[dniv]

Originally Posted by desrtsku

He actually threw several mach punches during their first encounter.

There's a misconception here, Accelerator has weak durability (at least he used to) but he is very resilient to damage. He once took bullet damage in the head and still stood back up like a man (or at least, he tried).

The other misconception is that when Accelerator believes he is in the wrong, his resilience obviously doesn't kick in, because he doesn't have that internal drive prompting him to get back up and fight for his ideals, which happened when Touma punched him out at the end of their first fight. But other times around, Accelerator is much stronger in that when he has conviction about fighting, he makes sure to finish it out.

This is why

Spoiler for NT 10:

Misaka will depositing that Misaka Clone for him to stop him from following Touma was hilarious, because he probably would have done that otherwise except for the fact that he cares about the clones more than anything else as he told Touma himself.

Accelerator is the sort of person who really comes through when he thinks he's doing something good or "classy" and he often lies to himself about the method he's using to do that good thing in whether he's a villain or a good guy, but when he begins to doubt himself, as with when he saw Mikoto and Touma both protecting the sisters and claiming that they were people and not just masses of protein, he lost all of his resolve to fight, after he finally acknowledged the truth in that statement.

He only lost because he thought he shouldn't win... THAT time. The same sort of thing happened with Touma the second time. He basically lost control, and felt bad about it, and wanted someone to stop him.

Spoiler for NT 10:

The third time he felt he was in the right, and even after he was knocked out, he would have kept up the pursuit, but he was prevented from doing so. This was probably also because he understood that Touma was doing whatever he was doing for some reason that makes sense to him, even if Accelerator didn't agree with it right now. Even if it isn't logical, people tend to always give more credit to someone who has done lots of great deeds in the past, even if his credibility seems more in doubt later, because a general trend overrides the temporary trend in people's minds...

I honestly think Kamachi purposely doesn't want any of his main protagonists stronger than each other because that would mean that he would be claiming that one philosophy is better than another one, and I don't think that he really believes that in the first place.