Nigh Invulnerability / Literature

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• 2001 - A Space Odyssey: The creators of the Monoliths are energy beings of limitless power, billions of years evolved from their biological origin. In the official outtakes compendium The Lost Worlds of 2001, however one of them reflects that there was nothing an Immortal valued more than surprise, and 'when there were no more surprises, it would be time to die.'
• Played straight in a different way in Adam R. Brown's Alterien series. The Alteriens can gain energy from impacts and pressure, making them seem nigh invulnerable. However, they can be hurt by iron and monomolecular blades.
• In the fantasy series, Astral Dawn, the high spirits are invulnerable to any physical trauma with the exception of their centers, which only other spirits can damage.
• Glen Cook's The Black Company novels are full of this.
  • Really high grade sorcerers are near impossible to kill due to their use of magic to do most of the things on the list. One sorceress Soulcatcher survives being beheaded. The Limper survives having a building collapsed on him, shot with ballista bolts, shot with magic arrows, beheaded, burned, etc. Many sorcerers presumed dead reappear throughout the series. The only real way to make sure they're dead is to burn every last piece of them. But even then in some rare cases their soul and raw power (but not their personality) can still survive, usually as some kind of artifact.
  • This applies to were-creatures like the forvalaka (were-leopards), who due to their Healing Factor have to be sealed away rather than killed.
• In Spider Robinson's Callahan's Crosstime Saloon: Lady Slings the Booze several characters are protected by a bullet-proof forcefield over the entire surface of their skin, of course the flaw being that a gun fired into the mouth of one character causes the bullet to ricochet off the inside of the forcefield with results akin to a sack of chunky salsa.
• In R.A. Salvatore's The Cleric Quintet Book 3 The Night Masks, the leader of the eponymous assassins' guild is Ghost — a scrawny, withered man who doesn't look at all imposing. He combines the Regeneration method (a Ring of Regeneration is hidden in his shoe, presumably around a toe) with the Multiple Bodies trick — he possesses an artifact, a Mirror that allows him to swap souls with someone, then kills his own fragile body with his victim's hand. When his body dies the victim's soul departs, Ghost then waits for the body to regenerate then uses the artifact to swap back, putting his soul back in his body and leaving the victim unharmed but soulless and therefore dead. The artifact in question is so powerful that it pulls Ghost's soul out of hell and back into his corpse after he is later finally killed, and has to be destroyed by the breath of an ancient red dragon... and the resulting explosion blinds the dragon in question. And if ALL THAT wasn't good enough, he has Vander, a huge giant-like humanoid called a Firbolg, as a slave with whom he will frequently forcefully swap bodies if the situation demands. Yeah.
• In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Rogues in the House" Murilo argues they should leave, "Human weapons cannot harm a were-man." — and Conan's reaction is to merely tell him it's impossible and then setting out with him to escape the place.
• The Cosmere: Although he never gets into fights, Inexplicably Awesome Hoid has a long list of powers and abilities. At one point he claims to have been eaten by a greatshell and have came out alive, and there's no reason to doubt the claim. In The Stormlight Archive, Shardblades are the most powerful and valuable weapons in existence, originally created to fight demons and worth more than entire armies and capable of instantly killing anyone they touch. When one gets pointed at him, he just smirks and says he doubts it poses him any threat.
  Hoid: You can keep waving it about if you like. Perhaps it makes you feel important.
• Devils & Thieves: Mareta magic grants invincibility. Even Jemmie's mother, who was born unable to use magic, can't get sick just because of the mareta magic in her family tree.
• An example from Discworld:
  • Wolfgang von Uberwald in The Fifth Elephant, being a werewolf, survives any number of horrific experiences until Vimes uses a signal flare to destroy him with fire.
  • Also in Discworld, vampires can be "killed" but they always come back one day. Some blood falls on their ashes or some such thing and then they are regenerated. This is one of the reasons Vimes hates them.
  • Zombies — after all, how do you kill somebody who is already dead? Shoot him with a crossbow, and it'll make him just annoyed. Losing a limb, or even a head is nothing that a few stitches can't fix. However, this condition doesn't (normally) give you any supernatural durability; in fact, zombies have a weakness in that they are far more vulnerable to fire due to how dry they are.
  • Honorary mention to Mr. Shine from Thud!. While ordinary trolls are made out of various kinds of silicate, Mr. Shine is literally Made of Diamond.
  • Even moreso, the Luggage once accidentally got stuck in Fourecks' ancient history and buried deep beneath its surface. A couple of geological eras later, an unlucky opal miner chips the opal layer covering it. Moments later it bursts out, again homing on Rincewind.
  • Golems can perform the same trick, often being discovered in solidified volcanic rock or ancient abyssal plains. The only one known to have been destroyed permanently was caught in the center of a giant steam explosion when a huge tank of water tipped onto him while he was firefighting. Even then, if his dust hadn't mixed irretrievably with the ashes of the fire, he could still have been rebaked.
• In The Dresden Files:
  • Nicodemus, the leader of the Fallen Angel-possessed Denarians, wears the noose that Judas hanged himself with as a necktie, making him immune to everything from getting blasted by a wizard to getting ripped in half with a machine gun by a mob boss. But not from itself.
  • Various gods and goddesses are functionally immortal. Beings like the immortal Faerie Queens can only be permanently killed under very specific circumstances, or they will eventually reform. Even if the conditions to kill them are met their power is not lost and a new Queen will take up their power, eventually being shaped by the power to be so similar to the predecessor that no one will really know the difference.
  • Other powerful beings like skin-walkers (or "Shagnasty", as Harry prefers) are nearly immortal, requiring a very specific brand of magic to banish them. Or, as Warden Donald Morgan informs Harry, an actual nuclear bomb can be used instead. It is entirely possible the skin-walker was not actually permanently killed by this and will reform with time, as mentioned with the Faerie Queens above. Based on the prison on Demonreach, it seems like sealing them away is the prefered way to deal with threats like this, but good luck locking them up in the first place.
• Cocodriles in Evolution. They're still around in the last part of the book, 500 million years into the future when life on Earth is on decline, having adapted to live in the dirt decreasing a lot its size.
• Evil Vulpie in A Fox Tail is made of tungsten and carbon nanotubes, making him literally Made of Diamond, bullets just annoy him, and even after he self-destructs he is repaired. In the sequel Fox Tails he shrugs off a handheld railgun with only minor damage and a bunch of mining explosives only succeed in snapping off his (still active) head. The "Goddess" gynoids he makes are similarly hard to destroy, but the Mecha-Aila takes it to extremes, surviving a bomb that was just short of a nuke and a 70-foot robotic tank, requiring an orbital bombardment to destroy her.
• Jon Remillard, aka Jack the Bodiless, in Julian May's Galactic Milieu books is nigh invulnerable in his native form of a disembodied brain. His brother Marc actually remarks in the book Diamond Mask that nothing had been discovered to harm Jon in that form up to that point.
• In Galaxy of Fear there are Artificial Zombies which shrug off any of the monstrous animals a Shapeshifter can turn into and attack them with, and the hail of well-aimed blasterfire directed at them by a Bounty Hunter. There isn't sufficient detail to show just how they can ignore those, but given that Eppon has their talent for handling damage and regrows limbs instantly when they're severed, it's probably some kind of Healing Factor.
• Usually when people actually run into one of H. P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, they end up going insane or getting brutally killed. In the few cases they manage to fight back, it turns out the beings are unkillable by mortal weapons. Sometimes they might be banished, like Nyarlathotep's avatar in "The Haunter of the Dark", who can't stand bright light, but even then they are likely to come back later. Others fall into the "Made of Air" category, and physical attacks go right through them. Some, like Cthulhu himself, can be harmed, but regenerate any damage within seconds.
  • In "The Call of Cthulhu", a boat rams Cthulhu in the face, causing his head to blow apart, yet the only effect is to make him slightly annoyed as his head regenerates right after the boat has passed through it. (He did go back to sleep for another millennium afterwards, so it was a net win for Team Humanity.) In another story (not written by Lovecraft himself) humans try to stop the awakened Cthulhu by firing a ramjet missile carrying a 300 megaton nuclear payload right at him. It doesn't even slow him down.
  • Even the "normal" aliens (i.e. not the godlike extradimensional ones that destroy worlds on whim) in Lovecraft's fiction are extremely resilient, or made from some exotic matter which makes normal weapon very ineffective against them.
    • Not all of them. Deep Ones and Ghouls aren't especially bulletproof, and in "The Whisperer in Darkness" the Fungi from Yuggoth can be kept at bay by guard dogs and leave pools of presumably-blood when shot at. And Wilbur Whateley in "The Dunwich Horror", who got ripped apart by an attack-dog.
• Harry Potter
  • Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter went the phylactery route to allow his spirit to remain Earthbound even after his body is destroyed. Since he can't regenerate a new body on his own, however, this turns out to be less clever than he thought.
  • According to Word of God, the fear inducing soul sucking Dementors are invincible. The Patronus Charm can drive them off, but they can't be destroyed by any means, magic or otherwise. Fortunately for the Harry Potter-verse, Word of God also stated that Dementors are not immortal and do eventually die. Of course, with no soul to hang on to, they can stick around until their body crumbles (a century or so after their creation, give or take).
• Deconstructed in Heroes' Haven by Ukrainian author H. L. Oldie. One of the first things that the order of necromancers tried in their research of mass-available immortality were various body-fortifying concotions, culminating in several techniques that made the subject's flesh impenetrable. This proved useless for their ultimate goal: volunteers would turn invincible, go and become legendary warriors and monster-hunters, and eventually painfully die from a tiny pustule that doctors couldn't puncture. Moreover, some of invulnerables got Drunk with Power (or just drunk) and went on rampage, which really didn't improve necromancers' reputation. At least, potions which gave temporal effect helped to raise funds for further recearch.
• The Shrike from the Hyperion Cantos, and Rhadamanth Nemes in the Endymion half of the series, would qualify as Trope Codifiers if the series was better known. The Shrike attacks the Swiss Guard, supposedly the greatest soldiers in charted space, and kills them all without sustaining any damage. Nemes is attacked by a starship that blasts her with a massive laser that only succeeds in melting the ground she'd standing on and encasing her in stone for a while. Even later, the Shrike punches her through about eight metres through solid rock. And the Shrike itself is more than just Made of Diamond, since it possesses control over time and space even if you did manage to kill the Shrike it wouldn't accomplish anything.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, AM transforms the last of its human playthings into a hideous blob-like creature who can't smash his skull on a computer bank, hold his breath until he faints, or cut his throat on a rusted sheet of metal. And he wants to die so very badly, but can't even scream.
• In the Incarnations of Immortality series, the Incarnations are nigh invulnerable unless they explicitly or implicitly allow it, such as when Death changes offices
• Iron Man: Steel Terror: Ultron uses the synthetic vibranium he had Tess-One steal for. Fortunately, Hank Pym finds a way to overcome this for both Ultron and his clones.
• The Sun Crusher in The Jedi Academy Trilogy. Not only the thing is said to be impervious to even turbolaser fire and more, but also can survive to ram an Imperial Star Destroyer, destroying it in the process, and to be in the core of a gas giant planet it's destroyed for good along the Death Star prototype when both fall into a black hole.
• In Jericho Moon, the Biblical Joshua is endowed with Nigh Invulnerability by Yahweh's favor, remaining untouched by any of several attacks that would've killed an unprotected man. Subverted when Yahweh's own storm winds catch up an arrow and send it unerringly towards Barra, so she grabs hold of Joshua and lets the missile pass through her own body and into his. In effect, God overcomes Joshua's God-granted invulnerability.
• The eromakasi (eaters of light) in the Journeys of the Catechist series by Alan Dean Foster can only be killed by eromakadi, because they are basically mist, and need to be sucked in. The most powerful mage in the world has two of them as bodyguards. That isn't the only nigh invincible creature around. The wall, a several mile long wall that can walk is also next to invincible, with the main characters just running under it.
• Journey to Chaos: Fairtheora is an orc, which makes him pretty tough already, and then he wears a special suit of metal armor that amplifies his resistance to magic. In addition to this is his formidable spirit barrier. His job description as "royal sentinel" means he has to be tough enough that the sitting Ataidar monarch can stand behind him and be perfectly safe regardless of what comes her way.
• The Lensman universe of E.E. "Doc" Smith features the Arisians and the Eddorians. Both races are ageless and have evolved beyond being vulnerable to disease or physical weapons. The Arisians are so strong that the only way they can be defeated is to be cast clean out of the Universe (which the Eddorians aren't yet able to do but one day will be), while the Eddorians are sufficiently robust that the Arisians aren't strong enough to make a clean sweep of it - and since the Eddorians reproduce by binary fission, leaving just one alive will only put off the inevitable. Enter the Galactic Patrol and the Arisians' four-pronged breeding program, whose sole purpose is to deliver a telepathic jolt strong enough to put all the Eddorians down for good. Once that's done, the Arisians' purpose will be complete and they will allow themselves to die, leaving their chosen successors to carry on. And they do.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • The One Ring itself is of the standard Made of Diamond variety. The only thing that will destroy is to throw it back into the fires of Mount Doom where it was forged. The entire series then revolves around accomplishing this. As Sauron's Soul Jar, it conveys similar Nigh-Invulnerability to him, and he was already quite resilient to begin with.
  • The Ringwraiths are incredibly difficult, though not impossible, to permanently destroy, and are immortal thanks to the powers of the nine magic rings that sustain them. The only ways to permanently destroy the Ringwraiths are to destroy their rings (which Sauron keeps in his personal possession), or destroy the One Ring. In his letters, Tolkien says that Sauron could have restored the Witch King in time, if not for those meddling hobbits dropping his Ring into a volcano.
• Many magical girls in Magical Girl Raising Project are given a skill that makes it nearly impossible to kill them.
  • Hardgore Alice can fix any damage done to her. Blow a hole in her stomach, decapitate her, burn her to ashes, nothing will kill her unless every molecule of her is destroyed. She's killed when she's attacked in her powerless human form.
  • Swim Swim transforms her body into a liquid form, meaning all physical attacks such as fists, swords, and bullets simply phase through her. Light and sound can still injure her however, and she's killed when a flash grenade renders her unconscious, knocking her out of her magical girl form. This lets Ripple kill her.
  • Genopsycho Yumenoshima possesses an invincible suit. When her visor is down, absolutely nothing can damage her, not even being soaked in lava or being hit by a disintegration beam. Her suit is invincible, but she is not. She's killed when an enemy is able to hit her body directly, ignoring her suit.
  • Sonia Bean can disintegrate anything she touches on a molecular level. This includes a ship dropped on her, fire, and poisonous gas. Nothing can touch her. Despite all their powers, magical girls still have to breathe. She's killed when she's trapped in a bubble which has its oxygen ignited, ruining her concentration and causing her to be burnt to a crisp.
  • Tepsekemei assimilates with the wind, so all physical attacks will go right through her, similar to Swim Swim. Despite the presence of Sonia Bean and an anti-magic barrier, she actually survives her ordeal unlike most other near invincible magical girls.
  • Grim Heart's ability is to ignore rudeness. More specifically, nothing is allowed to touch her unless she gives permission. Physical attacks such as halberds and explosions completely fail when used against her, mental attacks are unable to affect her, and if she's somehow brought to another world where a particular magical girl is a Physical God, her powers still take priority. She's arrested by the Magical Kingdom, and her transport explodes, allegedly killing her.
• Millennium Series: In The Girl Who Played with Fire, massive blond thug Roland Niedermann seems invulnerable to everything from full-force body blows to stab wounds and even gunfire. In fact, this is not the case: due to congenital analgesia, he simply cannot feel the damage inflicted on him. This, when paired with his enormous build, makes him appear invincible. However, the same genetic flaws that give him his strength and numbness result in him being an utterly paranoid psychopath.
• In Brian Sanderson's Mistborn: The Original Trilogy the Lord Ruler is definitely capable of surviving stabbing, decapitation, and even immolation. Vin finally kills him by ripping out the bracelets fixed into his skin that he was using in a sort of immortality infinite combo.
• The Neverending Story:
  • Anyone who wears AURYN effectively has this, since no resident of Fantastica will intentionally harm them. There are some who might hurt them unintentionally, though, and it seems to offer no protection from natural hazards like starvation, drowning, etc.
  • Uyulala is literally made of sound. For her, to stop singing is to die.
• Francis IX in Nina Kimberly the Merciless by Christiana Ellis is this. Much to the chagrin of the title character who wants to kill him, no matter how badly he wants to marry her.
• Parodied to hell and back in Nuklear Age by Brian Clevinger. The main character Nuke gets thrown into a sun and survives, beyond him there's Atomik Lad who has a nifty forcefield that blocks everything, Angus the Iron Scotsman who's covered in iron and never takes damage (apart from one nasty incident where he is found in his suit backwards), there's a guy made of tungsten, and last but not least Superion who can't be destroyed ever thanks to how his powers work.
• In Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind, the eponymous "mankind" is a race of aliens who are under relentless assault from a hero who Just Won't Die — the hero being a small boy playing a computer game, that of course allows you replay from the last save point whenever you die. Technically a form of The Proxy as well.
• The Perfect Run: Apart from his crazy-overpowered Red lightning powers, the supervillain Augustus's Orange power is being invulnerable to any and all injury, which makes him the World's Strongest Man and one of the biggest post-war threats to mankind. Only Yellow conceptual powers like Bill Costa's ability to cut anything or paradoxical powers like the Black Elixir have any chance of harming him.
• In President's Vampire, nothing apart from a nuclear blast, really hot fire or direct sunlight could kill Cade, and if provided with blood, he can heal from those as well. When he meets head-on with a car, he looks as if nothing's happened, but the car is pretty much written off.
• The People of Sand and Slag is about how, by gaining the ability to survive pretty much anything (we are talking about breaking their spines, eating sand for food, and regrowing lost limbs within few hours), humanity lost absolutely any interest in or desire to preserve the world around it. Soon after, people became completely indifferent to each other, as the concept of causing harm no longer exists.
• In The Reckoners Trilogy, this is called "prime invincibility" and is the defining mark of the High Epics. The Reckoners specialize in hunting and killing these Epics, and over the course of the series the author manages to check off pretty much every variant of the trope.
  • Fortuity, near the beginning of the story, has Combat Clairvoyance, and thus can't be killed because he'll sense any lethal threat coming and avoid it. You can get around this either by invoking Distracted by the Sexy (his Kryptonite Factor is that he can't sense danger from people he's sexually attracted to) or by "checkmating" him (putting him in a situation where all possibilities lead to him being killed).
  • Nightwielder uses the Made of Air variant. He is permanently intangible unless exposed to sunlight (or more specifically UV light). Since his other talent is summoning and controlling shadows, that's pretty powerful.
  • Steelheart uses the Made of Diamond variety. Bullets, nukes, Touch of Death, none have any effect on him. The book's plot revolves around the fact that the hero's father is the only person ever to wound Steelheart, and the Reckoners have to figure out how he did it. Turns out Steelheart can only be harmed by someone who isn't afraid of him.
  • Regalia used the Proxy variant. She can control and see out of any body of water within a considerable radius of her location, and her water control is precise enough to let her create decoy bodies (which are even capable of speech) out of water. As it turns out, she is bedridden with advanced cancer, and can no longer go out in person at all.
  • Mitosis, in a sequel, uses an interesting form of Regeneration. He can clone himself at-will, and since there is no "prime" copy, as long as you miss one of his clones there will be hundreds of him in under a minute.
  • Dead Drop, mentioned only, can use the Proxy variant. He can create a number of copies that bear his mind and powers, although doing so is said to leave his true body dormant.
  • Megan uses the Resurrection variant. Even if killed, she just resurrects elsewhere, though at one point she needs to be talked out of the Existential Horror of considering whether her "resurrection" is just the summoning of alternate versions of herself from the alternate realities which her powers allow her to access.
  • Prof utterly won the lottery on this one. His forcefield powers render him virtually untouchable to begin with, even against Epics on Steelheart's level, but even if you do get through, he's also got a regeneration power capable of dealing with nearly anything you throw at him.
• Renegades: Captain Chromium is famous for being effectively invulnerable, not only to physical attacks, but also, apparently, internal injuries and even power draining like Max's ability. The opening of the book implies that a poison dart through the eye might've killed him, but as Nova missed the shot, it's still up in the air.
• The Saga of the Jomsvikings: Aslak Holmskalle, who is the first to board Jarl Erik's ship in the Battle of Hjorunga Bay, does not wear a helmet, yet the swords of the defenders fail to do any damage on him (this and the ferocity with which he fights mark him as a berserker). He is only stopped when one of the defenders throws an anvil at him, which pierces his skull with its point, killing him instantly.
• Saintess Summons Skeletons: All dragon scales are very tough, but Thrayk's in particular is practically indestructible. Erredis predicts that even the System can't break it. Shaping one requires months of work with special techniques designed specifically for such an obdurate material. How did she kill him and obtain it? "We have no scales on the inside, sweetie."
• Darquesse, from Skulduggery Pleasant, can heal From a Single Cell. Sometimes, she chooses not to heal, just to see what it's like to suffer injuries. The only way to kill her is to instantaneously destroy her brain, since she can heal brain damage if it's not complete. At one point, she reattaches her own head.
• The Skylark universe of E.E. "Doc" Smith features incorporeal energy beings of almost unlimited power and effectively infinite lifespan. However, one of them reacts very badly to immortality. The rest of his existence becomes dominated by finding something, anything, that's powerful enough to destroy him, and he eventually succeeds.
• Space Glass:
  • Bagok Grinch is only damaged by Ratroe's sniper rounds.
  • The Marauder can regenerate and is resistant to most attacks, only getting stumbled most of the time.
  • The only way to defeat the World Eater was to get it to eat itself, being completely resistant to all other attacks.
• Morgan Primus from the Star Trek: New Frontier series of books is both this and immortal. This takes its logical course when something was strong enough to destroy her body... her consciousness transferred to the ship she was on. She is currently the Andromeda-like avatar for the starship Excalibur.
  • Which is as close as a book can get to Actor Allusion. She looks exactly like several characters who were played by Majel Barrett onscreen, though which ones were really her and which weren't is still unclear. The Federation computer voice is also played by Majel Barrett, so it's quite fitting.
• In Christopher Ruocchio's The Sun Eater, Hadrian can mimick the effects of invulnerability with his actual power set — which is receiving information from the future and superimposing alternate timelines with his current one. One of his most impressive display of this was getting struck thrice by a Wave-Motion Gun from a Planet Spaceship, each time he scoured reality for a timeline where the beam misses or misfires and imposes that on himself. So while the area around him is vapourized, he's completely unharmed by the blast — making him appear to everyone else that he's invulnerable.
  • Certain Extrasolarian renegades decided to turn on humanity in favour of the alien Cielcin. Among the things they gave the less technologically advanced Cielcins, is to refashion a fair number of them into cyborgs with adamant shells. Adamant is a material so strong that monomolecular blades won't affect it and even the main guns of a capital ship have a good chance of failing to harm it. It takes either anti-matter or sustained energy attacks of star-level intensity to break it down.
• This is one of the mutant abilities in Those Who Walk In Darkness by John Ridley, rendering one's skin impenetrable. The standard way of killing these mutants is to overload their pain receptors, but apparently contact poison works as well.
• James Toranaga of Touch (2017) has this by dint of being Made of Air whenever he wants to be. It has some drawbacks, though.
• Vampires in Twilight are invulnerable and sparkle as if coated in diamond dust when exposed to sunlight. The only way to kill them permanently is to rip them into shreds and burn the pieces, but since every part of their bodies is tough enough to shrug off bullets, it takes another vampire (or a werewolf) to pull that off.
• In the Ukiah Oregon series the Pack/Ontongard are the extreme regenerating version of this, with the added bonus that if they're dismembered the severed parts will turn into animals and regroup to reform the original body. Fire, acid, and certain poisons will keep them down, though.
• The Unexplored Summon://Blood-Sign:
  • Materials, essentially the Mons of the setting, have both the Made of Diamond and Can Only Kill Part of Him variants. They can only be damaged by supernatural means, such as other Materials' attacks. But even if they are destroyed, that only applies to that particular physical body — the same Material can be resummoned later with no ill effects.
  • Summoners and vessels can gain a more limited form of this. When they summon a Material, it enters the vessel's body and transforms them into itself, giving them the same immunity to normal attacks. The excess energy of the Material is also used to form a protective circle around the summoner, which makes them immune to almost everything (even Material attacks). However, the transformed vessel contains a core, and if this is destroyed, both summoner and vessel are knocked out and lose all of this protection.
  • The White Queen, the most powerful Material, takes this up to eleven. Most Materials are too afraid to even attack her, and even other Unexplored-Class Materials (which are ostensibly on her level) can't match her one on one. It takes literally hundreds of other Unexplored-Class to defeat her in a fight. Additionally, she is capable of bypassing a summoner's protective circle with her attacks (a trait only shared with the Black Maw, which is another facet of her).
• In Isaac Asimov's short story "Victory Unintentional" (the sequel to "Not Final!") the three robots ZZ-1, ZZ-2, and ZZ-3 were purposefully designed to be nigh-invulnerable in order to safely explore the surface of Jupiter. In addition to Jupiter's intense gravity and violent, crushing atmosphere, they are also attacked with a wide variety of alien weapons, only some of which they can identify, electrified, attacked with various gases and chemicals, heat rays, preyed upon (very unsuccessfully) by huge aquatic predators, exposed to extreme heat, radiation, direct contact with molten metals, and being robots, can survive in a vacuum indefinitely. The story stresses that the robots are so powerful they can never be harmed by anything other than a colossal nuclear detonation under any conditions whatsoever.
• In Warrior Cats, Lionblaze's special power is that he can't be hurt in battle. He can turn this power off if he really wants to, but it's pretty difficult; he only does it once in the series, to prove to the cat who he wants as his mate that they can control their own destinies.
• The Wild Cards series:
  • Demise is an undead and unhinged assassin whose wild card was triggered during a near death experience. He ended up getting a healing factor that allowed him to return from the dead. When his head was chopped off by a similarly psychotic Ace, Dr. Tachyon analyzed the corpse and realized that his head was growing back. He ordered the body cremated, and while Demise hasn't shown up in any other books yet, well...
  • Golden Boy is a classic comic-book Flying Brick (without the flying) who, when hit by anything up to a 50 millimeter artillery shell, would merely glow yellow instead of getting injured. According to Dr. Tachyon, Golden Boy projects a biological forcefield around his body whenever threatened by imminent danger, whether he is aware of this danger or not.
• Worm is full of characters with more than their fair share of power, including quite a few who are Nigh Invulnerable. Some special mentions are: Alexandria (Made Of Diamond), The Siberian (Made of Diamond), although the Siberian is actually a projection, so Fighting a Shadow also applies, Crawler (Healing Factor, Adaptive Armor, Adaptive Ability), Grey Boy (tough to classify), The Endbringers (Made of Diamond, Healing Factor, and arguably Fighting a Shadow, though the individuals can die), and Scion (Made of Diamond, Healing Factor, AND Fighting a Shadow).
• In the Xanth series, Bink has the 'extreme luck' form of nigh invulnerability, because his talent protects him from magic attacks using coincidences and so on. The Magician Trent finally figured it out when he was trying to transform Bink and was always missing, to the point of transforming bacteria on Bink's skin instead of Bink.
• In the Zachary Nixon Johnson series, the Thompson Quads are genetically engineered superhumans who are specifically described as "nigh-invulnerable". The plot of The Doomsday Brunette kicks off when one of them is murdered; no one can figure out how she was killed, since even after death her body remains too indestructible for the coroner to autopsy.

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