One of the highest possible ways to receive a speed rating is to outright ignore the restraints imposed by time, often by moving in a place where time has ceased to exist. Due to the controversial nature of such a feat, it must be analyzed carefully before being accepted. This article will focus on establishing guidelines for these feats.
Basis
The equation used to determine any given character's speed is written as:
- Speed = D/T
In a realm where the value of "T" is 0, the amount of time that passes is, similarly, also zero. This means that moving inside such a realm would be impossible with finite speeds, since all movement in our universe requires time (and therefore a "T" value that is greater than 0). If a character manages to complete an action inside a timeless realm, no matter how insignificantly small, the "T" value would always be 0, resulting in infinitely fast movement.
Requirements
Most series do not acknowledge such a feat as something that would take an infinite amount of speed to accomplish, and it's constantly portrayed as a one-off action occurring for the sake of plot. In that case, the feat is to be discarded as an Outlier or a Plot-Induced Stupidity.
In order for any given series to be upgraded based on these feats, their universe should meet, at minimum, a few of these criteria:
- The realm should be consistently and reliably described as timeless by knowledgeable characters who can be confirmed not to be lying or bluffing.
- The realm should display characteristics a realm without time would be expected to have, such as the lack of a visible passage of time, unless this is Cinematic Time.
- Although not necessary per se, and not entirely accurate either, the characters who traverse it being described as "beyond the space-time" or "beyond time" would be supporting evidence.
A simple way to look at it is to divide each one of the timeless realms in fiction in "Types":
- Type 1: "Timeless" Voids: Voids that supposedly lack time but are completely contradicted to be such. Examples: The Void in League of Legends and the World of Void in Dragon Ball Super.
- Type 2: Insubstantial Voids: Voids that have some properties of being timeless, but not enough to warrant Infinite speed, at least not most of the time. Examples: The Demon Realm in Dragon Ball Heroes and the Distortion World from Pokémon.
- Type 3: "True" Voids: Voids that are stated to be timeless and are explicitly shown to be such. They have many properties that would come with timelessness to the extent that it is undeniable they would qualify for Infinite speed. Examples: The Void Beyond in Final Fantasy XIII-2 and the Dark Area in Digimon.
Assigning a speed
It should be noted that characters who are able to move freely inside a timeless universe/void do not qualify for Immeasurable speed. This mistake comes from a misunderstanding of the Speed page, which states the following:
- Immeasurable (Movement beyond linear time. This is why the speed cannot be measured. Given that S = D/T, if T is undefined the speed formula cannot be applied.)
However, the aforementioned section refers to causality. As Note 5 elaborates upon:
- "Characters that are able to move backwards and forwards through time by movement alone qualify for immeasurable speed."
Moving inside a realm where time does not exist does not imply that a character can attack through time, bypass causality and hit their opponent in the past or in the future. Instead, it implies that the character is able to instantaneously travel anywhere they desire, which is what our standards for Infinite speed are for.
An easy way to understand this is to divide time in two dimensions, one that binds the character's speed and one that deals with the past, present and future. For example, a normal human would view a character with Infinite speed as doing an immense amount of actions at the exact same time (0). However, from the point of view of said character, he'd be normally performing these actions one after another, not instantaneously.
The same human would be completely unable to even view a fight between two characters with Immeasurable speed, because their attacks would be constantly rewriting history and changing what happened in both the past and the future. The same principle as before then applies: both of these characters are perceiving their attacks normally.