"AHAHAHAHAHAAA!! It's no use!! My septima lets me manipulate life itself! If I die, she will bring me back to life. And if she dies, I'll bring her back! This is our true power! Limitless reincarnation!"
— Elise, Azure Striker Gunvolt
A common quirk of a creature with multiple bodies, or 2/more creatures/person who are "linked" in a deep manner, or a Hive Mind group, is that all of them have to be defeated at nearly (if not exactly) the same time, otherwise the killed individual will regenerate/revive itself.
There are many explanation for this, including but not limited to: extreme regeneration ability that's apparently shared by two people, ability to duplicate themselves or breed a huge number of them in a short time (for Hive Mind cases), or the individuals being able to heal/resurrect their own dying comrade. Killing all of the entities at once would thus prevent any individuals to come back.
In video games, this may be the gimmick of a particular kind of mook (especially a Reviving Enemy), or a Dual Boss (or a Wolfpack Boss).
Compare Hydra Problem (cutting the hydra's head may make 2 more heads appear in its place), as well as Kill One, Others Get Stronger (another situation where simultaneous destruction may be a beneficial tactic). Contrast From a Single Cell. See also Anti-Regeneration for tactics to deal with this ability.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- Sternritter Mask De Masculine from Bleach is supported by his fan James who can revive Mask from any lethal injury. However, this healing goes both ways: If James is killed first but Mask is still alive, he can revive James as well. Thus, to kill them, the two must be killed at (roughly) the same time, hence why Renji immediately goes for the kill after Mask accidentally kills James in a Friendly Fire.
- The Twin Card in Cardcaptor Sakura needs to have both halves of it defeated at the same time, and Syaoran and Sakura find that attacking them separately is ineffective. Luckily, Meiling has trained with Syaoran in martial arts, and they are able to carry out a coordinated attack to defeat it.
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba has the Upper Rank 6 demons Daki and Gyutaro, who due to the nature of how they became demons count as Two Beings, One Body and, while they can separate to fight individually, they both need to be decapitated at the same time (or at bare minimum the other needs to be beheaded before the other can reattach their head) before they can be fatally injured.
- In The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer, one of the golems the beast knights had to fight as part of the evil mage's challenge showed up as a pair, and then some. One was a straightforward strong centaur like golem, the other a swarm of almost cute mook like minions. They beat them, but the next day the swarm showed up again, but slightly different, and stronger. This continued for several days, the Beast Knights knowing that they had to figure out the trick to making them stay down or their slow improvement would let them overwhelm the Knights. They deduced that they needed to kill all the golem's bodies for it to stop respawning, and that at least one body was hiding while the rest showed up to fight each day. Eventually one of the beast knights found it, killing it easily because since it hadn't been destroyed unlike the rest of the bodies, it never came back strong.
- In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Israfel was actually two entities which had to be destroyed at exactly the same time or else they would keep coming back. Similarly, Iruel was a nanovirus that kept growing and adapting until they managed to trick it into an evolutionary path that led to self-destruction.
Fan Fiction
- Soul Eater: Troubled Souls: This is the main reason why the Brother and Sister of the Gemini were such a difficult Kishin Egg to locate and kill. They are actually two entities which had to be destroyed in their combined form or else they would keep coming back. Maka and Caius found attacking them separately is a fruitless endeavor because the "killed" half would simply find the other, recombine, and then split again into two beings good as new. To make matters worse, the separate halves are big on working together to survive.
Literature
- In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Geryon has three torsos, each with its own heart, which gives Percy some trouble fighting him. He winds up praying to Apollo and Artemis for a shot that goes through all three. (For some reason, it never occurs to him to just try lopping off Geryon's single head with his sword.)
- The Reckoners Trilogy: The titular Epic in Mitosis has the power of at-will duplication, with no "prime" copy. So as long as even one of him exists, he can have a hundred bodies again within a minute. Fortunately, he also suffers from Conservation of Ninjutsu: the more copies of him exist, the weaker and more fragile each individual copy becomes.
Live-Action TV
- Kamen Rider Fourze: The Aquarius Zodiarts manages to be a one-woman version of this trope by having a pair of water jugs on her shoulders which can instantly heal any wound, including repairing the other jug if it's destroyed. Fourze has to use an attack which breaks both jugs at once to actually defeat her. The Gemini Zodiarts, meanwhile, is not this trope despite having two bodies: only one is real, with the other being an Action Bomb.
- Robot Wars entrant Gemini is the Trope Namer. If 50% of any competitor's weight was destroyed/rendered immobile, the competitor was counted out; for Gemini, which was a clusterbot that split into two smaller robots after entering arena, this required either completely destroying/immobilizing one of the two robots or destroying/immobilizing 50% of each robot. This rule was removed later. Later, when it competed in BattleBots, both robots had to be immobilized for it to count as a knockout.
Tabletop Games
- Dungeons & Dragons: In the 1st Edition supplement "Fiend Folio", the Cifal (Colonial Insect-Formed Artificial Life) is a monster made up of a huge number of insects bound together into a humanoid form. It has 10 hit dice altogether, two of them being the binding energy that keeps the insects together. If you do two hit dice of damage to it, the insects break apart and flee. That is, if you do 20% of its total damage, it is defeated. Of course, then you've pissed off a whole hive of moderately intelligent bugs, who, being demonic, are probably going to want revenge...
Video Games
- Arknights: One of the bosses of Integrated Strategies 3 consists of the Tidelinked Bishop and Tidelinked Archon. When one of them has their health depleted, they'll be knocked out and start regenerating health, and revive once they reach full health. The only way to defeat them is to have both knocked out at the same time, which will kill them. The Bishop has much more health than the Archon, so the latter is likely to be knocked out multiple times through the fight.
- Azure Striker Gunvolt features a Sumeragi Adept named Elise you must fight who splits into two bodies for her Boss Battle. If you fail to destroy both bodies at the same time, the surviving one will revive the dead one to one-third health. This can get tricky despite Gunvolt's ability to tag multiple targets for his flash field since the frenetic nature of the fight means you can double tag one body and deal it more damage than the other, throwing off your timing. Elise returns for a second fight at the end of the game, along with all the other adepts, revealing she actually possesses three bodies (the reason she survived to revive everyone else). Unfortunately for Gunvolt, this third body is immune to anything he can throw at her (and once the other two go down once together, she revives them both at half-health each), but fortunately, he’s not the only enemy of Sumeragi in the area.
- In Betrayal at Krondor, this is how the undead evil warriors called Black Slayers are implemented.note If a group of Nighthawks includes a Black Slayer, then all of them must be killed within a short time, or the dead ones — both Nighthawks and Slayers — will revive as Slayers.
- In Deadbolt, some vampire enemies will revive shortly after being killed unless you destroy the phylactery holding their soul. The twin sisters Amber and Evelynn made each other their phylactery, requiring you to kill both within seconds of each other, a task made difficult by them being far apart.... if not for your player character being able to warp through the vents conveniently connecting their rooms.
- In Deep Rock Galactic, the Dreadnought Twins are a boss encounter consisting of an Arbalest, which scuttles around on the ceiling firing fireballs, and a Lacerator, which charges in to maul and breathe fire at close range. If one of the Twins' health bar gets too low, both retreat and become temporarily invulnerable as they heal to equalize their health bars... and once one of the Twins dies, the other Turns Red and becomes much more dangerous. The best way for a team to deal with the Twins then is to coordinate their damage output so that both monsters' health bars are reduced at about the same rate, preventing them from healing and making sure the last surviving Twin won't have much health to act on.
- In the Don't Starve Together event The Forge, the 2018 version of the event had the Rhinocebros, Flatbrim and Snapback, a Dual Boss that would revive each other if one was defeated.
- Old versions of Dungeon Crawl have shedim, holy monsters which always come in pairs and can revive each other if given enough time to do so.
- Final Fantasy V has the Gargoyles that guard the tablets used in the Sealed Temple. Killing one will just cause the other to revive it; to defeat them, you must kill them simultaneously or prevent one of them from acting (such as by sending it berserk).
- Final Fantasy VIII has the Propagators, four color-coded pairs of creatures hiding on the Ragnarok. To defeat each pair, you have to kill one after the other without getting into a fight with another Propagator of a different color in-between. If you do, the defeated creature is revived by its partner.
- Guild Wars 2:
- The meta-event in Auric Basin (Heart of Thorns) concludes with a four-way battle against four Octovines. All four of them must be defeated within two minutes of the first one's defeat or any defeated Octovines will revive.
- At one point in Path of Fire, the Commander battles the ghosts of the twin queens Nahlah and Dahlah. Initially they're fought separately, but to conclude the fight you have to drop both of them within 20 seconds of each other.
- Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days has the Crimson Prankster, which immediately splits itself in two. Destroying one of the copies just causes the other to revive it with the same amount of health that the surviving copy has. They both need to be whittled down until the last of the remaining copy's health can be shaved off before it can revive the first.
- The Legend of Zelda:
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: In the Forest Temple, the Bow is guarded by a pair of Stalfos who can revive if you take too long to defeat one after the other. They later show up during the escape from Ganondorf's collapsing castle, where they can take up a lot of your limited time if you haven't mastered fighting them.
- The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: Shadow Beasts always attack in groups of 3 or more, and when only one is left standing it will let out a howl that revives the others. To defeat them you must use area attacks to take down the last two at once.
- Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals has a dungeon boss that splits into two, one form being fire-based and the other ice-based, which has to be defeated simultaneously. When the party first fights it, they fight each body one at a time; it regenerates and laughs in their faces, so the party splits in half and two characters fight each body.
- Subverted, ironically enough, with Mega Man 3's Gemini Man, who does split into two bodies but allows you to destroy each body in sequence instead.
- Mega Man & Bass has an enemy called Plasma±, resembling two green orbs with an electric current between them. Destroying one will cause the remaining one to respawn it if not quickly destroyed.
- Mega Man Battle Network:
- The Protectos in the postgame of the second game are preset encounters containing two or three three identical enemies with infinite HP regeneration and ability to instantly revive themselves if you take them out one by one. To win these fights, you have to kill all enemies with one attack at the same time.
- The third game has the rare Twins virus. As the name suggests, it always shows up in pairs, and both have to be deleted at the same time or else the one that survived will revive the other.
- The Numbers in the postgame of the third game are similar to the previous game's Protectos, except you must take out all same numbers in one go and in order (i.e. delete all the 1s at the same time, then 2s, then 3s). Hit any of them out of order and they retaliate with a 1000-damage attack.
- New Destroyman in No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle is a partial case. The Destroyman who can fly and attacks mainly through projectiles can revive the other Destroyman. The other one, who fights mainly through hand-to-hand combat, has no such abilities. However, the one who can fly spends most of the battle out of reach, making it hard to actually finish him off first before the close-range one pummels you.
- Persona 3 has Chariot and Justice, a Dual Boss fight where both targets have to be killed in the same turn, or else the survivor will use the Samarecarm spell to fully heal the other. The two bosses occasionally fuse together, and one may think to kill them in this combined form... however, this form endures attacks at 1 HP indefinitely if it sustains otherwise-fatal damage, so the bosses must be killed while separated.
- Slay the Spire features Darklings, black Blob Monsters that may appear during Act 3 and always come in threes. So long as at least one of a Darkling's allies survives, it will revive itself after one turn when reduced to 0 HP; all three must be dead at once to kill them for good.
- In Tsukihime, Nrvnqsr Chaos can only be killed if all 666 creatures that make up his body are killed at once. If they are killed individually, he can instantly regenerate them. This fact makes him nigh-impossible to kill, even for top-tier fighters like Arcueid. Unfortunately for Nrvnqsr, protagonist Tohno Shiki has the ultimate counter to this in the form of the Mystic Eyes of Death Perception — when he kills something, it stays dead, no matter what. So he's able to kill pieces of Nrvnqsr without them regenerating, which freaks the monster out.
Webcomics
- Sleepless Domain: Cassidy's power as the magical girl Flash Cut is to split herself into two halves. These clones are significantly less durable than Cassidy herself, but if either of them is destroyed, Cassidy herself reforms unharmed at the intact clone's location, and can continue to split herself for as long as she still has enough magic to spare. If both of her clones were destroyed at the same time, however, there would logically be no intact clones left to become her main body, and Cassidy wouldn't be able to reform. Which is exactly what happens when Goops gets a monster to slash at both clones. Cassidy uses her Dying Moment of Awesome to stab Goops's eye in retaliation before she disappears.
Web Original
- This is the schtick of a fae archer the party of Tales From My D&D Campaign runs across. He can separate his shadow from himself, which in addition to doubling his firepower means that whenever either his shadow or his real self is threatened, it can momentarily teleport to the other's location and then back again to dodge attacks. The only way to harm him is to threaten both his bodies at the same time.
