Badass Normal / Web Original

---

• Sly Marbo of If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device definitely qualifies. In a setting with literal gods and demigods running around, as well as countless transhumans who have been empowered far beyond normal human limits, he is a regular guardsman... who tends to wipe the floor with any of the superhumans who regularly challenge him, simply by virtue of pure skill and Unstoppable Rage.
• Justice Wing has many examples:
  • Broadhead and his former sidekick Crosspointe are super-archers — Crosspointe has literally never missed — but are completely unpowered. Similarly, one of Broadhead's old friends, Vermilion, is a swordswoman.
  • Many villains, including but not limited to the Jack O'Knaves, Bandolier, Fletcher Joan, and many more.
  • Nightstick, Cudgel, Truncheon, and Shillelagh are all Batman-family-like unpowered heroes in Greystone City.
• The Metaverse distinguishes itself from other superhero universes (outside of being live action) by featuring unpowered heroes as the majority as opposed to the looked down upon minority. That isn't to say that sci-fi in anyway takes a back seat; giant monsters and alternate dimensions are anything but scarce.
• Protectors of the Plot Continuum: Most PPC agents are ordinary humans who get the job done through whatever training they received, rapidly gained experience, and sometimes luck. "Normal" is a relative term in the PPC, though, given that they can recruit from almost every continuum that's ever been written; nonhuman characters include elves, dragons, Funny Animals, dinosaurs, aliens, and a superintelligent shade of the colour blue.
• SCP Foundation: Most competent Foundation personnel. Several staff members are (with the marked exception of Dr. Kain and Dr. Bright) humans without paranormal abilities, but they can take down or capture dangerous abnormal objects, and in some cases kill Reality Warpers.
  • Especially applicable to most of the Mobile Task Forces — all are Badasses, and most are Normals.
    • With a few notable exceptions, like MTF Tau-5 (Immortal cyborg clones created from the flesh of a dead god) and MTF Omega-0 (ghosts of personnel whose loyalty to the Foundation compels them to continue to serve from beyond the grave). But really, those are exceptions.
  • For example, one of the archaeological digs for SCP-140 went horribly, horribly wrong, and the doctor in charge of the site sacrificed his life to stop whatever the Hell was down there.
  • SCP-1983 is a house where the interior is an alternate dimension full of malevolent shadow entities. The Foundation sent a team of heavily armed and highly trained agents and they were massacred. The Foundation then sent in a Boxed Crook numbered D-14134 for a suicidal recon mission. Long story short, D-14134, in the manner of some badass Anti-Hero protagonist of a survival horror video game, actually managed to fight his way down into the creatures' nest and destroy them at the source, neutralising the SCP at the cost of his life.
  • SCP-3999 details how a thirty-something low-level researcher named James Talloran was placed in a Cosmic Horror Story by an insane Apollyon-class Reality Warper and subjected to three million years of Mind Screw torture straight from your worst nightmare. Not only did Talloran keep in sanity intact, but he eventually found a way to get reality back under control, gave the entity a humiliating speech and then destroyed it and himself to get reality back to normal again.
• Tech Infantry is a world with vampires, mages, werewolves, and 8-foot insectoid alien killing machines, and yet Erich von Shrakenberg, Icarus Hicks, James Welthammer, and the entire personnel of Earth Fleet and the Light Infantry manage to hold their own.
• Whateley Universe:
  • Sensei Tetsuo Ito, martial arts instructor at Whateley Academy. A little old man, he starts every term's aikido classes by picking the most dangerous mutant in the room and demonstrating that he can kick said mutant's ass.
  • Chief Delarose certainly qualifies, too. Not only is he the head of security at a superhero school (a job which carries its own innumerable worries), but Deathlist, a Hero Killer of the highest sort, knows him at a glance.
  • Erik Mahren was, prior to his explosion caused by late-term manifestation, referred to as 'The World's Most Evil Baseline', and managed for years to pull off some simply insane tricks with little more than training... such as putting a very powerful power mimic in the infirmary with two dislocations, and managing to be one of the very few surviving members of the Dragonslayers. They, themselves, were a Marine Corps squad of low-level Exemplars and baselines who took down ragers, monsters and other paranormals which had stymied entire superhero teams for years.
  • There is in-canon speculation (and occasional backhanded confirmation) amongst many that Doctor Diabolik may in fact not be a mutant, imbued, or even dynamorph holder, but just a very, very intelligent man. Even then, he has become a household name and the top of the B-list of villains.
• Detective Michaels in A World Less Visible goes into battle alongside werewolves, witches, demons, and an archangel, and manages to hold his own.
• The superhero story Worm has quite a few non-powered characters who attain this status, ranging from the mercenaries hired by supervillain Coil to the Parahuman Response Teams run by the U.S. government. The most prominent such character is probably Brockton Bay PRT Director Emily Piggot.
  • On the villain side, there's Saint, Dragon's nemesis, a hacker who was able to steal Tinker-made combat mechs that let him and his group fight on par with Parahumans. Though it is eventually revealed he received some power assistance from Teacher, so one could argue he doesn't quite count as "normal".
  • The DT troop with the foam launcher in the final confrontation with Jack Slash.
  • Therapist Jessica Yamada, who not only manages to talk a borderline-genocidal Glaistig Uaine down from, well, genocide but also gets her to agree to become a hero.

---