Alkarii wrote:Well, I assume she can't kill them, because there was that time that Bud withstood a nuclear blast. At least, I think it was nuclear...
It was nuclear, but it wasn't a traditional A-bomb-type nuclear detonation.
According to what the Nu Gui said (
here) the explosion was the result of a critical mass of nuclear material creating enough heat to bring the surrounding matrix (rock) to the point of an explosion. That is, the blast was a steam explosion triggered by a
criticality excursion. From our side of the fourth wall we know that the critical mass didn't occur naturally, but the effect was the same.
What happened was, in effect, somewhat like the explosion that
blew the roof off of the Chernobyl reactor some decades ago. Messy and dangerous, yes - an event of this sort tends to throw a lot of radioactive material around - but nowhere near the blast of an actual nuclear detonation. More like a "dirty bomb". I've seen a figure saying that the Chernobyl explosion was the equivalent of less than one ton of TNT. The smallest A-bomb yield I find mentioned was the Davy Crockett / W54 tactical warhead, which can be dialed down to a minimum of around 10 tons TNT equivalent.
As far as Bud goes, yes, she and Brandi are probably effectively invulnerable even against Castela. Bud's powerful enough to put out a shock wave that could destroy Earth and collapse the sun. I'm not sure that Castela's immunity to lightning would handle that.
Jin, on the other hand, is human-fragile these days, and Castela could almost certainly kill her without much difficulty. Heck, even Atsali could do that with one of her spin-kicks, or in her warbird morph.