Fate, often considered to be one of the most convoluted and expansive anime to ever exist, has convoluted and expansive anime powers, I would have thought. But many people don't know just the level that this reaches and why it makes most of the most famous powerhouses in fiction actually seem like nothing in comparison.
Servants in Fate are usually based on mythological entities or concepts, brought to reality by an omnipotent wishing device known as the Holy Grail. These servants are usually capable of destroying almost entire armies on their own, changing the fate of the world, and destroying pretty much anything on it. Some of these characters reach levels of godhood and form the very foundations of humanity, wisdom, power, and many other things. Saber, being the most popular servant obviously, is the one I wanted to focus on, and while she may not seem like an extreme god-tier threat even within her own series like maybe Gilgamesh or something, she does in fact actually scale to these entities and is considered a top representative of their universe.
A big roadblock with scaling Fate or Saber, and difficulty with me explaining why Saber would absolutely destroy Goku, Superman, SpongeBob, or whoever, is that servants in Fate are heavily restricted in what they're actually allowed to do when they appear. Not necessarily in their power, even though that can be the case, but their effects on the environment or planet are limited to a level that you wouldn't see in a normal show. For instance, in Dragon Ball, when Vegeta wants to blow up the planet, he can, right? He has enough power to do it, nothing’s stopping him. Same goes with Frieza or Kaguya from Naruto or Superman from DC or Yhwach from Bleach or literally SpongeBob SquarePants with a string.
But in Fate, destroying a planet or something requires more than it would take to destroy a planet because the planet itself is actually protected by a higher entity that restricts these omnipotently born servants from impacting its fate. And it's kind of the name of the show. This is because of a phenomenon called the Counter Force, which is basically the will of the Earth itself that defends it. Good proof of this, outside the obvious I just showed on the screen, is that we actually see servants in other media, all media being basically canon for Fate. I'm not joking, the mobile game, every video game, every visual novel, anime, it's all canon. Servants from these games actually scale to the ones in the show, sometimes being even weaker or stronger, but that's just sort of a basic-level breakdown. Servants can easily destroy fortresses, mountains, and fight crazy god-like beings that can easily destroy a planet.
But Nasu, the author of the Fate-verse, goes a step beyond that into a level of bat-crazy for no reason that unironically makes Saber one of the strongest characters in all of fiction, period. Making these Fate servants become something you'd see more from a Cthulhu Eldritch deity and not an anime girl—well, some of these anime girls are actually pretty much Eldritch deities, but it’s confusing anyway.
The baseline for strong Fate scaling is usually considered to be around when a character named BB is introduced. BB is a backup AI programmed by another character named Sakura that is so powerful that it can hack into and manipulate reality itself. The way it does this is by hacking into and absorbing a construct called the Moon Cell. The Moon Cell is a supercomputer, often considered on the level of the omnipotent Holy Grails. And this supercomputer's purpose is to record all things that have ever occurred and can manipulate the laws of physics, view the past, present, and future of the universe, and even collapse dead parallel universes entirely from the multiverse.
BB then obtains all these abilities by breaking into the final barrier of this Moon Cell, which is 8th dimensional in nature. As a reminder, our universe is three- to four-dimensional, and anything beyond the fifth would view us as fiction or non-existent in comparison to it. BB not only reaches this fifth level but the 8th dimension by doing so. BB is then later defeated by the servants in Fate/Extra, which would be Saber Nero, Caster Tamamo, Archer Emiya, and Gilgamesh. Saber Nero is pretty much just a weaker red Artoria, which is later proven in Fate/Extella when Artoria is summoned into the war between Nero and Tamamo from the Moon Cell to stop them.
Even if she isn't stronger or weaker, she is at least relative enough to face these servants that possibly halted the plans of an 8th-dimensional reality-warping entity. Normally, my skepticism would then kick in here, and I would say, "What if this 8th-dimensional construct is a barrier literally made with eight separate dimensions acting as a wall rather than an 8th-dimensional mathematical concept or principle?" However, when you read all of Fate's materials, you'll begin to see that its author and the many characters do mention actual dimensional theory quite literally many times. Mania is actually in Nasu's knowledge and ability to then write these mathematical concepts without a lot of headcanon or assumptions involved. Example: the very first mention of dimensional theory is in Fate/Stay Night and Fate/Zero, which I'll show on the screen now. And these two are the first Fates ever, so Nasu has known about these theories for a long time.
Nasu is known for doing a lot of research on the history of his servants and characters as well, and Plato is literally a servant who kind of, you know, made things like Platonic concepts, etc. You get it.
Anyway, Heroic Spirits ascended the Throne of Heroes, which resides within the swirl of roots or Akasha records. And the root is basically so complex and above all else that the author believes that even describing it in any concept or terms is actually doing a disservice. He actually believes that there is no way to word it without even downplaying it. It is always just blank or beyond our comprehension entirely, beyond the concepts of space and time, beyond concepts pretty much, period. Even outside of the story, it can't be explained. So these servants then, born from it, can do crazy things, or even trying to tap into it can also do crazy things—who would have thought?
But Saber’s only purpose was not to stop the servants from fighting after BB. When she was summoned by the Moon Cell, her true purpose was to stop a being known as Safar, who's kind of like Fate's Galactus. The same servants that defeat BB could only barely scratch Safar, while Artoria as a servant is considered on a completely different level, and she simply Excaliburs Safar away in numerous timelines. Safar, in her Avatar body known as Altera, swings around the Sword of Mars, which is stated to be the embodiment of the concept of cutting, which will become important for these servants in the next point.
One thing Saber actually does that might be a little mind-blowing and potentially, it caught me off guard when I researched into it unintentionally because of how absurd it is. Do you remember when Saber fought this guy? He's kind of a nothing character, almost, right? Very overshadowed by characters like Hercules and Gilgamesh inside the Fifth Holy Grail War. But what if I told you this dude himself would probably slam any version of Goku ever thought of in existence?
This guy, with a very unique swordplay of his that Saber can counter somehow—and I don't know how she does this so don't ask—she's just that plot-amped and broken, which is what I'm trying to tell y'all. But this technique, known as the Tsubame Gaeshi, breaks the rules of reality and allows Assassin Kojiro to disregard the concepts of space and time entirely via applications of something called the Second True Magic, the multidimensional refraction phenomenon, more commonly known as the Kaleidoscope. The True Magics are different from standard magecraft, as they are only obtained by maguses who have touched the Root itself, the thing that made all things, that is beyond all things.
While fighting this Assassin, Kojiro is on such a different level that the visual novel describes Kojiro’s slashes as being beyond Saber’s ability to literally perceive attacks from the future. And I'll go into that a little bit more later in the speed part. But after he uses his true skill finally, which is beyond the concepts of space and time, she actually survives three slashes from him. He's not even trying to spare her either and is clearly slashing her on a level that should insta-kill her. That she survives, somehow. So, I don't know how to explain how she survived, but take that as you will, that is a thing that happened.
I think it's important to bring this up because if you were to say, have a Bleach character try to slash at Saber, she can survive three slashes beyond the very concepts of space and time, beyond an infinitely dimensional scale, then they would literally just never be able to do anything to her, ever. Now, like I said, I'm not sure how intentional it was for her body to remain intact from literal outer-versal slashes, but like I said, consider the following: Saber is actually suppressed during this encounter, as her sword is invisible, which nerfs her sword's power and her own, as she has to focus on the technique. But later she rematches Kojiro, and Kojiro tries to do the same three slashes again, which by the way is further confirmation that her body somehow tanked these beyond-dimension slashes from cutting through her body all the way or decapitating her. But even when she activates her sword, she is able to outspeed the attack which has already been thrown three times, or she is perceiving it now in the future even though it is beyond time. But he does swing it at least once, and she outspeeds it.
Remember, this slash is beyond the concept of speed entirely, meaning she just outsped the concept of speed. Meaning anything bound by speed might not even be able to ever touch her. How stupid is that? And this is originally because, in the visual novel, the original Kojiro was supposed to be nerfed when he used this attack. However, in the anime that Nasu approves of, there is no indication he has the same nerf, so that was probably an oversight, but kind of a nasty one.
Before we get into her speed, there's one last discussion with her attack power that has to be discussed before moving on, that being Artoria with Avalon and her battles against Gilgamesh’s Ea and his Noble Phantasm Enuma Elish. This is significant because Ea is described numerous times as being able to destroy all of creation, which is described as "the world." Now, this wouldn't include Root, as Root would be beyond the world, as the world is just Earth. That Root is clearly above, as it’s above every universe, timeline, or whatever that has Earth in it. But regardless, the short answer is that Excalibur isn’t really ever comparable to Ea without special conditions.
Excalibur only enters the pinnacle of Noble Phantasms when it's in a situation where its purpose as the Last Phantasm of the planet comes into play against an outside danger that threatens the world itself, basically making her amped by the same force that I described earlier that makes the planet able to withstand attacks from higher-dimensional servants without exploding all the time. In Fate/Stay Night, when Excalibur and Ea clash—the most famous of these clashes that make most people comment on this in general—Gilgamesh was clearly taking it easy while Artoria was desperately struggling, even calling the clash of their powers "boring" before easily eclipsing her power and then defeating her.
Artoria is only able to overcome Gilgamesh in this route by basically catching him off guard with Avalon. Another counter to Excalibur being on par with Gilgamesh is Artoria’s summoning in Fate/Extella, where she should be stronger, to stop the war between Nero and Tamamo alongside the destruction of Safar. The only other servants that are suggested to be on the same level or grade as Artoria are the other two kings from Fate/Zero, Alexander and Gilgamesh. And we see this more powerful version of Saber and more serious Gilgamesh face off once again, with the result being similar to their first fight back in Fate/Stay Night, with Gilgamesh’s victory.
In terms of her speed, Saber is capable of facing entities such as Tamamo, as previously mentioned in Extella. The same Tamamo from Extra, who has the ability to, while weaker than the version of Saber, can apparently deal with casually running backwards in time like a Looney Tunes character to train herself to beat someone she was weaker than. Tamamo basically trained for a thousand years and after regaining her power via growing back all nine of her tails, she proceeds to run back in time and just kicks the Moon Cell and shuts it down, stopping it from erasing the protagonist of the game. And even with this, Saber is considered more scary than her and is pretty much the trump card servant in Extra or Extella, outside of, like, Gilgamesh or something.
Due to this, it may be highly likely Artoria can face beings that can pretty easily just travel through time with speed. And even BB, who was able to manipulate the past, present, and future at the same time with her abilities, couldn’t negate the servants she was facing. That, alongside that Kojiro slash you can somewhat react to, apparently, that is beyond the concept of speed, kind of makes you wonder.
Now that we’ve established her stats, some unique abilities she possesses are things such as the ability to erase things from existence with her attacks, including concepts themselves—even beings that represent these concepts. The best example of this is the demon pillars from Fate/Grand Order, which are just literally living concepts, and every single servant can pretty much mess these things up. She also possesses Avalon, which is the sheath of her sword, which withholds a sixth-dimensional realm, and she can immediately transport herself to whenever she wants. That can’t be fallen into without six-dimensional or above manipulation. It also grants her insane regeneration, which can regenerate entire vital organs, like when Shirou regenerates his entire heart or when Kiritsugu gets absolutely obliterated and just comes back like nothing happened.
So she is pretty much unable to die as long as she has this Avalon. Outside of Avalon, she possesses the ability to passively absorb and take fake souls from people's bodies, kind of like a Bleach Espada, to regain her powers. So even ghosts or spirits would be susceptible to her almost infinite stamina in her presence. But she could also destroy the concepts of them to begin with. Due to her luck stat, she is able to nullify causality and even manipulate fate itself to her favor, and this is best shown with her fight versus Lancer in Stay Night.
Lancer throws his Noble Phantasm known as Gáe Bolg. This Noble Phantasm manipulates causality so that once it’s activated, you are already stabbed by it, even before it is thrown, which gives the illusion it always lands after being thrown when it has already landed. But due to Artoria's luck stat and ability to manipulate this, she can actually deflect an attack which is literally just appearing into her heart instantly somehow. This luck, alongside her instinct, pretty much always directs her to the optimal path in combat, even when things are supposed to happen no matter what.
She also shoots giant anime lasers, which is no joke. Out of everything listed here, it’s stated to be her most powerful ability, somehow stronger than the ability to erase concepts, fight on eighth-dimensional levels, fight beings that can run through time, have six-dimensional regeneration or teleportation—nope, shooting the laser is apparently stronger.
So, with all of this in mind, regarding the power of Artoria or Saber from Fate, do you guys kind of believe me now that she can pretty much take anybody in fiction? Really, only a handful of people could ever really fight her, as you would need a very niche or particular description of abilities to actually be on that level. It usually takes something, you know, like DC Comics, which has been going on for almost a hundred years, or Fate, which has so many different mediums of information, to eventually just reach such an absurd level where it says something crazy like that.
So it's not that much of a shocker, but as someone who loved these anime a while back, it was really interesting learning that she was actually capable of all that, and I was pretty surprised.
But anyways, guys, hope you enjoyed the video, and I'll see you next time.
