VS Analysis: Aphrodite IX (Top Cow)

Background

Aphrodite IX
Full Designation: Aphrodite Tracker Killer, Generation IX, Model #2473561212
Real Name: April Taylor
Aliases: Extramilitary Espionage Unit, The Chairwoman
Nicknames: Aph, Green
Age: 749 (end of series)
Height: 5’7
Weight: 147.7 lbs
Occupation: Assassin (formerly), Leader of New Cythera
First appearance: Aphrodite IX #0 (April 2000)
Likes: Dr. Mane, Marcus Dragovich, Hephaestus IX, Areas IX, fighting and killing (post reboot), tea
Dislikes: killing (pre-reboot), brainwashing, Robert Burch (post reboot), the Chairwoman, senseless murders, resurrection chambers

Backstory

When Aphrodite IX woke up, the only thing she remembered was falling 40 stories onto solid concrete and being attacked by guards for a crime she couldn’t remember committing. Her past was a complete blank, and she had no memory of what she’d been doing before, nor how she knew the man that rescued her, Robert Burch. It was only when Burch played some recordings of her past that she had a vague outline.

These recordings taught her a few things: she wasn’t human. She was an android built for assassinations, and this memory wipe always happened 15 minutes after she completed her assignments. And from Burch, she learned that she killed for money, had an entire arsenal to carry out her jobs, and there was another job coming up: the assassination of First District Councilman Grazno Floyd II. She was to infiltrate the party at his mansion in the sky and take him out.

During this job, Aphrodite met a wealthy socialite named Neville Stewart, and he’d end up taking her back at his place and treating her wounds after a botched escape. Though her memory wipe had already activated by the time she woke up, this time something was different. As she laid in bed, Aphrodite began dreaming of her past, remembering her time with her creator, Tyson Mane, and how she’d killed a man, woman, and child during her first mission.

Haunted and confused by these strange memories, Aphrodite began slowly retracing her steps, piecing together what she’d done during her missions and realizing how everyone she’d met already seemed to know her.

Returning to her home, she found Burch inside and interrogated him. He didn’t know much about her, but he did reveal he smuggled her away from her creator’s lab and made her take up missions so she could get enough money to get them both out of the city.

At her urging, they returned back to her creator’s lab, where she finally regained her memories and was betrayed by Burch, who tried to kill her so the security forces wouldn’t get to her first. After splitting off from him, Aphrodite met the Chairwoman, who revealed her memory loss after each mission was self-inflicted, and that she’d been using Burch to send Aphrodite on her missions. Thanks to her programming, Aphrodite was forced to obey the Chairwoman’s commands, and she had a new target: Neville Stewart.

However, as she prepared to kill Neville, her restored memories finally let her recognize why he was so familiar. She’d first met him when the Chairwoman issued a public test of her abilities by forcing Aphrodite to kill her own father. This same event was what traumatized her into wiping her memory after each mission, all so the guilt of killing wouldn’t force her to remember murdering her dad.

Enraged, Aphrodite spared Neville and returned to the Chairwoman, resisting her commands through sheer willpower and beating her within an inch of her life. As she stood on her knees, the Chairwoman urged Aphrodite to finish what she started and kill her, launching into a mad rant about what she’d accomplish by taking her life.

She’d be punishing the council‘s quest for immortality. She’d give the people retribution for the resources that had been wasted. She could tie up the last loose end by killing the only council member left. She could take the Chairwoman’s place and rule in her stead. She’d be hailed as a hero. All she had to do was just kill one last woman!

But despite the Chairwoman’s constant goading, Aphrodite refused. She was sick of the Chairwoman’s nonsense and being forced to kill for her. Even with the Chairwoman’s ominous threats about what would happen if she was spared, Aphrodite didn’t care, leaving her beaten, bloodied “mother” behind.

Then the second series happens, and the continuity becomes a bit weird.

When it came out, Top Cow had already rebooted their universe. Yet according to the author and its final issue, the events of volume 1 still happened, just with a few changes.

Instead of being a full android, Aphrodite is a cyborg named April whose DNA was grafted with an extra technological helix. She’s also the daughter (possibly clone) of Francesca Taylor from Cyber Force, who’s retconned into being the Chairwoman. And her refusal to kill the Chairwoman was planned so Fransesca’s other daughter, Velocity, would do it instead.
The full memory loss after missions is changed to short-term memory loss.
Burch isn’t an old friend of Aphrodite’s who freed her, but a perverted, obsessed schoolteacher that tried to (and according to her narration, eventually did) molest her.
Aside from being an assassin, Aphrodite’s main purpose was to be part of Cyberdata’s Aphrodite Protocol, which would save humanity by converting them into cyborgs and let Francesca take over her body.

Regardless, Aphrodite’s new series began when she awakened from stasis in 2801. The world was now occupied by two warring tribes: the Gen, a race of genetically enhanced humans living under the monarchy of Genesis City, and the cyborgs of the totalitarian Speros City.

Despite being rendered a blank slate by the pods, Aphrodite quickly proved her worth to the people of Genesis by saving their prince, Marcus Dragovitch, from a group of cyborgs, and was welcomed by the royal family.

Unfortunately, her old handler Robert Burch was discovered by Speros and convinced to join them. Using his neural link to Aphrodite, he’d force her to periodically enter a “slave mode” for 20 minutes, covertly dispatching of Genesis’ queen and Marcus’ girlfriend, Lina, forcing her on the run after she was discovered. But when it came time to kill Marcus, Aphrodite’s willpower once again overcame her programming, and she instead stabbed herself in the cheek, tearing through the dot that connected Burch’s neural link.

In doing this, Aphrodite had freed herself from Burch’s programming and restored her lost memories, finally letting her remember her real name and nearly everything about her past…

And then a few seconds later Speros and its people launched their attack on Genesis. Aphrodite used her new freedom to defeat Speros’ forces and force them to retreat, earning Marcus’ trust back, but Genesis’ authorities weren’t as merciful. By their laws, she should’ve been executed to pay for the lives she took, but Marcus refused to allow this. He was able to lighten her punishment into being exiled into the desolate wasteland beyond, but Aphrodite didn’t mind. She was already planning to leave so she could find Burch and kill him.

And despite her exile, she’d found a new friend in Valr’x, Marcus’ former pet dragon. The two soon encountered a group of desert ninjas led by Aphrodite XV, a robot that helped Aphrodite learn more about her past and agreed to help her kill Burch. They made their way to Speros and infiltrated its ranks, but things went south when Aphrodite refused to let XV murder a child to cover their tracks.

The two fought, and Aphrodite IX emerged victorious, but when Burch entered the room, Aphrodite’s neural link was reestablished, leaving her unable to harm him. She was promptly ambushed and arrested by the officers of Speros, but before she could be tried and executed, something happened that none of them could’ve expected.

During her time with Aphrodite XV, the android had shown her a stasis pod containing Ares, a fellow cyborg with an IX tattoo. But as soon as they’d left, a protocol had activated that brought nearly all of the other IXth generation cyborgs back online, subconsciously guiding them to a satellite in Earth’s orbit. The only ones who didn’t get this signal were Hephaestus (who was presumed KIA) and Aphrodite due to her neural link’s damage. After tracking her down, Ares’ troops rescued Aphrodite and took her “home” to meet the rest of their family.

There, Aphrodite would meet the woman her siblings called “Mother.” Though for Aphrodite, “Mother” was actually her biological sister Carin Taylor, aka Velocity from the long defunct rebel group Cyber Force. Velocity revealed the truth of Aphrodite’s past and the real reasons behind the Aphrodite Protocol.

These revelations only made Aphrodite slightly less confused, but she had bigger things to focus on. Unbeknownst to her, while she and XV had been journeying to Speros, Marcus had slowly gone mad with grief over losing his family. He initially turned to religion to cope, but combined with the stress of being a newly appointed king, Marcus cracked. Believing himself to be chosen and blessed by God, Marcus launched an attack on Speros right as Ares had rescued Aphrodite.

When she learned about this, Aphrodite tried to reason with him, but he refused to listen to reason. It was only after Velocity had Genesis incinerated by an orbital laser that Marcus came to his senses. Horrified by what he’d done and his faith in God completely shattered, Marcus left with his remaining people, unsure where they would go or of his view on Aphrodite.

While Speros celebrated its new saviors, the IXs, Aphrodite tracked down Burch and killed him. Then after recovering and resurrecting Hephaestus, she and her siblings discovered their true purpose: to rule over what remained of humanity. The self-proclaimed “gods” of the IXth generation proceeded to establish their own kingdoms and slaughtered the Gens, leaving only cyborgs behind.

By 2807, Speros City had fallen and nine city-states had risen in its place. The cyborgs were now a working caste overseen by groups of mass-produced XVs, all modeled after the IXs in personality and appearance.

By 2820, tensions had begun rising between the IXs, and by 2827 eight of the cities were either allied or at war with each other. The only safe haven was Aphrodite’s city of New Cythera, a politically neutral kingdom secretly harboring the few survivors of the Gen genocide and smuggling the downtrodden subjects of Ares, Hades, and Apollo.

Unfortunately, the threat of war grew more prominent when others began working from the shadows. Over the past two decades, Velocity had gone mad with paranoia, fearing the IXs would fulfill the Aphrodite Protocol and resurrect the Chairwoman. Hoping to prevent this, she began manipulating the IXs into turning against each other and slaughtering the few who discovered her.

Things only became worse when Hephaestus and Aphrodite discovered the existence of 13 Artifacts from Earth’s distant past. Each IX would get their own Artifact, with Aphrodite bonding to a sentient metal gauntlet called the Witchblade. Everything hit a fever pitch when two rival Artifacts, the Darkness and the Angelus, found the hosts to continue their own war.

The Darkness bonded with Ares, a descendant of the Estacado bloodline, and began influencing him to indulge his violence and bloodlust. Its opposite, the Angelus, possessed a near dead Hephaestus, restoring him to full health… and turning him into a woman for some reason.

But it turned out all of this had aided the Aphrodite Protocol’s original goal. As the Darkness, Witchblade, and Angelus began to clash, their powers were all absorbed by an AI of Francesca. Forced to fulfill the Protocol by temporarily possessing Hermes, Fransesca tested her new body by killing Velocity. As she lay bleeding to death on the ground, Velocity entrusted Aphrodite with the Wheel of Shadows, an Artifact that allowed its wielder control over time.

Aphrodite and Fransesca fought for centuries in a seemingly unending battle, and everyone Aphrodite had ever cared about was caught in the crossfire. By the end of it, she realized there was only one way this would truly end: making sure it never happened in the first place. Using the Wheel of Shadows, she went back in time and killed Fransesca as a child, expecting the resulting time paradox to take her as well. When this didn’t happen, she returned to the future, only to find it was still intact. The once prosperous cities had been reduced to burning ruins, and the few people that remained were now mindless drones awaiting her command.

Aphrodite had killed the Chairwoman, just as she’d been programmed to all those centuries ago. Now she had no choice but to take up that role. She was now the new Chairwoman, left to rule over a barren wasteland.

Personality

First series

When she was first created, Aphrodite was naive and childlike. She always called her creator “daddy” and was more focused on playing outside and having fun instead of studying things like math, forensic physiology, and trigonometry, which she found dumb.

However, this childishness and naivety died the moment she killed her father. From that point on, any time she was assigned a job, her programming as an assassin took over. Whenever she was on a job, Aphrodite became a cold, merciless killer that could execute men, women, or children without batting an eye. She was so cold-blooded that begging for mercy would only piss her off and make your death more gruesome.

When these jobs ended, Aphrodite’s empathy would return, and her guilt over these murders, combined with not wanting to remember the trauma of killing her father, caused her to wipe all memories of her past.

By the time the series begins, Aphrodite is a confused amnesiac who feels on edge around the strange people that seem to know her. She was slow to trust anyone and confused, but still willing to carry out her jobs.

As time went on, Aphrodite began to evolve past her programming and previous limitations, gaining the ability to have dreams and begin remembering things after her kills. When she fully regained her memories, she was overwhelmed with guilt over how many people she murdered and refused to kill the Chairwoman despite her constant goading and threats, no longer wanting to be her puppet.

Second series + IXth Generation

As a little girl Aphrodite wanted to be a doctor so she could help people, but she was instead trained to kill them. Upon reaching adulthood, she realized that some of the people she’s killed aren’t purely good or evil and probably have families that will be sad when they’re gone. It’s also said she’s not afraid to die and believes death is a small price to atone for her sins, despite claiming she isn’t religious.

From the time she first met Marcus, she fell in love with him, but wasn’t sure if this was real or implanted. After freeing herself from Burch’s control, she initially believed it was the latter, but as time went on, she realized it was genuine. While their romance eventually fizzled out because of the emotional turmoil from his parents’ deaths and his kingdom’s destruction, they still kept in touch 20 years later and remained on friendly terms. And when shit hit the fan and the nine cities began warring, he was in the front lines defending New Cythera.

While she regrets killing Marcus’ mom and girlfriend, enough that she was willing to sacrifice herself to atone for it, her views on killing are completely different from the first volume. She enjoys being able to kill people of her own accord instead of being forced into it by her slave mode. And in the final issue of her solo, she admitted she wanted to laugh and cry after killing Burch.

When she isn’t killing or fighting people, Aphrodite is often extremely calm, relaxed, and a bit sarcastic at times. She can also get exasperated and annoyed with her “siblings” in the IXs, like when Hephaestus revealed he had feelings for her right after she’d been showered in gore from killing a monster. Or there’s the time she had to talk Artemis and Apollo out of killing all of Hades’ XV droids “just to be sure.”

By the time IXth Generation rolled around, Aphrodite had become the white sheep of her family. Where her siblings treated the XVs as servants and the cyborgs as slaves, Aphrodite allowed them to freely live out their own lives and pursuits. She even began smuggling the poor and downtrodden citizens of the other cities to New Cythera to give them new lives. And her influence allowed them to discover what freedom, dreams, and sleep were.

When the IXs discovered resurrection chambers, she was the only voice of reason. The rest treated murdering each other as nothing more than a game, and the deaths of their subjects as mild setbacks since they knew anyone who died would be brought back. This in turn made their power struggles turn into casualty-heavy wars, with Aphrodite actively trying to stop the violence and questioning if the resurrection actually did bring them back or if it was just a copy with the same memories.

After discovering the true goal of the Aphrodite Protocol was to create a Darwinistic society where only the strong survived, Aphrodite refused to let it pass, having no interest in killing or conquering any of the IXs. But by the end of the series she reluctantly took up the Chairwoman’s throne since she had no other choice.

The penultimate issue reveals that she and Artemis (who’s a dude despite being named after a goddess) were lovers in the past. And when he died, she took it really hard, unsure of what to do or how to honor his memory now that he’d entrusted her with his kingdom.

Experience

By the time of her first series, Aphrodite had killed at least 30 people through methods like strangling, impalement, drowning, headshots, blunt force trauma, poisons, decapitation, electrocution, perforated lungs, or artificially-induced cardiac arrest.

She’s taken down three waves of ninjas, torn through massive Darklings with the Witchblade, terminated a next generation robot called Aphrodite XV, and battled the Chairwoman for centuries before achieving a close victory.

She’s said to have unparalleled skill in combat and espionage, and was trained in quiet, quick kills and manipulating and seducing men. According to one of the guidebooks, she’s been programmed with knowledge of all martial arts disciplines and the use of all known weapons.

Arsenal

CDI Model V. 9

An internal computer linked to Aphrodite through the “beauty mark” on her cheek. It provides her with 25x10^17 calculations per second, and its AI has an extensive list of functions. It can detect heat signatures, scan the environment for hazards and adjust her body to handle them, translate languages, scan people to determine their species and possible weapons, detect danger, analyze weapons and vehicles for possible weaknesses, locate concealed weapons and flaws in armor, and tell Aphrodite the most effective way to kill with her current weapon.

When used in battle, the AI turns Aphrodite’s eyes red and endlessly cycles through strategies while analyzing the environment and surroundings for possible threats, and it can automatically activate systems like the Seduction Matrix. If Aphrodite’s inside her ship, the AI can engage its autopilot mode, activate its weapons, scan the area for certain targets, lock onto them, and hack their communications.

Even if the AI is somehow disabled, Aphrodite can still use its targeting systems, and it will eventually return given enough time.

Coin of Solomon

One of 13 legendary artifacts, the Coin of Solomon was forged during the reign of King Solomon using a mysterious metal found in his mines. This coin proved instrumental in the creation of the Aphrodite Protocol, giving the Chairwoman the intelligence necessary to start it.

Originally fused to Aphrodite’s frontal lobe, she later had it removed and turned into a necklace. Regardless of where it is, the coin provides her with great insight, enhanced intellect, epiphanic leaps of knowledge, and jumps in evolutionary biology. She’s used these abilities to locate the other Artifacts on Velocity’s lunar base.

Seduction Matrix

When she isn’t using her natural beauty and psychological manipulation to seduce men, Aphrodite can activate a Seduction Matrix to release pheromones that cloud their judgment, leaving them distracted and confused.

Trans-Dermal Sleep Inducer

To ensure Neville wouldn’t follow her, Aphrodite used this to force him to sleep with a kiss.

Dual Pistols

Aphrodite’s preferred firearms when carrying out her jobs.

Machine Gun

Used during her first mission to execute a Deputy Minister, his wife, and their daughter.

Submachine Gun

Used during a brawl with some cops.

Rifle

Contains a scope with thermal vision to let her see through walls.

Knives

If she wants to go for a more up close kill, Aphrodite can use knives to stab her target through the back, slit their throat, or throw them into someone’s head.

Blade Tonfas

During her time with Aphrodite XV, April donned a pair of electrically-charged tonfas as her main weapons, using them against several waves of ninjas, the robots in Ares IX’s sanctuary, several of Speros City’s guards, and Hades.

Flight Pack

A winged harness with anti-grav technology that lets the wearer fly.

The Witchblade

Another of the 13 Artifacts, Aphrodite discovered it inside the Lunar Sanctum, and it almost immediately bonded to her.

The Witchblade is a gauntlet of living metal made to act as a balance between the light and dark, keeping them from destroying each other and everything else. To do this, the Witchblade will bond to one woman per generation in both body and soul. Upon attaching itself to a "bearer," the Witchblade's mind becomes bonded with hers, responding to her thoughts and communicating with her. It can even give her information about what‘s attacking her.

When not in use, the Witchblade takes the form of a bracelet or necklace, activating in response to the bearer’s anger or when it senses danger, even if the bearer isn’t aware of it.

The Witchblade will automatically defend its bearer from anyone or anything it sees as a threat, including her allies, former bearers, and unhealthy habits, even if she’s unconscious. With enough time, their bond will progress to the point where it can act and transform on its own without her needing to think about it, and it can defend her without being attached.

Despite its nature as the balance between light and dark, the Witchblade is naturally malevolent, requiring a strong enough bearer to keep it in check. Failure to do so will cause the bearer to become overwhelmed by bloodlust, relishing the violence she causes, becoming more violent, and actively trying to kill.

While Aphrodite’s never shown its full capabilities, she has used the Witchblade to create multiple razor sharp tendrils, regular or giant arm blades, and a barrier to protect her from Hades’ self destruct.

After its energies were absorbed by the Chairwoman, the Witchblade was left powerless and abandoned inside the lunar sanctum, forcing Aphrodite to find something to replace it.

The Wheel of Shadows

Given to her by a dying Velocity in her final moments, the Wheel of Shadows was the Artifact used most extensively by Aphrodite.

The Wheel of Shadows grants its wielder complete control over the effects and passage of time, and whenever they use it, their body turns pitch black. They can speed up or slow down time at their whim, letting them get a speed boost by slipping between seconds, rapidly age humans or monsters, or reverse it and restore youth to the elderly. Even immortals who can resist the aging effects will still have their strength drained.

The time acceleration can be unleashed as an AOE attack, aging those around the user to death in seconds and decaying their surroundings.

It’s shown a few other abilities like solidifying time to create a defensive barrier or giving its user visions of the future, but they’re nothing compared to the Wheel’s ultimate power.

After wielding the Wheel for centuries, Aphrodite eventually mastered it, learning how to go back in time so she could kill Fransesca. Despite it being implied that changing the past would erase the user, she was still alive and the future was still intact afterward, implying the Wheel either protects the user from time paradoxes or creates alternate timelines (it’s vague which it is).

The Blood Sword

Also known as the Ketsuma no Katana, this sword was forged when a shaman summoned a demon and bound its essence into a katana. It’s been passed to various wielders throughout the centuries, and Aphrodite is the latest to claim it, having used it to kill the Chairwoman in the present and past.

When first unsheathed, it appears as a regular blade, but if blood is spilled near it or a fight begins, it will start glowing red.

The Blood Sword can communicate with its wielder and increases their strength based on the amount of blood spilled, but anyone who uses it becomes compelled to kill and a slave to their own bloodlust even without the sword.

In terms of other abilities, the Blood Sword can create an aura around its wielder to prevent them from being aged to death, and it fuels their strength from the rage of the souls it’s claimed.

Technically, Aphrodite’s never shown to suffer its effects or use its powers since she only had it for four pages. However, she’s seen them in action with first-time wielders like Hephaestus and Fransesca. You can probably argue this means she’d be able to replicate its powers, though it's a stretch.

Ship

A custom fighter jet exclusive to Aphrodite. It fits multiple passengers, has an autopilot mode, and its weaponry includes two forward mounted accelerated fusion beams, two wing-mounted null space missiles for planetary bombardment, and rear mounted flechette scatter bombs for defensive fire. The fusion beams are particularly strong, able to completely destroy massive, spaceship-sized Darklings.

Misc. Weapons

While never shown using them, Aphrodite had a wide assortment of weapons at her disposal while she was with Burch. These include pistols, shotguns, a revolver attached to a super soaker, machine guns, hook blades, daggers, and brass knuckles, just to name a few.

Skills

Stealth

As a robot/cyborg assassin designed for infiltration and covert kills, Aphrodite is skilled at keeping to the shadows, sneaking into areas, or using disguises to keep a low profile and get close to her target.

Both in-universe characters and official guidebooks have called her stealth skills unparalleled and said she won’t be found unless she wants to be found. If she wants to take things further, she can mask her scent to become completely undetectable.

Agility

After realizing the police were trailing her car, Aphrodite made her way back home by jumping, flipping, and parkouring across the city.

Marksmanship

Aphrodite’s training and programming allow her to wield numerous guns with pinpoint accuracy. She’s taken men out with submachine guns, regular machine guns, and revolvers, and thrown knives into people’s heads.

Endurance

Can operate for 14 days without sleep before shutting down. She’ll stop functioning if she doesn’t receive food after 75 days and water after 5.

Powers

Shapeshifting

Aphrodite can change her appearance at will, altering anything from clothes to hair to blend in with a crowd. The only catch is she can’t get rid of the green dot on her face, meaning she often has to obscure it with some type of headgear.

Regeneration

Aphrodite can heal bullet wounds in seconds and quickly regenerated from half her skin being blown off by missiles and gunshots. Even injuries that are fatal to a normal person are healed in a week.

In the one-shots, it was shown that other IXs are able to regenerate from deep lacerations or being stabbed and cut across the back, and other Aphrodite models have regenerated from having their collarbones broken or their synthetic skin and hair being completely incinerated.

Redlining

A focused adreno-glycaline surge that temporarily boosts her physical abilities, but quickly tires her. In this state, she can bench press 600 kg (1323 lbs), deadlift up to 685 (1510 lbs), has a striking pressure of 25 Newtons per square Millimeter (3626 pounds per square inch), sprint 100 meters in 7 seconds, and has a processing speed of 40 times 10^17th (4 quintillion) calculations per second.

Resistances

Electricity:

Despite being knocked out by a stun gun, Aphrodite later showed that she could endure being shocked by her restraints, and later powered through electrocution from Aphrodite XV.

Mental Manipulation:

In their first encounters, The Chairwoman’s commands overrode Aphrodite’s free will and forced her to kill those close to her. By the time Aphrodite regained her memories, she overcame this control through willpower.

It’s also said that if Aphrodite’s slaving program exceeds 20 minutes, she’ll start to fight back and her brain will shut down.

Radiation and Gravity Manipulation:

According to her official profile, she can resist radiation by 175% and survive up to 9 g’s.

Scanners:

Unable to be scanned by the Speros’ officers' technology.

Strength

Speed

Dodges a punch from a giant cyborg
Covers 13 meters in 1.2 seconds
Ducks under a punch from Marcus
Blocks swords from some desert ninjas
Dodges one of Aphrodite XV’s tendrils
Blocks Velocity swinging the Blood Sword
Dodges the Spear of Destiny being thrown at her
Can sprint 100 meters in 11 seconds (7 seconds while Redlining) and has a processing speed of 25 times 10^17th calculations per second (40 times 10^17th calculations per second while Redlining) (2 quintillion five hundred quadrillion - 4 quintillion calculations per second) (Mach 3.037 - 4.859)

Durability

Scaling

Being the ninth model of her line, Aphrodite should naturally upscale from previous models and even future ones seeing how she destroyed Aphrodite XV.

Aphrodite IV

Survives being impaled through the stomach by the Witchblade, elbows Sara Pezzini hard enough to shoot blood from her nose, and knocks her out with a knee to the stomach. Sara has:

Caught bullets (Mach 0.858 and Mach 0.86)
Repeatedly fought Ian Nottingham and Jackie Estacado, the former being able to consistently catch bullets (Mach 0.716 at best) and the latter explicitly dodging one (Mach 1.57 - 2.84)
Survived an oil tanker exploding while being on top of it (2.61 tons of TNT)
Survived explosions that could collapse buildings (0.078 and 9 tons of TNT)
Emerged unharmed from a massive explosion that destroyed a house (25.74 tons of TNT)

Fought Ripclaw, Velocity, and Cyblade from Cyberforce, then survives having her eye shot out
Ripclaw survived a building exploding and collapsing, though he might’ve still had a prior amp when it happened
Uses the Coin of Solomon’s energy to unleash a blast that knocks back Sara, Tom Judge, the Angelus, Ripclaw, and Ballistic
Destroys two Darklings

Aphrodite V

Aphrodite XV

Her tendrils can break collarbones, pierce through skulls, and decapitate advanced cyborgs

Intelligence

Feats

Has carried out over 30 murders
Defied her original programming to kill the Chairwoman
Regained her original memories by refusing to kill Marcus
Was the only member of the IXth generation to establish a peaceful rule and keep her original body
Successfully smuggled inhabitants of Ares, Hades, and Apollo’s cities to New Cythera
Killed Dr. Mane, Grazno Floyd, Abraxis, Lina, Aphrodite XV, Burch, and the Chairwoman
Became the new Chairwoman

Weaknesses

Aphrodite might’ve been designed as the perfect assassin, but she still has a few shortcomings. Unlike the other Aphrodites who are fully robotic, April is still human and requires food, water, sleep, and oxygen. If she’s deprived of any of these, she’ll eventually die, though it takes several days for this to happen. The spinoffs also show that IXs are vulnerable to poisons.

Because of her guilt over her past murders, she’s somewhat reckless and has no problem sacrificing herself to do what’s necessary.

Despite her healing factor mostly being quick, there’s one spot that’s vulnerable: the dot on her cheek. If the neural link inside is severed, she’ll lose her strategic AI for over a week, though it will eventually return after a week of healing and being rebooted by exposure to electricity.

This last one is more a fault of the writing, but she barely has any screen time with the Artifacts and we don’t know her full capabilities with them. She never replicates the Blood Sword or Witchblade’s more esoteric powers, and aside from getting “fleeting glimpses of women throughout history,” there’s no evidence she inherited the connection to past Witchblade bearers.