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Superpower Lottery / Literature

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Winners of the Superpower Lottery in Literature.

  • Cassie from Animorphs is revealed to be this in the fourth Megamorphs book, Back to Before. She is a 'temporal anomaly', an exceedingly rare creature with a spatial awareness so superhuman that her very presence undoes the timeline-meddling of resident Reality Warper the Drode. Amusingly, the Drode proceeds to throw a hissy-fit, angrily accusing the Ellimist of 'stacking the deck' by including a Game-Breaker like her on the team.
  • A Certain Magical Index:
    • On the lower end, you have people like Mikoto who worked hard to raise their rank and have intimidating powers. Then there are people like Izzard, Kanzaki, Vento of the Front, Acqua of the Back, Fuse=Kazakiri, Fiamma of the Right. Even Plucky Comic Relief characters such as Kuroko have serious powers.
    • On the higher end you have Accelerator. He can change the velocity vectors of anything he comes into contact with, including physical objects, energy blasts, and even UV radiation. This activates automatically as well, to protect him from any possible threat. So he can fly, replicate the effects of a variety of other offensive powers, (theoretically) shrug off a nuclear bomb without even trying, and still have time for an Evil Laugh. This is a series in which a character that can create and end universes with a thought and he isn't even the strongest entity in existence.
    • And then there's Touma and his Anti-Magic right hand, called the Imagine Breaker, which can negate the abilities of everyone above. Later novels suggest that his power originates from the combined will of the Magic Gods. Furthermore, Volume 22 reveals that the Imagine Breaker is actually a Power Limiter. If it's removed, Touma's shoulder will manifest an invisible entity which is stronger than God himself.
  • The Beginning After the End:
    • Arthur. He wins the lottery, then loses it, and then wins it again.
      • Thanks to retaining his mindset and experience from his past life (as a battle-hardened king in a world governed by Asskicking Leads to Leadership and with ki powers similar to the magic in his current life) he is able to prematurely awaken his mana core when he was three years old, which leads to him become a quadra-elemental mage with control over fire, water, earth, and wind, on top of also being able to control the deviant forms of the first two, lightning and ice. In turn, his control over the four elements allows him to tap into aether, which no one alive but the Asuras can control. Speaking of which, he was also fortunate to come under the care of the dragon Sylvia, who before her death imparted onto him her Beast Will, which not only allows him to tap into her powers but also assists in his ability to control aether. She also imparted onto him the egg containing her unborn daughter Sylvie, who later acts as his bond and mount in battle. Later on, his connection with Sylvia gets him the attention of the Asuras themselves (as Sylvia was the daughter of their ruler Kezess), who take him to Epheotus where he receives Training from Hell, furthers his understanding of aether, and receives new weapons. Once he returns to Dicathen in time for the Alacryan invasion, Arthur has become a One-Man Army able to slaughter a horde of mana beasts that would give most people pause.
      • In Volume 8, Arthur finds out that after overexerting his Beast Will at the end of the war, his mana core had been damaged beyond recovery. From there, he finds a way to Re-Power himself and Came Back Strong. He learns that thanks to Sylvie's Heroic Sacrifice to keep his body from tearing himself apart from using his Beast Will, his physiology has become part-Asura which not only enhances his physical capabilities beyond most mortals but also allows him to regenerate serious injuries. He develops an aether core to replace his destroyed mana core and gains a more comprehensive understanding of it that exceeds that of the Asuras thanks to studying the artifacts and ruins left behind by the ancient Djinn from whom he is descended from. He acquires game-changing spells known as Godrunes such as Destruction and Aroa's Requiem as well as a suit of ancient Powered Armor only the Djinn and their descendants could wear. He also awakens the Acclorite Wren gave him before the war, which manifests as a spectral wolf called Regis who acts as a shapeshifting Fighting Spirit and can also act as a conduit for the Godrunes. Thanks to his own learning and the power of his bonds, Arthur becomes poised to become master of all three paths of aether, with him wielding spacium, Regis wielding vivum, and Sylvie wielding aevum, which in turn could lead to him mastering the final form of aether, fate, the very power sought by Agrona himself.
    • Sylvie. Not only is she an Asura, but she is the descendant of two of the most powerful Asura clans in the setting. From her father Agrona, she inherits the power of the Vritra and their capacity for destruction. From her mother Sylvia, she inherits the power of the Indrath and their capacity for creation. Fortunately, thanks to being raised by Arthur her entire life away from both the Indrath and the Vritra, Sylvie has turned out to be the only decent living member of both clans as she resonates with the man who raised her over her own Warring Natures. On top of her Yin-Yang Bomb powers, after her Heroic Sacrifice Sylvie's soul was displaced across time and space, making both her a Time Master and a Non-Linear Character. This allows her to save the future Arthur's soul from Agrona before he could be reincarnated into his vessel of choice in a form of Stable Time Loop. Once Arthur is able to reconstitute her physical form, Sylvie's newfound mastery over time becomes an invaluable asset to him.
    • The Legacy. She is the crux of Agrona's plan to wage war onto Epheotus and is his ace in the hole for good reason. In her past life, she was an Unstable Powered Woman who was sought by the nations of the world for her power, and to end her suffering committed Suicide by Cop in a duel with the man who would become Arthur. Seeking to harness her power, Agrona summoned two anchor points (one of whom being Arthur himself) so that he could summon her. She carries over her power from her past life, becoming the only other quadra-elemental mage in the setting. Her dominion over mana is absolute, and she is able to absorb and drain the mana from other beings, Asuras included, as a form of Power Copying. Agrona intends for her to absorb the powers of all the Asura races in order to create a powerful Living Weapon and Person of Mass Destruction for use in his conquest.
  • Circleverse: Trisana "Tris" Chandler. Even living among other powerful mages, she comes off as a lottery winner. A powerful storm mage, she has enough power to level a city if necessary. By exercising tight control she can also achieve feats such as using winds to fly, create solid structures out of the rocks in the ground, divert the paths of storms, and scry on the wind, an incredibly rare achievement. Her power makes many other mages frightened and jealous, which bothers Tris to no end, and was directly responsible for her lousy childhood. In The Will of the Empress, she actually has to be taken out of action temporarily near the end so the others can get some of the spotlight.
  • Date A Live: Prominent among both the humans and the Spirits.
    • Every human are capable of using the super technology Realizers to become Wizards, but not everyone has equal level of compatibility with it. Origami is considerably stronger than her peer in Anti Spirits Team, and yet she is nothing compared to Mana (who ranks second in all of Deus Ex Machina, although that's because her body was modified to the point where she only has 10 years to live) who can defeat lesser Spirits. Ellen Mira Mathers and Artemisia Bell Ashcroft are even more powerful, to the point where they can go toe-to-toe against most Spirits fairly easily.
    • The Spirits are human-looking girls who come from another dimension (or rather, humans who were given Sephira Crystals by Phantom), and all of them possess an Astral Dress and an Angel, which basically make them invincible to anything that isn't another Spirit. However, the actual powers that each Angel possesses differs, with some being more useful than others:
      • Kurumi with her Zafkiel is the first example. She possesses a pair of guns which can manipulate time in 12 different ways with its bullets (accelerating up for Super-Speed, slowing down for Bullet Time, causing Rapid Aging, reversing states of objects for Healing Factor, predicts the future, Mental Time Travel, freezing objects in place, create temporal clones using her memories, share her senses with subjects she sent with her time travel powers, read an object's past, and Time Travel forward or backward). Although their usage uses up enough mana to endanger her life, she can cast City of Devouring Time to drain mana from others, be it humans or Spirits.
      • Kotori's Camael is ridiculously powerful, as she literally cannot die unless she runs out of mana or is completely destroyed. Offensively, she can summon a battle-axe that can create flames powerful enough to burn even other Angels to ashes.
      • Natsumi's Haniel is less powerful in direct combat, but it can replicate the lesser powers of other Angels, which means it is one of the most versatile Angels around. This is on top of its ability to turn anything into anything else, which can affect all but beings stronger than her.
      • As the Second Spirit, Nia possesses Rasiel, which is literally omniscient. All that Nia needs to do is touch the book and it will mentally answer the user any question (except subjective questions, such as "what should I do?", allowing her to be taken off-guard). Then it can also bend the future to an extent (it cannot directly affect beings more powerful than her), and create monsters made of its papers. Lastly, it can open portals to send people to the fictional world where they will be stripped of their powers and have to contend with their story's setting.
      • Mukuro's Michael takes the cake. With her Cool Key, Mukuro can tear open holes in the space-time continuum, allowing her to transport anything (herself included) to anywhere. It can also lock the traits of the objects it touches, from physical traits (such as abilities) to abstract concepts (like emotions and memories). She can even stop the Earth's rotation with it. And this is before using her key's true form — a halberd — which enhances its powers even further.
    • The game Date A Live: Rinne Utopia introduces the Angel Eden owned by Rinne Sonogami. It creates an entire world within reality, with the user as its "Ruler". It allows the user to alter events, memories, and even the flow of time within the world. As if that is not enough, the Angel's core can inflict One-Hit Kill on anyone — humans or Spirits — and can produce Guardians to help the Ruler do her bidding.
    • Isaac Ray Peram Westcott himself gets this two times when obtaining the powers of the Inverse Spirits.
      • In Volume 13, he has Nia's Qlipha Crystal inserted into his own body, allowing him to use the Demon King, Beelzebub which gives him the abilities of omniscience, ability to bend the future to his will, create minions to do his bidding, and trap people in the world of fantasy. Although the first two is somewhat restricted due to Nia and Rasiel's survival.
      • In Volume 19, he uses the same ritual that summoned Mio Takamiya, the First Spirit, into the world on himself, which turned him into the Second/Inverse Spirit of Origin, giving him access to three Demon Kings. Athiel allows him to emit dark particles that can kill anyone touching them, Belial allows him to manipulate the laws of reality, and Qemetiel allows him to illuminate the world with darkness before erasing someone from existence.
  • Finding Hephaestus has Lodestar, a clear Expy of Superman. She is virtually unstoppable, and even Fornax, the toughest supervillain in history, was eventually beaten by her. Ironically, they become best friends after Fornax retires and Cannot Spit It Out.
  • In the Gaea Trilogy, the eponymous Physical God subjects some characters to a weak sort that tends to involve Translator Microbes.
  • In Graceling Realm, having a Grace means entering the lottery. Graces can loosely be defined as "extreme to the point of being supernatural skill at one thing". That thing can be a lottery loser like climbing trees or licking one's elbows, something limited-but-useful like math or cooking, or a lottery winner like mind-reading, lying ( Leck), killing (Katsa), or survival (Katsa's real Grace).
  • In Harry Potter there seems to be a spell for just about everything, though with varied effectiveness. While any wizard and witch can use most of these spells, the most powerful characters tend to use the widest variety of spells. The best examples are Albus Dumbledore and Lord Voldemort who not only seem to be masters of all forms of magic but often break the rules involving the limits to what magic can do.
  • Haruhi Suzumiya series: Mikuru has a Time Travel device that can only be used with permission from her superiors in the future. Plot-important, but lame. Itsuki can enter Closed Space and surround himself in a flying glowing shell to fight giant energy beings. Pretty neat, though he's completely powerless outside of Closed Space. Haruhi is a powerful Reality Warper... but she's Locked Out of the Loop and — limited by her common sense — only uses her power subconsciously. No, the real winner is the Sufficiently Advanced Alien Yuki, who can tie the fabric of reality in knots, manipulate probability at a whim, make herself an Instant Expert in anything she likes, and in the fourth novel steal Haruhi's power altogether, permanently depowering Haruhi in order to totally rewrite reality to her whim and make herself the female lead. Even without the Reality Warper or Techno Wizard part, she still has inhuman computational abilities just by merit of her creator: she won the videogame played against the Computer Club by micromanaging twenty different fleets in real time with a lot of Rapid-Fire Typing. And following Kyon's prior "no cheating" command, she deliberately constrained her typing speed to what is, by her reckoning, humanly possible.
  • High School D×D has Sacred Gears that do things from simply doubling someone's power to healing that heals even Devils. The winners of the lottery are the Longinus, thirteen Sacred Gears which grows to eighteen in the Immediate Sequel that have the potential to kill Gods (with some even having world-destroying capabilities) and are all one-of-a-kind. And like all Sacred Gears, they can become even more powerful by undergoing Balance Breaker.
    • The True Longinus, the spear that killed Jesus, is the holiest weapon in existence and can generate and control holy light. Its Balance Breaker, as wielded by Cao Cao, gives it seven more powers, ranging from an Attack Reflector to teleportation, all of which are devastating in the hands of a skill-based fighter like Cao Cao. And as a last resort, it has form called Truth Idea, which generates random effects depending on God's judgement and the ambition of the user, and could do anything ranging from, empowering the user to win against overwhelming odds, empowering the opponent instead, or even just do nothing at all.
    • Zenith Tempest can control the weather, and its Balance Breaker allows him to localize its effects into bubbles.
    • Annihilation Maker can create any creature the user can imagine, which its wielder Leonardo uses to create creatures that target his enemy's weaknesses. Its Balance Breaker generates twelve extremely powerful monsters and one even more powerful one, and they all generate smaller versions of themselves. The most powerful monster required the intervention of one of the most powerful beings in the setting in order to defeat.
    • Dimension Lost can generate mist that warps space, allowing it to block any attack and teleport anything within it. It could poentially teleport entire countries if the mist spreads far enough. Its Balance Breaker transports enemies into an near-inescapable pocket dimension.
    • Boosted Gear contains the Welsh Dragon Ddraig and all of his powers, including the ability to endlessly double the user's power for a single attack or transfer that power to someone else. Being the Sacred Gear of The Hero, we see this one go through several upgrades throughout the series. At its strongest form, Diabolos Dragon has literally infinite power (though it's nerfed due to Issei's body not being able to handle such power) and can summon Ddraig himself in the flesh for a short time to fight along Issei.
    • Divine Dividing contains the Vanishing Dragon Albion and all of his powers, including the ability to divide the enemy's power in half and add it to the user's own and an Attack Reflector. In stronger forms, he's able to divide literally anything in half, and eventually can divide whatever he chooses into non-existence. He also gets his own Diabolos Dragon form.
    • Regulus Nemea is an axe that's said to be strong enough to split the Earth in half with the right wielder that can also transform into other forms and fight without a wielder. However, its current wielder, Sairaorg, fights with his fists, so he instead uses its Balance Breaker form as Powered Armor to amplify his already enormous strength.
    • Canis Lykaon is a Familiar that can produce infinite blades from either its body or from the shadows. Its more powerful forms not only gives it the ability to control shadows, but also turns the user into a powerful Werebeast.
    • Sephiroth Graal, better known as the Holy Grail, can control life, allowing for regeneration, age regression, immortality and the resurrection of the dead.
    • Incinerate Anthem, better known as the Holy Cross, can generate purple Holy Flame. It can also operate on its own and move to a different user even if the current one isn't dead yet. Its first seen user, Walburga, had a Balance Breaker that could use souls to create giant fire monsters. Its second user, Lint, could summon giant fire angels with her Balance Breaker.
    • Absolute Demise is a giant doll with ice powers that's powerful enough to freeze an area the size of a small country for however long the user wants.
    • Innovate Clear combines both Annihilation Maker and Dimension Lost, giving the user the ability to create a dimension with anything they want, albeit with the caveat that anything created has to stay within the artificial dimension. Telos Karma can manipulate probability, even causing impossible outcomes to occur. Individually, they're both powerful. However, both Longinus are in the possession of the same person, and their combined Balance Breakers effectively makes him a Reality Warper.
    • At the end of the original series introduces five more Sacred Gears that were so powerful, they were reclassified as Longinus. So far only three are known:
      • Aeon Balor, which was previously introduced as Forbidden Balor View has the power to stop time within the user's vision. It later turns out that Gasper's version of Forbidden Balor View had a fragment of the actual God Balor, which turned into a Longinus with the ability to manipulate darkness, with its most terrifying use being the creation of powerful shadow monsters.
      • Nereid Kyrie can control and strengthen dragons, some of the most powerful beings in the setting, and the sea.
      • Unknown Dictator can control and create electronic devices.
  • In The House of Night, vampyres who can control one element are rare and vampyres who can control more than one element are even rarer. Zoey Redbird, the series' protagonist, can control all five elements — Air, Fire, Water, Earth, and Spirit — something that no other vampyre in history has been capable of.
  • Vanyel Ashkevron, the hero of the Last Herald-Mage trilogy of the Heralds of Valdemar series, wins the lottery and then some. In an accident involving the creation of a Gate, he receives just about every one of the Heralds' Psychic Powers plus enough magical power to level a city. Unfortunately, the price of his lottery ticket was watching his lover go insane and commit suicide. And even worse, it's his ultimate fate to die in a Heroic Sacrifice after losing nearly everything he cares about.
  • Touya Mochizuki from In Another World with My Smartphone was essentially granted this from God for his accidental death on Earth. Not only is he able to utilize all forms of magic, his spells are often more powerful than the other characters. Additionally, thanks to his knowledge from Earth, as well as his smartphone with internet access despite living in a medieval fantasy world, he also has abilities the others can only dream of, such as using an app to see how many people may be surrounding him, or looking up the recipe to make ice cream. Or when he creates a gun that can also turn into a sword if needed.
  • The Infected ninety percent of the titular Infected (think Mutants, with mental illness as an added bonus) are said to have useless or nearly useless powers, things like glowing in the dark or sweat that smells like fresh-baked bread. We don't see much of these unfortunates though, as most heroes and villains have by definition won the lottery enough to be interesting. Even then, many people have powers similar to another Infected, but far more powerful or versatile. Super-strength and toughness are the most common power, but only a half dozen or so people are physical gods. Or take Denis, who is related to half a dozen people who can each manipulate minds or emotions to a limited degree, one can induce bliss, another terror, a jedi mind-trick and some minor memory tinkering, while he himself can induce emotions, sensations and to a point thoughts and imperatives in anyone within his line of sight. Then there are totally out-of-left field wins like Mark, who has the power of limitless time-stops.
    • Special mention must also go out to the Wyrdcraft clan and Tesseract, who all share the power of mastery over time and space including: space-warping, teleportation, mass teleportation, hammerspace, time-travel, casual travel to parallel realities, self-duplication, and turning into an invulnerable fourth-dimensional monster that can throttle people from the far side of the world (though only Tess exhibits this last one. Proxy turns out to have all these powers AND high-level precog.
  • Monstrous example in The Iron Teeth: the City Killer is a drake (already one of the strongest monsters in the setting) that's also a powerful crystal host, sporting enhanced size, deadly ice breath and possibly even an intellect. The combination allowed it to casually tear apart Coroulis, a major city.
  • Bell Cranell from Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? has the "Realis Phrase" ability, which Hestia mentions is a pretty rare skill to have. It lets him level grind extremely quickly, allowing him to become a Level 2 Adventurer in a month and a half when it would normally take at least a year.
  • In Maximum Ride, while most of the flock have some sort of minor superpower as a result of their mutations, Angel can read (and control) minds, speak with fish, and change her appearance despite being no older than seven.
  • In Mind Games, James is the first person ever with the System Class "Mesmerist". The System itself seems to be somewhat worried about the potential of this power, despite giving him the Unique Title "Mesmer's Heir", which doubles the effectiveness of his powers, since in combination with his Demi-god level Charisma and his Class Skill "Indirect Suggestion", he can probably pull off More than Mind Control. Things get really ridiculous when he gets his second Unique Title, "Child of Agalope", which cuts his Mana requirements to use his powers by half and doubles their effectiveness again, meaning that for as long as his Mana holds out, he can put the whammy on almost any being in the System.
  • Somewhat subverted in the Mistborn books — in allomancy (the basic magic system), most people have one of the basic powers (superstrength, super-senses, limited telekinetic control of metal, etc.) while the eponymous Mistborn have all of them. This may seem like (and in many circumstances is) a complete advantage over the lesser "Mistings", but as Vin discovers, having only one power means you get a whole lot more practice with it — in other words, in some ways you're better than any Mistborn, and can be just as useful. Of course, Vin herself in some ways wins the lottery over other Mistborn, as she has some powers they don't have thanks to a nasty bit of Hemalurgy performed by her mother, and being a proto-god. However, the known properties of some metals (specifically, aluminum and duralumin) can only be used in conjunction with another metal, so those Mistings are considered to have lost the lottery.
    • The Inquisitors from the same series win the Lottery by cheating. They practice the art of Hemalurgy, which lets them steal powers from others and apply them to themselves (by having someone pound giant metal spikes through the still-living victim's body and into their own!). As a result, your basic Inquisitor is basically a Mistborn with even stronger abilities. Later on they even find out that it's possible to steal Feruchemical powers with Hemalurgy, as well, which is even more powerful; by itself, Feruchemy is pretty dangerous, but when you combine it with Allomantic power in a single body, the interaction between the two lets you break several of the basic rules of both types of power.
    • The real winner of the lottery is the Lord Ruler, who was born a Feruchemist, and then found a metal called lerasium that gives whoever burns it the powers of a Mistborn. This combination makes him essentially a Physical God — by storing attributes using Feruchemy, and then burning the Metalminds, you can get back more of an attribute than you stored. You can then store this, and so on. Combine that with the regular powers of Allomancy, and you have someone who you need to channel a Shard to stop. That is why the Lord Ruler, although we don't see much of his powers, can slaughter armies without difficulty.
    • In The Alloy of Law, we find that there are no Mistborn or full Feruchemists any more — instead, you have Mistings (who have one Allomantic power) and Ferings (who have one Feruchemical power) and the rare Twinborn, who have one of each. Most Twinborn win the lottery (at least withing the setting), doubly so for someone who has the same metal for both powers (allowing them to store the power in a Metalmind, then burn it for a greater return, which they can then store and so on) but their are varying levels of Twinborn.
    • Some Twinborn combinations are useful, but nothing special - the ability to store warmth (Brass) combined with the power to conceal Allomantic power use (Copper). Others have combinations of powers that are very useful in certain areas — someone who can store wakefulness (Bronze) and has super-senses (Tin) makes a great sentry, while one of the characters, Wayne, can create a bubble of sped-up time around him (Bendalloy), while also storing health (Gold) — this makes him a brilliant one-on-one combatant.
    • And then you have the protagonist, Wax, and the antagonist, Miles, who have some of the best combinations available. Wax can store his weight (Iron) and telekinetically push metals (Steel). Since when you push on something, the overall motion is determined by your relative weights, then Wax can level city blocks and chuck train carriages at people, not to mention he can push on things to leap great distances, while storing his weight to travel further and survive the huge falls. Miles is a double Gold Twinborn — while the allomantic Gold power (which allows an Allomancer to see what they might have been if they had made different choices in the past) is not particularly useful, by compounding Gold he can give himself a healing factor that puts Wolverine to shame, and he has suffered so many injuries in the past he doesn't feel pain any more — both of which he illustrates when he blasts himself in the face with a shotgun to prove his power to his men.
  • In the Moontide Quartet this is the case for magi and children of magi, depending on how their bloodline goes. Each level of power is the square of the previous, and blood ranks go from Ascendant (source) to pure-blood (children of Ascendants), half-blood, quarter-blood, eighth-blood and then sixteenth-blood. This means that using a quarter-blood as the baseline, a half-blood would be twice as powerful, a pure-blood four times as powerful, and an Ascendant sixteen times as powerful.
    • However, this pales before a very rare phenomenon, when a magi fathers twins (or more at once) on a mother. While rare at best because of the near-sterility of magi, the mother can, during the pregnancy, manifest power on par with ranks much higher than those her children - a given example is a quarter-blood father of eighth-blood children, yet the mother manifested (only during pregnancy) power on par with a pure-blood, sixteen times more powerful than her children.
    • The above is deliberately exploited by one character, the Ascendant mage Antonin Meiros. Although it is extraordinarily difficult to father children (or become pregnant) for an Ascendant, he succeeds. And a little-known fact is that when an Ascendant sires a child on another, the mother gains power permanently rather than temporarily. To this, when his wife is bearing twins, because her children would be pure-blood, her own permanently granted power is much, much higher. To the scale where, at her full potential, she is four times as powerful as an Ascendant mage, who are themselves near-godlike in ability (and going through the procedure to become one is not only impossibly rare, but carries a more than 50% chance of failure, where failure means death). This would make the mother sixteen times as powerful as a pure-blood, two hundred and fifty-six times as powerful as a half-blood, and sixty-five thousand, five hundred and thirty-six times as powerful as a quarter-blood, and the difference only becomes greater from there. Superpower lottery indeed.
  • The Mortal Instruments:
    • Basically anytime somebody needs something that is not explicitly covered by another character's power set, all eyes turn to Magnus Bane. As a very old, powerful and knowledgeable warlock, if he doesn't know the specific spell needed, he usually knows where to get it.
    • Sebastian a.k.a Jonathan Morgenstern basically has all the capabilities of a Shadowhunter dialed up to eleven. Rather than being slightly stronger, faster, more agile and more durable than mundanes like regular Nephilim, he has actual Super-Strength, Super-Speed, Super-Reflexes and Healing Factor, plus Jump Physics, Flash Step, Super-Senses and the ability to use various forms of Geometric Magic (including demonic runes). Even vampire Simon is surprised by how strong and fast Sebastian is. He can deliver a Curb-Stomp Battle on Jace, who is otherwise one of the best Shadowhunter warriors around!
  • The ability to use magic in My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! is almost exclusively found among the upper class. Maria is not only a powerful mage despite being a commoner, but she is able to use light magic (which is so rare that there are less than ten people capable of using it in the entire country). This ends up being deconstructed. Because commoners with magic are so rare, people assume that her mother must have slept with a nobleman, and the rumors eventually result in her father abandoning the family. Also, being blessed with such rare magic leads people to believe that all her constant academic success is a result of said magic, when she's actually a defiance of Hard Work Hardly Works.
  • Overlord (2012) stars an MMORPG player who is trapped in the body of his max level lich character and sent to another world along with several loyal NPCs and all of his treasures from the game. In the new world, none of the natives are anywhere near as powerful as he or his minions are, so he turns into an Invincible Villain Protagonist on a path to world domination.
  • The Perfect Run: Some powers are just better than others. Ryan's save point means he's technically the only real person in the universe and therefore immune to all consequences that he doesn't allow, Augustus's two powers make him both invincible and unstoppable so that he elevated his Camorra Mob family into an N.G.O. Superpower, and Wyvern can turn into a freaking dragon. Psychos also tend to be more likely to develop crazy overpowered abilities, though at the cost of their sanity and being horrifically mutated.
  • Hatou Manabu in Qualia the Purple is immensely powerful. Initially, her friend gives her a cellphone that's attached to her arm thanks to an accident. Later on, she finds lots of practical use that goes from meeting her alternate selves to become someone else because they're technically her from another perspective and finally becomes The Narrator of the story. Despite all that however, she still can't save her best friend.
  • Release That Witch: Regularly discussed. Many women can become witches, but their abilities all depend on their cognition of magical energy, making some able to use far more magic or have far more utilitarian abilities than others. Ancient witches considered "Extraordinary" witches that have self strengthing abilities like Super-Strength or Super-Intelligence the most powerful. Other groups meanwhile consider witches with combat abilities the best. Roland meanwhile considers any witch that can help in his ongoing One-Man Industrial Revolution the most valuable, as technology can empower witches and normal people alike.
  • In Renegades, the prodigious abilities can vary quite a lot - for every prodigy on the level of the Nigh-Invulnerable Captain Chromium, there's someone like the girl who can inflate her head and float a little. And then there are the absolute winners, like Ace Anarchy, who was powerful enough to lift entire buildings with his mind, and Max, who passively absorbs the powers of others.
  • In an obscure children's book called Samantha Stone and the Mermaid's Quest, Samantha spends much of the book trying to learn how to teleport — both herself and objects. She gradually becomes better at it, able to teleport herself and others, but often not exactly where she intends. But by the end, Samantha is teleporting behind enemies to knock them out, teleporting out of ropes when tied up, and teleporting captured prisoners out of a cell. The villain only undoes this power by binding and gagging her, thus preventing her from casting the spell. However, the story ends shortly after a big rescue and fight scene which involves use of the teleportation power, but on a cliffhanger implying a sequel. So basically, if Samantha keeps her teleportation powers for the sequel (should it get made), then she could easily "break" the whole story by warping out of danger at all times, unless the villains are prepared to bind and gag her over and over — unless something appears to Deus ex Machina her ability down to uselessness.
  • In Lila Bowen's The Shadow Weird West series, the composition of the main characters were mostly lycanthropes or "shifters" of varying power. The protagonist does pretty well, Rhett Walker is the "Shadow", a Chosen One that can sense imminent danger and appear as a mundane human to other monsters. Rhett also shapeshifts into an African carrion bird that's larger and stronger than a condor. Until he got vampirized, Rhett's second in command, Sam is the big lotto loser as the Token Human. Irish laborer, Earl also gets shafted as he turns into a donkey (but out in the badlands of Texas, being a tough old donkey helps in surviving with little food and water). Rhett's others second, Coyote Dan and his sister Winifred are rather in low end, able to turn into small coyotes (though Winifred also has the curse of 9 Lives, that lets her survive death 9 times). Sister Ines comes up pretty well as a Mexican gorgon who turns anyone into stone that looks at her, too bad it's not controllable. The big lotto winner is Cora, who turns into a fire-breathing, Immune to Bullets flying dragon. The only drawback to Cora is that turning into a dragon is tiring over time.
  • Skulduggery Pleasant has many, many sorcerers of varying power categories and levels of ability, and it's implied that it's a mixture of training and natural talent (and, occasionally, outside amplification) - and pretty much anyone with magic can do more if they study it. Some can barely light a candle-flame. Others are borderline omnipotent.
    • Elementals are the default form of sorcerer, manipulating fire, air, water, and earth, and it's seen as the Jack of All Trades power-set/the one you get if you can't think of anything better. However, as the protagonist, a powerful elemental, demonstrates, if you work at it you can do a lot. Mevolent, one of the most powerful and feared sorcerers of all time was an elemental, and fully capable of being a Flying Brick, while Skulduggery eventually turns fireballs into flamethrowers, slowed descent into full on flight fast enough to casually keep up with an express train while flying standing up, and refines Earth magic from a solely defensive suspended animation power to Tunnel King skills.
      • Speaking of Skulduggery, he's also a living skeleton, which makes him very, very hard to kill and functionally impossible to mind-read. Oh, and he's magically ambidextrous, being a massively powerful necromancer. His Superpowered Evil Side is Lord Vile, an unstoppable and implacable necromancer, a Flying Brick with shadow-manipulation and limited teleportation and Voluntary Shapeshifting in his armour. By his own account, he absorbed enough death to crack the planet open in the space of five years. And that's not even getting into the Combat Clairvoyance the Viddu De granted him, though he turned that after pretty quickly as it made things boring.
    • Necromancers manipulate shadows, control the dead, can teleport over relatively short distances through the shadows, can sense death, and in the most powerful cases, can fly. The most dramatic example of this is Lord Vile, second only to Mevolent in terms of how much he's feared - and even then, it's a very close second, something which turns out to be entirely justified when he reappears and repeatedly goes toe to toe with Darquesse.
    • True Name Sorcerers - those who have discovered and sealed their True Names, their ties to the Source of Magic - can functionally do anything with magic, merely having to observe it to figure it out. Oh, and unless you destroy their brains immediately, they can and will survive anything up to and including having their heads ripped off. And that's if you're lucky enough to catch them before they ascend beyond physical form. They also tend to develop a bit of a god complex after becoming Drunk with Power. In the case of Argeddion, he only needs to see a skill once before replicating it and figured out how to resurrect others, among many other things. In the case of Darquesse, who had a learning curve so steep that it shocked and frightened Argeddion, she rapidly learns all there is to know about what makes the universe tick, then starts casually violating the laws of physics on the road to omnipotence. Given that she's also functionally got the emotional development of a toddler, and the Lack of Empathy that progresses into outright Blue-and-Orange Morality as she starts to see everything as merely energy in different states and things like consciousness and personality as mere 'fluff', this can be... disturbing. She develops further perspective in Phase 2, which she explains as essentially zooming out further - when you're up close, the people matter, when you're further out, the energy matters, when you're even further out, the people are the energy, so everything matters. Eventually, she ends up becoming All-Loving Hero.
    • Valkyrie starts out as an Elemental and Necromancer - and while prior to the Surge in the late teens/early 20s that locks them in, a sorcerer can theoretically wield any combination of powers at a fraction of their potential, her Elemental powers aren't noticeably massively weaker than the others, and she's explicitly the most powerful and quickest learner at Necromancy since Lord Vile himself, to the point where her necromancy focus (a ring) has to be replaced with an adult capacity one long before her Surge. And that's before she becomes Darquesse. It's also worth noting that Vile himself was an immensely talented and intellectually brilliant sorcerer, well past his first century when he turned to necromancy, and the key reason he was so powerful was that he was a dead man wielding death magic. Valkyrie lacks any of those advantages, and her necromantic development is still tracking with his.
      • At the end of Phase 1, thanks to losing her True Name and with it her magic (thanks to Darquesse being banished and taking on a life of her own), she ends up with a very nebulous power set that mostly seems to boil down to a direct tap to the Source of Magic, which leads to apparent New Powers as the Plot Demands because she's very reluctant to study it and risk it being replicated, meaning most of her discoveries are instinctive. So far, we've seen immensely powerful white lightning, flight via white lightning, Psychic Powers including precognition, sensing and destroy spirits, reading minds, and accessing other people's magical abilities and taking them to a whole new level, so long as they're in range. Oh, and teleportation on one occasion, though no one has any idea how that happened. Even alt!Mevolent, who fought Darquesse to a draw, is genuinely impressed, openly admitting that he needs to cheat and ambush her to be sure of beating her. Skulduggery theorises that she's effectively an 'omnidextrous' sorcerer, and both he and Cadaver Cain believe she could be the most powerful sorcerer ever to live.
      • At the end of Phase 2, she supplements the white lightning with black lightning, having absorbed the power of the Sceptre of the Ancients when it exploded, making her a living god-killer.
  • SSS-Class Suicide Hunter has this as its central premise. The Tower where protagonist Kim Gongja lives hands out skills to people that impress it, for good or ill. The protagonist himself gets an S-ranked skill thrown at him by said tower which allows him to copy one random skill... from the one that kills him. Fortunately for him, the guy that kills him gives him Resurrective Immortality which he then uses to go back in time and kill the bastard before he gets the skill himself.
  • In the Supergirl tie-in novel Age of Atlantis (set in season 2), a Mad Scientist gives dozens of citizens powers based on their wishes and thoughts at the time he activated the device. Among the many who get new abilities, a TV weathergirl starts controlling the weather, someone who works with animals at the zoo can talk to them, and an Outlaw Couple of petty crooks get the ability to levitate heavy (and valuable) objects and create a swarm of bees that can even sting Kryptonians and provide handy distractions.
  • Super Powereds:
    • Some Supers have abilities that are far above others. Of course, the Super who takes the cake is Globe, who is a Reality Warper within a certain spherical radius. He can manipulate the laws of physics themselves around him. Only two other Supers are/were capable of resisting his power.
    • To a limited extent, Titan also fits the bill, even though he's "merely" a strongman. His actual power is Adaptive Ability, meaning his body adapts to any difficulty and stays that way (i.e. no atrophy due to disuse). His merchandise claims that he's the strongest person in the world, and, as far as anyone knows, this is true (from a purely physical standpoint). It took him decades to learn to control his strength. In fact, he barely uses a fraction of his true strength in most fights.
    • Of the protagonists, Vince (Globe's adopted son) has Energy Absorption, which doesn't appear to have a limit on how much of each type of energy, or even how many types of energy, he's able to absorb, store, and use. In the first novel, he absorbs one of those massive California forest fires, and still continues to tap into that fire energy for the rest of the series. Once he learns to absorb kinetic energy, he can take and deliver Megaton Punches, as well as fall from heights without so much as a scratch. Nick can manipulate probabilities, which doesn't sound like much, until he demonstrates his ability at full (currently) power, which utterly devastates a truck speeding down a highway through a series of improbable events at once. Globe later gives him a taste of his possible eventual power level, and he's able to see and manipulate lines of probability to achieve exactly the outcome he needs, regardless of the odds; good luck shooting at him, since the gun will either miss or jam. Mary is potentially the strongest telepath and telekinetic in the world, she just lacks focus and training. Alice starts out as a mere flyer, before her true power (gravity mastery) is revealed: she can make anyone fall sideways or even up, she can levitate objects, then drop them at ten times the normal gravity, etc.
  • In Those Who Walk In Darkness by John Ridley, this applies to telepaths. Not just because of the mindreading, but because they can use an apparently unlimited number of People Puppets and have an effective range of miles. They do have a handicap: they're not necessarily all that bright ...
  • The Twilight vampires: In addition to superhuman strength, speed, durability, beauty, and immortality, each one gets a special power based on what kind of latent abilities they had in their previous "human" life. It's pretty clear who's won though. Losers get even more strength, or stubbornness. Winners are mind readers, can see the future, can cause you unbelievable pain at will, control ALL FOUR classical elements, or in Bella's case, immunity to other powers, which can be shared. The only way to kill them? Burn them after tearing them to pieces (to keep them, clearly, from just running around while on fire).
  • Used twice in the Wild Cards series. The premise is that an alien virus, known as "Wild Card", is released over New York City. It kills 90% of the affected population outright (known as "drawing the Black Queen"), turns 9% into deformed "jokers," and empowers the remaining 1% ("Aces"). Among said Aces, the usefulness and potency of powers are varied (some with particularly useless powers are known derisively as "Deuces"; also, there are some known "Joker-Aces"). So you have a matryoshka cascade of lotteries: you need one victory to survive, another to keep your human shape (at least to some degree) and then you need to win one more Superpower Lottery to get something useful.
    • Notable winners are the Astronomer and Fortunato, both wielding whole packages of powers (flight, telekinesis, strength, telepathy, ace suppression etc.), and being limited just by their "recharge" mechanics.
    • Another notable ticket goes by the moniker of "Radical", who activated the virus' effects during a drug trip. Later experimentation with various drugs granted him the ability to assume several different superheroic identities, although counterbalanced with a variety of weaknesses. The renamed "Captain Trips" could only maintain each form for an hour per dose, the forms' powers were highly situational and the required complex cocktails of drugs required working with illegal materials. Then the real winning ticket happened, as "Captain Trips" finally found a combination of drugs that allowed him to recreate the "Radical" as a permanently empowered form which also used all the powers wielded by the temporary forms before that.
    • And then there's the Sleeper, who has drawn the only ticket saying "keep drawing tickets". To elaborate, he's the only known case where the "Wild Card" virus runs like a malaria infection. The Sleeper has been in the Superpower Lottery for more than half a century, drawing "Aces", "deuces", "jokers" and any combination of those. While it's unknown if he can draw the "Black Queen" at all, the Sleeper believes so and is rather psychotic about every new activation of the virus.
  • In The Witchlands, witches are born with various level of powers, and while the weakest can only manage parlor tricks, the most powerful ones can topple mountains.
  • In Worm, The powers granted by Trigger Events and Cauldron Formulas vary in usefulness. Some characters became incredibly powerful, for example becoming a Flying Brick (Alexandria) or even having whatever powerset you need for the current situation (Eidolon). Others have to be more creative when using their powers, like the main character with her bug control.
    • An example of a winning ticket would be the "path to victory" power, which allows the user to achieve anything by giving them a step-by-step walkthrough to their objective, unless countered by other powers or the powers' source.
    • The raw power level of abilities varies enormously as well. Some powers really only make their user roughly as dangerous as, say, a person with a gun, while others allow the user to kill thousands of people in an instant. For example, one "Stranger" type ability might make it so people are naturally inclined to trust or like the user a bit more, while another person has an ability that literally renders people unable to physically harm them, intentionally or not.
    • The early formulas crossed into Superpower Russian Roulette in terms of their potential for negative transformative effects; Cauldron has since learned how to make safer formulas. The "Case 53s" lost their human shape and their powers are often entirely useless or incredibly dangerous and uncontrollable.
  • Xanth comes to mind — where every human has a special, unique talent, and people with particularly powerful magical talents are Magicians and are able to serve as king (or Sorceress, the female equivalent). There are weak but useful abilities, for example determining the direction of anything (including 'Source of Magic', but limited by the fact that it only provides a straight-line direction with no indication of obstacles that need to be avoided to get there), or speak any language. The relatively few useless talents are called 'Spot on the Wall' powers (named after some poor schlump whose talent was Exactly What It Says on the Tin). Magician levels are Illusion (at a range, that you can see through, that encompass all five senses), the ability to turn anyone but yourself into any other living creature, controlling all plants, the ability to turn yourself into any other living creature, making things true by agreeing with them (only barely avoiding Story-Breaker Power status by the fact that the thing agreed with has to come from someone unaware of her talent), knowing damn near everything, enhancement (of anything, without apparent limit, and including "enhancement" of negative traits), nullification of magic (no matter how powerful), and being immune to magical harm. That last talent hides itself as well, so that people don't wise up and try to hurt him by mundane means either. Not there are very many entirely mundane means available; Xanth is so thoroughly infused with magic that even the simplest objects are probably at least a little bit magical. The talent also has indirect magical harm in its protections, so something like magically hiding the edge of a cliff from him and trying to get him to fall off wouldn't work either. It's even theorized in-universe that when the omnipotent demon that's the source of all magic in Xanth left, shutting all the magic down, it came back very shortly afterward solely because of this talent, as putting him in danger by removing magic could be considered indirect magical harm. That's right, it's so powerful that it can even affect its own omnipotent source.
    • One of them even (without trying to) makes winning the Superpower Lottery a hereditary trait; he impressed the above-mentioned omnipotent demon, who decided that all of the character's descendants would also be Magicians/Sorceresses. The demon never told him about this reward, though.
    • Another one, perhaps the ultimate winner of the Superpower Lottery, is a character who has the talent of having whatever talent she wants. Each talent can only be used once but eventually regenerates. However, using minor variations can easily overcome that flaw, and a little creativity can produce an almost infinite number of variations on any given talent. Unaddressed is what would happen if she simply picked "omnipotence" as her current talent and never switched to a different one.

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