You really think that monster was even somewhere closer to the size of Mount Everest? He was the size of a small to medium scale mountain range. And well your Atomic bomb yield argument is quite sound. The thing is I sometimes dislike that writers most of the time underestimate that human ingenuity can create wonders in fiction and always create some mcguffin that can solve the problem. The world of Superhuman also is different in the sense there are no normal countries rather long years of war has created completely different situation. SO if so many years of war has gone by, isn't it possible that human technology also reached a different pinnacle as well.But nope same old kinetic based weaponry.
And another ridiculous thing that the Authors love to put in their stories is any human moving at FTL speeds not understanding what would happen if someone even reaches relativistic speed. One can reach several hundred times the speed of sound. But once a human reaches relativistic speeds, their body no matter how powerful will follow the rules of physics at any cost. So the thing is a human moving at speed of light is impossiible and I wish authors would actually use relative speeds for human and not throw around words like FTL travel done by a person. Its not like we are dealing with magic here. The powers we have seen are all based on scientific principles, so it would be great if atleast a scientist like Xanthe wouldn't say shit like FTL travel.
I am not saying the monster was the size of mount Everest, I am just giving Everest as a reference so we can start throwing some numbers around. Keep in mind Everest is one mountain, while the mountain range that was shown in-game is, well, a mountain RANGE, so in terms of total mass it could very well be a lot more than Everest. It could also be similar or less, since we don't really know how big the mountain range is, it was never specified for us and its a fictional mountain range. The rock monster was clearly towering over the mountain range and its mass was probably in the same ball park as that mountain range, but idk. Again I am just throwing around numbers here with the purpose of seeing if its within the same order of magnitude or not. Even if the mountain monster has half the mass, or a fourth the mass of the mountain range, the math still holds up, you're still dealing with tens of millions of tonnes of TNT worth of energy to even begin to damage the monster, and that's not even factoring in the fact that the mountain range is obviously not made purely of soil, but of a mixture of unspecified rocks and other materials, while the mountain monster is clearly stated as being TOUGHER than the mountain (meaning for the same mass its going to be able to tank more energy). How much tougher is unclear so again, I set a lower range of energy being comparable to Tzar bomb in order to damage the thing, and an upper range of continental-destruction levels of energy. We really don't know, it's not specified. Look at the Valraven as a clue though, the damn thing has a medieval-style suit of armor which is probably no thicker than a few inches at its thickest point (the breastplate where its heart was) which was able to shrug off tank cannon shots, meaning its got AT LEAST 30inches of rolled steel-equivalent armor (probably more because we dont even see the damn shots leaving a dent in it's armor, if you fired a tank round at 30 inches of rolled steel, it might not penetrate but it would definitely bury itself in the armor to a considerable depth and a follow up shot to the same point would probably penetrate). That armor is already defying physics, either its some unknown mystical alloy of metal like mithril or adamantite or some fantasy shit from wherever the monsters come from that has strength and toughness properties that humans are incapable of reproducing with current technology, or its somehow able to acquire such properties through being enhanced by the monsters powers. We don't know, it's not specified, we just know that the armor is unnaturally tough and strong to a supernatural degree, far outperforming even our best composite materials. If that is any indication of the kind of performance boost monsters are able to achieve then the rock monster is likewise going to be waaaaaay tougher to blow up than a measly mountain range.
When you talk about technology reaching a new pinnacle, it is clearly shown in the setting that humanity has progressed. They have prototype plasma rifles for example, as shown in the fight with Jake, and they have all that other tech developed by Xanthe and his group based on studying superhumans and monsters. Did you see the matrix-like VR set up they had? The containment facilities for monsters? Clearly this is all cutting-edge stuff and developed in secret, hidden from the public. Obviously the first responders to a monster incident are going to be police, who are armed with just handguns and basic small arms, and then the military, who are going to be armed with small arms, infantry fighting vehicles, anti armor weapons, etc. and not experimental black project plasma rifles or other shit.
Remember, the humans in this setting are not that much more advanced than us, we are talking like less than a century. We are already 22 years into the new century and we have not developed anything more destructive than the weapons we had 50 years ago. That is because we are still operating based on the laws of physics, which are slow to advance. A 120mm tank cannon 50 years ago is still going to perform comparably to one produced today, and there is no reason for us to use anything more because that is enough to deal with the threats that tanks are built to handle. Human weapons are built to deal with human enemies, not supernatural monsters with unnatural toughness and destructive power. In terms of the setting, obviously as time passes the human governments will not sit on their hands and will begin trying to develop and implement new weapons, tactics, and technology to counter the monster threats, but they will obviously have limited success because again, if you are operating within the confines of physics its hard to build a gun that can blast apart an enemy that is armored in supernatural materials that DEFY physics and can literally shrug off tank rounds like they're nothing.
And by the way, in terms of power scaling, the valraven is clearly at the top end of second tier evolution or possibly early 3rd tier. The MC is shown to be able to punch above his weight class, depending on the enemy he can even take on someone who is one evo above him, and for him the valraven fight was one of his toughest and really pushed the limits of everything he had. If the valraven did not care about larping as an honorable warrior it probably could have played more dirty and beaten him.
Regarding the FTL travel, I would agree with you if the powers actually obeyed physics, but again they stop obeying physics once you get past evo 4 it seems. FTL does fall under the realm of sci-fi, a lot of settings have it, and it implies that you are not affected by relativistic affects. For example, lets suppose we have a space ship that has an "FTL drive" that works by bringing the ship into "hyper space" where normal physics doesnt apply, or where traveling 1 meter actually lets you travel 1km in real space, so from the standpoint of hyper space its not going ftl, but when it returns to "real space" it has travelled FTL. Now instead of a ship imagine the same effect is being applied to the superhuman. Or else how do you explain Alice even at evo 1 generating singularities that mess with gravity? Do we even know how to affect gravity in real life? No, and neither do the humans in the setting. What about seemingly storing enough mass as energy and converting it freely from energy to mass like the MC does to produce essentially thousands of times his own body mass? That violates physics just as much as FTL does. It's clear these powers are not obeying physics from the very start, and once they reach higher evo's the manifestations of their output also begin to treat physics as merely a suggestion. I don't see anything remarkable about evo 5 superhumans being able to go FTL. Think about the chick who can teleport, she isn't even evo 5, and her power IS FTL by definition, because she can TELEPORT to any place she has seen before. And its not like we are even shown the limits of her powers either, is there a distance limit to how far she can teleport? In one of the dead ends she literally teleports our MC into space, he looks over and sees planet earth off in the distance. That's a distance of thousands of miles. Not even light can travel that distance instantly. It takes 8 minutes for light to go from the sun to the earth, and her power, if she could cover the distance from earth to the sun in one go, would take zero time to cover it.
In real life teleportation violates causality and is impossible as far as we know. Quantum teleportation with individual atoms in a lab setting is possible, but even then its not ftl because they transmit the information from location A to location B at relativistic speeds, so the actual transportation from A to B is not instant but obeys light speed effects. So far as we know there doesnt seem to be any case in nature where information can out-run light speed, yet the teleportation clearly violates this.
