Undying Warrior

Among characters lucky (or unlucky) enough to have obtained eternal life, there's a popular tendency for immortals to devote themselves to the career of a warrior at some point in their lives, either because they started off in the military or because they realized their talents could be useful in a martial lifestyle. Some may have been born to a Proud Warrior Race — or even a war-oriented Society of Immortals. A few may have been cursed to such a lifestyle, and some may even have a death wish.

In terms of military experience, these characters might have been everything from Greek hoplites to 21st century marines, so expect at least a chance that they might have Been There, Shaped History. As for their approach to warfare, they can be patriotic soldiers devoting themselves to a cause, mercenaries interested in nothing but money and excitement, or even seize control of entire regions as independent warlords.

Whatever the case, these characters keep being drawn back to the battlefield, even if they eventually acquire other interests over the centuries. As such, it's very common for characters such as these to exhibit thrill-seeking Blood Knight tendencies, even among those who suffer from PTSD or — in rare cases — retire from the military for a more peaceful lifestyle.

Needless to say, this is the option most often chosen by immortals with Resurrective Immortality, a powerful Healing Factor, or just plain Complete Immortality... although a few exceptions among The Ageless and those with Born-Again Immortality do exist.

More successful immortal warriors may become Immortal Rulers as a result of their conquests. Taken to its logical conclusion, the character may even be a War God or War itself.

Compare and contrast Immortal Assassin, Military Superhero, and Super-Soldier. Can overlap with Warrior Undead, but these guys are generally, ah, better preserved.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Berserk:
  • Several of the major Apostles (humans transformed into demonic beings) qualify, and the new Band of the Hawk that Griffith builds after his resurrection includes a number of them. Special mention, however, goes to Nosferatu Zodd, whom Guts and Griffith chronologically first encounter during the Golden Age Arc while assaulting a castle. Zodd is a furry giant resembling a minotaur who lives under the castle and slaughters a squad of soldiers that stumble across him, then goes mano a mano with Guts and Griffith and throws them around like ragdolls. He's only forced to turn tail when he spies Griffith's Crimson Behelit. Following Griffith's resurrection as the Fifth Angel of the Godhand, Zodd serves as Griffith's bodyguard and steed.
  • The Skull Knight is a mysterious undead Warrior Poet who opposes the Godhand, and previously wore the Berserker Armor that Schierke and Flora give to Guts. Something happened long ago that reduced him and his horse to an armored skeleton with Glowing Eyelights of Undeath, but also made him one of the few characters besides Guts able to kill Apostles. He's implied to be Emperor Gaiseric, the founder of the Kingdom of Midland.
• Blade of the Immortal: The eponymous immortal, Manji, is a Rōnin who was infected with kessen-chu, bloodworms blessed by a priest that give him a Healing Factor that makes him virtually unkillable. He wanders Shogunate Japan earning drinking money and hoping that if he kills 1,000 evil men, he'll finally die. In the story, Rin Asano, a samurai's daughter, hires him as a bodyguard in hopes of avenging her parents' murders. In the epilogue, he's shown to still be around a century later after the Meiji Restoration.
• Japan Animator Expo has "Hammerhead's" eponymous character, who after a series of experiments becomes a nearly indestructible death machine. He's put to work facing dangerous monsters who would rip ordinary people in two, but while he can get dismembered and hurt in all sorts of ways he will always regenerate. He hopes to find an opponent who can put an end to him once and for all.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency: Wammu is a member of a race of Humanoid Abominations called the Pillar Men; he cannot be killed by anything other than sunlight and The Ripple, has lived for tens of thousands of years... and unlike his more pragmatic comrades, Wammu lives for battle and respects the memory of those he finds to be Worthy Opponents.
• Yona of the Dawn: Zeno was part of the original generation of Dragon Warriors and was given immortality to better protect Hiryu in battle, though he was considered the weakest of the Dragons until his powers were discovered. However, after the others went their separate ways, Zeno stuck around and decided to protect Kouka Kingdom from invaders, acting as a One-Man Army. However, he gave this up and became a drifter after the rest of the Dragons died.

Comic Books

• The DCU: Vandal Savage's millennia-long life could be summed up as a bloody-minded marauding Cro-Magnon who has never really needed to adapt his strategy once he got immortality. Even in modern times fighting superheroes, he leads armies and gets his hands dirty, and regularly gets killed but only to rise again and continue his ways.
• The Valiant Comics character Eternal Warrior is a thousand year-old, undying warrior who has been travelling the world and protecting it with the aid of a Geomancer, a chosen representative of Earth itself.
• Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale: Aja Oba starts out as a ruthless Warrior Prince and Front Line General known for his brutal tactics; cursed with immortality by the sorceress of a tribe he wiped out, he compensates for the loss of his kingdom and loved ones through extreme Blood Knight tendencies. Among other things, he participates in the Punic Wars, the American Civil War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Vietnam War, and even single-handedly fights off an Alien Invasion — twice — with only comparatively brief periods of retirement in between.
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:
  • The gender-bending immortal Orlando has spent most of their history as either a committed hedonist or an insatiable Blood Knight. In the case of the latter, Orlando took up arms in the Peloponnesian War, fought on behalf of the Roman empire, became known as Roland, participated in the third Crusade, fought in both World Wars, and has become a member of numerous iterations of the League across history. As of Century: 2009, they've even participated in The War on Terror before returning home as a Shell-Shocked Veteran after committing a massacre of both enemy combatants, civilians, and their squadmates.
  • The intro to 2009 also features a cameo from fellow immortal soldier Corporal Cuckoo — by now having finally been promoted to colonel, but still sporting far too many scars to have earned in a single war.
  • Hugo Coghlan started out as the legendary Celtic demigod Cú Chulainn, fighting off whole armies with superhuman strength and near-invincibility; by the early 20th century, he's still alive and kicking, destroying legendary monsters, serving as a bodyguard to Jani in her war against Ayesha, and moonlighting as a hitman.
• The Old Guard: The protagonists of the story are effectively ageless and capable of Resurrective Immortality, and use these powers the pursue mercenary careers. For good measure, all of them were soldiers prior to becoming immortal: Andy is a warrior from ancient Scythia, Nicky and Joe were on either side during the Crusades, and Booker was a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars. The Baby of the Bunch, Nile, was an American soldier in Afghanistan.
• Preacher: The Saint of Killers started off as a Sociopathic Soldier in the American Civil War, and even his attempt at retiring ended in bloodshed; after dying and inheriting the power of the Angel of Death, he became not immortal but effectively invincible, and is now employed exclusively as a hitman on behalf of Heaven.
• Thor: Vikings: Viking warlord Harald Jaekelsson was cursed with immortality by a botched rune spell, and is over a thousand years old by the time he and his crew make landfall in New York. He has also become virtually invincible during that time, to the point that he is able to fight Thor to a standstill.
• X-Men: Wolverine and his Arch-Enemy Sabretooth are both described as being old. At times, it's implied they've been around since The American Civil War and participated in both World Wars. This can be chalked up to their Healing Factor, which also had the side effect of dramatically slowing their aging to the point of near-immortality.

Fan Works

• Kyril Sutherland from The Night Unfurls has Resurrective Immortality and is heavily involved in martial careers, like beast-hunting, mercenary work, and the military (in the original version). Shell-shocked, he yearns for a day where he could get a farm, lay down his weapons, and fade away.
• Purple Days: Although Joffrey has been many professions across thousands of "Groundhog Day" Loop iterations, the appreciation he gains for the soldiery and their sense of camaraderie notably sticks.

Films — Live-Action

• Highlander: The Immortals cannot be killed unless their head is severed from their bodies. If an Immortal beheads another in combat, he will be imbued with their victim's power; as a result, Immortals have been fighting a secret war for ultimate power throughout history as after all There Can Be Only One. Because Immortals only discover their powers in the event of their violent death, it's not uncommon for them to have been warriors or soldiers — as was the case with both Connor and Duncan MacLeod. Also, despite the need to keep their existence a secret, it's not unknown for some immortals to occasionally work as mercenaries in mortal wars or enlist themselves in causes they support.
• The Last Witch Hunter: Kaulder is a former knight who was cursed with immortality by the Witch Queen before killing her. Since then, he has lived for the past eight hundred years hunting, fighting, and bringing criminal witches to justice for the Witch Council. Turns out the Witch Queen was also using Kaulder to store said immortality until the time came for her to be resurrected.
• The Old Guard, as with the original comic, features the adventures of a gang of immortal mercenaries drawn from various eras of history — including ancient Scythia, the Crusades, the Napoleonic Wars, and the 21st century conflicts in the Middle East. All of the immortals possess agelessness and Resurrective Immortality — with a twist: after an indeterminate period of time, they will lose their immortality and die permanently... and given their violent lifestyles, they rarely get any advance warning.
• X-Men Film Series: As with their comic counterparts, Wolverine and Sabertooth are practically immortal thanks to their regenerative powers, and the introductory sequence of X-Men Origins: Wolverine demonstrates that the duo have enjoyed a very long career in the military: among other things, they both participated in the American Civil War, World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War before getting embroiled in the modern conflicts between mutants and humans.

Literature

• Casca: The Eternal Mercenary: The main draw, Casca Rufio Longinus was the Roman legionary who drove the spear into the side of Jesus on the cross. Jesus cursed him to wander the Earth aimlessly, always as a soldier from one battle to the next until the Second Coming. If he is "killed" in battle, he just regenerates and walks off the battlefield, looking for another war.
• The Dark Hunters:
  • The eponymous Hunters are a group of warriors resurrected and made immortal by the goddess Artemis to hunt the vampiric Daimons — in exchange for revenge against those who murdered them in their previous lives.
  • The leader of the Daimons, Stryker, was a fierce warrior many thousands of years ago and still maintains the lifestyle in the present day.
• The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August: The immortal Kalachakra only possess Born-Again Immortality via "Groundhog Day" Loop, so most prefer to avoid violence — especially given that they usually end up reborn feeling the aftereffects of any trauma they experienced. The one exception to this is Fidel Gussman, who prefers to spend eternity on war, though he freely admits that he has no hope of changing the outcome of any of the conflicts he gets involved in, and fights simply because he enjoys the thrill of violence more than the luxury offered by the Cronus Club. Plus, he honestly prefers dying in battle to dying of cancer — his most common cause of death.
• Good Intentions by Elliot Kay: Alex winds up as one when magic is used on him that lets him remember all his past lives. In all of his past lives, he's been a warrior and hero, dating back to before Ancient Greece. Though he admits that some of the skills from his past lives aren't terribly useful in the 21st Century, like when he was a Viking his favorite tactic was "block all the doors to the enemy's home and set it on fire."
• The Master Mariner, written by Nicholas Monsarrat, has a naval example in Matthew Lawe. Cursed by a shipmate for his cowardice when confronting the Spanish Armada, he is condemned to sail the world's seas for ever, serving as a sailor on Hudson's doomed attempt to find the Northwest Passage, Cook's voyages and Nelson's campaigns. Monsarrat died before he could finish the second volume, which would have seen Lawe serve in both World Wars before finally dying by way of an Heroic Sacrifice to save the lives of his shipmates on a sinking Great Lakes freighter.
• Necroscope: The Wamphyri indulge heavily in violent lifestyles, having been gradually corrupted into enjoying bloodshed and rape by the eldritch parasites within them. In particular, those on Earth have exhibited a very rich military history: Thibor Ferenczy committed so many war crimes in the service of his mortal monarch that he accidentally gave Vlad the Impaler his title in the process, while his sire Faethor gleefully helped sack Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, rode with Genghis Khan in the unification of Mongolia, and even served in the Ottoman Empire's conquest of Byzantium.
• Pale: John Stiles is a Dog of War, which is a type of Other born from bits and pieces of soldiers and/or their victims during conflicts where it becomes impossible to identify the living from the dead — in his case, the 2001 War in Afghanistan. As long as the conflict they're born from continues, they'll survive anything that's plausible for a human to survive, and anything a person couldn't survive they'll revive within a few days due to their Resurrective Immortality. There are a few other examples like KIAs Warbourn and Gore Strewn, Aware who are favored by War and practitioners who ape them respectively who live for war and receive all the benefits of this trope.
• Rivers of London: Have these with certain Fae, used here as a generic term for "outsider", called Old Soldiers sole survivors of bloody battles who find themselves blessed with eternal youth. One standout is Oberon, a slave from Jamaica who killed his "master", fled to the continent and fought in the The American Revolution on the British side, he teaches art in London these days.
• Shadow of the Fox: Hakaimono is the first and most powerful Oni of Jigoku (Hell). He is also an immortal Blood Knight who lives for the fight and has drifted from location to location in search of battle, leaving many bodies in his wake.
• The Stormlight Archive has two groups of Magic Knights with Resurrective Immortality in the cyclic war against Odium: the Fused, Odium's elite warriors; and the Heralds, the champions of humanity. When a Desolation begins, both groups return to the planet Roshar to take up the fight again. Seven thousand years of this have left them exceedingly tired and more than a bit insane.
• "Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?": Written by Gerald Kersh, the eponymous corporal has been alive since the 16th century, having been accidentally been made immortal following the Battle of Turin by a treatment for the wounds he sustained that day; essentially The Ageless, he's also been blessed with a powerful Healing Factor that allows him to recover from just about anything — though unfortunately, it doesn't prevent him from scarring. Unable to find success in any other career, unable to replicate the treatment, and unable to hang onto money, Cuckoo has spent the past five hundred years as a soldier in one war after another — ending up absolutely Covered in Scars in the process. Also, as he laments, it's taken him five centuries just to earn the rank of corporal.

Magazines

• Doctor Who Magazine: It's revealed in "The Glorious Dead" that after the Japanese samurai Sato Katsura was rendered ageless and undying against his wishes, he became an undefeatable pirate until he allowed the Spanish Inquisition to capture him out of weariness or boredom. Once he came out of his fifty-year BSoD, under the Master's design, he waged a global holy war and eventually went intergalactic with it.

Music

• Unleash the Archers: The viewpoint character of the concept albums Apex and Abyss is the Immortal, "a weapon of empires past" who has spent untold eons being periodically awoken by various masters to serve their goals. In Apex the evil Matriarch sends him to kill her four sons as part of a ritual to make herself immortal as well, which includes the Immortal pulling a One-Man Army routine in the song "Ten Thousand Against One". In Abyss he battles her instead, having been called forth by the son of one of the men he killed in Apex.

Tabletop Games

• Forgotten Realms has Tempus, the God of War. His dogma is primarily concerned with honorable battle, forbidding cowardice and encouraging the use of force of arms to settle disputes. In addition, his temples look more like military fortresses than the archetypal church of Crystal Dragon Jesus; said temples feature barracks, mess halls, armories, and training grounds. Clerics who invoke his power can use the "Guided Strike" ability, which lets one attack of their choosing have supernaturally good accuracy.
• Future Card Buddyfight: The Purgatory Knights were legendary heroes of Dragon World who willingly trapped themselves in Darkness Dragon World to stop a demonic invasion, while at the same time using a black magic to make themselves immortal so they could keep fighting. However, said magic, alongside endless fighting and being exposed to Darkness Dragon World's toxic environment for thousands of years, ended up distorting their appearances and caused them to go insane, making them shells of their former selves. Later support has some of their members become the Purgatory Knights Reborn, having regained their sanity and fight for Dragon World once more, represented by them being Dual cards that can be used in Dragon World or Darkness Dragon World decks.
• Warhammer:
  • The Blood Dragons. An order of vampire knights devoted to honorable combat and transcending their hunger, they actively seek out battles across the world to test their mettle — either challenging lone warriors on the road or pitting entire armies against the nations of the world. As such, of all the vampire bloodlines, they're the only one whose members wage war not for the sake of knowledge, power, or hunger, but simply for the sake of fighting.
  • Mordrek the Damned, a warrior in the service of Chaos, has Resurrective Immortality and is brought back every time he's killed (and he's not happy about it). Hero Killer Wulfrik the Wanderer (himself possibly an example, at least in the "won't die of old age or disease" sense) has fought him twice and been victorious both times, which still hasn't kept him down.
  • In fact, many heroes of Chaos are blessed with a mild form of immortality so they can continue doing the work of their gods without falling to disease or old age, though they can still be slain in battle. Worse still, the most successful of these champions may eventually be rewarded with ascension to the role of Daemon Princes, who are blessed with Complete Immortality. Sigvald the Magnificent, the champion of Slaanesh, has been a sociopathic 16-year-old for three centuries now.
  • Saurus, the Lizardmen warrior caste, are one of the two Lizardman subspecies to be biologically immortal. Most die relatively young due to their lifestyles of constant fighting, but their veterans simply continue to grow stronger and become more experienced as they age. The eldest living Saurus are thousands of years old and some of the deadliest warriors in the world.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Space Marines are incredibly resilient, immune to most diseases, and long-lived to the point of being virtually immortal thanks to their modifications; as such, they can and will spend centuries on end waging war in the name of the Emperor. For good measure, their lives are so violent that nobody's certain if they can die of old age. Their Chaos Space Marine counterparts possess similar agelessness as a result of similar genetic upgrades; worse still, thanks to the patronage of the Chaos gods, they can be blessed with more tangible forms of immortality in order to act in the name of their new patrons. They may even transcend physical existence to become Daemon Princes, who are by nature blessed with Complete Immortality.
  • Space Marine Dreadnoughts are Marines whose injuries are too great to allow them to continue service, but whose experience is too valuable to lose; so, they're interred in huge walking life-support tanks and allowed to sleep, sometimes for centuries, until they're needed in battle again. Chaos Dreadnoughts are similar, with the caveat that it's a punishment: they too spend centuries waiting between battles, but without the benefit of sleep, their weapons removed and their bodies chained to a wall. As a result, they're irretrievably insane, and have a chance of shooting their own side in combat.
  • Perpetuals are immortal mutant humans who never age and can recover from even atomic disintegration; for good measure, given the state of the setting, it's kind of inevitable that they'll see frontline combat sooner or later. Known Perpetuals include the Emperor of Mankind, who lead a crusade to regain control of the galaxy, Vulkan, the Primarch of the Salamander Space Marine chapter, and Ollanius Pius. The latter may take the cake, as Pius is even older than the Emperor, and has participated in many conflicts throughout humanity's history, including the Napoleonic Wars, the Gulf War, and Jason's expedition for the Golden Fleece.
  • Orks are a Proud Warrior Race of kill-crazy brawlers who live to wage war, and so far, nobody's ever witnessed a single one of them die of old age, leaving it ambiguous as to whether or not they are completely ageless. For good measure, they possess an incredible healing factor, and continue to grow throughout their lives — a process dramatically enhanced by winning fights with other Orks.

Toys

• Transformers: Cybertronians are often depicted as effectively ageless and have lifespans that can be counted in millions of years. Even Bumblebee, normally considered a Kid Hero by Cybertonian standards, is older than human civilisation by a wide margin. While many Transformers fight in the war because of things like belief in their cause or even simple survival, there are a few for whom war is everything.
  • The Combaticons are a Badass Crew, but of their members Brawl basically lives for war. Swindle is at least a shrewd businessmech, Blast-Off is able to travel through space under his own power, Vortex is a frightening interrogator. But Brawl is generally depicted as being good for little more than fighting. Only team leader Onslaught, who enjoys war as an intellectual challenge, comes close.
  • The Autobot Roadbuster, most well-known as a member of the Wreckers, is popular and well-liked by his comrades. An experienced and reliable soldier, he can be counted on to always have their backs. However, it's been mentioned that when talk about post-war life comes up, he tends to go quiet and stare off into nothingness, making other Autobots fear he'd be unable to cope if peace ever did come.
  • Kup is ancient even by Cybertronian standards. He's Seen It All and so has a wealth of experience and knowledge, though he sometimes rambles on. In some versions of the Transformers mythos (e.g. Transformers: Animated, Transformers IDW), this lifetime of warfare and experience translates to him being a teacher and trainer of younger bots.

Video Games

• Destiny:
  • The Hive invoke this consciously, as their Religion of Evil states that if you can't protect your own life, then you don't deserve to live; therefore the only way to live forever is to become a perfect killing machine, eternally proving your right to exist — and that your right to exist trumps everyone else's. It helps that they're not only biologically immortal, but also Abstract Eaters who literally feed on violence to survive: those Hive who excel at war can last upwards of a billion years without slowing down.
  • Guardians, the player characters, are dead people given Resurrective Immortality and Reality Warper powers by the Traveler to fight for its cause, living arguments that people granted power won't become selfish monsters, but instead choose to serve the common good. Pacifistic Guardians exist, but are vanishingly rare. Everyone else is varying degrees of One-Man Army thanks to a combination of their powers and learning from every death, although they also tend to be varying degrees of Bunny-Ears Lawyer instead of martial paragons: Destiny takes Gameplay and Story Integration very seriously, which means that players? habits of dancing, Hover Bike stunts, magpie-like hoarding of guns and loot, and killing themselves repeatedly for kicks are all how Guardians canonically behave in the field.
• Horizon Forbidden West: Gives us the Science Fiction variant of this trope, thanks to a Longevity Treatment Erik Vissar of Far Zenith spent millennia reliving his glory days as head of the PMC he founded "snapping necks in VR", creating unwinnable scenarios just for the challenge. These centuries of experience coupled with his various sci-fi weaponry make him an incomparable threat. That said this is still a sci-fi universe, take away his shields, stab him in the heart, and he dies just like anyone else.
• The Legend of Dragoon: It's eventually revealed that Rose is immortal thanks to a magical choker given to her by Charle Frahma, and has spent most of her life as a warrior — from participating in the Dragon Campaign over eleven thousand years ago, to helping Dart and the rest of the party win the Serdian War in Disc 1. More unpleasantly, Rose has been using her power in order to periodically hunt down The Antichrist and kill it — along with everyone that said Antichrist might have enthralled into its service.
• Lost Odyssey: The Hero Kaim is one. He's lived multiple lifetimes and starts the game as a mercenary in the service of the Kingdom of Uhra. Also reflected literally in the game's battle-system: Kaim, Seth, Ming and Sarah return to life after two turns of being KOed.
• The Secret World:
  • The player characters belong to an entire group of this; having been bonded with the Bees, you are blessed not only with incredible magical powers, but Resurrective Immortality and near-agelessness. However, you're given this power so you can serve as human white blood cells for Gaia, hunting down threats to the world and obliterating them — sometimes in huge armies of fellow players.
  • In Transylvania, the officers of the vampire army are veterans of conflicts stemming back to the fifteenth century, using their military experience, inhuman strength, and magical powers to further Queen Mara's ambitions... with the exception of General Hasdatean, who is on your side. For good measure, the most powerful of them can regenerate from being staked through the heart and reduced to ashes. However, the Bees eventually subvert the whole thing by revealing that vampires aren't actually immortals - it's just that they live for so many millennia and have such violent lives that nobody's ever figured out that it's possible for a vampire to die of old age.
  • Inbeda. An Oni exiled from Hell during the Edo period, he's since made a career for himself as a mercenary in mortal Japan, picking off legendary samurai, Yakuza bosses, corporate executives, mythical beasts, and even a few emperors over the centuries. He's even formed his own mercenary gang, the House-In-Exile... and while Inbeda has come to enjoy the finer things his exile affords him, he's not afraid to return to the battlefield with an army at his back.
• Soul Series: Edge Master is the immortal master of all manner of weaponry, has been in countless battles over the centuries, and serves as a direct mentor to Kilik and Seong Mi-na at different points of the series in martial arts.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic:
  • The Sith Inquisitor Player Character gains Resurrective Immortality during the storyline as a result of binding the Force ghosts of several ancient Sith Lords to themselves with Sith sorcery. As long as they have at least one ghost, they're almost indestructible, though lightside Inquisitors have the option to help the ghosts pass on at the end of the class story. It turns out to be a Deadly Upgrade and the Inquisitor is forced to rebuild their body and mind with Rakata technology and Force rituals in order to handle the ghosts properly... which in Shadow of Revan means they're able to use technology left by the Abusive Precursors to extend their lifespan directly.
  • The Sith Emperor, Darth Vitiate, is reputed to be immortal, and at the very least has ruled for almost a thousand years. In the expansions he turns out to be a life-eating quasi-demonic being who body surfs between mortal hosts, after having used Sith sorcery to consume all life and Force essence from his home planet Nathema.

Visual Novels

• Fate/stay night: Saber felt that she was not a good ruler for England. Her regret about this lead her to make a contract with the Throne of Heroes that causes her to be summoned to fights in Holy Grail Wars. At the end of the Fate Route, she goes to Avalon, instead of returning to the Throne of Heroes. Archer/EMIYA is immortal because he made a contract with the Counter Force that has forced him to be resurrected him multiple times to kill people who are causing timelines to develop in ways the Counter Force doesn't like. He regrets the fact that he accepted superpowers from the Counter Force.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation: Able is a violent and deranged Humanoid Abomination who lives solely for combat, slaughtering anyone in his path; he's also capable of Resurrective Immortality, is believed to have been alive since the days of ancient Sumeria, and is even implied to be Abel from the Bible.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Avatar is of the Born-Again Immortality variety, reborn over and over in different nations to bring peace and balance to the world by being the only wielder of all four elements. As such, they have shaped much of their world's history, stopping wars and conquerors, even founding nations and forming their own islands. Downplayed, since being the Avatar often involves peacekeeping and diplomacy as much as, if not more than, fighting.
• Mighty Max: Norman the Guardian was born in an ancient Viking village that was razed by an immortal monster. He wandered the Earth afterwards honing his fighting skills, and eventually acquired The Ageless type of immortality. He's Been There, Shaped History as a legendary warrior ever since, and 10,000 Years later he's able to take revenge on the guy who killed his family.
• Samurai Jack: In an early episode, Aku slaughtered an entire Viking village and turned the only survivor into a magma monster to prevent him from joining his loved ones in Valhalla. The survivor fought countless battles over the course of centuries waiting for someone powerful enough to give him a warrior's death so he can be free of Aku's curse, which turned out to be Jack.
• Teen Titans: The Brotherhood of Evil member General Immortus is an immortal military genius who has participated in countless wars for thousands of years. He was also apparently the mentor of Sun Tzu, who Immortus considered to be one of his best students.

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