You’re standing in the center of a bright warehouse. There are no poles or structural support beams, nor is there any furniture or other items to grasp. Every fifteen seconds a random door opens from one of the walls and a lone five-year-old child charges at you, to kill you.
How many do you think you could take out before they finally brought you down?
This isn’t an easy question, no matter how simple it seems at first. You know just one of your punches could potentially take a child out, but eventually you’ll tire, and your punches will get weaker. Maybe there are types of attacks you will not use because they are children, but your opponents will kick, claw, and bite to defeat you. You will slow from your injuries, but every new opponent is well-rested, and hearty. Will your wrist give out, will a knee buckle, or will one of them get in a lucky shot?
This macabre question isn’t anything new. Plenty of movies and literary references have violent children. Stephen King’s famous short story-turned-movie Children of the Corn is a perfect example of children going after adults.
Any healthy, average adult has the potential to at least take down three kids. Even a short, weak adult will have some height, length, weight, and power advantages over a five-year-old. Heck, even someone who has never been in a fight has learned how to hit something harder, if only to get ketchup out of a bottle. A weakling adult simply has more mass, leverage, and knowledge of force to make every half-hearted swing carry more power.
I’d imagine the two biggest factors for a defending adult is physical conditioning, and heart.
Surely someone like the original Incredible Hulk, Lou Ferigno, would lose quickly if he only tried to restrain his opponents, whereas someone sleight like Prince (may He rest in peace) with the training and fight of Marcus Luttrell, would be a Nor’Easter of brutality. While Ferigno would go down sooner in this scenario than many would originally think, he’d still be able to take down more people than, say, Macauley Culkin without much training and no reserves about hurting a first-grader. At some point Ferigno would have to spin quickly to address a new attack, and accidentally slam one of his commercial-grade arms against a kid, instantly taking it out. And Culkin has probably been in more bar fights than all of the Jonas and Hanson brothers combined, so he could surely do more damage over a longer period of time than, say, Mitch McConnell.
Just to be fair, the rules would be simple. Such as:
- One child is released every 15 seconds.
- Any style of combat is allowed.
- A child is considered out of action when he or she is unconscious, or physically incapable of continuing to fight.
- The adult is considered defeated when he or she is unconscious, dead, or physically incapable of continuing to fight.
Hopefully the answer will never be known for sure, but theoretically, how many five-year-olds do you think you could take in a fight?
100