Tonight on Deadliest Fiction, it's a triple threat match between hardened killers, men who gave everything to escape their old lives only to find the past just can't let them go! It'll be a vicious showdown as John Wick, the legendary hitman whose quest for vengeance destabilized a global criminal conspiracy, Lucas Hood, the master thief impersonating a sheriff who brought a whirlwind of violence upon the seemingly sleepy town of Banshee, and Spike Spiegel, ex-Syndicate assassin turned intergalactic bounty hunter, all find themselves embroiled in a kill or be killed shootout! When one man is left standing, then we will have the answer to the ultimate question...
WHO...IS...DEADLIEST???
Intro[]
John Wick[]
| “ | People keep asking if I'm back and I haven't really had an answer. But now, yeah, I'm thinkin' I'm back.
— John Wick
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” |
An orphan of the Ruska Roma, John Wick was once the deadliest hitman on the planet, famously deemed the "Baba Yaga" or "Boogeyman" by the Tarasov Syndicate, his primary employers. After falling in love, John did one final hit, deemed "impossible", before retiring. However, tragedy struck when his wife Helen was diagnosed with terminal cancer and died. Grieving, John came to care for the dog Helen left him, treating it as his last connection to a normal life. Unable to catch a break, John fell into misfortune when Iosef Tarasov, son of his former employer, breaks into his house, kills the dog, and steals his car after John rebuffed his attempt to buy it. Enraged, John reentered the game and wiped out the entire Tarasov organization over the space of two days. Adopting a new dog, John retired for real, though he was forced to return to settle a blood debt involving the D'Antonio crime family.
Lucas Hood[]
| “ | You think we are who we are? Or do you think people can change?
— Lucas Hood
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” |
His real name unknown, the master thief that would become Lucas Hood began a life of crime at a young age, when he murdered his abusive father before fleeing to join the army. His fiery temper continued to get him in trouble, culminating with him assaulting an officer and being court-martialed, only to be saved from prison by a man named Dalton, who gave the man a position in a high-risk black ops unit as a chance of freedom. "Hood" would prove to be an effective soldier and killer, but on his final mission, he struck up a friendship with the target: a hacker named Job who exposed him to a profitable criminal lifestyle.
The two went rogue, becoming a criminal duo that eventually began working for the Ukranian gangster Rabbit, where "Hood" fell in love with Rabbit's daughter Anastasiya, with the two making plans to run away together after stealing a massive shipment of diamonds. The shipment was, in reality, a trap set up by Rabbit, and "Hood" sacrificed his freedom to ensure Anastasiya escaped, ultimately spending fifteen years in prison.
Upon his release, "Hood", with Job's help, tracked down Anastasiya, now going by the name Carrie, to a small town in Pennsylvania called Banshee, but discovered that she had a husband and two kids. Saddened, "Hood" made plans to leave town when two criminals attempted to rob the bar he was drinking at. Before he could step in, the real Lucas Hood, the town's new sheriff who had just arrived, intervened and was subsequently killed in the fight. Sensing an opportunity to keep an eye on the love of his life, the thief assumed the identity of the sheriff, aided in his ruse by the bar owner and Job, who helped set up a fake identity.
Spike Spiegel[]
| “ | Whatever happens, happens.
— Spike Spiegel
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” |
Little is known about the past of Spike Spiegel until he joined the fearsome Red Dragon Syndicate and was mentored by the respected capo Mao Yenrai. Spike quickly became one of the organization's most esteemed members, going as far as to lose his eye in service of the syndicate, and befriended Vicious, a fellow member of the syndicate, before meeting Vicious's lover Julia, with whom Spike fell in love with on first sight. While the power hungry Vicious schemed for control of the syndicate, Spike grew quietly embittered with the life and contemplated faking his death to escape it while urging Julia, with whom he was engaging in an affair, to come with him. The two agree to a rendezvous, but Vicious caught wind of the plot and attempted to blackmail Julia into killing him. To save Spike's life, Julia failed to show up to their meeting, leaving Spike to wander off on his own. After a few years, Spike formed a partnership with ex-cop Jet Black, and the two became an infamous bounty hunter duo.
The duo's work would take them all over the galaxy in Jet's ship, the Bebop, and pit them against an assortment of strange characters, more often than not fumbling the bounty out of sheer misfortune but doing their best to stay afloat. They would also reluctantly take on more members to the team, including the fiery, seductive con artist Faye Valentine, eccentric child hacker Ed, and a genetically modified corgi named Ein. Secretly pining for Julia all the while, Spike would come to develop a begrudging fondness for his newfound circle of friends while being reluctantly drawn back into the affairs of the syndicate as Vicious began to make his power play. He would finally reunite with Julia as she resurfaced on the eve of Vicious's violent coup against syndicate leadership, leading to a bloodbath as Vicious's upstart faction clashed with loyalists and began eliminating any he suspected to be a threat to his ascension to power. Reluctantly leaving the crew of the Bebop behind, Spike and Julia attempted to run away together, but are ambushed by Vicious's hitmen as they make their escape. The ensuing shootout leaves Julia dead and a distraught Spike nothing to live for but revenge. After a final farewell to Faye and Jet, Spike assaulted the syndicate's headquarters, tearing through Vicious's men before confronting his former friend in a final duel. He managed to prevail, but was left badly wounded, powering through long enough to descend the steps of the headquarters before collapsing, his final fate uncertain.
Weapons, Skills, and Abilities[]
| “ | So I guess you have a choice. You want a war? Or do you wanna just... give me a gun?
— John Wick
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” |
Weapon and Equipment:
- Heckler & Koch P30L: John's signature handgun is a Heckler & Koch P30L, fitted with a custom compensator to reduce recoil and muzzle rise. The P30L is a semi-automatic handgun with 15 rounds per clip and a range of 50 meters.
- Bulletproof Suit: A special suit made of unknown material, John's suits are capable of stopping bullets from pistol fire and knives from certain angles, buying him time to recover and counter-attack.
Skills and Abilities:
- Peak Human Physicality: Retirement did not hurt John's physical performance in the slightest, and he was able to easily keep up with and surpass assassins much younger than him. On top of his considerable strength and fast reflexes, he was notoriously difficult to kill, powering through bullet and stab wounds to see his mission through and once surviving a fall off the roof of the several stories high Continental Hotel after engaging in the lengthy defense of it against a variety of assassins. He was regularly able to fight for hours, if not days, on end with little rest, and was often willing to take hits if it left the opponent vulnerable, such as allowing his old friend Caine to shoot him to ensure the Marquis would let his guard down or letting Viggo stab one of his old wounds to create an opening to break Viggo's arm.
- Expert Marksman: Highly trained in all forms of combat, John was a crack shot with a wide variety of weapons. While he usually favored the pistol, he showed similar talent with rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, and even thrown weapons like tomahawks and knives. He was so accurate that he regularly landed split-second headshots as his preferred means of eliminating enemies, enabling him to make short works of groups of enemies by simply landing kill shots in rapid succession. He was able to couple this with a precise understanding of the human body, able to land damaging, but non-lethal hits on foes he didn't want to kill, such as stabbing the Bowery King but giving him the ability to keep pressure on the wound or driving a knife into Cassian's aorta, giving the man the chance to survive as long as he didn't follow him.
- Master Combatant: John is potentially the deadliest assassin in the world, widely feared by the entirety of the criminal underworld as a mythical figure even after years in retirement. John's fighting style heavily emphasizes brutality and efficiency, bringing down enemies as quickly as possible by any means necessary, even if it involves dirty fighting tactics like eye gouges and strikes to the groin. In hand-to-hand combat, John used a style that resembled a mix of Brazilian jiu-jitsu, judo, sambo, aikido, karate, and krav maga, often mixing in tandem with his gunplay to quickly disarm or subdue enemies before killing them. Using these skills, he regularly made short work of hundreds of foes, with only the ninja Zero (who attacked John when he was already exhausted from a battle with his students) and former associate Caine able to match him in an extended fight. He also had a knack for improvised weapons, killing a hulking Serbian hitman with a book, killing several men with the disassembled pieces of his gun, and once managing to kill three men with a pencil.
- Stealth Master: John is an expert in infiltration, often fading in and out of the shadows so easily that he seems to simply appear next to unaware targets, and was so skilled at it that he was able to turn the tables on Zero, a master ninja, and disorient him enough during their fight that Zero made reckless strikes at John's reflection through bulletproof mirrors.
- Tactical Expert: While the higher-level political machinations of the underworld aren't his strong suit, John is still very intelligent in both battlefield tactics and split-second improvisation. He often attempts to learn the layout of areas before infilitrating them, ensuring an easy entrance and escape, and is shown to have amounts of environmental awareness, quickly finding things to use as makeshift weapons and keeping track of foes moving and out of cover during firefights.
| “ | Right now the biggest career move you can make is getting the fuck out of the way.
— Lucas Hood
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” |
Weapon:
- Glock 17: The weapon of choice of the Banshee Sheriff's Department, the Glock 17 is a semi-automatic pistol with an effective range of 50 meters and 17 rounds per clip.
Skills and Abilities:
- Peak Physical Condition: Training constantly and with nothing but time during his stint in prison, Hood has kept himself in a state of high physical conditioning, able to take part in lengthy foot chases and leap from car to car during a chase on the highway without any signs of fatigue or slowing. His endurance is often noted as his most persistent trait, withstanding days of torture without breaking and standing up from vicious beatings from men twice his size with a defiant refusal to stay down, while he's physically strong enough to systematically break the fingers of an MMA fighter and rip a bed post off of it's hinges when he's been handcuffed to it.
- Skilled Hand-to-Hand Fighter: Lucas is an exceptionally talented fighter, favoring a style used by special forces to bring down foes quickly, with an emphasis on stiff, crippling strikes and grapples to bring opponents to the ground. Given the cutthroat nature of his lifestyle, Lucas also emphasizes dirty fighting, utilizing strikes to the groin, breaking opponent's limbs or fingers, and gouging the eyes while attacking with any improvised weapon he can get his hands on. He once defeated the Albino, the towering boss of the prison gang hired to terrorize him, by stabbing him in the penis with a shank before crushing his head with a weight, while he's regularly able to take on groups of foes at once and win, with multiple witnesses describing him as a one man army. He is the only person in Banshee that was able to defeat Clay Burton, the fearsome bodyguard of Kai Proctor, in a fight, though he had weakened Clay by hitting him with a car immediately prior, and managed to hold his own against Chayton Littlestone, an undefeated underground fighter with a considerable height advantage, before one of his deputies managed to break up the fight.
- Stealth Expert: A highly talented master thief and former government operative, Lucas was skilled at infiltration and subterfuge, able to pass himself off as a law enforcement official without raising too much suspicion outside of a few hostile parties, regularly broke into the homes of armed and experienced criminals to gather evidence without being caught, and masterminding a successful heist of an army base alongside a small group of trusted allies, systematically ambushing and eliminating the soldiers on guard duty without any of them ever realizing.
| “ | Look at my eyes, Faye. One of them is a fake because I lost it in an accident. Since then, I’ve been seeing the past in one eye and the present in the other.
— Spike Spiegel
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” |
Weapons:
- Jericho 941 R: Spike's signature pistol is a modified Jericho 941 R, customized with specialized grips and a laser sight on the side, though he never actually uses the laser sight. The Jericho is a semi-automatic handgun with an effective range of 50 meters and 16 rounds per clip.
Skills and Abilities:
- Expert Martial Artist: Spike is an immensely talented practitioner of Jeet Kune Do, mixing it with high kicks closer to French boxing to take advantage of his considerable reach. Fitting for his general "go with the flow" worldview, Spike's fighting style emphasizes using the opponent's momentum and strength against them, taking control of the flow of the fight while swiftly punishing breaks in defense, while also quickly improvising. He was able to defeat Asimov, a criminal whose strength and speed was enhanced by the Red Eye drug, with little difficulty, fought ex-military turned private security woman Elektra Ovirowa to a standstill while playfully flirting with her, and savagely beat an entire gang that mistook him for Vicious to a pulp.
- Skilled Marksman: Spike is also a highly talented shot, able to flip and shoot a small vial out of the air and confidently shoot and kill a syndicate member with harming the hostage he was holding. His skill made him talented at both further distance sharpshooting and using his gun in close combat, able to match (and ultimately outdraw) the talented swordsman Vicious in a close-quarters fight.
- Peak Physicality: Despite his skinny frame and unassuming demeanor, Spike is incredibly tough, regularly surviving being shot, stabbed, caught in massive explosions, and falls from considerable height. He powered through his climactic attack on Vicious's headquarters, killing numerous men before engaging in a brutal fight with Vicious, and only collapsed on the steps where he started once the job was done, while his strikes were strong enough to knock people out in one blow and lift them off their feet from the sheer force. He was also very nimble, able to easily run across train seats to deliver a flying kick while Jet often relied on him to chase down targets due to his speed and talent for parkouring across chaotic environments.
- Stealth Expert: Spike was very talented in infiltration and sleight of hand, able to easily slip in and out of spaces without drawing attention to himself and often casually pickpocketing people without them being any the wiser. He was very talented at misdirection, often planting or taking things from foes that were too focused on attacking him, like when he nearly killed Vicious in their first fight by quietly pulling the pin on a grenade and dropping it at his feet while Vicious was trying to cut him down.
- Talented Improviser: Despite his often lazy, joking demeanor, Spike was noted to be far more intelligent than he often let on, quietly picking up on tiny details about people and quickly set traps and ambushes for targets. This demeanor is implied to partly be a feint, luring targets into a false sense of security before he makes his move.
X-Factors[]
| X-Factors | John Wick | Lucas Hood | Spike Spiegel |
| Experience | 95 | 90 | 90 |
| Training | 90 | 90 | 80 |
| Brutality | 90 | 95 | 80 |
| Intelligence | 75 | 65 | 75 |
Explanations[]
- All three men have a wide variety of experiences under their belts, having worked in their respective criminal undergrounds for a considerable amount of time, but John's age works highly to his favor here. On top of his implied history as a veteran of the Marine Corps, John worked for years as an assassin before returning to the lifestyle in a spectacular fashion, tearing through multiple crime families (and their armies of soldiers and a variety of eccentric hitmen) and becoming enemy #1 of the High Table in a relatively small timespan. In Spike's case, while he was a widely revered member of the syndicate and fought a murderer's row of targets from mad bombers to superhuman clown assassins, it was for a far shorter timespan. Lucas's time in spec ops, Rabbit's gang, and as sheriff have meant that his life is near constant combat, but he was out of the game for well over fifteen years due to his imprisonment, largely keeping himself outside of the occasional scrap and his battle with the Albino's gang, leaving him someone locked out of the loop upon his release.
- Both John and Lucas have histories with the special forces and working underneath the direct mentorship of revered, powerful figures within their respective underworlds, giving them a mixture of both traditional military training and a more general skillset designed for shadier purposes. While the exact details of Spike's upbringing to the syndicate are unknown, it can be assumed it served as his primary source of training, giving him a variety of talents as an assassin, bounty hunter, and fighter.
- None of these men particularly flinch at the act of taking a life, but Spike is notable as he often attempts to bring in targets non-lethally and shows a distaste for senseless violence, even going as far as to feel guilt and empathy for some of his targets. John is the quintessential hitman with a heart, putting down targets with ruthless efficiency but working to ensure that civilians aren't caught in the crossfire, with this particular soft spot for the innocent making him stand out against the more ruthless agents of the High Table. Having a life that can best be described as an endless barrage of trauma, Lucas is a pent-up ball of suppressed rage and pain with violence as his only effective outlet, and he often applies an over-the-top level of brutality onto those that he feels make deserving targets, outright crippling and humiliating those that have earned his ire, though he also draws the line at hurting people that (mostly) don't deserve it.
- Lucas is talented at infiltration and deception, but he's not really a big picture person in terms of planning and strategy, often needing others like Job to look into the finer details of plans when it comes time to actually look into them. He's also hotheaded, willing to abandon the plans of others if he feels they're ineffective and often making rash decisions that come back to bite him the ass later. Spike and John are more blunt tools, willing to let others make the plans, but both are often underestimated in terms of intellect, with John showing a shrewd tactical mind that enables him to ambush and eliminate large groups of superior armed foes and Spike showing a quiet perceptiveness and talent for misdirection.
Notes[]
- Voting ends September 28th.
- The respective canons for each warrior will be:
- John Wick: During the events of John Wick: Chapter 2 and John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum.
- Lucas Hood: In between seasons 2 and 3 of Banshee.
- Spike Spiegel: In between the episodes "Brain Scratch" and "Hard Luck Woman".
- The Scenario: An object of high importance is stolen from Mister Sinister in the dead of night, setting off a scramble amongst DFederal's various factions to claim it for themselves. Attempting to leave his life as a killer behind, John Wick is hired by Wilson Fisk, who pressures him into the job in return for a favor, to hunt down the party responsible. Meanwhile, Spike Spiegel takes a bounty from the DFPD to bring in the thief, while Lucas Hood, eager to have leverage over powerful figures in the city, uses his connections to try and track down them down personally. This sets all three men on a violent collision course, leading to a fateful meeting where only one can claim the prize.