Death Battle Predictions: Cole MacGrath VS Alex Mercer

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“Legends Never Die” 

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." 

-Proverb

Cole MacGrath, the bike messenger turned superhero Conduit from inFAMOUS.

Alex Mercer, the scientist turned Evolved bio-terrorist from [PROTOTYPE].

When it comes to the evolutionary chain, humans may be smart and strong and all, but beyond that, we’re nothing too impressive. We have forever been aware of our puny limits, but what would happen if the world was turned upside down by a new type of person? In a way that tested the humanity of them and those in their cities, these two schmucks found themselves in the middle of an outbreak that rewrote their genetic signatures, turning them into unlikely gods with the power and more importantly, the choice to save or destroy everything. After over a decade of demand for this nostalgic 2009 sandbox rivalry, the Patron Saint of New Marais finally meets the Prototype himself in a battle of good and evil, and it’s finally time to answer the question of which of these two incredible inhumans will win a DEATH BATTLE!

Before We Start…

What is being given to Alex should be fairly uncontroversial, as Prototype for the most part has no non-canon media nor crossovers to discuss, with the two comic lines and games being clearly canon and applicable to give to Alex. However the Prototype 2 DLC abilities are being excluded for being non-canon abilities, so not much discussion should be given there.

Cole however, is where things get a little bit more tricky. While it is fairly clear to everyone that he would not be given feats or scaling from his appearances in Street Fighter X Tekken and Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale, the more debatable aspect is the divide between the good and evil timelines and the feats and abilities that come from them.

Thanks to inFAMOUS: Second Son, it’s made clear that the good timeline is unquestionably the canon timeline. This means that things such as cryokinesis and the powers exclusive to good karma are standard to Cole… but then the question comes about applying feats or abilities that are exclusive to evil karma, both of these have very different answers.

Outside of the final mission in InFamous 2, there aren't any major story differences between good and evil karma Cole (ie: there are no missions that are exclusively in one karmic path). You can even go through the entire campaign with one karma, and then work up the opposite karma just to be able to play the opposite ending as seen below.

This would mean that it isn’t really far-fetched to assume that outside of amps specific to the good or evil karma timeline (the RFI and the absorption of The Beast respectively), they are physically identical. Especially so, considering that you can still go down the evil karma route after having absorbed cryokinesis and vice versa, meaning Kuo and Nix’s respective conduit powers don’t amplify Cole massively in a different way to each other.

Abilities however, are a different story. While technically, if you were to play through both the Good and Evil Karma routes, you’d be able to use both freely regardless of your karma in another playthrough, giving Cole both Napalm and Cryokinesis breaks the lore of the character. This is due to the fact that, in the story, Cole only uses the Power Transfer device once, and after using it he destroys the machine, with no opportunity to gain the other’s power after. Assuming Cole can use both Napalm and Cryokinesis would mean ignoring the plot of the story for the sake of attempting to try to composite without technically compositing. So no, Napalm will not be included, only Cryokinesis will as that is Cole’s canon choice.

Finally, while it isn’t completely impossible for its events to be canon, Festival of Blood and the vampiric abilities Cole acquires in it will not be considered, as regardless of the expansion’s place in canon, he loses them after Bloody Mary’s defeat. 

As a quick sidenote, we were only able to get access to the Prototype 1 and Infamous 2 guidebooks. Unfortunately we were not able to obtain the Prototype 2 and Infamous 1 guidebooks but the one we did have access will also be factored in.

Background

Cole MacGrath

“I was someone you’d never notice. Just a guy delivering packages to folks you’d never know. And then one day… a package found me.” 

An average citizen who delivered packages within Empire City, Cole MacGrath lived a relatively simple life as a delivery person. That all changed, however, when he was sent to deliver a package that would change the world, the Ray Sphere. Upon opening it up, a huge explosion engulfed a large portion of the city and Cole was at the heart of it all. The blast left many dead or injured and a plague that spread around the city leaving many ill which forced a quarantine around the city. Things looked grim for the future of Empire City, but hope remained as within Cole, a spark was taking shape. Quite literally in fact, as the resulting blast had left Cole with the power to control electricity, becoming a conduit, a new type of human with strange abilities and attributes.

Due to delivering the bomb that killed thousands of people and sent Empire City into anarchy, Cole was labeled a terrorist, and became public enemy #1. His girlfriend Trish, who had lost her sister in the blast, dumped him, leaving only his best friend Zeke in his corner. Despite all that, he ponied up and became the defender of the city. Cole utilized his new found powers to help those who are powerless to stand up against rogue conduits and opportunistic hoodlums, all while on a quest to track down the person responsible for all this.

Unfortunately, he faced many hardships, including Trish’s untimely demise. He eventually crossed paths and went toe to toe with the man who orchestrated the blast, Kessler, a deranged man who let Trish die and would push Cole and Zeke’s brotherhood to its limit, but Cole prevailed and eventually defeated Kessler. Turns out however, this is exactly what Kessler had hoped for. Kessler just so happens to be Cole himself from the future, who had time traveled to the past in order to groom Cole into a powerful being who would be strong enough to take down a being who ended the world in Kessler’s timeline, The Beast. This laid within Cole’s consciousness and even haunted him at times, but he readied himself for when that time would come.

And that day did indeed arrive. The Beast emerged from within Empire City, and Cole would battle it. He was pushed to the brink and in the end, Cole couldn’t stop it and Empire City was no more. Despite the hardships, Cole persisted and continued on quest to grow stronger in New Marais by absorbing blast cores to power the RFI, a device that would take down the Beast for good and also cure the growing plague that had spread across the world. After many battles and decisions that were thrown in Cole’s way, he found himself with enough power to use the RFI at last.

There was a catch however… it would not only stop the plague and kill the beast, but every conduit on the planet, including Cole. This was a tricky situation with not many outs. He could take the offer to join The Beast and evolve humanity to become conduits at the cost of many human sacrifices and no cure for the plague. But he ultimately couldn’t go through with a choice like that, especially with his best friend on the line. So he made a selfless decision to battle The Beast one last time and use the RFI to stop them once and for all. And just like that, the plague was cured, The Beast was gone and every conduit had succumbed to death, including Cole himself.

But he wouldn’t be forgotten as just some conduit; his best friend Zeke and the people of New Marais knew what he had done, and he would forever be known as the Patron Saint of New Marais. He was more than inFAMOUS, more than just a superpowered person with powers, he was a hero to the people and at the heart of it all, just as human as anyone else. 

Alex Mercer

“My name is Alex Mercer. I’m the reason for all of this. They call me a killer, a monster, a terrorist. I’m all of these things.”

Despite coming from a troubled upbringing, Dr. Alexander J. Mercer was a leading figure in the field of genetics, which would eventually lead to him being hired by the secretly government-funded research company Gentek. There he would be tasked with manufacturing weaponized diseases, with his greatest achievement in this undertaking coming to be known as “Blacklight”, which was not only dangerously infectious, but also possessed the ability to evolve at an unprecedented rate. Because of his contributions to the project, he eventually became a target of the elite military group Blackwatch, which was tasked with containing the spread of viruses like the one Dr. Mercer created.

To that end, they began hunting down and “silencing” anyone with any knowledge of the Blacklight Virus. Fearing for his life, Dr. Mercer took a sample of virus and attempted to flee Manhattan, but ended up being cornered at Penn Station. On that fateful day, Dr. Alexander Mercer died, but in a final act of defiance and pure unfeeling malice, he smashed the vial containing the Blacklight sample, unleashing it on New York City and causing a viral outbreak that would go on to claim millions of lives. But as fate would have it, this would not be the end of Mercer. The virus ended up infecting his corpse, and reformed it down to the last cell, leaving “it” with no memory of its past life.

Upon awakening, “Alex Mercer'' discovered that he possessed several extraordinary powers, including shapeshifting, high-level regeneration and most importantly, the ability to “consume” just about any person, gaining their form, abilities and memories in the process. His goal thus became hunting down important figures in both Gentek and Blackwatch in order to acquire their memories. In his mission, he is aided by his younger sister Dana Mercer and the pathologist Dr. Bradley Ragland, who urged him to infiltrate Gentek in order to find the answers he sought. Within one of their facilities, he would discover a woman named Elizabeth Greene, who he would later learn was the centerpiece of a viral outbreak of Blacklight’s predecessor - Redlight - in Hope, Idaho several decades ago.

Eventually, she was captured and contained by Blackwatch, becoming the basis for Gentek’s research and more specifically, for his own. In the days that followed, Alex would battle against Greene, as well as Blackwatch and the various infected that now infested Manhattan’s streets, while piecing together his origin bit by bit, victim by victim. This all culminated in him discovering a desperate plot by the military… to wipe the city from the map using a nuclear bomb - the only way to contain the infection. While Mercer managed to avert this threat by the skin of his teeth, the truth left him more confused and mortified than ever. Not only was the blood of millions on his hands, but he could no longer even call himself human. 

After all was said and done, he ventured off and spent several years traveling the world in search of meaning and worth, but all that he was left with was his gradual descent in his faith with humanity. Betrayal and ruin was all that he found, so he decided to return the favor to all of humanity. Returning to New York City, he unleashed a second Blacklight outbreak upon the city and created a group of shapeshifters, the Evolved, in order to infiltrate and sabotage both Blackwatch and Gentek. He would make a new age of evolved beings to wipe humanity off the face of the earth and rule it himself. During this time, he would encounter a man named James Heller and infect him with the Blacklight Virus, an act that transformed the soldier into a Prototype much like Mercer himself. He attempts to persuade Heller to join his cause and have his daughter be head of the new world, but James wouldn’t have his fucking weird, fucking rambling, shit.

So the two would face off in one final battle for the fate of the world, one that ultimately ended in Mercer’s defeat. Something he may have even wanted, all along. With his reign destroyed and plans ruined, Mercer was violently consumed by the vengeful Heller, leaving nothing but the fleeting memory of the [PROTOTYPE] that almost ended humanity.

Experience & Skill

Cole MacGrath

Prior to becoming a Conduit, Cole worked for most of his young adult life as a courier, delivering packages around Empire City to make ends meet. He had previously attended college, and while he came close to graduating, he dropped out in part to piss off his parents. He also learned how to climb and is naturally skilled in parkour.

Though once Cole got his powers, the experiences he went through drastically changed. Only having his powers active for about a little bit over a month at most, Cole doesn’t have that much raw time in the field. However over the course of InFamous, the InFamous comic run, and InFamous 2, Cole has fought a wide variety of foes with drastically different powers and adapted on the fly to fighting them despite how differing their powers were from who he fought before, which includes the following:

• Sasha, who is a scientist who used to work for Kessler. She also leads the Reapers who have control over the Neon District. She can control tar that could mind control people and drive them mad and could create tentacles out of tar and can fire tar missiles. Even before she could mind control people she was researching mind control techniques. 

• Alden Tate, an elderly man who had survived on the streets since he was a child and had developed powerful telekinetic abilities, who made entire pseudo mech suits out of metal to battle Cole. He also leads a group called the Dust Men, who are powerful enough to rival the Reapers. 

• Kessler, who is literally Cole MacGrath himself from the future and has the same powers as him but with some extra abilities, alongside being far more experienced and skilled with said powers. Kessler is also the leader of the First Sons and has been their leader for decades in addition he made numerous experiments involving the ray sphere. Kessler also planned the entirety of events that took place in inFAMOUS 1 until his death.

• David Warner, a super conduit who could absorb peoples neuro-electricity at a touch, could smell people on the genetic level, see through walls and had super strength enough to physically throw Cole around.

• Joseph Bertrand, a billionaire industrialist who completely rules over New Marais and the Militia. He can turn into an acidic, monster creating via infection, city block sized monster.

• Lucy Kuo, a NSA agent who has received combat training. She also has control over Cryokinesis.

• John White, AKA the Beast, who can turn into a building sized magma and rock man with fire powers, the ability to generate huge explosions, manipulate gravity and create hand sized singularities.

• Alongside various trained guerilla soldiers and various monsters created by Bertrand and forced conduits embedded with Lucy Kuo's powers.

And while he only had them for what at most could be days, Cole mastered new powers in the form of Lucy Kuo's cryokinesis in a short timeframe to use them alongside his existing Electrokinesis powers, which he’s long since mastered.

Alex Mercer

Thanks to the unique abilities granted by the Blacklight Virus, Alex is remarkably talented in a variety of fields thanks to his ability to absorb biomass allowing him to absorb the memories alongside the biomass of those he consumes. This is notable considering he’s consumed trained military soldiers and scientists. Meaning that via assimilating their own memories, Alex has decades upon decades worth of combat experience, various types of scientific knowledge, and other miscellaneous information.

He's also consumed Hunters whose natural intellect can be near-genius, With him having absorbed thousands of people, and a wide variety of expertise among them (from military soldiers to scientists to various civillains to his own evolved), it's clear that Alex can be considered a genius in raw intellect, extremely experienced, and has a variety of miscellaneous skills. He’s also had well over a year to adapt and learn about the extents of his power, and has fought a variety of bio weapons, various infected and a plethora of trained militia soldiers, giving him a fairly large array of different opponents he’s experienced fighting against such as:

• Elizabeth Greene, a being who was infected with the redlight virus. The redlight virus is capable of producing multiple viruses, many are harmless, others however could erase human civilization. She can infect civilians on a massive scale and even control them. Elizabeth is described as intellectual, calculating, patient, violent, and bloody. Even the Supreme Hunter fears her. 

• Supreme Hunter, a duplicate of Alex Mercer, the Supreme Hunter is an autonomous creature with free will and goals. Alex Mercer fought the Supreme Hunter twice and both times it’s stated that the Supreme Hunter was tougher than Alex and that Alex only won through sheer patience and skill. 

• James Heller, an elite war veteran where when he was just a human was able to kill a brawler with just a combat knife. Lust for vengeance he went on to find and kill Mercer with resilient DNA making several of Alex’s powers not a solid option. While Mercer may have lost against Heller, the fight they had was far from one sided and showed Alex can adapt to not having several of his powers be nullified by an opponent.

Equipment

Cole MacGrath

Amp

Designed by Zeke, this pronged metal rod Cole wields can channel his electrical energy for devastating close-range attacks. It’s good for stabbing, bludgeoning, and shocking the hell out of people, as well as stylin’ on them big time. The Amp allows Cole to do Finisher Attacks, Ultra Attacks (which are stronger than Finishers), and Ultra Drain, which drains electricity from enemies to replenish Cole’s own.

RFI

The Ray Field Inhibitor, often abbreviated as the RFI, is a device created by Dr. Wolfe as a means to kill The Beast and was later given to Cole. Unbeknownst to Cole, killing The Beast with the RFI would not just kill The Beast, but also kill him and every single Conduit on the planet.

While empowered by the RFI, Cole gains the following abilities:

Explosive Bolts: Rather than standard bolts, Cole instead uses explosive bolts that detonate on hit, while also massively amplifying his power. For a comparison, Cole went from a drawn out fight with his previous encounters against The Beast, to bringing him to his knees in a matter of seconds.

Situational Power Nullification and (highly specific) Death Manipulation: The RFI completely nullifies a Conduit’s abilities. However the act of nullifying the Conduit ability will eventually kill the Conduit.

Alex Mercer

Firearms

Whenever Alex had to shapeshift and hide among the military, he’d take various firearms that soldiers use. This includes pistols from police officers, assault rifles from US Marines or Blackwatch troopers, and the M249 machine gun also used by Marines and Blackwatch, the MGL grenade launcher that fires its 40 mm grenades at speeds just under 250 ft/sec using a shoulder-firing mechanism with a six-round spring-driven revolver-style magazine, that is capable of accepting most 40x46mm grenades.

And perhaps the most powerful weapon among them all, the FGM-148 Javelin missile launcher which while has the least amount of ammo (7 rockets in one launcher), not only has the highest damage of them all but also uses a pre-launch targeting system with a built in self-guidance and tracking system that homes in on the pre-designated target. The FGM uses an imaging infrared (IIR) targeting system to track its targets. 

M1 Abrams Tank

One of the first vehicles Alex learnt to ride upon absorbing marines are tanks. And in the history of Prototype, there are several kinds of tanks Alex had to use against either the military or those who were unfortunate to have a Blacklight Virus. It is a slow but insanely strong weapon. This one in particular is the M1 Abrams Tank which is equipped with a 120mm M256A1 Smoothbore Cannon firing M830 HEATFS (high Explosive Anti-Tank Fin Stabilized) rounds as its primary weapon.

During the first outbreak, it featured a 7.62mm M240 Coaxial Machine gun, and a 12.7mm M2 Browning Machine gun in a secondary weapon station located above the commander's hatch. During the Second Outbreak however, it was instead armed with a Gatling Gun mounted on the side of the turret as a secondary weapon. 

M2 Bradley Armored Personnel Carrier

Another tank Alex had to use is the M2 Bradley Armored Personnel Carrier, which is equipped with a 25mm M242 Bushmaster Autocannon that fires M792 High Explosive Incendiary with Tracer and Self Destruct (HEI-T/SD) rounds as its primary weapon, and a BGM-71 TOW ATGM (Anti-Tank Guided Missile) launcher as a secondary weapon installation.

Thermobaric Tank

At last but not least this is perhaps the most powerful tank Alex has driven. The Thermobaric Tank's Chassis is a regular M1 Abrams. However, for the purpose of containing the infection, it's been thoroughly upgraded. It features thicker armor, complete with reactive layers on the mud flaps, a dozer blade for clearing obstructions and, the most noticeable feature, two thermobaric cannons mounted on the sides of the turret.

It fires thermobaric rounds from the two launchers on either side of the tank (one at a time) that have a massive explosive radius, due to the explosion being caused by the round using oxygen from the surrounding air to create a high-temperature blast wave. These rounds move somewhat slowly, and don't hit a target immediately, but they're strong enough to compensate for their slower speed. When the rounds hit a target, the screen loses color and a huge explosion is witnessed. The Thermobaric Tank's secondary weapon is the middle M256 Smoothbore Cannon that shoots normal shells, overall explosive as hell.

AH-64 Apache

Now we are getting to the most powerful weapon in the history of Prototype. The Helicopters!!! They may seem fragile but the auto aim plus high damage of rockets allows them to destroy buildings, tanks and enemies in seconds. This single-rotor AH-64 Apache is equipped with a flexible mounted 30mm M230 Chain Gun, Hydra 70 general-purpose unguided 70 mm (2.75 in) rockets, and AGM 114 Hellfire anti-tank guided missiles. Empty, the Apache weighs nearly 11,000 lbs. It is manned by two crewmen, a pilot and a gunner. This doesn’t stop Alex from using both seats simultaneously however. 

UH-60 Blackhawk Transport Helicopter

Another type of helicopter Alex used throughout his story is the UH-60 Blackhawk Transport Helicopter. The Transport Helicopter is equipped with Hydra 70 Unguided 70mm rockets and AGM 114 Hellfire 

Air-to-Surface Missiles. Just like AH-64 it is capable of easily destroying buildings, enemies and tanks.

The Parasite 

Created by Gentek with the help of Karen Parker, the parasite is a pathogen intended to cure the blacklight virus. Mercer was successfully injected with the parasite however with the help of Doctor Ragland, Alex was cured of the parasite. Mercer later used this against Elizabeth Greene.

Once successfully injected the parasite does the following:

Disease and Biological Manipulation: The Parasite was able to nullify Mercer’s shapeshifting abilities. Mercer also described it as a weaponized cancer that was eating him from the inside out.

Abilities 

Cole MacGrath

Acrobatics

Even prior to the explosion, Cole exhibited remarkable agility. He can effortlessly balance himself on poles and telephone wires. Most impressively, during his battle with Alden Tate, he demonstrated unparalleled prowess in agility by scaling a collapsing bridge's arches obscured in fog while simultaneously fighting the Dust Men. 

Conduit Physiology

Cole is what is known as a Prime Conduit, pretty much a marvel mutant the best form a conduit can be. He is far more physically capable than any regular human, his biology has been altered, and he is granted numerous supernatural abilities from his conduit gene.

As such he gains the following abilities:

Longevity: Kessler, Cole’s future self, is over a century old. In addition Kessler appeared to be a young man when Alden was a mere child; It is later revealed that at the time inFAMOUS 1 takes place Alden is still alive and is an old, grizzled man and Kessler is also still alive, albeit much older. It is also revealed that there are conduits currently living that have been around since the Salem witch trials. 

Regeneration: Can regenerate from gunshot wounds, such as automatic turrets, assault rifles, and magnums. Can regenerate from explosions, such as rocket launchers. Cole can also increase the speed of his regeneration via absorbing electricity.

Electricity Manipulation, Energy Manipulation, Magnetism Manipulation, Heat Manipulation, and Paralysis Inducement: And finally Cole main ability as a conduit. The ability to create and manipulate electricity. Cole passively creates electricity around his body which can become lethal. Cole can also become overcharged with electricity. Cole lightning is shown to be able to burn The Beast; The Beast can resist the temperatures of a nuclear bomb. Cole lightning/ionic storm is so hot it can leave scorches on streets. Cole can also paralyze his opponents with his electricity. Kessler, his future self, can also do the same. Cole can even paralyze The Beast, who is made out of rock and lava/magma. Some of Cole's lightning abilities are identified as bursts of energy. 

Resistances to Radiation Manipulation and Deconstruction: Survived the initial blast from the Ray Sphere, and wasn’t infected by the Ray Field Plague across both games which was created from the same Ray Sphere. The plague itself is stated to be radiation poisoning. Was in the epicenter of the Ray Sphere Blast. Which can deconstruct people on the atomic level. 

Electrokinesis

Cole’s Conduit ability is the control over and generation of electricity. Over the course of his journey, he became much more powerful and versatile, allowing him to manifest this superpower in unimaginable ways. 

Bolts

Lightning Bolt: Introduced in inFAMOUS 1, the Lightning Bolt fires a standard electric projectile but can be upgraded. Every time Cole manages to hit an opponent with this bolt, energy is restored. His health is also restored if he manages to strike it at an opponent's head. The Lightning Bolt can also cause a chain reaction between enemies although this only happens if they’re struck in the head.

Alpha Bolt: Replaces the Lightning Bolt in inFAMOUS 2. It is a standard electric projectile that is easy to fire and can string together for a long series of electric shots. 

Pincer Bolt: Shoots out 3 homing bolts in a single blast.

Artillery Bolt: Shoots out a slower, stronger bolt.

Magnum Bolt: One of the most powerful bolts available to Cole, but it is also one of the slowest.

Bolt Stream: Shoots out weak bolts that can home on targets and the rate of fire is increased, creating an automatic weapon of sorts. 

Megawatt Hammer/Rockets

Megawatt Hammer: A rocket-like electrical blast. Deals splash damage. Enemies caught in the blast will be knocked upwards and fall slower, in addition this blast can hit multiple enemies at once. 

Alpha Rocket: Explodes on contact with anything. It can electrify targets and can cause a chain reaction between enemies. 

Redirect Rocket: This rocket can be used as a standard rocket or as a homing rocket. For it to home on a target Cole must hit an enemy with a bolt attack while the redirect rocket is mid-flight. 

Sticky Rocket: Splits into three smaller rockets that home in on and stick to a target before detonating.

Overload Burst

The Overload Burst is a powerful lightning bolt that chains off conductive surfaces, striking anyone near a metal object.

Electromagnetism

Shockwaves/Blasts

Shockwave: An electric shockwave that can push away enemies and objects. If anyone is caught in this shockwave they will float in the air in slow-motion.

Lightning Hook: This blast power is different from the others. It sends an electromagnetic hook that pulls enemies and objects close to Cole. Think like Iku’s thunder ribbons.

Alpha Blast: Standard electric shockwave that pushes away enemies and objects.

Sniper Blast: More precise, but less devastating.

Detonation Blast: Instead of a shockwave, this is a condensed ball of kinetic energy that can stick to surfaces and enemies. It can be detonated afterwards for a strong explosion, or alternatively used as a boost upwards.

Graviton Blast: Stronger kick that keeps those affected stuck floating in the air temporarily. 

Grenades

Shock Grenade: A ball of electromagnetic energy that explodes. It can stick to people and objects. It can even restrain enemies. 

Alpha Grenade: Electromagnetic energy condensed and lobbed that explodes after a period of time.

Sticky Grenade: Sticks to any surface before exploding.

Electrocution Grenade: More volatile, electrocuting anything nearby. Can be re-absorbed for energy.

Stalker Grenade: Doesn’t go particularly far, but will hunt down any nearby enemies before it explodes. 

Cluster Grenade: The best variant by far, it turns into several smaller grenades that are just as powerful. Excellent for crowd control and maximum damage.

Electric Drain

While Cole’s energy is limited, he can easily recharge it by running to a nearby power source and directly siphoning electricity from it. Plus, this also can heal Cole from any wound he receives. While it takes a bit to drain at first, upgrading it allows for a much faster drain speed. Various power sources Cole is capable of draining include street lamps, telephone booths, cars, generators and even storms.

Kinetic Pulse

Cole can magnetize objects to levitate them, and can follow this up by hurling them violently. It also has a pretty cool infinite height glitch!

Polarity Wall

This power lets Cole create an electromagnetic force field that acts as a shield from attacks, and can also convert fired bullets into energy to use for himself. Although, this shield isn’t impenetrable, seeing as it can’t protect Cole from rocket launchers. 

Lightning Tether

An electrokinetic rope that pulls Cole toward whatever it latches onto. Useful for reaching areas faster and for making a quick escape. 

Gigawatt Blades

Cole forms a pair of blades from his arms using his currents to attack foes with. It can also take the form of a singular larger blade from one of his arms instead. The blades themselves allow Cole to dismember opponents if need be. This was initially just a DLC ability in Infamous 1, but Cole has been shown using it in the comics from the scan above.

Radar Pulse

The Radar Pulse detects electricity in objects and even organisms. Thanks to Radar Pulse, Cole is able to detect nearby energy sources, enemies and blast shards (very useful if you want to 100% the games). Shapeshifting is ineffective against it, as Cole was able to sense an enemy through their disguise in a sidequest. Radar Pulse can differentiate someone from friend or foe. In inFAMOUS 2 it got an upgrade, allowing Cole to see diseases within other people such as the Ray Sphere Plague. 

Static Thrusters

Whether traversing buildings or breaking a fall, Cole can use his static thrusters to slow down his descent to allow for more precise mobility. In Infamous 2, he gains an upgraded version of this ability where it also slightly propels him into the air. Cole can also pair this when grinding on rails, cables and so on to get around faster.

Induction Grind

Should Cole get on a power line or train track, he can use the electromagnetic forces underneath to zoom himself forward at impressive speeds fast enough to outpace a train. He can attack while using this ability plus this will completely recharge him of his electricity and heal any injuries he has received.

Induction Launch

The ability allows Cole to reach higher places via cars and electrified poles. He can even perform this via a detonation blast before it explodes. 

Thunder Drop

Allowing for both style and good damage, Cole can drop from above and unleash a large, electrical burst upon crashing down. It is good for crowd control and anyone who is caught in the blast will be electrified. 

Precision

Whenever an enemy’s difficult to hit, Cole is able to slow down time to better target his foes. While using precision, Cole can launch a precise bolt at any unfortunate targets. It also increases the range of his lightning bolt, and Cole can upgrade this once to increase the time dilation.

Arc Restraint

If Cole finds a downed enemy, he can lock them in place with Arc Restraint, where he manufactures his own electricity into bands to hold the foe down.

Pulse Heal

So long as they’re alive, Cole can aid any injured citizen across his missions. By using his hands and shocking his target similar to a defibrillator, Cole can restore citizens back to their feat. Although pulse heal can’t save the severely wounded seeing as he couldn’t save Trish with it. In Infamous 2, he can use an upgraded version of this move which sends a short pulse from a healed civilian that also restores any injured people nearby. Though should note that he has never used this ability on himself. 

Bio Leech

An action that allows Cole to drain the bioelectric energy of another person. This allows Cole to replenish his energy reserves, but results in the death of the victim. This does give Cole evil karma, but this is a move he can use regardless of his karma rank. Despite this ability being an evil karma associate, Cole has shown to use it in the comics. 

Cryokinesis

Lucy Kuo, a rather unlucky conduit, was injected with a substance that gave her cryokinetic powers. Kuo’s powers had also been grafted onto other people by way of a Power Transfer Device. So when Cole eventually allied with her and they got access to it, he made the decision to add some frosty abilities to his own arsenal.

As such he gains the following abilities:

Ice Manipulation and Low Temperature: Cole now has the ability to create and manipulate ice and cold. This ability can even work on Lucy Kuo and forced conduits who are resistant to ice manipulation and low temperatures. Even before obtaining his cryokinesis abilities he was able to flash freeze anyone who was unfortunate enough to be caught in an ‘ice cloud’. Some of Cole ice abilities can reach sub-zero temperatures. 

With these abilities he can do the following

Shatter Blast - Creates a collection of ice spikes that blasts at the target. 

Ice Grenade - Creates a cluster of ice spikes upon detonation. 

Freeze Rocket - A ball of sub zero gas that instantly freezes a target on contact and leaves them as a fragile, frozen shell. 

Ice Launch - Launches Cole into the air via an ice stalagmite beneath him

Frost Shield - So guys like, what if we had Polarity Wall… but as an ice ability instead?

Lightning/Ionic Storm

Undoubtedly Cole’s most powerful attack, seeing as he used it to finish off Kessler and The Beast. He calls upon a storm accompanied by a massive lightning bolt from the heavens to rain down and obliterate anyone and anything unlucky enough to be caught in the blast. This move is pretty much an instant win in most situations.

Ionic Vortex

Cole shoots out a giant electrically charged vortex that sweeps up the surrounding environment and electrocutes victims, a devastating area-of-effect attack that’s almost impossible to escape.

Ionic Freeze

With his added powers of cryokinesis, Cole can violently launch forward a wave of large icicles, freezing anyone in its path solid. Luckily this doesn’t include civilians, as Ionic Freeze will only affect enemies, somehow.

Karmic Overload

Upon reaching the maximum level of good (or bad) karma, Cole can temporarily enter a state which grants him infinite energy for about 10 seconds. While useful in a pinch, using it causes Cole’s karma meter to decrease immediately afterwards, preventing him from maintaining this state indefinitely. 

Miscellaneous

Telepathy: After touching a dead woman's skull he saw images detailing what actions took to get to this place and saw an “echo” of someone running away. 

Non-Physical Interaction: Cole can not only just interact with illusions/images but defeat illusions/images such as ones created by Sasha and Kessler. 

Technology Manipulation: Over through his journey Cole has been able to manipulate vehicles, surveillance devices, street lamps, transformers, and satellites.

Hand-to-Hand Combatant: Despite Cole much preferring to use his electrokinesis on opponents he is no stranger to utilizing H2H. 

Resistances

Electricity, Energy, and Heat Manipulation: As Cole is able to absorb and manipulate electricity, he naturally has a strong resistance to it. When his powers were first awakened, he was struck by a powerful electric shock from a damaged generator - one that he even noted should’ve killed him - yet suffered no damage whatsoever. In inFAMOUS 2, he is even able to casually draw power from natural lightning. There does however appear to be a limit to how much electricity Cole is able to withstand, as he is able to be harmed by Kessler’s electric blasts and can likewise damage his future self with his own attacks. Cole has been shown many times he can shrug off the intense heat and energy of lightning as shown with his battle with Kessler.

Mind, Madness, Disease, and Biological Manipulation: While Cole was at first affected by Sasha’s tar, later over his journey he showed some resistance to the effects. Resist the effects of Sasha’s tar, a mind control agent. Sasha tar can also drive people mad and turn normal civilians into zombie-like creatures. When someone is infected with tar their body goes under drastic changes such as the body being filled with tar and the ability to spit tar. 

Ice Manipulation, Fire Manipulation, and Low Temperatures: Can survive attacks from Kuo and other ice conduits without being frozen, despite their ice properties. Can survive attacks from Nyx, who uses Napalm abilities.

Acid Manipulation: Resists the acidic projectiles from Bertrand. 

Matter Manipulation: Resists The Beast’s black hole. It has been shown that The Beast’s black hole can break down matter. 

Absorption: Kessler couldn’t absorb his neuro-electricity.

Limited Power Nullification and Power Absorption: Was able to resist the nullification ability and absorbing ability of The Beast for a short period of time. 

Alex Mercer

Blacklight Physiology

Alex Mercer isn’t Alex Mercer, but rather, the Blacklight Virus Itself. The actual Alex Mercer died upon unleashing the Blacklight virus prior to the events of the first Prototype, and the virus manifested using his identity afterwards. This ended up giving Alex a variety of abilities and powers. Seeing as Alex is the peak of the Blacklight virus and having far more experience and time to evolve then any other Evolved. It’s fair to assume he should logically be capable of replicating powers that any other infected are capable of using.

Alex’s main abilities:

Biomass Manipulation: Just like how Cole’ main ability is to create and manipulate electrokinesis, Alex’ equivalent is to create and manipulate biomass. He can control it on a genetic level and can also manipulate tissue. In addition, he can manipulate it down to its molecular structure and convert it into whatever he wants it to be at the moment, seeing as he has full control over his own body.

Adaptation and Reactive Evolution: Alex’s physiology is constantly growing and changing like the virus that makes up his body, he’s adapted an immunity to Bloodtox, which was made to target the infection, and after adapting to it, had their own physiology such as their blade and armor massively improve. Stated to have nearly limitless potential. Which is also noteworthy considering how Elizabeth Greene was seen as an evolutionary incarnate. 

Regeneration: Alex has been shot in the head, had his arm severed, and most impressively was reduced to a pile of blood(which is consistent with the Supreme Hunter, a copy of Alex, doing the same) and was regardless able to regenerate. Do note however, that consuming biomass does not increase the potency of his regeneration, but rather the speed of his regeneration.

Immortality: Is stated to be effectively immortal. Can operate with a large hole in his head. Is comparable to the Supreme Hunter as the Supreme Hunter is an imperfect copy of Alex; The Supreme Hunter is also stated to be immortal and can operate while just being a puddle. Absorbed Elizabeth Greene; Elizabeth is stated to be un-aging. Isn’t bound by life or death. 

Self-Sustenance: Comparable to Elizabeth Greene and absorbed her. Absorbed Elizabeth Greene; Elizabeth can stay in the exact same position for thirty nine years with no indication that she has consumed or was given any water, food, or any other nutrients. 

Shapeshifting: His body is in itself a weapon. Every potion of his body is under his control; he also is able to instantly mix the best of any creature into a single super-effective form. His shapeshifting prowess should be comparable to the Supreme Hunter, who was able to fool Alex with his shapeshifting. Alex can transform into an absorbed victim of his. Notably, this also provides him with the victim’s memories, making his disguises more effective by allowing him to perfectly pose as anyone. Alex rebuilds himself on a cellular level and can reconfigure his molecular structure to become something else. Is stated to be a security nightmare. 

Absorption and Biological Manipulation: Via brutally dismembering and absorbing a victims biomass, Alex’s absorption grants him new abilities, skills, and can even restore his health, alongside allowing him to absorb the memories of his victims. Absorbing more biomass makes him stronger as well. His absorption can even ignore regeneration seeing as he can absorb the Evolved, who have comparable regeneration to his own. Another important thing to note is that this is more impressive than it seems because the Evolved should inherently resist absorption. Alex was able to absorb a Leader Hunter who is resistant to absorption. As a result, Alex should have gained the ability to resist absorption himself, which he later shared with the Evolved. As such this heavily implies that Alex absorption can ignore those who resist absorption. It's probable that Mercer's biological manipulation can also completely ignore durability, evident as he was almost able to absorb (via biological manipulation) Heller without causing significant damage to him. Mercer's failed attempt to absorb Heller can be attributed to Heller's resistance to absorption, surpassing that of others.

Transmutation: One of the more surprising abilities of the infected usage of the Blacklight virus is its consistent ability to transmute biomass, such as turning living people into bio-bombs, creating electronics to communicate and call in artillery strikes and clothes to use and wear, or in the very weird case of Elizabeth Greene, shoot out boulders from pure biomass?

Blacklight Virus

Considering he is the blacklight virus it would make sense that he would be able to wield it as a weapon. Stated to be as old as life on Earth, the Blacklight Virus is a symbiote an extremely potent disease that was the catalyst for the events of pretty much all of Prototype. The creator of the infected, the source behind Alex’s powers, it's highly dangerous, highly contagious, and highly lethal. 

Accelerated Development: The Blacklight virus is stated to be producing over hundreds of different strands on a daily basis, and rapidly grew resistant towards Bloodtox, which was designed to target it.

Disease and Madness Manipulation: Seeing as the Blacklight Virus is, well, a Virus. It shouldn’t be that surprising that it's a highly dangerous pathogen, especially seeing as it can drive those infected mad. The Blacklight virus can infect organisms through various means such as physical contact, bodily fluid contact, and injection. It can even bypass filters. Those infected with the virus have a 99.9% rate of dying from organ failure and cell saturation. Like Alex said himself, “One Virus, Three Weeks, Millions Dead”

Mind Manipulation/Hive Mind/Telepathy: Those with the blacklight virus infected in them have a hive-mind for communication. Which Alex can control.

Sensory Powers

Infected Vision: Allows Alex to pick out hostiles, as well as allowing him to detect symptomless carriers of the Blacklight Virus.

Thermal Vision: Allows Alex to detect hostiles past obstructions like walls, smoke and clouds of Bloodtox. The visual range of Thermal Vision is however limited to a certain range.

Hunting: Sends out a viral sonar pulse intended to detect a specific target, before rallying it back to allow him to pinpoint his prey. This can work even if the individual is far away.

Superhuman Hearing: Throughout his adventures Alex has shown extraordinary Hearing skills, like hearing a Hunter from inside an apartment or hearing a slight sound of someone moving in snow while sleeping inside a cabin several meters away.

Claws

Grows four razor-sharp talons on either hand, which are effective in slicing apart human enemies. With this ability he can slice, cleave, and slash on the move.

Ground Spike

Alex channels a large amount of biomass into the ground and causes several enormous spikes to erupt from the ground, which can be used to impale several enemies from long range. Is most commonly used with the claws equipped, but is not exclusive to them. Prototype 2 has a different variation of this attack, where Mercer launches a wave of short spikes towards his target instead.

Blade

Forms a long, double-ended blade on Alex’s right arm, which much like the claws, is used for close-quarters combat. It is much more powerful than the claws and can cut through vehicles, as well as powerful Infected enemies like brawlers with relative ease. He can slice and dice from the air and unleash a series of slashing attacks from a standing star. 

Whipfist

Transforms Alex’s arm into a long, whip-like weapon with a jagged blade at the end, which provides him with extended range. Can also be used to pull enemies towards Alex or alternatively, to latch onto them and allow Alex to pull himself to them. 

Hammerfists

Alex can shift a large amount of biomass into his fists in order to create large, hammer-like bludgeoning weapons. While much slower than his other melee weapons, they are strong enough to smash through armored vehicles like tanks and APCs with only a few strikes. Hammerfists can also erupt a series of spikes either around or in front of it, providing some versatility in range. Alex can also fling himself upward with one of his hammerfists, which can be useful for airborne foes or closing large gaps (and also looks pretty funny).

Glide

As the name suggests, Alex is able to glide through the air at great speeds, by using own blood to move his body, allowing him to cover a lot of ground fairly quickly. While in the air he can perform a move called the air dash. The air dash is useful for avoiding projectiles, getting extra distance or changing your trajectory mid-flight.

Musclemass

This ability boosts Alex’s physical strength immensely as well as enhances his combat speed. Not only does this increase the power of his physical attacks across the board, but also increases the damage done by thrown objects, which will fly further and faster while Musclemass is active. Although initially it provides a twofold increase, it can be upgraded twice with each upgrade "greatly boosting its power".

Shield

By shifting a large amount of biomass into his left arm, Alex is able to form a nigh-impenetrable shield which protects him from all manner of attacks and nullifies all damage he would’ve taken from it. When sprinting, it doubles as a sort of battering ram when Alex puts it out in front of him, allowing him to plow through obstacles with ease. If it takes enough damage, the shield will shatter and will need time to regenerate before it's available for use again. Strong enough attacks, such as an RPG rocket, can shatter the shield in a single blow. 

Armor

Alex coats his body in a dense layer of biomass, which reduces the amount of damage he takes from all attacks. Unlike the shield, which only protects Alex from frontal damage, the armor protects Alex from attacks from all sides and can remain on indefinitely. However, it should be noted it does not completely nullify damage - only reduces it. The added density also severely limits Alex’s mobility, preventing him from gliding, dive-rolling, wall-running and even vaulting over objects until it is dispelled (But that might just be a gameplay limitation).

Elizabeth Greene Powers

While we never see him use these, Alex’s consumption of Elizabeth Greene means he theoretically should be capable of all of the abilities we see her perform.

Host Form: Takes form of a large, flesh worm that appears from the ground, alongside having two giant tendrils next to it to fend off any attackers.

Infection Wave: Unleashes a giant wave of ‘infectious energy’ around it to push back anybody up close and as the name implies, contains the infection of the virus.

Energy Orb: Sends orbs of energy flying at targets. It can absorb the "Life Energy" from the target upon contact.

Boulder Spittle/Telekinesis (?): Shoots out boulders (somehow) despite the creature not having any visible space present in its mouth for the boulders to travel, provides another way to pressure ranged foes.

Other Abilities

There are a handful of abilities that are never directly performed by Alex, but can be performed by other Infected like him, specifically James Heller. Given that he was the one who gave Heller his powers, it stands to reason that Alex possesses these abilities as well.

Tendrils: Using what is quite literally a fist full of tendrils, they’re able to deal solid damage to foes, but more importantly, can also ensnare enemies and rip them apart.

Tendril Black Hole: After a target has been ensnared by the tendrils, additional ones will shoot out from their position and ensnare nearby targets and objects before pulling them back towards the epicenter.

Biobomb: An organic explosive of sorts is implanted into the victim, which will eventually cause several massive tentacles to burst out of their body; it resembles the “Tendril Barrage” Devastator in appearance and function.

Pack Hunter: Used to summon lesser infected to aid in combat. While Alex does use a variation of this ability in his boss fight, which he uses to summon infected birds called Flyers, Heller and other Evolved utilize it to summon Brawlers, Hydras and Juggernauts. This suggests that Alex would also be able to summon them and perhaps other types of infected as well.

Miscellaneous Moves

Alongside his main weapons, Mercer can also learn a variety of unique moves that he can pull in a pinch, or if he feels like styling on a foe. This will only include notable moves, as a good chunk of them are simply just stronger punches, kicks or throws.

Air Stomp: Comes crashing down from the air slamming his foot down, slamming the ground around him.

Cannonball: While airborne, Mercer curls into a ball and launches himself at his target and any unfortunate civilians nearby.

Bulletdive Drop: Perfect for bombing foes, Mercer can cancel his glide and charge straight downwards, crashing into the ground.

Groundshatter: After charging, slams his fists into the ground for a small AOE attack.

Knuckle Shockwave: Slams his hands together to create a small shockwave around him.

Curb Stomp: Steps in loser.

Palm Slam: Holds back and then releases both hands to unleash a short, yet powerful shockwave in front of him that can launch enemies quite far.

Powerbomb: By far the most stylish, Mercer, using a grabbed target, slams himself and them into the ground that launches both into the air.

Body Surf: Mercer can dive kick onto a person and surf along them like a surfboard before kicking them afar.

Critical Mass 

In essence, Critical Mass represents any excess biomass Alex has absorbed, which allows him to take extra damage and perform powerful attacks known as Devastators.

Adrenaline Surge

When Alex is at low health, he can use his excess biomass to gain a moment of invulnerability and a single free devastator attack.

Devastators

By far Mercer’s most powerful attacks. After a short delay, Alex Mercer is able to exert his biomass for a variety of lethal, wide area of effect moves that will tear his enemies to shreds.

Tendril Barrage: Launches a massive set of tendrils in every direction, piercing anybody unlucky enough to be in its range.

Groundspike Graveyard: Erupts a massive field of spikes around Alex that impales his foes Vlad-style.

Critical Pain: While sacrificing area of effect, Alex instead focuses a lethal tendril barrage onto a single enemy, dealing gigantic amounts of damage.

Biomass Expulsion: Similar to the Tendril Barrage, but instead launches any foes near enough in the air before following up with his tendril barrage.

Resistances

Limited Heat and Radiation Manipulation: After having survived the Nuclear Explosion that almost killed him, with how the Blacklight Virus’s adaptation works, Alex should become somewhat resistant to both high temperatures and radiation by now, but to what extent is unknown.

Limited Low Temperatures: Alex has traversed the cold North American tundras unphased, considering how his clothes are a part of his body. This basically means he did the equivalent of walking around in tundras naked.

Limited Electricity Manipulation: After having been battered with a stun baton by Specialist Cross for an entire fight, with how the Blacklight Virus’s adaptation works, Alex should become somewhat resistant to electricity by now, but to what extent is unknown.

Disease Manipulation: The Blacklight Virus has potential to cure all ailments known to man.

Poison and Biological Manipulation: Adapted to and fought off Bloodtox, which is a poison that damages normal biological processes within infected, induces necrosis in infected flesh and breaks them down.

Life and Death Manipulation: Alex Mercer himself states that he isn’t bound by “life” or “death”. A doctor states that he isn’t sure if the classification of life or death fit Alex anymore. 

Mind Manipulation: Despite being infected with the Blacklight virus, wasn’t controlled by Elizabeth Greene, who was controlling the hivemind of the infected.

Limited Absorption: Having consumed and assimilated the abilities of Leader Hunters, who demonstrated temporary resistance to Alex's absorption, he should acquire their abilities. In addition he should be comparable to Heller, who resisted his absorption.

Possibly Soul Manipulation: Viruses should theoretically lack souls, suggesting that Alex should remain unaffected by soul manipulation, as he would not possess one.

Forms

Alex Mercer

Evolved Form

After betraying his creations, The Evolved, he absorbed all of their biomass in which Alex gained a massive powerboost. This form increases his strength and speed by at least 8 times (as 8 evolved were absorbed) and gives him plenty of biomass to keep on fighting even after getting his limbs ripped off from his body.

Feats

Cole MacGrath

Overall

• Was titled the Demon of Empire City, but later became the Patron Saint of New Marais

• Fought his way through the military, the militia, the Reapers, and the Dust Men

• Helped rebuild Empire City

• Mastered Electrokinesis and Cryokinesis powers.

• Defeated Sasha, Alden Tate, Kessler, Bertrand, Lucy Kuo, and Bloody Mary

• Killed the Beast

• Finished off David Warner, a super Conduit that fed on neuro-electricity

• Guest starred in Street Fighter X Tekken (of all games)

• Is very InFamous

Power

• Can causally charge car batteries

• Destroyed a regular helicopter destroyed

• Overpowered a Devourer 

• Destroyed the Fremont Bridge

• Can turn bullets into energy with Polarity Wall (85.9 kilotons - 14.7 megatons)

• Was able to damage and destroy the Ray Sphere

• The Ray Sphere can tank its own explosions (135.8 kilotons - 5.7 megatons)

• With a lightning bolt, sank the USS George Washington (4.76 megatons)

• Can create tornadoes with Ionic Vortex

• Can generate ice pillars and large waves of ice spikes with cryokinesis

• Blew off half of the Beast's head with an Ionic Storm; the Beast previously survived a nuke to the face practically unfazed, a nuke directly stated to be 51 kilotons of TNT

• Ionic storm creates, well, storms (1.6 - 34.4 megatons)

• All of his energy was enough to charge the RFI

Speed

• Regular bullet timer

• Intercepted and deflected a rocket

• Reacts to mini-gun fire from a helicopter

• Can move in tandem with Kessler’s lightning attacks (Mach 206)

• With his Static Thrusters, resisted the pull of the Beasts Singularity

• Moved in tandem with beams from the RFI, a radiation-based source, so they likely move at the speed of light (51% SoL) (This only happens in the Evil Karma storyline, but nothing at this point suggests he should be faster than his canon counterpart by any capacity)

Durability

• According to Zeke, he survived being run over by a truck with only a few bruises; this happened even before his Conduit powers awakened

• Can survive being hit by speeding trains in gameplay

• Gets a helicopter’s gas tank thrown at him and manages to walk off the resulting explosion (Karma dependent)

• Got thrown into a building that was subsequently obliterated by a missile and managed to survive, although he was knocked unconscious in the process

• Gets hit by a large piece of flaming wreckage thrown by the Beast and is only momentarily dazed

• Smacked by a helicopter leg

• Jumped out a 6th story window and was no worse for wear

• Survived a blast from a mortar round without a scratch

• Survives a shotgun blast at point-blank range

• Can survive against The Beast (as shown above). In addition The Beast himself confirmed he was ‘bloodlusted’ when he fought Cole. 

• Survived the Ray Sphere Explosion at literal ground zero (he was holding it) (135.8 kilotons - 5.7  megatons)

• Has been electrocuted (Kessler), burned (Nix), blasted with ice (Kuo), bombarded with acid (Betrand), tar (Sasha), been shot (general gunfire) and so on and walked it off

Alex Mercer

Overall

• Was humbled by Elizabath Greene but then ended up humbling her

• Defeated the Supreme Hunter, twice

• Fought his way through Blackwatch and the infected

• Released the Blacklight virus, twice 

• Created the Blacklight virus

• Tainted the Whitelight with the Blacklight virus

• Became leader of the infected

• Created and lead the evolved

• Killed and consumed thousands of people

• Manhandled James Heller

• Is THE Prototype

Power

• Can throw cars dozens of feet into the air casually

• Can slash, rip, punch, pretty much use any of their powers to turn regular humans into gibs

• Can physically destroy buildings, tanks, and helicopters

• Can punch through a two foot steel door (771 Kilojoules)

• Destroyed a Hive base by crashing into it (55.5 Tons)

• Effortlessly tossed a tank into the air with one hand

• Can yank helicopters around with the Whipfist

• Drop Kicked a Helicopter so hard it smashed through a chimney

• By just transforming, messes with the clouds across Manhattan (102.5 kilotons) (Debatable)

Speed

• Blocked gunfire from an M1 Abrams (Mach 9.5)

• Dodged a rocket launcher

• Has evaded turret fire multiple times

• Moved so fast a helicopter pilot can’t see him

• Blocked a grenade launcher round from relatively close range

• Can run so fast he can run up walls

• Other evolved have generated sonic booms

• Can process the entire memories of those he consumes in short timeframes (0.01c - 0.66c)

Durability

• Casually tanked a grenade (as seen above)

• Can survive Tank Fire

• Shrugged off his apartment exploding

• Survived a military base exploding (76.3 - 352.86 tons)

• Barely survived a nuclear explosion from the Manhattan bomb, which was estimated to be 5x that of the Little Boy Bomb dropped on Hiroshima

• However, if looking at the nuclear projections in game, the bomb would be worth 8.2 megatons; however, a higher end is also possible while taking into account that Captain Cross (Supreme Hunter in disguise) stated that the bomb will glass all of manhattan (0.44 tons for what Alex survived, curse you surface area) (Debatable)

Scaling

Cole MacGrath

Various Conduits

Cole is pretty commonly regarded as one of the strongest conduits in the world, and having defeated or fought on par with almost every Prime Conduit within the time he was alive, it wouldn’t be farfetched to say Cole would be comparable to any conduit, be it Prime or Forced, that was around while he was alive.

• Kuo can make giant ice pillars

• Alden can flick buses several stories

• Sasha can dodge bullets

• David Warner could survive RPG blasts

Kessler

The literal future version of Cole MacGrath comes back from the future to try to change the course of history, and despite being younger, less experienced, and Kessler supposedly being twice as powerful, Cole still manages to fight on par and even kill Kessler. So being comparable to him is far from something hard to believe.

• Kessler’s punches created shockwaves (15.3 kilotons - 15.33 megatons) 

• Kessler is able to teleport from one building to another in the blink of an eye

• Kessler can flash step in tandem with Cole’s lightning

• Kessler was stated of being capable of being able to defeating his timeline’s Beast in the Beasts early days

Joseph Bertrand III

The creator of the Corrupted that plagued New Marais, this sly businessman sought to commit Conduit genocide but was stopped by Cole. He also posed as the Behemoth, a gigantic Corrupted monster that Cole and his allies were able to finally take down. Having fought him in his Behemoth state twice and bringing him down the second time, Cole would naturally scale to him.

• Survived his own ray sphere explosion

• Is the size of a building while in Behemoth form

The Beast

The bringer of the Ray Sphere Plague, the reason Kessler had to go back in time, and the greatest foe Cole has ever fought. The Beast has some absurd feats, and the fact that in their first encounter, were it not for the Beast’s ability to put itself back together, would be considered dead even seeing as Cole blew half the Beast's face off and forced the Beast in Cole’s own words ‘put itself back together’ means that while Cole needed the blast cores to get back to the level of strength he had prior due to the Beast draining him, at his peak he should be comparable enough to the level of power the Beast is packing. And this is not taking into account the fact that once Cole was amplified by the RFI, he quite literally took the Beast down in less then a minute without so much as a scratch on him.

• The Beast was able to survive a nuke aimed directly at him (51 kilotons)

• Specifically, the Beast absorbed the energy of it, and was staggered rather then was destroyed after being hit by it

• Destroyed Empire City in a single blast (546.6 megatons)

• Moved a massive array of clouds when he first formed (6.02 megatons - 1.88 gigatons)

• Casually collapses buildings and sends buses flying when they first formed

Infamous: Second Son Characters

What at first might seem surprising to exist as a scaling chain seeing as Cole is quite literally dead by the time of Second Sons event actually has an existing scaling chain. That being through Blast Shards and Blast Cores.

Blast Shards are the upgrade system in both InFamous 1, 2 and Second Son, being used in InFamous 1 and 2 to give Cole extra battery cores/total electricity he can store, and used in Second Son to allow Delsin to upgrade his individual abilities. It’s stated in both InFamous 2 that Cole absorbs the energy from the Blast Shards, and it is made fairly blatant in InFamous Second Son that Delsin is absorbing the energy from Blast Shards as well.

The main point to note is that even with just InFamous 2 (seeing as the Beast drained Cole at the beginning of the game), Cole absorbs 305 Blast Shards, while Delsin only absorbs 204. Seeing as both absorb the energy of the Blast Shards and Cole absorbs over 100 more, it’d be weird to assume that Cole wouldn’t be comparable to Delsin and Second Son era conduits, as his body had absorbed a lot more energy, and that isn’t even taking into account the energy Cole would have absorbed from the Blast Cores. And it’s important to note the rules of the Death Battle when factoring this scaling in.

Combatants would be examined at their maximum potential, and since both Cole and Delsin’s maximum potential would be collecting all of their respective blast shards, Cole’s potential would be much higher than Delsin’s.

Delsin Rowe

Mr. Second Son himself, with an absorption based conduit ability allowing him a variety of abilities over the course of his adventure giving him a variety of good feats. Seeing as, at their peaks, Cole has absorbed more blast shard energy then Delsin, and both were actively gaining energy from Blast shards at all, it shouldn’t be too farfetched to scale Cole to Delsin’s level of power.

• Is able to keep up with Fetch Walker, who can fire beams of pure neon light.

• Later acquires these powers for himself, and to quote the game itself, can run at lightspeed. Other Second Son characters should also scale to this in reactions, as otherwise Delsin would be blitzing around all of them which is never the case.

• Using a Karma Bomb, is able to sink an island-like concrete structure created by Augustine (5.7 kilotons)

Abigail “Fetch” Walker

Another one of the Second Son era conduits, and one that Delsin had to track down and fight to copy her Neon powers, having been defeated by Delsin and the two having fought on par earlier, her being comparable to Delsin, who’d Cole be comparable to thanks to Blast Shards, isn’t too far-fetched.

• Blasted a hole through Curdun Cay’s walls

• Can strike at relativistic speeds (1.717 gigatons)

• Can turn people into raw energy (1.5 gigatons)

Various Playstation Characters and the cast of Street Fighter X Tekken

Cole scales to KRATOS who-ok fine not really

(if we had a nickel for every fighting game with rollback that had Cole MacGrath, the Sony cats and Heihachi Mishima that released in 2012, we’d have two)

these ads were pretty awesome though

Alex Mercer

The Infected 

Given how Alex can slaughter the infected en mass and has beaten almost every time of infected there is regardless of the type of infected. It’s hard to argue against Alex being at worst comparable and realistically superior to the infected.

• A swarm of infected can cause an earthquake (0.003 tons)

• A Hunter jumps on a tank, destroying it in the process (209 megajoules) 

• Goliaths are too strong to destroy with conventional weaponry

• If Heller wasn’t able to defeat them, single Goliaths can threaten to destroy a city (most likely over time) 

Supreme Hunter

Seeing as he literally cut the Supreme Hunters head off in his final fight against him, it would make sense why Alex would be considered superior to the Supreme Hunter, especially by the time of Prototype 2’s endgame.

• The Supreme Hunter is stated to be a duplication of Mercer

• The Supreme Hunter states that once he consumed Mercer, he’d be quite confident in surviving the 75 kiloton nuke that was set to go off

• However, if looking at the nuclear projections in game, the bomb would be worth 8.2 megatons and debatably higher (Debatable)

• By the time of Prototype 2 Alex had consumed thousands of humans, 8 evolved, and became much stronger than he was during Prototype 1, so it shouldn’t be too far-fetched to assume he had long made up for not consuming the Supreme Hunter.

Elizabeth Greene

As her “son” and the one who ultimately defeated as well as absorbed her, Alex should be credited with Elizabeth’s greatest attributes, physically and mentally.

• Caused a large scale seismic activity (480.4 tons)

James Heller

While ultimately losing to Heller in the end, Alex being able to fight him for as long as he did is more than enough to have the two be comparable. Mercer was once even able to hit and overpower Heller before he could react, and prior to the final battle, decimated Heller multiple times in direct combat, so scaling to the capabilities of the other Blacklight being should be fairly clear cut.

• Heller can rip off the turrets of tanks

• Can upper cut helicopters

• Generated shockwaves that destroyed helicopters before his devestator even came out

• Leapt this high

• After absorbing Alex Mercer (who he was on par with during the fight), sent tentacles around the Red Zone to absorb every single infected into himself (106.24 kilotons/Mach 7.8)

• Alex should be comparable to about 50% (so about 53.12 kilotons/Mach 3.9) of this feat since it required his and Hellers biomass to pull it off. Albeit over the course of the fight Heller tore off Alex’s limbs multiple times and lost some of his own biomass during the fight, so 50% is more of a lowballed guesstimation and it could likely be higher, especially when considering Alex having far more biomass.

Weaknesses

Cole MacGrath

Being a walking lightning rod, Cole has become so volatile that he can’t come into contact with large bodies of water, as he’ll shock himself due to his powers short-circuiting. Similarly, Cole is unable to hold certain devices due to how his powers interact with them; for example, he can’t use guns or drive cars since his electricity can cause them to short out and explode. His ability to heal and regain energy is also reliant on the environment, as he needs to drain energy from nearby sources to do so, whether it may be nearby sources of electricity or another person directly via leeching. As such, it can be easy for Cole to tap out of reserves for all but his basic abilities if he lacks the energy to use them.

Alex Mercer

(Welcome to the top of the food chain)

Alex’s regeneration is part of the reason why he’s near unkillable, but it does have a specific limit in that it is reliant on how much biomass he currently possesses. With large amounts of biomass, he can regenerate from grievous injuries quickly, but at low amounts, it can take far longer for him to do so. Again, it is worth pointing out that the amount of biomass affects the speed of his regeneration, not the potency; he can take incredible amounts of punishment, but he can be incapacitated easily if he has no way to speed up his recovery.

Before The Verdict

Doesn’t the Ray Sphere just awaken conduits abilities and doesn’t injure them?

While the Ray Sphere's purpose is indeed to awaken a Conduit's dormant powers, which would naturally require said Conduit to survive, the one that granted Cole his powers in particular was unprecedented in terms of scale and several pieces of evidence exist that Cole was not guaranteed to survive the blast it created.

Simply from what we see in the opening, Cole was severely injured as a result of the blast and from the comics, we learn that they were so severe that he ended up briefly dying, only surviving due to being resuscitated by the electricity coursing through his body.

Before their final battle, Kessler admitted that he was uncertain whether Cole would actually survive the blast. This is in spite of the fact that he has spent decades attempting to perfect its design and running countless tests on other subjects.

Another bearer of the Conduit gene, John White, was completely torn apart by the Ray Sphere's energy. This occurs in one of two ways depending on the Karmic choice: either Cole will destroy the Ray Sphere's casing with a lightning storm or he will activate it in an attempt to increase his power; either way, the Ray Sphere will create a vortex that obliterates John, as well as the pier him and Cole were standing on. It should be noted that this burst of energy was a fraction of the blast Cole endured at the start of the game.

In one of the Dead Drops in inFAMOUS 2, John hints that only exceptionally strong Conduits like Cole would have withstood the blast as he did. This can admittedly be interpreted in other ways, but John’s knowledge of the Ray Sphere project and emphasizing Cole’s strength in this instance makes it likely his survival wouldn’t have been possible unless he was exceptionally powerful.  

It should also be noted that the Empire City Ray Sphere seems to be prone to malfunction, such as when Zeke attempted to activate it only for nothing to happen. It’s also noted that Kessler “stepped up the timeline” in terms of when the Ray Sphere would be activated, which likely impacted its production and explains its later faultiness. 

At the very least, this all suggests that Cole's durability and resistance contributed to his survival. 

Didn’t The Beast regenerate from the nuke and not tank it?

In the mission “The Beast Draw Nears”, Cole and Zeke have acquired a nuke to try to take down the Beast. They fire the missile and make direct contact. There’s an argument that the Beast suddenly appearing and starting to reform after the nuke meant that the Beast didn’t even withstand it. That being said, the most basic counterargument is the fact you can literally see that after the Nukes explosion, the Beast moreso just, fell over then took any prominent damage. Alongside the statement in the guidebooks that the Beast absorbed the energy of the nuke.

Wouldn’t Alex have died from the nuke if the crow didn’t intervene?

This one is a lot more clear to discuss, at the end of Prototype 1, Alex was left as little more then a small glob of biomass after having been blasted by the nuke and absorbed a crow to reform their body. It seems at a glance that Alex would have been left incapacitated or even worse if not for the crows intervention. But if anything its more likely absorbing the crows biomass just sped up the process of Alex regenerating, considering the Supreme Hunter, a copy of Alex, was regenerating from a similar amount, albeit over time. It’s reasonable to say that while Alex would have needed a lot of time to fully recover, the crow wasn’t necessary for Alex’s own survival.

Is Alex weak to electricity?

This is a pretty common misconception when it comes to the matchup, so let’s clear it up real quick. The argument for Alex’s electricity weakness comes from his encounter with Specialist Cross, who is able to stun him using a stun baton, ergo it means he’s weak to it. The issue is that this has nothing to do with Alex being weak to electricity at all; being affected by something doesn’t at all equal to you being weak to it, by that logic humans are weak to bullets just because they have no defense against them. This is backed up by one of the writers of Prototype, Dennis Detwiller, who elaborated on this exact point. There are also arguments regarding Alex potentially adapting to electricity from this attack, but these will be detailed more in the verdicts.

Is the upgrade image icon of Heller destroying the moon legit?

 

Nuh uh (who’s to say it’s not just a big cookie)

But for a more serious explanation, this being an upgrade icon rather than an actual feat within Prototype 2, the upgrade not giving Heller moon length reach, and the fact that for how iffy of a feat it is, it being far above any other feat in the series makes it an outlier to even use considering how you’d have to be arguing for a upgrade icon that is massively above anything else in the series to be taken as legitimate.

In summary Alex no diffs Dark Carnage

Can Cole scale to the Beast destroying the moon?

At the end of inFAMOUS, Cole’s future self shows him what would happen were he not able to stop the Beast, and in this apocalyptic future, the moon has been cracked. There is a question of whether or not Cole could scale to this level of power, seeing as he fought the Beast, but all signs point to this not being the case.

For one, we don’t actually see the Beast affect the moon, it’s just destroyed in this alternate timeline. There’s no time frame or method to go off of. It’s probably not a dramatic metaphor, but it is hard to gauge how powerful it is. He could have torn it apart over days or blown it apart in one single blast and any interpretation could be viable, but that’s the problem. Therefore, a reasonable calculation cannot be derived from this feat and will not be accounted for in the verdicts.

Multi-Continental Infamous?

When looking through Infamous, the best feat many argue giving Cole happens at the end of the game, where Cole, with the RFI, is able to power it and shoot a massive blast visible from space that results in the death of The Beast and all other conduits. Given Cole powers the RFI himself, it can be argued that he should get this feat, which calculations before have placed within the Multi-Continental range. The problem with this however, is that the method used for the original calculation would mean that the RFI’s blast tears through a majority of the atmosphere. Though if this were the case, this would result in all of humanity being killed, which clearly isn’t what’s happening considering the good ending of Infamous 2 is the ending where Cole saves all of humanity.

The new calculation of the feat uses luminosity, which when done gets to… building level, not exactly as powerful as it looks huh?

Verdict

(Credit to Redrunner)

Stats

With this being an over decade long discussion, it only makes sense that both have quite the resume for stats to be talked about. We’ll re-establish Cole’s scaling to avoid contention, but Alex won’t need that. He’s pretty blatantly the top tier of the verse.

First off, Cole’s scaling to The Beast should be fairly clear cut. At the start of Infamous 2, Cole was able to have a prolonged fight with The Beast while being able to survive all his attacks dished out, even being able to blow off part of The Beast’s head and stagger him. John himself even confirmed that he was bloodlusted at that time, and saw Cole as a bigger threat than anything else, so he had no reason to hold back his power in this encounter.

Yes, Cole was unable to put down The Beast, but this was due to his sheer size and regeneration that made Cole fail to defeat him in the end. Being relative in power is nice, but if your opponent is so much bigger and has some absurd regen, you’re going to be struggling greatly to deal lasting damage. The Beast dropping Cole back into the water did depower him, but he was able to grow back in power thanks to absorbing the Blast Cores and was able to contend with The Beast by the end of the game, with the only change being that he was having his health and energy restored over time by a generator. As such, Cole should scale to any feats The Beast demonstrates.

For the Second Son cast, while it may first seem jarring to scale the two given the years separating them, remember the Blast Shards detailed in the scaling section. Due to both absorbing power from these sources, it logically stands to have them comparable in power. However this isn’t the end, as Cole is able to absorb more Blast Shards overall than Delsin (totalling to 305 as opposed to Delsin’s 204), meaning if anything he should be slightly superior to him power wise. There’s also the fact that Cole has had far more time using his conduit powers than Delsin has, and ultimately there’s nothing suggesting that the two eras of conduits should be any different in attack potency. As such, we will be using feats from Second Son to support our case for Cole’s stats.

Let’s talk about power. For the Electrical Conduit, his feats and scaling at worst get from the Kiloton to Megaton range. This includes Cole scaling to The Beast who directly survived a nuke (51 kilotons), Polarity Wall being able to convert bullets to energy (85.9 kilotons - 14.7 megatons), sinking the USS George Washington with a lightning strike (4.76 megatons), and surviving the Ray Sphere at the very start of Infamous (135.8 kilotons - 14.7 megatons). Arguments against the Ray Sphere were tackled in the Before the Verdicts section, but even if after all that we still assume conduits aren’t harmed by the explosions, Cole was able to destroy the Ray Sphere near the end of Infamous 1, and as we know it can tank its own explosions, Cole must be outputting a comparable energy output. So either way, he scales. 

But those aren’t even the best feats he has. Cole can create storms with Ionic Storm, (1.6 - 34.4 megatons), and most impressively, scaling back to The Beast can get him to a whopping 546.6 megatons via blowing up Empire City! But even after this, Cole still has even higher feats he can scale to. He should be comparable to the Second Son cast, such as Fetch, who can both turn people into energy (1.5 gigatons) and strike at relativistic speeds with Light Speed (1.72 gigatons). It’s not even like these kinds of feats are outliers anyhow, as The Beast is shown even moving clouds that with the more reliable end, gets as high as 1.88 gigatons of TNT.

That’s not all we need to talk about for Cole’s power though, as he is likely even more powerful than this. Going back to the previously discussed Blast Shards, as we’re taking Cole at his best, therefore absorbing all the Blast Shards in Infamous 2, this would mean he should be upscaling all these feats further, albeit the exact amount can’t be quantified. However, Cole’s most notable upscaling comes at the very end of Infamous 2, via him utilizing the RFI to utterly decimate The Beast within a few seconds despite the latter’s insane regeneration. Now, there is some contention on whether the RFI should be a standard part of Cole’s arsenal, but we believe it’s fine giving him it once all is said and done.

Starting off, the RFI was what Cole was working towards across Infamous 2, it was why he entered New Marais, the reason he was absorbing all those Blast Cores, and he had it on his person the entire time through. And by the end of Infamous 2, once the RFI was charged (only not being able to charge it himself due to Zeke damaging the power regulator), he was able to utilize it in one final bombardment against John and never relinquished it at any point. The only reason he stopped using it at all was because he killed himself by choosing to release its blast. It’d be unfair to not say Cole can’t have something he not only was working towards the entire game but had until his last breath. If we’re taking Cole at his best, with the pinnacle of all his efforts across the games, it would only be fair giving him the RFI at its maximum charge as that was his entire goal, one that he successfully achieved in the end. So not only is he scaling to 1.88 gigatons, he’s also heavily upscaling it thanks to the RFI with a side of blast shards.

Now we’ll move to Alex’s side of things for power which is… more complicated and that’s putting it lightly. Mercer’s lower feats include him punching through a steel door (771 kilojoules), crashing into and destroying a Hive base (55.5 tons), and, at the start of Prototype, was just fine surviving a military base exploding (76.3 - 352.856 tons). However, saying that these are the best feats Mercer has would be disingenuous, as Mercer has clearly grown stronger across the Prototype games, to where by the end of Prototype 2, Heller, with his and Mercer’s biomass, was able to extend tendrils across Manhattan that total to 106.24 kilotons of TNT. That being said, this is likely not the full extent of power that Mercer can get, as in Prototype 1 Alex has shown the ability to shift the clouds across Manhattan when transforming, which gives a yield of 102.5 kilotons of TNT. 

Though this feat itself is… strange to be frank. We see the clouds in the same position after transforming, and transformation itself could easily just be a simple visual effect, as this kind of cloud shifting is unsupported by any in-game statements, word of god, guidebooks, and so on. However, given there is at least a visual basis for the feat (and the Supreme Hunter arguably moving clouds at the start of his fight via his devastator), we’ll give the benefit of the doubt and allow the feat for Mercer.

Next, we should be addressing the most discussed Prototype feat: The nuke, and whether Alex really scales to it. For context, the ending of Prototype 1 involves Mercer teaming up with Robert Cross (or more accurately the Supreme Hunter posing as him) to stop the nuclear destruction of Manhattan. The Supreme Hunter then catches Alex off guard and reveals his true intentions; consuming him to be able to ‘withstand’ the nuke, leaving him Manhattan’s only survivor. Assuming this is taken at face value and accounting for the yield being divided by two to account for both Prototypes™, this would yield 37.5 kilotons using statements of the bomb yielding 5 times that of Hiroshima. But if you decide instead to use the nuclear projections in game, this would get 8.1 megatons. So, this would seem like a really impressive feat for Mercer to be comparable to, right?

Unfortunately, there are too many cracks in this feat for us to reasonably buy it. Let’s get the obvious out of the way first; Alex barely made it out from that nuclear blast alive. Most of his biomass was incinerated in the nuke, reducing him to nothing but a small puddle. The counter some may come up with is that it makes sense with how Mercer didn’t consume the Supreme Hunter (as he decapitates him in the fight), therefore him not comparing to the full thing adds up.

However, that’s not how explosions work. The damage taken when moving away from an explosion isn’t constant, and instead is a sharp dropoff that decreases dramatically even moving a short distance away. You can see in the cutscene that Mercer was a great distance away from the nuke, to where if we calculate the yield Alex survived (assuming it’s 8.2 Megatons) results in… 0.44 Tons of TNT. Now of course, this isn’t to claim Mercer is that durable (as we’ve mentioned we’re using the Kilotons cloud feat and has many feats way above that level), but it proves how Alex is visually shown to not be comparable at all to even half the nuke’s output. 

From there, the argument for the scaling still working is that Mercer would’ve been nearly depleted of his biomass from his rematch against the Supreme Hunter, and therefore explaining Alex’s inconsistency in durability. However, Team Cole feels it’s a bit lacking for an explanation. We don’t know the amount of biomass Alex has left by the end of the fight, and it’s not like they were wearing each other down until Alex barely emerged on top. Prototype 1’s guidebook makes it clear that the fight is a test of patience and outright discourages Mercer fighting up close, which makes it even harder to determine how much biomass Alex has reserved by the end.

Even the ending of the fight is completely unaffected by how much health you have by the end, as Mercer barely survives no matter what, and yes while this is gameplay, it’s only used to support the previous arguments in the flaws with arguing biomass depletion. But even so, it is likely that the Supreme Hunter thought he didn’t even need Mercer at full biomass to think he could ‘survive’ that nuke. Rather than trying to consume Mercer outright to get the full meal, he instead threw him to the side and felt confident in fighting him and as such depleting his biomass, indicating he didn’t think he needed Mercer at full reserves to think this could work, making this point much weaker.

There is one final argument which we’ll tackle briefly, that being Mercer potentially adapting to the Nuke following him being cooked via the Blacklight’s adaptation. This would likely translate to a possible heat resistance, but not only is this not as impressive given Mercer would’ve been exposed to much less of it due to the distance, but also this would only be a resistance and not growing in durability. Even entertaining the idea of him growing in durability wouldn’t work either, as it would be borderline-NLF territory to assume Alex can adapt to something that is far more potent than anything he’s dealt with before, especially after only being exposed to it once. This isn’t to say however that Alex may have grown in strength to surpass the nuke later on at some point in Prototype 2, but we’ll put a pin in that for the time being.

Overall, validity regarding the statements for Alex partly scaling to the nuke are shaky at best and contradict what we’re shown, and such won’t play a role in determining Mercer’s end of upscaling. Speaking of which, let’s talk about it.

Multipliers for Mercer may seem unfounded at first, but keep in mind Prototype has consistent statements regarding how consuming biomass strengthens the individual, meaning Alex should be far stronger compared to the cloud feat by the end of Prototype 2. We don’t get an exact number, so we’ll need to do some guesswork to get an idea on how strong Alex could be by every Dragon Ball fan’s favorite topic: Multipliers!

The best multiplier Alex has to start with is by scaling to James Heller, who he was able to manhandle easily, albeit before his peak at the end of the game.

Throughout Prototype 2, Heller absorbed a total of 30 Evolved across the story and side missions, who should also be comparable to the end of Prototype 1 Alex (102.5 kilotons) considering they all were created by him. Admittedly, Heller did have to wear down these evolved first (or in other words, deplete their biomass), so it’s difficult to provide complete justification in each being a 1x multiplier. However, considering Heller’s additional consumption of lesser yet solidly powerful enemies like Orion, it should at least make up for the lost Biomass.

Alex also absorbed all the biomass of the eight Evolved at the end of Prototype 2, and there’s no issues with him getting the full thing as he easily overpowered them before consuming them all. There is the argument of this being a separate 8x multiplier, but this would assume all are comparable to Mercer which would make little sense especially with how easily he consumed them without even needing to wear them down.

We can also factor Goliaths into the Evolved multiplier as well. Goliath’s are extremely strong enemies in Prototype 2, and should easily be comparable to the likes of the Evolved, if not superior. However, keep in mind that when Heller does consume them, he only rips off their heads as a finisher. It can be inferred that he’d at least consume a chunk of them though, considering he can gain ability upgrades from them and therefore must have absorbed at least a solid chunk of them. Heller can canonically consume four of these.

Musclemass would be an individual multiplier by itself, as it gives Mercer a 2x strength increase when used. However, considering that it can be upgraded twice, let’s assume that it can total to a 6x strength boost.

Finally, we’re going to be throwing a 10x multiplier for everything Heller has consumed by the end of Prototype 2 but shouldn’t be close to the Evolved in power. This includes the likes of Brawlers, Orion, Juggernauts, and the many other infected Heller has absorbed to account for any unquantifiable stat increases from consumption. This frankly might be getting incredibly generous, but let’s do it for debate’s sake.

Full document for the Evolved and Goliath multiplier here.

So adding that up, we get a multiplier of 43 (30 + 8 + 4 + 1 for Heller’s own power) * 6 * 10, or 2580 total. Multiplying that with the base stat of 102.5 kilotons, we get 264.45 megatons of TNT, likely stronger if you account for Mercer easily besting Heller in their encounter before Prototype 2’s ending. This is extremely impressive, but it is still weaker than The Beast destroying Empire City and moving clouds as well as Fetch’s two gigaton feats. So even giving Alex the benefit of the doubt, Cole would still hold an advantage in strength.

Now that the multiplier discussion’s over with, let’s outline speed. For MacGrath, he should at worst be in the low mach ranges through feats such as intercepting and deflecting rockets, dodging gunfire, and scaling to Sasha who can dodge bullets. Moving to higher feats, Cole can move in tandem with Kessler’s lightning (Mach 206), and his future self can do the same against Cole’s who he can keep up with. But even this scratches the surface of the Conduit’s best speed showings. 

Let’s take a look at the Evil ending of Infamous 2, where Cole was able to move in tandem with the straight beams from the RFI, clocking at 0.51c. We know that the beam Cole evades must be radiation, as the RFI is stated to be a radiation-based source, and therefore means that the beams we see fired from it should logically be radiation.

And yes, this feat is performed by Evil Cole, but the different paths of Infamous 2 have no evidence to suggest that Cole is any different stat-wise (and was under no amps while fighting Nyx either), and just because the Evil route is non-canon doesn’t suggest Cole isn’t capable of the same feats, as it’s meant to show what would’ve happened had Cole decided to side with John instead. These relativistic feats are also consistent with Cole’s thrusters resisting the Beast’s singularity pull, Delsin and Fetch moving at light-speed, and other Second Son characters being able to react to this as otherwise they’d be getting blitzed hundreds of times over. 

But that isn’t all to discuss in terms of the Patron Saint of New Marais’ speed, as Cole can get even faster thanks to his precision ability, which has multiple statements of being able to slow down time, meaning he can become a lot faster if he wishes.

Going on to Alex, it goes without saying that he has countless feats he either performs or scales to that are within the low Mach range, and it’d be absurd to suggest otherwise. The best feat of these would be him blocking gunfire from an M1 Abrams, clocking at Mach 9.5. But let’s address the big talking point about Alex’s speed; him being able to process memories of the victims he consumes, with the best showing being him processing a 69-year-old man’s memories, clocking anywhere from 0.20c - 0.66c. While this feat seems extremely impressive, we have to account for how this is a perception feat and therefore isn’t 1 to 1 with his reaction speed. The perception to reaction speed ratio is 0.052x, so plugging that through we get 0.01c - 0.034c as his potential top reaction speed.

Now, while Alex’s best speed feat is noticeably weaker accounting for reactions, there are other arguments for him being lightspeed outside of these. Though these all have their own issues that render their usage highly questionable. 

To start, in Prototype 2 Alex is shown unleashing an EMP wave alongside the virus, and we see the wave affect the camera. The argument for Alex scaling to this involves arguing he’s moving in tandem with the wave, but the difficulty with this comes in us having no idea how the wave is moving in the scene, as it’s completely invisible. It would be impossible to get a calculation off of this without making assumptions on how it’s moving, which would make it wildly inaccurate no matter what. 

The next argument involves Alex outpacing the ‘infected wave’ in his battle against Greene, and concluding that the statement means it’s pure energy meaning it’s moving at the speed of light. However, we have no other basis to assume this. We have little reason to assume it’s talking about pure energy outside of a description which could just as easily mean a random, fictional energy we can’t quantify the speed of. It’s why we have standards for things such as lasers, other than just taking their name at face value. And while Alex has generated electromagnetic energy before via EMPs, they are invisible and intangible while the Infected Wave is anything but as it displays considerable force (contradicting it being lightspeed) and is clearly visible. Ergo, the Infected Wave is unviable as a speed feat without making an unwarranted leap to what it could mean with nothing else to go off of. All in all, the remaining arguments for FTL Alex have a rough foundation and don’t present enough evidence to back up their validity.

To wrap up, let’s talk about upscaling. To begin, no, we can’t use the multipliers we gave Alex’s AP for his speed. There are guidebook statements implying it at first, but this is just referring to the in-game upgrades that Alex can unlock mobility-related moves and increase his movement speed, not his combat or reactions. And unlike power, there are no statements directly saying that consumption increases speed outside of this. It isn’t discounting the possibility of him getting faster over time, especially since he once hit Heller before he could react, but this is more of upscaling rather than multipliers and can’t be quantified.

So, after that exhausting discussion, let’s recap where both land in stats:

Cole MacGrath

Strength: Greatly upscaling 1.88 gigatons

Speed: 0.51c (Moving in tandem w/ RFI beam) - Roughly SoL (Scaling to characters reacting to Second Son’s Light Speed). Upscaling all via Precision.

Alex Mercer

Strength: Greatly upscaling 102.5 kilotons (without multipliers) - Upscaling 264.45 megatons (with multipliers)

Speed: 0.2 - 0.66c (perception), 0.01 - 0.034c (reactions), Mach 9.5 (combat). Upscaling all.

With this, it’s clear that despite Alex being an incredibly powerful opponent, no doubt underestimated, Cole is still far superior when it comes to stats. Cole is over 7 times stronger than Alex, and while Alex could be stronger, the same applies to Cole and the gap widens with Cole upscaling his feat far more (obliterating John in seconds) and having a more impressive feat to upscale in the first place. But the speed gap is even wider, as while Alex is faster in travel speed and is relative in perceptions, Cole has speed where it counts, being over 51 times faster in reactions and cataclysmically faster when discussing combat speed, and Alex’s upscaling from speed isn’t closing that gap especially with Cole’s Precision ability being an effective speed boost. Once all is said and done, the Patron Saint of New Marais is the clear winner for the stats trinity.

Arsenal & Abilities

With just how vastly different Cole and Alex’s power sets are, there’s a staggering amount of discussion on whose abilities would allow them to take the upper hand in this fight. Which means there’s a lot of areas to cover in order to comprehensively review both, causing this section of the verdict to be a bit long, so bear with us as we explain everything.

To start, it’s fairly clear that Cole as a fighter is far more versatile than Alex. While Alex may have a variety of tools with his shapeshifting to turn his body into various weapons, it doesn’t take that long of a glance to see that Cole has more raw variety. Alex has his claws, shields, blades, extendable arms via whipfist, ground spikes, and armor he can grow alongside a wide variety of AOE devastators. However, with Cole having a variety of lightning blasts, lightning rockets, shockwaves, detonation blast, graviton blast, a variety of electric grenades that can home in or explode into multiple, a lightning blade, and cryokinetic versions of a fair few of those attacks, alongside AOE tornados, lightning storms, and ice spike waves does mean that Cole just has a lot more to throw at Alex than vice versa.

Of course, it’s not just quantity that Cole takes, but quality as well. Alex is going to have a difficult time closing the distance between himself and Cole at any given moment due to how good Cole’s arsenal is at keeping Alex at bay. He can blast him with standard electric bolts, or pelt him with the Magnum Bolt which is a condensed stream of lightning rather than single fire projectiles. Cole can fire the Megawatt Hammer which is an electric rocket, which could tag Alex even if he isn’t directly hit thanks to the Alpha Rocket causing chain reactions. Cole can catch Alex off guard with the Overload Burst which chains off conductive surfaces and strikes enemies near metal objects. Or even bombard Alex with various electric grenades that can explode, pop into smaller grenades like a cluster bomb, and even restrain Alex with the Shock Grenade.

Cole can even throw various cars or other objects in the area with Kinetic Pulse. There is also Cole’s various cryokinetic abilities like the ice grenade and freeze rocket that could attempt to freeze Alex in place to open him up for a bigger attack, alongside Cole's various homing attacks that would constantly put Alex on the back foot such as the Bolt Stream, Redirect Rocket, Sticky Rocket and Stalker Grenades all having homing properties, and his ionic abilities having natural large AOE, such as throwing a tornado, a wave of ice spikes, or a stream of lightning blasts at Alex. This leaves Cole with a variety of ways in just his basic abilities to constantly put pressure on Alex from afar.

Meanwhile, even just in raw quantity, Alex is obviously going to struggle to attack Cole from a distance outside of throwing cars in the immediate vicinity, but that’s something that can be countered by Kinetic Pulse just throwing them back. He could attempt to surprise Cole with ground spikes, but those have obvious windup by him stabbing into the ground. He could possibly extend his whipfist like the tendrils Heller unleashed at the end of Prototype 2, but that would leave him open to being smacked.

Alex has his various devastators trying to AOE Cole like the Critical Pain firing out a barrage of tendrils or firing tendrils or spikes in every which direction, but that's something that Cole has his own equivalents to. While he does have a few options for defending himself from Cole’s projectiles and for closing the gap, those being his shield and armor, they would realistically only provide him with temporary relief. The armor in particular severely hinders Alex’s mobility, which would make it far easier for Cole to escape if he doesn’t remove it; the shield does not hamper Alex’s mobility, but Cole can still blow through it pretty easily. When you compare the list of abilities between the two, Alex simply doesn't have many options when compared to Cole’s own ranged arsenal.

Alex’s attempt at using military vehicles in order to try to make up for the disparity in ranged options will also end up shooting himself in the foot, all things considered. As most conventional weaponry Alex would simply be fuel for the Polarity Wall as it converts bullets into energy, allowing Cole to just heal himself rather than have any sort of pressure be put on him. As for the variety of military vehicles Alex has taken over his adventures, it would leave him open to having his vehicles flung around by Kinetic Pulse, or just simply making him a bigger target for Cole's various rockets.

But what if Alex does close the gap? With how most of Alex's abilities are geared for a more close-quarters engagement it wouldn’t be hard to assume that between this and Alex’s better experience in CQC he could overwhelm Cole if he closes the gap. But that isn’t exactly the case as Cole has a variety of methods to keep up with Alex’s various biomass weapons in close quarters. The Gigawatt blade, for example, is a pure lightning blade that would allow him to tear through Alex due to the heat of lightning without having to actually physically touch him, and his amp is capable of draining Alex’s energy to restore his own if he were to use Ultra Drain.

Furthermore, things such as Shatter Blast and Ice Rockets would be capable of freezing Alex while he’s up close to allow Cole to make distance or wail on Alex. There’s also his various shockwaves that are designed to be used to keep foes at a distance. Most notably is the Graviton Blast, which keeps those who it affects stuck floating in the air temporarily, leaving them open to Cole either using that time to make distance again or unloading a barrage of attacks while Alex is helpless. While a bit more risky, Arc Restraint is another tactic to trap Alex in place and prevent him from moving temporarily. All in all Cole has a variety of ways to take advantage of Alex in a close-quarters circumstance, rather than being exploited himself.

Of course that implies Cole would want to keep the fight in CQC rather than using his variety of mobility options to allow the gap to grow. Which then leads into a discussion on who has better mobility options. Alex has the more obvious instances of his superhuman strength allowing him to jump high into the air, running up walls, using the whipfist as a hypothetical grappling hook, and his own strange gliding that allows him a variety of options for quick mobility. Cole has his own equivalents to the majority of that however, as the Lightning Tether is a far less hypothetical version of Alex’s Whipfist, the Ice Launch allows Cole quick vertical mobility to counter Alex’s own jumping, the static thrusters allow Cole more methodical gliding and allows him to fight off Alex while he’s gliding away, and the induction grind allowing Cole to heal and speed away to outpace Alex. In conclusion, Cole has a plethora of ways to outmaneuver Alex.

So a direct approach clearly isn’t the best method, but one of Alex’s bread and butter abilities is his shapeshifting allowing him to become a perfect replica of those he consumes, allowing for a possible stealth attack approach. Cole has two very obvious counters to this however. The easier counter is the radar pulse allowing Cole to detect enemies even while disguised and view their internals, while the inside of Alex is obviously a lot less clear on what goes on inside of him, it also allowing Cole to simply detect foes means that Alex’s disguises will be a lot less efficient. Or you could go the more ‘can’t see him, hit everywhere’ route with Ionic Freeze literally being stated to not hurt civilians, meaning even if this took place in a crowded area, it would only target Alex and force him out of hiding.

Now neither of their resources are unlimited, and they do need to fuel themselves on electricity and absorb people respectively. Now if you were to assume this is a fair environment for both, such as a populated city, then between sources of electricity being more plentiful than humans, and that humans would obviously run away from the living lightning bolt vs the embodiment of every virus you’ve ever seen going at it, this means that even with just the environment it would be far easier to say Cole would have a better time keeping himself fully fueled. This isn’t even accounting for other fuel amps such as the RFI or Karmic Overload which would allow Cole to continue fighting without even having to worry about his energy reserves, something Alex in return doesn’t have an equivalent or answer to.

Now granted, Alex isn’t going at this alone, seeing as he’s the leader of the infection means that calling in backup from various other infected isn’t out of the question to try to overwhelm Cole. But this goes back to Cole's AOE, not only has he fought swarms of monstrous enemies in the past, he also has a variety of AOE attacks to handle multiple of them at the same time. This isn’t even accounting for the fact that Cole is significantly stronger than Alex, who is the peak of the Blacklight Virus, and Alex’s summons would be even weaker and thus prone to Cole easily dispatching of them rather than them helping overwhelm Cole realistically.

Now, Alex has some weirder abilities of his own, such as his weird ability to cause Transmutation, fire out energy blasts, and call in artillery strikes, while the latter two are more so basic attacks and wouldn’t help due to the stat difference, the first one, in this case possibly turning Cole into a Bio-Bomb is interesting, albeit unreliable due to requiring to physically transmutate Cole up close, which as established earlier would be difficult to do due to the stat edge and Cole's far better ranged game and mobility options.

As for Alex’s ability to absorb people, this suffers from the fact that consistently in Prototype 1 and 2, outside of the evolved Alex absorbed at the end of Prototype 2, requires them to be actively worn down in order for Alex to fully be able to absorb them. This also ends up leading yet again back into the fact that Alex would have to get up close to Cole when it’s been well established that Alex would struggle to close the gap between them.

A major point to discuss is Alex Mercer's regeneration, and if Cole will be able to overcome it. Alex is capable of regeneration from a pool of blood which is extremely impressive, and far more impressive than Cole's minor regeneration allowing him to heal from being shot, so the question would be if Cole could actually put Alex down. One of the options Cole has for bypassing Alex’s regeneration is simply absorbing his bio-electricity and shutting him down, not having to even destroy him since without bioelectricity, his body wouldn’t be able to function.

Another more interesting argument is that due to the heat of Cole's lightning, he could cauterize Alex’s injuries and prevent his regeneration from being as effective. The most important thing to consider is that while Alex’s regeneration is impressive, both himself and others infected with similar capabilities have consistently been shown to struggle regenerating from more serious injuries. In the most famous example, while Alex was able to survive being caught in a nuclear blast, his body was reduced to mulch and remained that way for an undefined amount of time until he utilized the biomass of a passing raven to speed up his healing process. This isn’t to say he wouldn’t have recovered at all without it, just that it would’ve taken significantly longer. Given this, even if Alex was able to survive Cole’s more powerful attacks, without an immediate source of biomass, he would struggle to recover and retaliate before Cole bombards him again.

Now one might bring up Alex’s adaptation as a point to why he’d be able to handle Cole's electricity trying to burn him up, and while the Blacklight Virus has in the past been able to rapidly counteract attacks such as Bloodtox, it seems dubious to argue that it’d be able to adapt to start to resist an attack from something far stronger and hotter than anything Alex has ever endured, especially since he was almost boiled alive by the nuke at the end of Prototype 1 far from the epicenter of the heat. Even if he hypothetically could, he wouldn’t simply have the time to adapt before he ended up getting overwhelmed by Cole's raw firepower.

To further expand on the above point, while there have been instances of both Alex and James Heller becoming more resilient and full-on immune to Bloodtox and extreme heat respectively, this came as a result of repeat exposure. In Alex's case, it took him several days to begin developing his immunity to Bloodtox and even then, he continued to be harmed by it until the end of the game. In Heller's case, while the second explosion he was hit by ended up being much less effective than the first, it still hurt him significantly.

All this is to say that Alex's adaptation is not immediate, and that he will need time and consistent exposure to even begin to withstand Cole's electricity, much less become completely immune to it. Given that he was likely struck by high volumes of electricity multiple times during his fight with Cross in Prototype 1, it is reasonable to assume he's become more resilient to it as a result; what isn't reasonable is assuming that he's developed a full immunity to it solely from that one encounter, especially when Cole's electricity is leagues more powerful. Unless he plays his cards exactly right, Alex purposefully prolonging the fight and allowing himself to be hit is a gamble that is very unlikely to pay off.

Speaking of time, Precision is such a powerful ability in this fight that even with Alex's potent adaptation, he has no counter to Percision's ability to dilate time, something stated not once, not twice, but three separate times in the guidebooks. This isn’t even inconsistent for Cole's powers, considering Kesslers most powerful ability and the catalyst for the events of InFamous to begin with was to travel back in time. Needless to say that it gives Cole a lot of breathing room for countering and reacting to anything Alex can do.

Of course, the one major thing that hasn’t been brought up yet is the Blacklight Virus, it has a lot of stuff to cover and is Alex’s most prominent wincon, having hundreds of strains, being capable of driving people mad, and its general potency as a virus is almost unmatched, so how can Cole handle it?

Well for starters, thanks to being able to fend off Sasha’s tar, which is a mind control agent that can drive people mad, the mind and madness aspect of the Blacklight Virus would fail to mess with Cole. Furthermore, considering Alex’s main method of trying to infect Cole would be the gas he can release from his body, the most obvious and blunt answer would be Cole to use Ionic Vortex to… literally blow it away with a tornado-it has mass, it’s a gas, it can be tossed around by high winds such as a tornado to prevent it from getting close to Cole.

But if Cole were to get infected, there’s a shockingly hard counter to the Blacklight virus being able to survive in Cole's body. Most viruses die within the mid-100 degrees Fahrenheit or so, and while Alex did survive the nuclear explosion, the distance means the heat he withstood wasn’t as much as it could’ve been meaning the Blacklight Virus’ heat resistance isn’t too potent. Why does this matter? Because Cole's lightning, which is generated passively by his body and can surround him in a storm of electricity, gets up to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, far hotter than anything the Blacklight Virus would have survived, meaning it’s a genuine possibility that Cole could literally fry the virus out of his body even if it were to enter him, preventing it from infecting him at all.

Alex’s arsenal is nothing to scoff at, his arsenal of military weapons, variety of biomass weapons, strange abilities, and the frankly devastating potential of the Blacklight Virus gives Alex a lot of angles to try to approach this fight, but Cole just has far better counters to almost anything that Alex can do to give himself breathing room and prevent Alex from solidly getting an opening.

Tertiary Factors

As far as miscellaneous edges go, it’s a bit of a split that leans more towards Cole. Intelligence-wise, Alex has the advantage which is pretty straightforward. Even without the virus and him absorbing the memories of others, the actual Alex Mercer prior to his death was a proper scientist and one of the people responsible for creating the Blacklight virus for Gentek. By comparison, Cole’s a college dropout, and while not exactly dumb, he doesn’t really have credentials on par with his opponent here.

Experience is something that can be a bit more debatable, but we believe Cole still takes the lead in the areas that matter. In terms of raw experience, we can’t deny that Alex possesses more simply because of how many people he’s consumed, including various soldiers and Evolved and all the skills they have up their sleeves. It also does help that while both die at the end of their respective second games, Alex actually has had his powers for a far longer time than Cole has, as Prototype 2 takes place a whole year after the first Prototype with the comics filling in that time frame whereas inFamous 2 takes place only one month after inFamous, meaning that Cole was only ever an active Conduit for the final month of his life. 

That said, Cole does benefit more from having a wider variety of foes that he’s beaten. Whereas Alex has mostly battled against foot soldiers and Infected, Cole has taken on and defeated Conduits with crazier and diverse power sets like cryokinesis, pyrokinesis, transforming people into mutants, telekinesis, mind manipulation and electrokinesis - off defeating his own future self no less. On top of that, most of these Conduits possess skills similar to that of Alex himself in one way or another (Bertrand’s monster army, Sasha attempting to mess with his mind, David Warner's absorption via touch, the Beast’s regeneration), whereas Alex hasn’t really fought someone like Cole, having only fought military soldiers and similar bio-weapons to himself.

In addition, none of the soldiers Alex has consumed would have any relevant experience in dealing with someone like Cole, so any strategy he adopts would need to be formulated on the fly. Meaning that Cole would have more experience fighting someone entirely different and would be able to adapt quicker to Alex, while Alex would have not fought that many different foes and all his experience and skills aren’t as applicable to handling Cole's Cryokinesis and Electrokinesis powers.

So while Alex is far more intelligent, experienced and skilled on paper, most of that ends up falling flat against someone like Cole, who Alex has never seen or fought anyone similar to before, whereas Cole has fought and adapted to fighting a wider array of opponents, so his experience is far more applicable to this battle.

Conclusion

“Sometimes I hear people talking about Conduits and humans like they're totally different. That's bullshit. ‘Cause there ain't nobody with more humanity than Cole MacGrath.” 

Advantages:

• Stronger and tougher, even accounting for Alex’s multipliers

• Superior combat and reaction speed

• Precision slowing down time widens the gap in speed even more

• Wider variety of ranged options and abilities, some of which Alex has never tackled before

• Fought a larger array of the supernatural and enhanced foes

• Superior AoE with Ionic attacks, can counter Alex’s numbers advantage if more Evolved are summoned

• Abilities counter most of Alex’s options; Biomass has no special resistance to ice or electricity, Radar Pulse (potentially) counters Alex’s shapeshifting, and Polarity Wall and Frost Shield defend against most firearms Alex can use

• Has fought opponents similar to Alex before (Sasha, David Warner, Bertrand, and The Beast)

• More reliable and accessible power source

• Can possess an infinite amount of electricity for a brief moment via Karmic Overload; this can help him end the fight quickly. If given access to the RFI, Cole will indefinitely have an infinite amount of electricity

• Has ways to fend off Alex if he gets up close (Such as shockwaves, Gigawatt Blades, Graviton Blast and freezing)

• Was the protagonist for more than one game

• His rival in Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale is Raiden Metal Gear (peak)

Disadvantages:

• Inferior movement speed 

• Inferior regeneration

• Without the RFI, needs to consistently replenish his supply of electricity

• Unlikely to go unaffected by the Blacklight Virus

• Very unlikely that he would be able to achieve Karmic Overload again within the course of the fight

• Intelligence and overall experience pales in comparison

• Somehow NOT the one with the codename “Zeus”

• Evil Side has a rivalry with Fat Princess (what)

“I understand that I had a brother once; a boy named Alex, a boy who used to play games with me and go skating with me and watch scary movies with me. I understand that Alex is dead now.”

Advantages:

• Regeneration makes him tough to keep down

• Despite being at disadvantage when it comes to stats, he has numerous instant win options such as his absorption manipulation, biological manipulation, the Blacklight virus, and the parasite

• More experienced and academically smarter 

• Would dominate in a H2H situation

• Superior stamina and mobility

• His Shield and Armor can protect him from Cole’s projectiles

• Could hypothetically develop a resistance against the amount of power behind Cole’s electricity plus heat if given enough time

• The RFI will not affect Alex due to different physiology 

• Potential numbers advantage with Evolved underlings

• The original Edgy Skillet AMV character

• Superior crossdresser

Disadvantages:

• Much weaker

• Too slow to reliably dodge the vast majority of Cole’s attacks

• Severely lacking in viable ranged options

• His most reliable win-cons require him to get close

• Less reliable reserves 

• If damaged enough, he will struggle to regenerate quickly enough to retaliate

• While his armor can potentially protect him from Cole’s projectiles, it severely limits his mobility, making it easy for Cole to escape

• Most firearms and weapons he may use will strengthen Cole due to Frost Shield

• During Prototype 2, Alex became very cocky and tends to mock his opponents

• Series is ten feet under the ground 

• Prototype 1 comic is bad actually (literally The Boys)

Ultimately, while both sides’ feats truly make them live up to their fearsome reputations, the Demon of Empire City has the decisive edges needed to put down his tenacious opponent for the count permanently. Alex is a powerful and formidable individual who could feasibly win if a few things here and there swung his way, but for the most part, it’s Cole superior stats and arsenal that afford him the tools needed to control the fight on his terms and end it as well. 

His poweset offers various counters to Alex’s, chief among them being an assortment of better ranged attacks that allow him to get out of Alex’s effective range up close - not to say a close-quarters fight would be a death sentence since Cole’s melee tools are serviceable enough to hold the line. Ionic attacks serve as a great AOE attack that not only provide better battlefield control than Alex’s Devastators, but would also help in thinning out the herds of Evolved Alex can send his way - again, shouldn’t be much of an issue since Cole has experience fighting against large groups of foes.

If Alex attempts stealth via disguises, Cole can easily utilize Radar Pulse to see through them. Energy recharging? Both men are reliant on their environment to refill, but Cole would always have more access to nearby electrical sources to top off whereas Alex would need to go out of his way to chase down humans actively escaping him to gain more biomass, and this is to say nothing about how Cole could just shut Alex down completely with Bio-Leech. The Blacklight virus is incredibly potent, but as mentioned above, Cole should have enough tools to avoid getting infected in the first place if not resist its effects outright.

This leaves Alex’s main advantage in this fight being his absurd regeneration, and while Cole’s own pales in comparison, he can easily counter that by… being several factors stronger and faster than the opposition. When comparing the numbers, they show the Conduit being just that with Cole being 7x stronger (at worst) and 51 times faster (with Precision only further helping); Alex wouldn’t be able to land many critical blows or even have any attacks he does land to be of any major consequence whereas Cole has enough to overpower his Infected opponent and eventually overtax his healing by ensuring Alex would have nothing to grow back from

 Karmic Overload and potential access to the RFI should help in that regard since they would afford Cole the temporarily unlimited energy needed to call upon every single thunder god in the world to smite Alex over and over again if need be. Even factoring in the Blacklight virus’ adaptation, Alex wouldn’t have the time needed to develop the appropriate resistances to survive longer given that again, Cole’s boasting a level of power his universe can’t match.

Again, credit where credit is due. Alex could definitely win some scenarios had some factors swung the other way, but as it stands right now, it’s our friendly inFamous Conduit who’s more likely to come out as the victor here and put this 14-year old rivalry to rest for good.

The winner is the InFamous Prime Conduit himself, Cole MacGrath.

Final Tally

Team Cole MacGrath (17) - Ninjamonkey3904, Cabbage, Clockboxxer, Discount Ginger, greymerlion2, Hyperstarman, Ice Level Kratos, Kirbonic Pikmin, Kobuddy, Noah, PUNPUN, Ramen=Noodles, Redrunner, Retro, Rina Antiqua, Soma, ishi_yuki

Team Alex Mercer (1) - Oleggator

One Last Message

(Credit to Dekhead)

Yo, Hyperstarman here. I just wanted to share one last quick message that the other G1 members were kind enough to allow me to say. This matchup has been quite the ride for me to say the least. Never did I expect it to legitimately happen, with the endless jokes of it never happening for over a decade, much less be so heavily involved in the process of pushing for it to become a reality. I remember a couple years back how wild it was to first join this community and now flash forward to a couple years and seeing myself so interconnected to it is crazy. All the support brought in during last year's poll was mind blowing and was really grateful to those who helped out.

It was just a fun experience to be involved in all that, and just interact with everyone and discover new friends along the way. It was a great time for me to be a part of those circles and just having fun rediscovering this old era of my childhood. And the lead up to it with all the fanart and discussion was just very heartwarming to see and I'm just grateful for those that made it a fun time for me and others as well. Giving those a chance to discover these games for the first time and having others rediscover them again was awesome to see.

It's been a wild ride and with it premiering so soon I just want to say thank you to everyone that made such an amazing experience and everyone the Death Battle crew for making it a reality and putting in their passion for it. So let's strap in and have one final countdown for the 14 year long rivalry... one last time.

https://youtu.be/635MqzOObLY?si=UwCFmWA43aiWLg-2