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Val staggers a very surprised Daxamite with a kick to the face. (Mr. X thinks he actually broke his jaw, based on the art, but I think it's probably just bruised...the guy talks just fine afterwards and doesn't seem to be in serious pain.)
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A couple years after the above scene, Val defeats a possessed M'onel. (Yes,same guy as Preboot Mon-El, a Daxamite). This is another long fight--LSH v4 #111 if you want to see more than three pages. Val's feats here include:
•Instantly deducing M'onel's possession and psychoanalyzing the entity possessing him, just by reading his body language from one panel (yeah, M'onel's eyes are glowing and he's snarling and stuff, but still);
•Dancing around M'onel's attacks, including a volley of heat-vision blasts (or a single continuous beam, not sure) at close range;
•Redirecting M'onel's charge and throwing him out of the solar system, so that he ends up in the gravity well of a nearby red star, causing the possessing entity to flee. And Val aimed him that way on purpose; they talked about the star earlier in the story. Crikey.
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Val vs. the Emerald Empress, within a larger Legion vs. Fatal Five battle. Even before she got the Eye, the reboot Empress was an incredibly skilled mass-murderer who "knew a thousand ways to kill a hundred species with her bare hands." Probably Lady Shiva-class or above. In the last page, Val hears her heartbeat from a kilometer away, tracks her by it, lets her stalk him, then casually takes her out in one shot.
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An admittedly “slow and out of condition” Karate Kid—he spent the last several months training as a pacifist monk—takes on Nadir, a guy with Kryptonian or near-Kryptonian strength and durability. (He defeated Ferro in one panel and two punches, and then casually fractured his body to bits by hand.) Val loses the first round, then comes back and finally defeats him by exploding his weapon’s powerpack. Feats include:
•Surviving getting smashed into the ground by Nadir three times, and twice recovering instantly or almost instantly;
•Dodging between rapid-fire energy blasts;
•Kicking Nadir hard enough to put him on his knees coughing up stuff;
•Punching his powerpack, thereby rigging it to explode when Nadir fired his weapon.