Implacable Man / Literature

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• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Vain, the magically constructed being in the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, is an Implacable Man but not a villain. Instead, he spends most of the time doing very little and being vaguely ominous while he follows the heroes around and shrugs off all attacks.^note Well, almost all attacks; there are a very few things that do injure him though they don't stop him from... doing whatever it is he's doing. Vain normally wears an impassive, even almost beatific, expression, but in order to get a mistrustful Covenant to accept Vain as a companion, the Ur-Viles who constructed him put a compulsion on him to obey Covenant's direct orders one time. When following those orders, Vain's expression changes to one of savage glee; the only other times he shows any emotion are when he goes and grins at the ship's mainmast and when his purpose is about to be fulfilled (which prompts him, after three books of being The Voiceless, to speak, though even then he mostly just expresses quiet satisfaction that he's finally getting to do what he was built to do).
• The Nazgûl in The Lord of the Rings. The only way they can be killed is if the One Ring is destroyed.
• The Silmarillion has Fëanor, you steal his shit he will find you and fight your entire army of fire and shadow demons to get them back. Remember that one time Gandalf fought a Balrog? Now picture a bunch of them.
• Merlin, the main character of Safehold series. He's an android made of battlesteel, his "nerves" are optic fibers that grant him inhuman reflexes, he's super strong, doesn't have to eat or drink because he's powered by a pocket fusion generator, and has to rest only for few hours every five days. His "brain" is not in his head but in his body, and is protected by a few inches of battlesteel; a cannonball might behead him, but it would take high-tech Federation gear to actually put him down. Shown clearly in Like A Mighty Army, in a form of Mook Horror Show.
• The Cauldron-Born in The Chronicles of Prydain; they are invulnerable, and all strategies for dealing with them revolve around drawing them away from Annuvin (because they grow weaker when outside it) or delaying them. At the end it is revealed that they can be killed by Dyrnwyn, the black sword. In The Film of the Book, The Black Cauldron, that Implacable Army can only be defeated by the Heroic Sacrifice of someone jumping into the titular cauldron (which is fatal).
• Shrike from Mortal Engines, last of the Lazarus Brigade, survives being shot and stabbed (a lot), being blown up, being run over by a mobile city, and ten thousand years of entropy.
• A definite candidate for this trope is Verroq, the 'bearded mercenary' from The Bartimaeus Trilogy who, though a prominent baddie, is only named in the last book. He survives... well, anything and everything, really. Bartimaeus himself puts it best:
  "Whether I squished him under a statue, blew him up with a Detonation or (as in our last encounter) simply set him on fire and hurled him down a mountainside, he never seemed to suffer the slightest injury."
• Discworld:
  • In Going Postal, having one of these sent after him (in the form of Mr. Pump, a golem) is what convinces Moist von Lipwig to give in and serve as postmaster. As Vetinari putts it: "You need to eat; Mr. Pump does not. You need to sleep; Mr. Pump does not". Golems do have a weakness, though: they can handle fire, and they can handle water, but being living clay, they can't handle both at the same time.
  • Another, earlier golem example comes in Feet of Clay, in which Angua remarks that, despite its cracks, the golem king would probably keep attacking even if it became nothing more than floating dust.
  • The Luggage. Even if you go to the ends of the earth, the Luggage will be heading there with its hundreds of tiny feet. (It's also rather vicious.) It will follow you to the beginning of time or its end, into another dimension, or through the gates of Hell itself, utterly destroying whoever and whatever gets in its way.
  • And a human example: Sam Vimes. "As far as they're concerned, I am far-reaching consequences!" Yes, he is. In Thud!, his usual unstoppable determination is augmented by an ancient quasi-demonic spirit of vengeance which makes him, briefly, the scariest being on the Disc.
• Older Than Steam: In book V of Edmund Spenser's 1596 poem, The Faerie Queene, Talus, the iron sidekick with a penchant for incredibly violent justice, proves unstoppable by any of his enemies.
• Many Dean Koontz antagonists fit this trope to a T. If they want the heroes they will hunt them, and hunt them, and hunt them until they are killed or incapacitated. Often very competent and capable of tracking their quarry through their connections. But thankfully the same can be said of the protagonists, whose spirit to live and Divine Intervention save the day.
• In The Black Company, all magic users tend to be hard to kill, but the worst by far is the Limper. For starters he gets stabbed a few hundred times, hacked apart, mutilated, knocked out of the sky, then decapitated. It doesn't stop him. Eventually he is shredded to tiny pieces and boiled in a giant pressure cooker, and the gooey mass of flesh and gore still breaks out and tries to keep going.
• Vago the golem from Storm Thief. Not only is the guy next to impossible to harm with conventional weaponry, Revenants, which instantly kill everything else by brushing up against them die the instant they touch him and give him energy. Granted, he was designed to kill them, so that bit is justified.
• Croup and Vandemar in Neverwhere, who cannot be killed and doggedly pursue the heroes until the end.
• The Bible, in the Book of Job, mentions a "leviathan" and "behemoth" that apparently shrug off all human attempts to subdue them, at least if the quite literal Word of God is to be trusted.
• Rare hero example: Roland of Gilead, protagonist of The Dark Tower, especially in the first book.
• The gods of the Everworld series are, not surprisingly, rather hard to kill. You know, being gods and all. However, what is required to actually kill them varies according to book. At first, they can be killed only by another god or the weapon of a god. Period. Later on, it is said that Hel could've been vanquished by an enchanted sword, and one character says that a fall into a crater the group is at would kill even an immortal. Nonetheless, gods are stabbed with swords, cut with blades, and shot full of arrows with little effect over the course of the books. It is possible that the books' Coo-Hatch steel could kill an immortal, however.
• The Warrior Bugs from Starship Troopers, at least according to Johnnie. It takes losing all four limbs on one side to topple one, and it's not out of commission till the nerve case is damaged. If it hasn't been toppled by then, it can still charge forward until it bumps into something like a wall.
• The Steel Inquisitors from Mistborn: The Original Trilogy can only be killed by decapitation or pulling out the metal spike embedded in their back — they'll recover almost instantly from anything else. Their boss, the Lord Ruler, is even tougher — prior to the beginning of the book he had reportedly been stabbed, shot, decapitated, burned and flayed alive and shrugged it all off like nothing. Word of God says the decapitation was an exaggeration, he was only partially decapitated and would have died if he'd actually been completely decapitated.
• Hyde from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a chilling example of this. Although we don't see him shrug off lots of damage, the point is made clearly — if absolutely, positively nothing is going to stop you, then surely that must include even the innocent little girl who just got in your way, which is indeed what happens when Hyde callously walks into, and then over, her. In the face of this monstrous behavior, the observers are disgusted.
• Several characters from The Dresden Files, but most notably Cowl, whom a fallen angel-powered Harry flipped a car onto, and it did nothing. Wizards are the Glass Cannons of the Dresdenverse. Also Nicodemus. He gets shot full of a full cylinder of bullets without even flinching. After the second bullet he actually started making the quintessential "can we hurry it up" gesture.
• The Princess Bride has a Badass Normal example. Sure, the Man in Black is technically just an ordinary human without any superpowers or invulnerability, but... When following Buttercup's kidnappers, he outraces the fastest ship in the land, climbs the original Cliffs of Insanity, even after they cut the rope, beats Inigo Montoya in a duel, wrestles Fezzik unconscious, and finally deliberately drinks poison without suffering any effects to beat Vizzini in cunning.
• Those using the Tin Man Powered Armor or CID Motion-Capture Mecha in Dale Brown's books are Immune to Bullets, allowing them to appear this way. The illusion is shattered when anti-tank weaponry is brought out, though.
• All of The Undead armies in The Malazan Book of the Fallen (the T'lan Imass, Forkrul Assail, and K'Chain Che'Malle) have this as their hat. From what we've seen of the Jaghut Tyrants they also count, as do Annomander Rake and many of the series other badass characters.
• The Golem of Flesh, Everyman from Way of the Tiger. Every time you kill him, he reappears, repeating his line "I am Everyman." After the first few fights, even if you take no damage (through fudging the dice, or just being really good at rolling them), you still lose hit points on each subsequent attempts, as "exhaustion" kicks in. The only way to get away from him: lure him to a cliff and make him fall. Incidentally, said cliff leads to hordes of monsters who will gladly keep him occupied for eternity.
• The Irrha from The War of the Flowers, a mindless disease spirit that someone sends to kidnap the main character. It follows him everywhere, even between dimensions, constructing a new body from whatever's handy (trash, stray cats, parts of a homeless guy, whatever). In the end, it can't be stopped from carrying out its mission — but it can be sidetracked onto the Enfant Terrible for whom the changeling protagonist was switched at birth.
• Conan the Barbarian in The Hour of the Dragon, when he's after the Heart of Ahriman. All right, he has to quell one "Leave Your Quest" Test when he thinks of less complicated adventures with lower stakes, but only one.
• Inheritance Cycle: Durza, the Shade. Not only is he a powerful magician, he's also as physically powerful and agile as an elf, with extra regeneration too. The worst part, and what qualifies him for the trope, is that being a Shade he cannot die unless you stab him right through the heart; other injuries are either shrugged off or, if lethal, simply discorporate him back to a mass of spirits that can regenerate its physical form very quickly and come right after you again. It's noted that this is very painful, but he stopped caring long ago.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: In The Last Olympian has Hyperion, The Dragon to Big Bad Kronos, plus Kronos himself. Percy Jackson, once he takes a dip in the River Styx, is almost a deconstruction as he is an Implacable Man when he needs to be, but once the need has gone, he feels all the more tired for it. There are also the skeleton soldiers from The Titan's Curse, who chase the heroes across the country on foot and can only be stopped by children of Hades.
• Nearly any greater dead or free magic construct in the Old Kingdom trilogy unless you have exactly the skills and equipment needed to handle them, and any of the dead are this when faced with modern weaponry.
• Michael is a heroic version of this in the Knight and Rogue Series. Due to suffering from Chronic Hero Syndrome he eagerly pursues the villains, and when they finally confront him and throw him over a 300 ft high cliff he just gets winded.
• In Simon R. Green's 'Verse, the Walking Man is an agent of holy wrath who cannot be stopped by any force short of divinity. Anyone who becomes one will believe God is backing his play, and he'll be right.
  • It's possible that the Walking Man is more powerful than even other gods, as The Punk God of the Straight Razor went toe to toe with him and still got his ass kicked in the end.
  • Note that the Walking Man's invulnerability and powers only last as the Walking Man is punishing sinners. As soon as he tries to kill an innocent, he becomes a mortal man again.
• The Lifeless in Warbreaker are an implacable army. They're essentially zombies that are perfectly obedient to whoever has the authority to command them. As such, they're completely fearless, completely tireless, don't need to eat, and can shrug off any injury as long as it doesn't directly impair their functioning. Furthermore, though they lose their free will they do retain learned skills, so where other undead would just Zerg Rush, Lifeless who were soldiers in life are fully capable of using advanced combat techniques and tactics. Taken Up to Eleven with Kalad's Phantom's, legendary ultra-Lifeless created as Elite Mooks by a Sorcerous Overlord and ultimately revealed to be composed of skeletons sealed inside solid stone, making them all but impossible to destroy. Good thing for the heroes that their creator did a Heel–Face Turn and is now The Atoner...
• Cophthera-gn of The First Dwarf King definitely fits. The heroes empty their guns, and it seems they'll be able to defeat him... and then he gets right back up, all his wounds healing themselves, and the heroes run in panic. Feschera stabs him with her scimitar, only for him to rip it out and nail her to a tree with it. The heroes then cause him to fall into a chasm, which does nothing more than wash him downstream, where he's picked up by his allies.
  • Pathruushkè further demonstrates Cophthera-gn's implacability by stabbing him through the face with his staff, then pulling it right back out. Not only does Cophthera-gn heal within seconds, he doesn't even flinch.
• In the Fighting Fantasy book Knights of Doom, your character inevitably encounters the assassin's dagger, an invincible, disembodied hand clutching a dagger whose only purpose is to kill the you. You can run away, you can fend it off, you can even trap it inside a heavy box, but the assassin's dagger will keep catching up with you at multiple points throughout the adventure. If you don't find a way to banish it before the end of the book then it will sneak up on you and bury itself in your back just as you confront the Big Bad.
• Arenadd from The Fallen Moon, at least in book three. After suffering multiple mortal injuries, he is eventually killed by drinking a bottle of the deadliest poison in universe. He gets better in a few days. For some examples, he was turned into a human pincushion, fell off a mountain, starved to death, likely broke his neck a few times, and stabbed through the heart twice, one of which was with a magic BFS designed by a god to kill him.
• In a collection of Pacific Coast Indian folktales, one story has a group of hunters find that the "old woman" who took shelter from the winter in their lodge is actually a brain-eating monster. They hit it on the head with a hatchet, then burn the lodge with its body inside. They then led it on a chase across the country-side, setting traps for it as they go until they finally lure it onto thin ice and it falls through, and was presumably released again come spring. Since there were no other versions of the story from other tribes, it was probably made up on the spot by a storyteller who would have been writing for Hollywood, except it was the 19th century.
• In The Knife of Never Letting Go, by the time of Todd and Viola's final confrontation with him, Aaron has pulled through being mauled by a crocodile, almost drowning, getting his nose torn off, and more through the power of his own twisted faith. Horrifying disfigurement is a small price to pay for the fulfilment of his mission. He only dies for good when Viola puts a knife through his neck and he goes over a waterfall.
  Aaron: I am a saint!
• The gholam is that in The Wheel of Time. It is a supernatural assassin immune to both the one power and conventional weapons, it lives forever (the only one active in the series is thousands of years old), and it also has super-strength, super-speed and the ability to alter its shape as will (for example it can "spill" itself under a door, through a grid or through a keyhole). And it never, ever, gives up on its target. The only reason why the one set after Mat hasn't killed him yet is that Mat has supernatural good luck, owns a unique Amulet of Concentrated Awesome that helps him defend itself, and is very smart whereas the gholam is kind of stupid (it usually doesn't have to be smart to be a threat, "kill everyone" is often a good enough plan). The fan community actually maintains a webpage discussing how you could possibly kill a gholam. It turns out one of the possibilities discussed there is the way the gholam is actually dispatched in the final books: he is flung through a portal to the Void Between the Worlds. Even then it is not dead, just thrown out of the heroes' world with no chance of returning. And condemned to keep falling in a totally empty world. Forever. And it is immortal.
• In Those That Wake, the Tower Guardian is impossible to take in a straight fight, and is only defeated by tricking it.
• Kazuo Kiriyama is this in all three versions of Battle Royale (book, movie and manga). Even after brutal hand-to-hand combat with a highly skilled martial artist, a leap out of a speeding car, a spearhead to the eye, and several gunshot wounds, including one to the face, he still gets back up, his expression just as dead, and shoots the offender. Egregiously shown during the fight with Shinji Mimura, who blows up a building with his homemade bomb trying to kill Kazuo... only for Kazuo to calmly step out of a car that'd been hurled out of the building and mercilessly gun him down.
• The Giants from The Heroes of Olympus have this as their primary power. They lack the vast magic or weapons of gods or demigods, but can only be killed by a god and demigod working together. Otherwise, they reform if destroyed and heal any other damage. The longer the battle lasts the faster their injuries heal and they never tire. Of course, get a demigod and even a minor god working together this power becomes useless and they fall over like a house of cards.
• Ser Gregor Clegane from A Song of Ice and Fire. Also known as "The Mountain that Rides", Gregor is possibly the biggest and most physically powerful man in the world. Standing around eight feet tall, he is able to wear plate armor that any other man would be unable to even move in, in addition to chain and leather armor underneath that. He is also strong enough to wield a two-handed greatsword with one-hand and carry a shield with it. Mixed with his Unstoppable Rage from migraines (possibly due to his size) and implied use of painkillers to dull said migraines makes him a nearly unstoppable force. Eventually, it works against him when he's fatally poisoned by Oberyn Martell, and his physical resilience keeps him alive and in agony for weeks.
• In No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh is a downplayed example. He isn't a killer robot from the future, and he can bleed and get hurt, but Anton is still as close to a Terminator as could conceivably be found in real life. Like a Dostoyevskian character, Anton is completely driven by an idea. In this case, the idea is that every action that a person takes will ultimately decide their fate. If Anton is hired to kill someone, that means to him that somewhere along the line, they have committed an action that warranted it, whether or not they realized this at the time, and there is NO amount of begging and pleading that will save them once they're in Chigurh's sights. Anton simply views himself as fate's messenger, and calmly and methodically makes sure that his victims realize how poor their decisions were before he blows their brains out. Compare with Genghis Khan and his "I am the flail of God" quote, to see where he is coming from.
• In the young adult novel Death in the Deeps, Prisoner One is the epitome of this trope, fighting off Lycans, Leviathans, a Basilisk and Wraiths during his single minded rampage through the prison. The only thing that actually hurts him is an explosion that decimates the surrounding ice for a mile in every direction yet does little but burn his hair and sear his skin, which quickly regenerates.
• In the Drenai saga, Angel is famous for his tolerance for injury.
• The mechanical hound in Fahrenheit 451 will stop at nothing to kill whatever it has been programmed to kill, using its acute sense of smell.
• The Algis Budrys story "Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night" has Burr, who the protagonist Sollenar attempts to kill by shooting him multiple times, and who is described as "shredded, leaking blood and worse than blood". He later falls many stories from a high-rise office building, but nevertheless, he just keeps coming. Justified in that Burr has gotten a special device from an alien engineer. Sollenar thinks it's an immortality device, but it turns out to be a generator of fully realistic illusions; Burr is long dead, but knowing that Sollenar would kill him, programmed the device to make Sollenar believe his maimed body is still seeking vengeance.
• Patternist: Doro the Body Surfer has two rules for the people he claims as his own — never disobey him and never run from him. His power works regardless of distance, destroys the minds of the people he possesses, triggers automatically when he's in danger, and lets him sense people's locations, so they almost never try. When Anyanwu flees him, he shows up at her doorstep over a century later.
• The One Who Eats Monsters has Ryn, an ancient deva who has gained something of a reputation over the incalculable time she's been alive. She's actually known as The Implacable One, as well as The One From Whom There's No Escape. When she decides on a target, whether it's a monster, a deva, or a god, she will hunt them relentlessly through the ages and slaughter without mercy. She's powerful enough that her past battles have left entire continents scarred for millennia, and even if her body was destroyed, she would simply be reborn and continue the hunt. Those who hear she's involved in a situation generally have a very justified Oh, Crap! reaction.
  Ghorm: The Fates named her the Implacable One. When the oldest, most vengeful deva call you that, it's a clue that maybe this monster holds a fucking grudge.
• Dying Earth has the aptly-named Chun the Unavoidable. He eats the eyes of people who steal from him. And as one thief discovers, even hiding in an empty pocket dimension won't stop him from finding you.
• The Stormlight Archive: Lezian the Pursuer is The Dreaded for this trope, backed up by his Resurrective Immortality. He obsessively hunts and kills anyone who defeats him, no matter what it takes. Kaladin becomes his Arch-Enemy for repeatedly besting him, but ultimately, Kaladin forces him to flee in front of hundreds of witnesses, utterly destroying his legend.
• Johnny Maxwell Trilogy: Lampshaded in Only You Can Save Mankind. The Screewee Empire are genuinely fearful of the protagonist's ability to keep coming back every time they kill him, since they're a video-game antagonist race who are somehow real. When he points out it must surely be the same for them being as he's played one level many times and there's always three ships, they simply answer "different ships".

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