Batgirl survived an explosion that launched the Birds of Prey away.

• Tim Drake survived a warehouse-sized explosion

• Azrael consistently reacted to lasers and lightning after they were fired (Debatable)

• Alfred Pennyworth punched Deathstroke (real)

Deathstroke

Cassandra has fought Deathstroke on a few occasions, once even casually dodging all of his attacks, with Slade once stating the only way to take her down is to do it “from a distance or to get into her head”, making it pretty clear that Cass is superior up close to the Terminator.

• Has tanked being crushed by a submarine being thrown at him (1.3 kilotons of TNT)

• Has taken energy blasts from Gunfire, a hero who can convert mass into energy.

• Gunfire can blast magma from the core of the Earth to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean (38.54 kilotons of TNT)

• Can dodge swings from Katana

• Katana can swing her sword fast enough to deflect a laser beam (2.27c)

• His staff can shatter glass meant to withstand missiles

• Claims he is physically superior to Batman

Misc. Gotham Rogues

Being the Batgirl means the criminals of Gotham City will come out at night, and Cassandra Cain has had many fights with some of Batman’s greatest enemies, like the Joker and Harley Quinn, and even Scarecrow while he was in his Scarebeast form. She’s also been compared to Killer Croc on amphetamines in strength. 

• Mr. Freeze survived his own freeze gun exploding on him, which can make massive ice blocks in seconds. (1.883 Kilotons of TNT) and explode into a massive ice column when ruptured (5.78 Kilotons of TNT)

• Bane broke both of Killer Croc’s arms and famously broke Batman’s back

• Venomless Bane is considered only second to Batman as the perfect peak human

• Ra’s Al Ghul can cut a man in half

• Two-Face was able to damage and outskill Killer Croc despite being a human

• Firefly survived being in the epicenter of a large explosion 

• Lady Shiva is capable of defeating Post-Hush Killer Croc while limiting herself to only using one arm, leaving him heavily injured

• Shiva is comparable to Richard Dragon, who dodged a point blank laser (1.12 c)

• Shiva also could one shot Jason Todd, David Cain, stomp Question and Renee Montoya

• David Cain was able to defeat Deadshot while in handcuffs

• The Scarebeast was so powerful that Batman needed a special suit in order to face him

X-23

Wolverine

While Wolverine admitted Laura isn’t as strong as him, he claimed she was faster and sharper than him, and considering they have fought before in the past with Laura winning the first encounter, and the fact that Laura has faced down many of his own rogues, and has claimed to have a better healing factor then her predecessor, they should be more than comparable in feats, especially with Laura’s new adamantium skeleton, but it's likely the speed is now weighed down a bit, and they are even in it rather then Laura being faster.

• Withstood being punched from the X-Mansion to Georgia (1.3 - 333.5 tons of TNT)

• Implied to have survived a nuclear blast at point-blank range (21.7 Kilotons of TNT, debatable) 

• Has dodged Cyclops’ optic blast and even intercepted one with a katana, which have been reiterated numerous times as moving at the speed of light 

• Snapped steel chains made out of the "hardest steel money can buy, guaranteed unbreakable"

• Similar to Laura, Wolverine has adamantium claws that have harmed enemies far outside of his caliber, including the Hulk, Thor, and even Thanos

Misc. Mutants

Laura has had her fair share of facing against other mutants, with Wolverine himself calling her superior to most mutants in the vicinity, has also fought the likes of Jubilee and Gambit, and one-shot Nightcrawler, showing she should scale to some members of mutantkind. 

• Cyclops can redirect his optic blast in a nanosecond (3.33c)

• Beast claimed to move and react within nanoseconds (3.33c) 

• Gambit was able to match Daredevil in skill

• Nightcrawler dodged natural lightning bolts from Dracula

• Sabertooth is called stronger and faster then Wolverine, who Laura has fought before

Deadpool

The Merc with the Mouth has always been at Wolverine’s side, whether he was pissing him off or helping him with a dandy adventure. They’ve fought on multiple occasions, with Wolverine winning some encounters and Deadpool winning others, thus Laura should be comparable to him.

• Dodges bullets on numerous occasions

• Was punched out of Krakoa so hard it created an explosion that engulfed part of the island (30.9 kilotons of TNT)

• Tanked a large explosion (633 Tons of TNT)

• Has also dodged optic beams from Cyclops

• Survived an explosion that would’ve destroyed the Hoover Dam.

Captain America

Laura’s encounter with Captain America was not too serious of a fight, and only sought to trick him, but even still Captain America has shown to be on par with Wolverine, drawing blood from him and even crushing the tendons in his arms, thus Laura should show some level of comparability to the super soldier, being one herself. 

• Can hit with the force of a 5 ton meteor (72 tons of TNT)

• Can swing his shield at the speed of light 

• Survived a large AoE attack that cratered the ground (12 Kilotons of TNT)

• Easily crumples up metal with his bare hands

• Can strike with lightning bolt speed

Daredevil

Physically speaking, Laura is easily superior to Matt, but when it comes to speed, Daredevil has shown that he is superhuman level for a reason. Wolverine has called him someone that is hard to catch, and is considered faster than the likes of Punisher and Black Panther. Thus, Laura would downscale from Daredevil to some degree, but still keep up nonetheless

• Dodges, block and deflect bullets on a daily basis

• Can perceive a nanosecond interval, and arguably react within it (3.3 - 5.6c)

• Has intercepted Iron Man’s repulsor beam and also dodged Cyclops's optic beam

• Sees U.S. Agent in slow motion, who is comparable to Captain America. 

Weaknesses

Cassandra Cain

Despite her tremendous amount of combat experience and techniques that come with it, there come with it some notable drawbacks. For example, body reading can potentially not work on opponents that are more random and chaotic such as the Joker, or someone as unpredictable and pragmatic as Deathstroke, as it can be too much for her to follow at once. More importantly, her over-reliance on body reading sometimes leads her to take hits she really shouldn’t, such as when she was tagged by a bullet because the gunman didn’t need to think in order to aim thanks to his cybernetics, though she mostly learnt how to deal with it. She also used to be illiterate and limited in speech due to her circumstances growing up, but has since overcome this with speech classes and even tutoring from Alfred! More importantly, Cassandra’s mental state isn’t great at times. Cassandra is an absolute perfectionist, and even slightest failure at anything can mentally devastate her. On top of that, her trauma due to her upbringing and more importantly, her murder, she refuses to kill under any circumstances, and her insistence of saving absolutely everyone, even the worst of villains, have caused her great trouble on numerous occasions. Her guilt used to be so serious that she was outright suicidal and wanted Shiva to kill, though Shiva actually carrying through with killing her and then bringing her back solved that problem.

…Also, basically any book with her written after her solo ended? After years of development and amazing writing, she is unceremoniously turned into a villain just to provide Tim bloody Drake with an arch nemesis. Okee…. And when DC realizes their mistake, they assign her redemption arc to… Adam Beechen, the same person who wrote her being a villain to begin with. The result was about what one would expect, a total clusterfuck of a story with all-encompassing OOC and character assassination not just of Cass, but of many other characters from her comics, like David Cain. Afterwards, Cass returned to normal, but passed on the mantle to Steph and didn’t appear too often until… Oh god… The Flashpoint. After being erased from existence for several years, she came back under James Tynion’s pen with a completely new (lamer) backstory, lamer skills and relationships, and… Yeah, Tynion gave her caveman speech. Amazing. And her only purpose was to appear and punch people or to give development to Harper Row/Batman/Clayface. And THEN Infinite Frontier came and gave her her Batgirl identity back, with there being THREE active Batgirls now, Steph, Cass and Barbara. What resulted is possibly the most aggravating book of them all, where Cass and Steph act like middle schoolers while Babs is their “How do you do, fellow kids” type “big sister”. Obviously, both characters were reduced to caricatures, fulfilled annoying zoomer archetypes, engaged in fake emotional storytelling (You are SO STRONG!1!1!1!1!1) and ultimately had the book canceled after 19 issues due to the lack of interest. DC, please give her a decent book…

OH AND BY THE WAY BRUCE WAYNE IS A SHIT PARENT AND NO ONE IS CONVINCING ME OTHERWISE

X-23

Laura may be a nearly flawless fighter but she's far from perfect, while quick on her feet and clever she has a tendency to rush her opponents no matter how out matched she is, and at times has been taken out of a fight by enough sustained punishment, such as a physical beating from the Blob and being tossed aside by diamond form Emma Frost, or being momentarily stopped by enough gunfire, which can take longer for her to recover depending on how heavy her injuries are. Her healing factor, while great, does have limits, such as a broken neck, which can leave her paralyzed for minutes, or head shots that can render her unconscious, Laura herself has said that ripping her head off can probably kill her, it has been overtaxed by especially powerful characters like Nimrod, showing that powerful enough energy attacks make it more difficult for her to properly heal. And even with an adamantium skeleton, Wolverine points out that his joints are still made of flesh and his limbs can be removed via cutting or ripping them off. She’s also admitted that enough tranquilizer darts can render her unconscious. Her tracking can also be overridden if a powerful enough scent fills the scene, as evidenced by an army of Saberteeth, as Laura implied a smell shared between enough bodies could make it hard to detect other scents. Her regeneration can also be negated by the Murasama blade, a weapon specifically designed to negate the regeneration of Wolverine. 

Verdicts

Team Cassandra Cain

Stats

Cassandra Cain and X-23 are two characters who have demonstrated physical feats well beyond what is considered peak human. When it comes to raw strength, both have lots of accolades on where they are in the food chain among the streets of DC and Marvel. Starting with Cassandra, she’s no joke. When she was just an infant, she broke her father, David Cain’s thumb, and when she was just a little kid, she was capable of knocking out Bronze Tiger, one of the greatest martial artists on the planet. As a teenager/young adult, Cass would send sandbags flying during training and could smash apart stone mannequins for 10 hours straight without stopping. All her life she’s faced down against opponents much stronger and faster than her, all with her ever growing strength due to her rigorous training from the ground up. Many times has she explicitly harmed metahumans on numerous occasions, ones with superior strength and speed and supernatural abilities, such as when she broke Towering Chris’s nose, a super strong woman described as “six-and-a-half feet of bulletproof muscle”, or when she drew blood from Scarebeast, who himself is stronger than Batman. And in the pantheon of Gotham City’s heroes and villains, Cassandra Cain is the one they fear the most. She’s been referred to as the “muscle” of the Bat Family, which includes peak humans such as Nightwing and the Red Hood, and was compared to Killer Croc on amphetamines. She’s touched down with many titans, including Deathstroke the Terminator and his daughter the Ravager, and famously beat her mother Lady Shiva, who no one on Earth was able to do at the time. And where most vigilantes would fall under the cowl of the Caped Crusader, Cassandra has been referred to as outright superior to the Batman, with Batman even stating that no one fights the way Cass does. When it comes to scaling (the boring part), Batman has shown to be comparable to Adam Strange, taking on some of his rogues and threatening to break their neck, thus Batman should be comparable to Strange, who withstood the acceleration of Earth expanding at high speeds, which would yield to about 77.6 kilotons of TNT. 

Batman himself has harmed the Black Wind, making him bleed with his attacks, debatably scaling to him in power, as Black Wind can create thunderstorms that reach the horizon, which comes out to around 245 - 653 kilotons of TNT. Granted, this feat is debatable. The arguments against it are that his storm creation ability doesn’t necessarily translate to striking strength, thus it would be odd to scale Batman to a feat that realistically he doesn’t compare to. The argument for it however, is that Black Wind himself stated that the wind abilities he uses can be used to augment his strength and speed, and draw power from it, so one can make the argument that he can enhance his physical abilities with that type of power, and given Batman at times has shown he can similarly harm metahumans, a case can be made for the scaling here.

Moving over to X-23, per being a Wolverine, Laura has tremendous physical strength. She can flip over and destroy cars, slice through aircrafts, and her claws have shown that she can harm characters far more powerful then she is, such as the Blob or World War Hulk. Her training all her life has allowed her to slice through hordes of enemies, ranging from ordinary gunmen, or some goblins from the Limbo dimension, not much can withstand the cutting power of adamantium claws due to their highly durable nature. Laura herself has tangoed with many other mutants, hero and villain, along with other superpowered beings such as Omega Red, Mister Sinister, Beast, Lady Deathstrike, and of course the Wolverine himself. She’s also faced enemies specifically designed to counter her and her powers, such as Siphon, a life draining monster that can negate healing. Due to the clone having an adamantium skeleton, one can suggest that Laura is fully comparable to Wolverine (minus maybe experience), who can survive being punched from X-Mansion to Georgia, which is about 333.5 Tons of TNT. Wolverine has consistently fought Deadpool, who can survive an explosion worth 633 Tons of TNT. One may argue the Trigger Scent can amplify her stats, but it’s a condition she can’t normally access without the Trigger 42 chemical compound, which has often been employed by her enemies to exploit her killer instinct, and even then Laura has spent her life trying to resist the effects of it, along with the fact that Cassandra doesn’t have access to any chemical comparable to it to use. 

So when it comes to general showings, both have superhuman feats and experience facing threats past their weight class. The adamantium claws make it so Laura has an instant durability bypassing option, due to the claws consistently being able to harm characters far superior to both of them, and it should go without saying that one too many clean swipes will easily flatten Cassandra if she was to get sliced by them, but in raw scaling, Cass has greater upscaling to lots of the stronger street level characters, and the highest end feats tip the edges to Cass being stronger, whereas Laura is a lot more in the comparable realm to the people she fights, and isn’t drastically superior to anyone in terms of strength or raw power, so Cass ends up having the better feats. 

In terms of speed, both have many similar feats due to their nature as assassins; often securing quick kills, and making it out alive without a scratch. Both have frequently dodged bullets almost on a daily basis, although Cass has shown far more instances of dodging bullets after they were fired, even being able to fully outrun a bullet. Both can also move fast enough to appear as blurs to their opponents when in combat. Laura is adept in parrying and blocking enemy attacks, being able to block a sword swing at only nine years old, whereas Cass is more adept in disarming opponents before they can react or from afar. Both have also shown to be capable of blitzing entire rooms full of enemies before they can react. But when it comes to scaling to others, the scales once again tip in favor of Cass. When not holding back, she was able to dodge all of Batman’s attacks with ease, and hit him so fast that he didn’t even perceive it. Most impressively, when David Cain and Batman were engaged in a clash, Cassandra moved so fast she managed to place two bags of money between their feet when their fists were inches away from each other, without either being fast enough to perceive it. Batman can fight and keep up with Black Canary, a metahuman who can perceive nanosecond intervals, and arguably act during them, which is about 3.3c-4.3c. Over on X-23’s side, she should easily be comparable to Wolverine due to being called faster and sharper than him (though the skeleton may bring this down a bit), who intercepted Cyclops’ optic blast with a katana, which moves at the speed of light. In the scaling section, we mentioned Daredevil as debatable, who perceived a nanosecond interval, and arguably reacted within it, which is about 3.3-5.6c, almost as fast if not faster then Black Canary’s own nanosecond feat. However, it can be argued that X-23 would at most downscale this, for a few reasons. One being, that Wolverine himself admitted that Daredevil is hard to catch in combat, and other characters such as Captain America have struggled to hit Matt in a fight, suggesting that he is generally considered faster than his fellow street tier brethren. At best, even if you argue she is comparable in speed to Matt, Cass trounces this since she upscales massively from the Canary nanosecond feat, and given her history of blitzing street tiers like Batman, and moving as a blur to other members of the Bat Family, her upscaling is much more solid and concrete, whereas it's arguable if Laura only downscales Daredevil, making the speed gap very much noticeable. Thus, Cassandra Cain is also considerably faster than X-23 despite both having scaling to nanosecond related feats. 

Last but not least is durability. Given in most cases strength scales to durability, it isn’t too hard to assume Cassandra wins out in that regard either, but another aspect about both of their durability feats beyond scaling is their pain tolerance and stamina. Due to their upbringings as assassins, training also came with surviving brutal conditions and injuries. Both have been able to continue fighting through bullets, with Cass even playing  two-for-flinching with bullets as a child during training, even to the point of fighting through being shot by dozens of people at once, such as when Laura got shot 25 times or when Cass got shot by over half a dozen high caliber sniper rounds. In terms of more grave injuries however, Laura regrettably takes the cake. While Cass has fought through being stabbed through the heart and got up from a car crash with already broken ribs, Laura’s healing factor makes it so she can fight through injuries designed to downright mutilate a human or completely obliterate her body. Stab wounds, fighting without limbs, talking and walking with all of her skin peeled off, the list goes on. By Weapon X design, Laura was meant to withstand such heavy and fatal injuries and fight through it, pulling her ahead in the damage she can take compared to Cass.

Arsenal & Abilities

So, as previously established, we can see that Cass takes the stat trinity pretty handily. But how does she measure up to Laura’s deadly blades, indestructible skeleton and seemingly invincible healing factor? Well, while most of X-23’s powers and abilities are very impressive and the claws + regen combo at a glance looks like an instant win, it’s not as simple as it looks, and Cass’s own abilities and counters make it pretty unlikely Laura can land the killing blows she needs. Let’s break them down.

First of all, we should establish Cass' opponent's own abilities. Wolverine and characters related to him such as X-23 herself are notorious in Marvel comics (and by consequence, internet Versus Debating) thanks to their functional “immortality”. Logan and his daughter have survived and come back from significant damage such as being burned down to the bone, disemboweled and most sorts of gory punishments you can think of. Thanks to their healing factors, they can also afford to keep fighting after being stabbed and shot, and quickly recover. Their indestructible adamantium skeleton also makes it hard to dismember, and adds a hard layer of protection to their heads. However, Wolverines are not invincible. They use a good portion of their healing just to not die from adamantium poisoning, can have the healing factor overloaded to its limit, and depending on the damage dealt, the healing process can take a long time and leave them completely incapacitated during that time frame. It is very consistent that snapping the necks of Wolverine and X-23 will put them out of commission for a few minutes or more, as stated by Logan himself, proven by Nightcrawler when he snapped Wolverine’s neck, and also showcased when Laura got her neck snapped. And while their bones are impossible to break, the joints and ligaments between them by no means are, leaving them vulnerable to having them cut or ripped off, as shown when wolverine cut off his own hands by severing his ligaments, or when Savage beat Laura so hard her jaw fell off. Significant damage to their hearts also takes them out of the fight for some time, as shown when Scarlet Spider stabbed Wolverine in the heart and he fell unconscious, taking time to heal back up. But most importantly, it has been stated by Laura herself that decapitation would probably kill her, as she can’t grow another head back, and the Xavier Protocols seem to imply that decapitation can kill Wolverine, though these were both documented when neither had an adamantium skeleton at the time. Laura’s claws are powerful, dealing damage to Marvel heralds and such, but obviously, they have short range and multi+ sharpness can only do so much when you don’t hit important parts of your opponents or just superficially slash them. With all this said, let’s move to Cass’ own equipment and skills, and explain why her counters work really well against Laura’s impressive set of abilities.

X-23 functionally has no ranged options and has mobility limited to her own acrobatics and claws for climbing. Cassandra’s batarangs and explosives give her the range advantage, and while they wouldn’t be able to really damage or kill Laura at all, they can easily be used as distractions or means to stagger Laura while Cass evades her attacks, or simply creates an opening to strike, though Laura’s Wolverine suit comes with thermal lenses that can detect heat signatures nearby, along with having super senses of her own that can have detected incoming attacks through hearing and scent, Cass’s stealth will not help her too much. Cass’ grappling hook is also a great tool for mobility and maneuverability paired with her own set of acrobatic skills, giving her the blatant advantage in battlefield control and traversal. Laura also has the Murasma armor and shield, augmenting her stats and allowing her to resist attacks that negate her regeneration. It is incredibly bulletproof, but given Cassandra has fought bulletproof enemies such as Towering Chris, and the fact that she doesn’t have anything like the Murasma Blade, the armor is not really the most useful in this situation.

Up close, things get a bit more complicated, but Cass’ own stats paired with her unparalleled martial arts skills still put her at an advantage. Cassandra’s body reading is something that Laura has never dealt with in her history. It allows her to become virtually untouchable to her opponents via reading into their actions through the analysis of body language. With it, she can basically predict your next move and act accordingly, with it being compared to thought reading and precognition. It also allows her to see weak points and intentions on other people, and even correctly visualize feelings and words others were thinking. It was also used before to correctly guess that an enemy has cybernetics. It’s basically a very thorough method of precognition and combat analysis, and because it doesn’t technically use telepathy, it can’t be countered by Laura’s latent resistance to telepathy. All of this paired with Cass’s superior speed means X-23 would have a significantly hard time trying to even tag her, let alone deal the strike to Cass’ vitals she needs to win, and it also means Cass would be able to intuitively find out about Laura’s own vulnerabilities and use them to beat her. 

Cass also possesses the ability to use pressure points offensively, a very useful technique when dealing with difficult opponents. She has been showcased to temporarily paralyze Oracle with them, disable someone’s hand (which couldn’t be used to pull a trigger even with a year of physiotherapy), stop a man’s heart, put metahumans to sleep, and even beat a monster that was giving trouble to Superboy by attacking its insides, which is consistent as a means to bypass durability to when she knocked out Gemini, someone invulnerable to most blunt attacks thanks to her rubber-like body. She also is only of the few people in the world that knows the Falling Leaf Nerve Strike, a powerful technique that knocks out people for hours. X-23 has never showcased any resistance to pressure point strikes, meaning Cassandra could as well just use them to paralyze her body, or stop her heart, making her incapable of doing anything and leaving her open to a neck snap or decapitation with a sword by targeting her neck’s joints. With all this being discussed, it’s only fair that we explain more in-depth why we came to this conclusion, given the immortal nature of Wolverines:

Q: But how can X-23 even be decapitated if her neck is made of adamantium?

A: Wolverine himself admitted that his joints and ligaments were meat unlike his bones, capable of being cut, which is also evident by the many times that both Logan and Laura have lost arms or legs separately, like when the Krakoa clone lost an arm. At the top of the spine, the cervical, there are stringy, cartilaginous joints known as the disks that separate every link in the spine. The base of the spine connecting to the neck is still vulnerable to being cut, severing the head, which should be feasible if Laura is knocked out due to pressure points or having her heart stopped. The issue in arguing this couldn’t work, is that as far as anyone is concerned, no opponent has tried decapitation normally on Wolverine or X-23 without using the Murasma Blade, and have tried methods such as incinerating the body (which failed), or snapping his neck, which has also failed. The former is noteworthy, because the reason Wolverine was able to regenerate from that kind of annihilation was due to his brain still being protected in the cranium of the skeleton, implying that if his brain/brainflow are intact, then he can perform his regeneration within minutes. But this was with the head/skull still attached to the skeleton, and going back to the Xavier Protocols, it is suggested that enough separation of the head from the body would make Wolverine unable to properly regenerate, due to no oxygen effectively killing his brain, thus being unable to regenerate. And as we’ve mentioned before, Cass has ways to incapacitate, knock out, or cripple Laura in multiple ways, along with body reading that can figure out what kind of superhuman she is dealing with, and her skill level allows her to be precise enough to take her head clean off.

Q: How would the pressure points work if X-23 has a healing factor? Can’t she power through it thanks to her pain tolerance or something?

A: Well, Cass’ pressure points…don’t have to cause real damage if Cass doesn’t want to. As evident by her briefly paralyzing Barbara Gordon with a nerve strike. Laura also can’t do much if her heart is stopped, as it’s not actual damage being dealt. Even if it was, Wolverine has taken time to recover after his heart was stabbed, making it a reliable incap method. Note that Laura has never shown any specific instance where she resisted or quickly recovered from pressure point strikes.

Q: Is the Dimensioneter standard?

A: The Dimensioneter is a weapon Cassandra picked up after the Shadow King, due to no longer needing the belt as he had obtained his own actual set of powers. At one point, Supernova and Rip Hunter were gathering a bunch of weapons in the event that Booster Gold’s now turned psycho robot Skeets would come after them, including the Dimensioneter. Gathering the devices was a desperate move by Rip and Supernova, and by extension Booster Gold, who at the time was trying to be a protector of the timeline. Thus, it would only make sense that Booster would return the weapons after their use, such as the Starman staff, especially since the Dimensioneter didn’t turn out to be of any use. In other words…it's not clear if Cass got the belt back, let alone how it was taken from her. You can argue that she would have it returned to her as the other weapons were returned to their owners, or you could argue not due to us never seeing her use it again after the events of 52. If you were to assume the former, the Dimensioneter gives Cass an even deadlier weapon, turning intangible and being able to drag Laura into her shadow to damage her even more, all the while being unable to be damaged herself. While she could send Laura to the Shadow Lands, as we’ve seen from Laura’s time in the Vault, her longevity would make it so she wouldn’t have a tough time just outlasting Laura, although the Shadow Lands are an unknown place with monsters of vague strength level. Regardless if you use the Dimensioneter or not, Cassandra has other ways of taking down Laura as we’ve established.

Tertiary Factors

In terms of skill and experience, both of these fighters have an arsenal few can match. Both were raised as perfect weapons as children, and came out extremely successful in terms of their capacity for carnage. However, when looking into it closely, it becomes obvious that in terms of sheer fighting ability, Cassandra is on a whole ‘nother level compared to her opponent. Laura’s skill is incredible, being considered one of the finest assassins on the entire planet and knowing well over a dozen ways to kill a human in many gruesome ways. Similar to Cass, she was trained all her life, to the point where it was suggested by Tigra that Laura didn’t need any more lessons in combat, and has fought opponents far more experienced then her like Wolverine. However, Laura’s training consisted mainly of specifically assassination, primarily focusing on the ways to kill, while Cass’s had a bigger focus on actual one-on-one fighting and close quarters combat. Indeed, Cassandra is carried entirely by her absolutely wild fighting skill, while Laura often relies on her superpowers to seal the deal, especially her pain tolerance to roll with any strikes or more lethal weaponry, often waiting to just be shot to death when she is surrounded for instance. One of Laura’s most enduring strategies is taking as many hits as she can with her regeneration, before she can have her own opening to strike back. Another one trick she commonly uses is surprising opponents with her feet claws, relying on the fact that her opponents don’t realize she has one. While this has worked on highly skilled opponents such as Taskmaster, Cassandra’s has worked on similar superhumans like Deathstroke with similar levels of analytical thinking and prediction. Oftentimes Laura uses them at the very last moment, when she’s pinned down or physically restrained, but Cass’s body reading has shown that it can read the body language of an opponent down to what they’re thinking and what they are about to do with their next move or attack, and given Cass’s superior speed, it is likely that Laura can dodge the foot claw. 

Cass, meanwhile, is consistently considered the absolute best fighter across the planet. She has learned every single martial art and every single weapon known to man, she knows the Falling Leaf Strike which only two people other than her know, she was the first person in history to defeat Lady Shiva, and she has done it repeatedly, she defeated 200 League of Assassin ninjas, with said ninjas being said to be the most dangerous fighters on the planet and that Batman could only take on a handful at a time at most. Cass’s skills are consistently said to be “unsurpassed”, to have no upper limit and to be higher than even Batman’s. With many weaker opponents, like Stephanie Brown, she could fight her while not paying any attention to her. Anything Laura could potentially know that Cass didn’t, she could likely just copy, considering she managed to copy a move that lets her punch a shadow.. Cass’s superior acrobatic prowess would also make it even harder for X-23 to land a hit, whereas the adamantium skeleton may hinder her more consistent level of acrobatics, and Cass is also more used to utilizing strategy in a fight when just brute force won’t cut it. On top of that, Cass also possesses smelling salts. What use might they be, would you ask? Well, Laura’s senses can be overridden with a powerful enough smell, and Cass would certainly take advantage of that in order to further confuse Laura, or even snap her out of the trigger scent, since that is a state of high emotions where her senses go crazy due to her feral nature. Cass has also faced foes similar to Laura, for instance, Mad Dog, her crazed “brother”, fights very similarly to Laura when she’s under the trigger scent, and Cass instantly defeated him once she got serious despite being mortally wounded (he only stabbed her because she protected a friend with her own body). Laura’s weaknesses are simply much easier to be exploited in this fight, considering Cass is a more strategic combatant, for instance, with how she defeated Joker by exploiting his insanity after her body reading failed. Laura, on the other hand, can hardly take advantage of any of Cass’s Achilles’ heels. She has no feasible way to negate the body language reading and she has no way to find out how she can exploit Cass psychologically. In terms of skills and knowledge, Cass simply has her opponent beat.

“I'm not...doomed...to be bad...I am...a bat. This...is where I should be.”

Advantages:

• Handily takes the stat trinity with better AP values and upscaling

• Far more skilled in combat

• Body language reading makes it really hard for Laura to ever land a proper hit or surprise Cass

• Superior equipment

• Better mobility

• Dimensiometer makes it nearly impossible for Laura to do any kind of damage

• Comparable in intelligence outside of combat

• The devotion of her shippers

• Go read her solo series IT’S SO FUCKING GOOD

Disadvantages:

• Has no protection against adamantium claws, which easily slice her to pieces

• Adamantium skeleton nullifies explosives and make her harder to physically harm

• Stealth is hard countered due to Laura’s enhanced senses and thermal scanners

• Less willing to utilize lethal force at first

• Lesser pain tolerance

• Bruce Wayne’s parenting

• Adam Beechen, James Tynion IV and Becky Cloonan/Michael Conrad

Conclusion

Overall, Cassandra has better justification for upscaling in strength and speed feats than Laura (apart from the claws, which trump Cass), and at worst has comparable showings of beating metahumans superior to her and moving fast enough to blitz the naked eye, while still having better bullet timing and agile feats, with Laura only having the much greater pain tolerance then Cass. Taking them at their best would put Cass as far stronger than Laura due to the Adam Strange and Deadpool explosion feats respectively, so no matter what angle you approach this fight as, Cass has better showings of strength. If you apply higher feats, Cass would only trump Laura even more, considering Black Wind’s storm creation feat can reach over 600 kilotons of TNT. To any that would argue that Cass wouldn’t be because “she’s a peak human and Laura is a superhuman!”, do remember that the measure of a peak human is definitely not the same as in real life. No peak human in real life does something like smash apart stone mannequins for 10 hours straight, so there isn’t a real life rule set to be followed here. Cass has the feats to prove she can do things beyond what a normal human is capable of, especially when fighting against outright superhumans. To further empathize this point, Cass actually is acknowledged to be superhuman in stats in DC, considering how the CIA thought she was either metahuman or had cybernetic enhancements, and that she has super strength and super speed. Combine that with beating up blatant superhumans in-story, dodging bullets after they were fired (yes, Batman-like people can perform those feats too, but with Cass it’s clearly intended to portray her as a superhuman, as opposed to the normal vs “haha this funny character takes an explosion so they’re atomic bomb level now” moment. It is in fact Laura who lacks any explicit reference of superhuman stats, as in speed and strength, in plot, at least compared to other Marvel street tiers (who are superhuman for our real world, of course). She is superhuman, but because she possesses powers unrelated to super speed or strength (regeneration, super senses). So, no matter how you look at it, Cass is simply stronger and faster. 

Her equipment, skills and powers also being a perfect counter for Laura, to the point where she has numerous quick and easy ways to take Laura out (snapping her neck, paralyzing her, stopping her heart, cutting her apart, just knocking her out, or even BFRing her to the Shadowlands, if we do give her the belt), and while Laura’s wincon is even simpler (just giving Cass a good slice with her slice) Cass’s superior speed and body reading would ensure it would be a long time ‘til Cass finally gets tagged. Cass simply has more options. She can overwhelm Laura in close quarters, she can retreat and spam projectiles, she can just chicken out, use the accursed belt and make it basically impossible for Laura to win, if it comes to it. Ultimately, Laura has few options but to Leeroy Jenkins herself into a head on attack, and even in that scenario Cassandra’s superior stats and skill would give her the edge. At the end of the day, despite X-23’s great mutant powers, Cassandra Cain had the strength, equipment and skill necessary to take the victory in this hard-fought battle.

Team X-23

Stats

Concerning stats, it's a mixed bag, but Laura should comfortably pull ahead when it matters most. Concerning strength and durability, Laura scaled to Deadpool and Logan, both of whom shrugged off up to 30 kilotons of TNT. Cass scales to DC's street crowd, and Batman heroes/villains, who should upscale from Adam Strange's feats up to 80 Kilotons based on his own feats. This may seem better for Cass at first, but she's not fighting anybody where an advantage like this is a game changer; she's fighting a Wolverine. 

For those unaware, Laura recently gained the Adamantium Skeleton Logan has, and as a result, she is pretty much unkillable to Cass through strength alone. The only way to kill her at all is through taking her head off, attacking her brain, her heart when compared to Logan, etc. Given the Adamantium would block 80% of this however, a strength advantage is basically meaningless unless it's big enough, which this isn't. This, combined with Laura's healing, mean most of Cassandra’s attacks won't do any major damage, and on the flipside, Laura has the standard Adamantium claws, which have consistent showings of herald level attack power. So, while Cassandra can't conveniently bypass Laura's healing factor or her durability thanks to the Adamantium, Laura only really needs one good strike to finish the battle through her claws power. 

As for speed, Cassandra notably upscales from most heroes in the DC street tier game. She has the examples to prove so, and that kind of speed is FTL to nanosecond timing. The Marvel street crowd has the same exact arguments, and Laura fits in there fairly well. Conveniently, this would make Cassandra faster, but realistically, it's not that big of an advantage, if one at all. Despite her speed hype, numerous characters she should be below have kept up with her anyway, such as Batman. In the same way, despite Wolverine being portrayed as slower than most people, he still keeps up his fair share of times, and the same should be true for Laura. Thus, Cassandra is faster, but not by much, and this advantage also lessens when the Trigger Scent comes out. 

Overall, raw stats slightly lean Cassandra, but Laura's nature as a Wolverine allows her to mitigate or outright ignore these advantages, while one-shotting herself with her claws.

Arsenal & Abilities

Comparing abilities, both are fairly similar in multiple ways. They both have enhanced senses, ridiculous endurance, and other tricks along the way. The former means neither one can try any stealth tricks, while the latter means both can push through large amounts of pain. The problem for Cassandra here is that she is the only one who can't heal from damage, and only suffers over time from it. Due to Laura's healing factor, all of Cassandra's tools are basically useless to her, and none of them can stack up to her claws in any metric. Blades, bombs, gasses? Laura's dealt with them all before, through resistances or just plain not giving a shit. Anything with smoke or corrosive properties would also be hindered by Laura’s own gas mask, meant to block such distractions. In addition, while neither can pull stealth on each other, Laura possesses more means to counteract this through her suits thermal reading, meaning Cassandra can't really fool her with her suits tricks, and she can't rely on stealth for any sneak attacks in the first place.

This also comes into how Laura's healing matters. You can argue Cassandra could bypass it in a few ways, like arguing the ligaments are flesh so dismemberment and decapitation are options, or that she could simply rip out her heart like Kaine did to Wolverine once. Thus, you could argue she could do enough damage in certain ways to incapacitate Laura for a time. The problem with this is that she needs to actively figure this out, and capitalize to the best of her ability through all her tricks, whereas Laura only needs a few hits at most to kill her due to the Adamantium claws. While Adamantium skeletons have been worked around before, this requires outside knowledge or specific technology to scan for weaknesses, both of which Cassandra doesn't possess. Therefore, she has little means of figuring out exactly what is necessary to win for a time, and her means of doing so have flaws, to be blunt.

Her body reading being almost like telepathy is a rather impressive tool, don't get me wrong, but it won't help her much here. It can scan for general weaknesses, but not to such an accurate degree it will tell her how to accurately kill Laura. Due to her healing factor, any damage taken would simply force her to think continually when she should be fighting, and it's unlikely she'd find the correct way before being overwhelmed herself. This is also a problem in that it has failed against unpredictable and chaotic movements like Joker or Deathstroke, and Laura's own Trigger Scent fits that description perfectly. While she could stall Laura with pressure points and nerve attacks, this isn't a permanent solution, and Laura's own skills mean she would recognize and adapt to it.

Coming next is Cassandra's Ace in the hole: the Dimensiometer. This piece of technology can turn her intangible while still letting her attack others, and is liable to be used for BFR. The problems with both are that it has a limited charge, and can't help her with any of the other areas she fails in. BFR is an option, and Laura won't be able to attack her in this timeframe, but its own timed usage means Cassandra is on the clock once she uses it, and is also counting on Laura not adapting to it or biding her time until it wears off. Even concerning it at all, this wouldn't save her if Laura landed a good hit before she brought it out, as again, she can't actually heal from the damage, only endure it to a degree. 

So, when comparing abilities, Cassandra has her fair share of useful tools, but Laura has counters to pretty much all of it. 

Tertiary Factors

Lastly with tertiary Factors, this is where things really decide Laura's victory. Both have similar years of experience and training, ridiculous hype around their name, upscaling from others, and etc. Cassandra technically has more of these examples, and is likely more skilled in hand to hand, but it won't matter all that much given Laura's own attributes making this not much of a factor. This overall is Cassandra's main problem, and the thing that leads to Laura's own advantages. 

Cassandra not being able to heal from Laura's attacks means any injury is another step closer to her death, and the strength/skill behind Laura's claws paired with her surgical precision means any hit she'd land would be even worse for Laura despite her Dimensiometer. For example, when battling Emma Frost, she purposely sliced her body in such a fatal way that she needed to enter her Diamond form to survive. 

Against Cassandra, her shadow form won't remove any injuries, or prevent her from bleeding out and any similar effect. Its limited charge also means she can't hide forever, and Laura already counters her fake aura trick/stealth thanks to her senses and suit. Due to her healing and experience, none of Cassandra's other tools can really do anything, and all this really leaves is Cassandra exhausting her resources and options against a foe with none of those problems and likely all the time she needs to pull ahead more times than not. 

Conclusion

"I was born inside a cage. Raised inside a cage. I am here because I do not know how to live any other way. But I will learn."

Advantages:

• Adamantium skeleton/claws have her clutch AP and durability in spades; ensuring she can take and dish far more than Cass can handle

• Her Trigger Scent helps lessen the speed difference

• Healing Factor and Adamantium Skeleton makes actually killing her a chore, and one Cassandra isn't really equipped to do

• Laura's senses, gear, and healing factor counter practically all of Cassandra's options, and help her adapt to the trickier ones like the Dimensiometer

• Comparable in experience and in ways to quickly kill opponents

• Smarter than Cass outside of combat

• Pretty much perfect in every adaptation

Disadvantages:

• Physically slightly inferior

• Not as versatile in gear or applications of tech

• Vulnerable to BFR and her regeneration can be bypassed in certain ways

• Can't touch Cassandra when she goes Shadow

• Her own stealth can be countered through senses

• Likely less skilled than Cass

Overall, it's certainly an uphill battle, but Laura has precisely what she needs to prevail. While slightly inferior, her Adamantium skeleton and claws make this meaningless, and her own attacks almost always a sure hit kill. Her own power like the Trigger Scent helps her keep up, and her other powers overall counter all of Cassandra's gadgets. None of her bombs or gasses can do much, and her body reading can be worked around through the Trigger Scent or its unlikely chances of finding how to kill Laura. The Dimensiometer turns the tables a bit, but it doesn't remove Laura's advantages like countering her stealth, or heal any prior injuries. Its limited charge doesn't help either, nor does Laura's overall better chances to hang in until she gets the hits she needs. Cain was simply unable to outmatch Laura, and thus she couldn't make the cut.

The winner…is Laura Kinney, the Wolverine

Final Tally

Team Cassandra Cain (4) - Bang, Kaiser, Lunge, Spirit

Team X-23 (2) - Joe, Round 1 Fight

Special thanks to Ninja for the custom images in the Background sections, and to Flip for the custom images in the Scaling sections!