One Man Army / Literature

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• All You Need Is Kill: Played straight, deconstructed, and discussed. Both Rita and Keiji are clearly One Man Armies, and it's stated that without Rita humanity would have lost the war years ago, but they're not so powerful as to be able to save all their teammates, a failing which rips them up inside. Some of Keiji's army friends think that Rita is just a propaganda creation because nobody could possibly be that good. After Keiji breaks out of his loop, his incredible battlefield prowess causes his old teammates to regard him warily.
• In Animorphs there's Big Bad Visser Three and Automaton Erek King.
• In Babylon 5: The Passing of the Techno-Mages trilogy, Galen becomes the most powerful Technomage by the end of the third book and is able to wipe out an entire city block by himself, as well a the planetary defense ships. When confronting Kosh, the latter isn't certain he would come out on top if Galen chose to fight. Later, Galen goes to Z'ha'dum and not only survived, but also helps Sheridan survive (more or less) and shuts down the planet's observation network. He also manages to take on two rogue Technomages, who have sided with the Shadows and learned some dangerous tricks of their own. Compared to that, his feats in Crusade seem like child's play.
• Lone Huntress subverts this a bit. Lisa is every bit the one woman walking nightmare for Space Pirates, evil aliens, and corrupt authority figures. She's also a traumatized mess, terrified to walk down a crowded street.
  • One line sums it up best: "Only someone with serious psychological issues and emotional baggage, suppressing a constant, low-level urge to flee or attack, could assault someone the moment they met, based on nothing more than the disgusting stench of them."
• The Bible:
  • Samson slew a thousand men of the Philistine force sent to capture him...with a jawbone of an ass. Cracked said it best: "the Philistines went to war against just Samson. And, they pretty much lost."
    • As also put by comedian Dave Gorman: "The moral of the story is, don't mess with Samson."
  • David was asked by his future father-in-law sent him to slay an hundred Philistines and collect their foreskins, hoping he'd get himself killed in the attempt. David came back with two hundred.
  • In the Book of Judges, we hear of a man named Shamgar, who appears nowhere else in the Bible. His claim to fame? Using an ox-goad to single-handedly slaughter 600 Philistine warriors.
• A Bolo is effectively a One Tank Army. Earlier models get referred to as Continental Siege Units, while later ones become Planetary Siege Units, able to engage everything from a lowly foot soldier up to space battleships.
• The Brightest Shadow: All true masters of sein become this. Actually literalized in that it's implied that in some cultures, masters are actually counted as armies during warfare.
• Captive Prince: Damen is renowned as an unholy terror on the battlefield. In two separate battles, he leaves his forces behind and singlehandedly cuts a bloody swathe through the enemy army to kill the commander. After the battle of Charcy, he notices his men looking at him awestruck, then belatedly notices the trail of corpses he left behind.
• In the Codex Alera there are numerous characters who, for whatever reason, are of such badassitude that they just handle entire armies on their own.
  • When the gates to Garrison are breached by the Marat horde, more than ten thousand strong and accompanied by wolves and herdbanes that fight beside their warriors, Pirellus of the Black Blade orders Amara to have the remaining legionares regroup on the top of the walls to prevent more Marat from scaling the fortificaions. When Amara asks him who will hold the gate, he responds that he will, and proceeds to do so. Singlehandedly. Against the entire horde. While getting impatient at the way the Marat seem to be holding back.
  • Giraldi explicitly calls Araris a "one-man Legion" in Cursor's Fury after he massacres dozens of Kalarus' Immortals singehandedly.
• In the period between the first and second book of the Council Wars series, we have a town requesting an infantry legion be sent to deal with the raids from a neighboring town. They get Herzer Herrick. What does he do when he arrives? He trains the town militia up to a decent standard of performance. In this book series, it is said that a single elven warrior could cut through an entire platoon of human troops with little difficulty, being genetically-engineered Super Soldiers created for a war long ago. In Council Wars, elves aren't just better than you, they're better than a lot of you.
• Loki Stormbringer (real name: Brian Gragg), chief enforcer of the Darknet in the Daemon duology. Each book ends with Loki versus a seemingly very much superior military force, the internal security of a clandestine military base in the first and an entire army of mercenaries in the second. Each fight turns out to be a Curb-Stomp Battle...in Loki's favor.
• Roland of Gilead, The Gunslinger of Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. In the first book, he kills EVERY SINGLE PERSON in a town of dozens of people, all with a pair of six shooters, while they were armed and charging him in a crazed mob.
• Armies have been trying to take Carnival down for three thousand years. It has never worked because she's one of these; she even takes out most of an undead horde before they finally get the better of her by force of numbers. And even that can't keep her down for long. It helps that she's a demigod, though.
• Remo Williams — aka The Destroyer (the overall title of the series of pulp thrillers in which he stars) — is a definite example. Trained in the mysterious martial art of Sinanju, he's capable of running across water, dodging bullets, and feats of effectively superhuman strength (achieved through concentration and energy-conduction of a Use The Force-like kind rather than by bulging muscles). Most of these were carried over in a low-key way into the one film so far based on the series. Ultimately, he's revealed to have become an actual avatar of Shiva.
• Discworld:
  • Honourable mention to the Kingdom of Lancre, whose standing army literally consists of only one (normal) man: Shawn Ogg. Except when he's lying down. Of course, given that behind him stand Nanny Ogg (except when she is lying down), this may be the most powerful army in the Discworld. On the other hand, Lancre has Granny Weatherwax. She might not single-handedly slaughter her way through an invading army, yet she is still famed as invincible, ruthless, and terrifyingly competent. As an usurper and his shrew of a wife, a wicked godmother, the Queen of the Elves and an entire family of vampires Vampyres (to name only a few) have discovered to their misfortune.
  • Hogfather features a throwaway reference to an action figure called "Captain Carrot: One Man Night Watch". It's appropriate. Captain Carrot isn't technically from Lancre, but Copperhead, which is close enough that his father sent a messenger to ask Magrat Garlick for help with spelling a word. He's perfectly capable of slaughtering an entire army if he has to, but he's so good at talking to people he never had to.
  • Sam Vimes has stopped entire wars dead in their tracks just by being himself at them, and he gives orders to Carrot. This frightens people, and it should.
• Druss the Legend from David Gemmell's Drenai Series. With no training he kills six well armed veterans with a wood axe. Later he attacks a camp of forty raiders single-handedly and wins (Though this could probably be attributed to the fact their camp was on fire and their horses stampeding at the time). Throughout his life he goes through many such badass actions: Fighting a boxing champion to a standstill at the age of 17, ending sieges through single-combat with enemy champions, fighting hundreds of battles and campaigns, literately been to hell and back twice. But the greatest moment of Badassery is his death. 60 years old, poisoned and heavily wounded he holds the gates of Dros Denloch for a while against a horde of enemies, taking over thirty with before he finally falls.
• The Dresden Files:
  • "They don't call Michael the Fist of God for nothing." In Skin Games, he beats Nicodemus in a straight-up sword fight. Despite having been retired for the past few years.
  • In Changes, we get nine people (well, okay, seven people, a fairy, and a dog) versus the entire Red Court. Murphy does a very decent impression of Michael in the process.
  • Any of the Wardens also qualify. Dresden himself is generally no slouch in the combat department, but even he is struck by the difference between his usual battle magic and the skill, ferocity, and efficiency with which dedicated Wardens can go to town. In Dead Beat, the first time we really see Wardens at work, five of them scythe their way through dozens of zombies within minutes—and with Dresden zombies, think less Dawn of the Dead (1978) and more Terminator. It's mentioned that Morgan once got within twenty yards of The Red King, which entailed cutting his way through several Physical Gods in addition to what must have been dozens of regular vampires in the way.
  • And even the Wardens pale in comparison to The Senior Council. Summed up, this is a group of the seven most powerful wizards on the planet. Not seven of the most powerful. The seven most powerful. This group includes: "Injun Joe" Listens-To-Wind, a Native American shaman who is so proficient at spellcasting and shapeshifting he can curbstomp the native equivalent of an angel and make it look easy, Ebenezer "Blackstaff" McCoy (considered the magical equivalent of the Heavyweight boxing champion) who is so strong he can pull a satellite out of orbit and drop it on his enemy's mansion and casually and literally rip the lives out of hundreds of people at once. Taking the cake though is The Merlin (the title of the leader of the White Council, named after the obvious), who is generally considered to be the single most skilled and powerful wizard on the planet. He stops the army of the Red Court with one ward. This entailed keeping over a dozen Physical Gods held back long enough for his own army to escape, and he did it with one ward. As Harry (and Morgan) notes: "You don't become Merlin of the White Council by collecting bottlecaps."
  • Harry himself is no slouch especially not now that he's the Winter Knight. To whit: He has done everything from summoning a zombie T-Rex, to taking the force of gravity from a quarter mile radius and condensing it all down into a range about 200m across, to setting an entire mansion on fire at once, and so on and so forth. There is a reason that now that Morgan's dead he is the most infamous warden in the world. Now that he's the Winter Knight, it's even better. When he really cuts loose, he can jump 50m with a few step start, form ice claws sharper than steel and use them faster than Sidhe can react, and bench press in the realm of 400 Kilos. He's also enough of a Memetic Badass that a group of Wardens, all of whom were more skilled and experienced than him, hesitate to take him on.
• In The Executioner action novels Mack Bolan, Vietnam veteran turned vigilante, decimates the American Mafia using everything from frontal attacks with rocket launchers, machine guns and sniper rifles, to using infiltration and wiles.
• Ming-period novel Fengshen Yanyi:
  • Many of the named generals are extremely skilled warriors, usually adept at using spears and glaives from horseback, and they fight hard enough to keep many common soldiers at bay. Played realistically, however, in that while they can fight multiple opponents at once, they rarely can prevail against superior numbers.
  • Zigzagged with many powerful Immortals such as Nezha and Yang Jian: they possess supernatural skills with their weapons and can wield astonishing magical treasures, but they usually can scare whole platoons of soldiers into running away. When the entire city of Fengmingzhen is affected by plague except for Nezha and Yang Jian, the former panics at the thought of the Shang Army attacking them in that moment, as he points out that neither can repeal a whole army alone.
  • The closest thing to this trope played straight is the Big Bad King Zhou: near the end of the novel he's cornered by the forces of the eight hundred nobles of the country, lead by the four Dukes and surrounded by a huge mass of soldier: despite the odds, King Zhou, with the help of his last three loyal generals, fights with such tremendous might he manages to kill countless officers and slay one of the three Dukes before being forced to withdraw, wounded.
• Saucerhead Tharpe from the Garrett, P.I. series has been described this way, as he's been known to take on a dozen ogres single-handedly and toss them around like dolls.
• In John C. Wright's The Golden Oecumene trilogy, Marshal-General Atkins Vingt-et-un is the entire military, and does a fine job of it.
• In Harry Potter and it's prequel series, Fantastic Beasts, there are some examples of veteran wizards and witches being able to take down numerous opponents at once, but none more so than the three most powerful wizards of the age, Lord Voldemort, Albus Dumbledore, and Gellert Grindelwald, as they are so much more powerful and skilled than almost anyone else numbers tend to be useless in handling them.
  • Voldemort is infamous for having murdered some of the most powerful and skilled wizards and witches around, both alone and in groups. Perspectively, he is seen to effortlessly slaughter a room full of Death Eaters and took on Minerva, Slughorn, and Kingsley, all of whom are on the level of this, the latter two having also taken out multiple opponents at once and while he didn't outright beat them until he got angry and his magic exploded, they were described as being unable to finish him off either.
  • Dumbledore instantly defeats Fudge, Umbridge, and two accomplished Aurors with a single spell. Later on, he wipes the floor with the Death Eaters during the Battle of the Department of Mysteries an entire contingent of Aurors and to show why even Voldemort fears him, delivers a Curb Stomp Cushion fight to him. Even dead, Voldy still gets rattled by the name when Harry mentions Dumbledore during their final confrontation.
  • Grindelwald may be even more of this than Voldemort. The first film has him annihilate a squad of Aurors with a single spell and while disguised as Percival Graves and without the Elder Wand, he easily dominates up to 30 Aurors and would have beaten them had Newt not intervened. The second film has him single-handedly defeat everyone who tries to keep him contained during his escape attempt within moments and conjure a powerful ring of black fire and manipulate it to effortlessly kill an army of Aurors and soon after was moments from killing even Newt, Theseus and Tina, who are all at the level of handling themselves outnumbered.
• In the Honor Harrington novels, the main character is this on a personal level, and her third hyper-capable command, the second HMS Fearless, are both this. The first Fearless was an antiquated light cruiser interrupted on her way to the breaker's yard to be turned into a test ship for an experimental weapon. Having failed at this, she is shuffled off to a quiet assignment to run out the clock (not that it happens that way, but that was the intention). The second Fearless is a state-of-the-art heavy cruiser, with double the firepower of a conventional heavy cruiser, and she finishes the story by taking out a battlecruiser three times her size.
• The Primarchs of Horus Heresy were made to be this and do they ever deliver. Their kill count can climb into the thousands and they can perform absurd feats of strength, from holding a foot of a Humongous Mecha up with their bare hands to swinging heavy battle tanks out of their way with hammers. To give a more direct example, even when attacked by surprise in cramped, close quarters by twenty armoured, heavily armed and prepared soldiers, alone, unarmed and unarmoured himself, Roboute Guilliman wipes the floor with the Alphas in less than a minute.
• In Hurog, Tisala escapes after being tortured and is not exactly in perfect health when she kills a group of bandits, only armed with a tiny knife. Not that Ward is any less badass, he just doesn't get to prove it.
• Inheritance Cycle: Roran. It was one hundred and ninety three! Any of the Dragon Riders and elves probably count, but it's never stated explicitly.
• The Iliad:
  • There are two states available of Achilles: Achilles in His Tent and routing the enemy. Interestingly, Homer played with this trope: almost all of the Olympians stuck their fingers into affairs of mortals at the time, so Troy would be screwed even without Achilles, as it had its share of divine enemies, and the Greeks got their asses handed to them while Achilles was wangsting because his mother specifically asked Zeus to provide a nice background for his later return.
  • He often gets overlooked, but arguably the biggest badass in The Iliad is Diomedes. Agamemnon calls him a coward, so, just to prove his mettle, he goes and kills so many Trojans that Ares himself is compelled to intervene. Diomedes proceeds to send Ares crying home to daddy. Keep in mind that Ares is the fucking God of War.
  • Also, Patroclus. When the Trojans were getting too close for comfort, Achilles still wouldn't fight. Patroclus put on Achilles' armor and charged into battle. He, by himself, roused the Greeks and pushed the Trojan army back. They thought he was Achilles. Too bad he met up with Hector, an even more badass one man army. Even that's selling him short. Hector wasn't able to take him down alone, Apollo had to sneak up behind Patroclus and knock his armor off, and Eurylochus stabbed him in the chest first. Patroclus himself tells Hector he came in third at best.
  • All of the above pale before Ajax. Diomedes defeated two gods in one day (Ares and Aphrodite), and Patroclus routed an army until he lost his armor, but both were defeated by Apollo. Ajax, however, was never beaten in the Illiad, even by the gods. In fact, when Zeus forbids the gods from helping the Greeks (but not from opposing them), all the Greek heroes are driven from the field, one by one, except Ajax, who is wounded by several gods, but never stops fighting. How many times can you put "the combined efforts of several gods, while he had none to help him, failed to stop this guy" on someone's resume? He racks up a mook body count roughly equal to Achilles, fought Hector to a stalemate, and when he actually does die in later (now lost) poems? It's by suicide. That's right, the only thing badass enough to defeat Ajax is... Ajax. Wow.
  • Really Diomedes could have ended the Illaid a lot sooner, the dude managed to kill every person he fought against. The only reason he ever fails is because of divine intervention or due to his honor (like that guy he traded armor with). Took three Olympian gods to stop him from killing Aeneas and potentially ending Rome right then and their. He was so powerful that when Diomedes decided to fight Hector, Zeus himself sent lighting bolts down in front of him, because he knew that he can kill Hector (heck before this happened, Diomedes hurled a spear at Hector which would have killed him if Apollo hadn't magicked his helmet at the last second, but even then Diomedes was able to KO him).
  • Greek Mythology was filled with examples of this. Even Oedipus got in on it, when he unknowingly killed the king of Corinth (also his father) and his entire bodyguard, leaving only one survivor. The survivor ended up lying that they had been attacked by a gang of thieves, because no-one would have believed him if he told the truth. Jocasta said at one point that if you want to play Oedipus, play on his fears. The messenger that tells Oedipus he was actually adopted by Polybus is there to bring Oedipus back to Thebes, where he'll be rewarded for bringing the king (ie. ulterior motive). And the servant who confirms the tale is a slave, and at the time the testimony of a slave was only considered valid if delivered under torture. Layers upon layers of confuddled possible half-truths.
• James Bond, who has this trope as part of his job-he's sent into enemy territory to take down entire private armies or criminal organisations on his own. He's able to take on multiple opponents with little problems in hand-to-hand combat or gunfights, and always manages to demolish whole criminal empires by the end of the book. However, From A View To A Kill deconstructs this aspect-being used to handling huge threats alone, Bond goes up against several heavily armed Russian operatives by himself without any backup and barely escapes death.
• The Jenkinsverse: Due to how fragile most species in the galaxy are, even baseline humans are The Juggernaut, but actual trained soldiers are a horror. Adrian Saunders stands out due to his pragmatism, working knowledge of alien technology, and preparation. The Hunters, a race of insane predators who spend all their time eating sentient races, actually declare war on the entire human race because Adrian manages to slaughter a thousand of their soldiers with a few clever traps.
• Journey to Chaos:
  • During A Mage's Power, Fairtheora guarded Ataidar's border with Latrot (half of the southern border) by himself. Kasile's father thought that anything more would be superfluous.
  • Such is Dengel's spiritual and magical power that he can swat any number of soldiers like flies with a single gesture.
• Wirr in The Licanius Trilogy spins this trope in a unique direction. When holding an Oathstone, he has the ability to control anyone to follow his exact instuctions (regardless of if they are in earshot). When his forces agree to the tactical advantages of this, it allows him (one man) to control his entire army from his command post.
  • The Venerate are a more straight example. As millenia-old sorcerers any one of them can tear through armies single-handedly although only Tal'kamar and Isiliar really get to show this off. Even when faced with foes who have more raw power than them as in the case of Diara vs. Asha their sheer experience allows them to handily triumph.
  • By the end of the trilogy all the main characters qualify to some degree. Asha and Davian are explicitly stated to be the strongest people in the world considering all the Venerate and all the Augurs except Davian are dead
• Marcus Creasy from the Man On Fire novel tortures and kills his way through the entire Italian Mafia in his Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Both film adaptations really toned down his accomplishment.
• In the Matador Series, Emile Khadaji is a literal one-man army, though he uses deceptive tactics to make it appear otherwise. He parlyzes 2,388 soldiers over the course of six months, then when he's about to be found out, he does the same to their commander, then turns himself in. As intended, it inspires others to start a revolution. "If one man can do this alone, think what all of you can do together."
• Mistborn:
  • Any mistborn would probably count, but especially Vin. At one point, Elend even promises a minor character "two armies". Vin, by herself, is the first of said promised armies.
  • Steel Inquisitors (created to kill mistborn and possessing many of the same powers, plus an insane Healing Factor) also certainly qualify, and a Koloss may not be worth an entire army, but a fully-grown one is certainly worth a company of human soldiers. Exaggerated with the Lord Ruler — it's explicitly stated that he could kill the entire population of his capital city (currently in a state of revolt) by himself given enough time but fortunately Vin manages to figure out his Achilles' Heel before he can actually start doing that.
• The protagonist of the web serial Modern Awakening, Feng Shen, is a survivor of a civilization of Xianxia cultivators who awakes from suspended animation when Earth suffers a System Apocalpyse. His knowledge of cultivation enables him to leapfrog past all modern humans, to the point where he can outrun bullets - not that he needs to, as they simply bounce off him. At one point, he is forced to start killing people against his will. His final kill count is somewhere between tens of thousands to millions of people: there's no way to know for sure. The death toll includes multiple large military units, who don't stand a chance.
• The titular Murderbot of The Murderbot Diaries is an artificial bio-mechanical construct with serious upgrades which include built-in guns, and regularly wades through roomfuls of Mooks in seconds. It helps that it's perfectly capable of pushing through being shot to pieces or losing large amounts of its body mass. It's also insistent that it's not a combatant, it's a security unit, and it's very good at its job.
• The Night's Blade provides a One Woman Army example in Aleanor.
• In Okuyyuki, protagonist Reilly takes on a whole tank platoon single-handedly—as in, not in a tank himself, but on his own with a sword—and makes a very creditable performance of it.
• In Paradise Lost, the Son defeats Satan's entire army of rebelling angels on his own. For all of Satan's big talk, God and the Son are of course infinitely more powerful than him.
• In the last Percy Jackson and the Olympians book, The Last Olympian, Percy himself becomes this after taking a swim in the river Styx, giving him Nigh-Invulnerability, and increasing his strength and reflexes, at the cost of making him tire out quicker, and making his emotional Fatal Flaw even more harder to control. In this state, he takes on a two-hundred plus army of monsters. By himself. And kills all but twenty, who flee, pretty much without breaking a sweat. Even after he loses it in the second book of the sequel series, The Heroes of Olympus, Percy still (mostly) single-handedly trounces the First and Second Cohorts of the 12th Legion of the Roman Army in their own war games.
  • In The House of Hades, Frank goes up against about two hundred monsters with poisonous breath in Venice. He receives the Blessing of Mars in the process and kills all but one, which is then transformed into a snake to help free his questmates.
  • Later in The Blood of Olympus, Nico takes out six Roman soldiers in about ten seconds. While malnourished and close to falling apart at the molecular level.
• The Reunion With Twelve Fascinating Goddesses has Deities and Deity Knights (the latter being Spirit Knights who've managed to form a contract with a Deity). A force of 3000 is seen as being merely enough to fight a Deity on equal terms. One Deity Knight manages to crush a force of 2000 without killing any of them.
• Zhao Yun is recorded as single-handedly taking on Cao Cao's army in order to rescue Liu Bei's heir in the historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. May or may not have actually happened.
• Allanon in Terry Brooks' Shannara series. In The Elfstones of Shannara, The Alliance against the Demons consists of the Kershalt Trolls, the Westland Elves, the Dwarves, the Border Legion Free Corps, and Allanon. That's right. The man is actually badass enough to qualify as an army whenever the leadership gets together, and is entrusted to do things like hold entire ridgelines by himself. Being the most powerful Druid ever probably helps. And then of course there are things like the Skull Bearers, and The Reaper which might also qualify for this.
• The Silmarillion:
  • Túrin's father, Húrin, performs a You Shall Not Pass! to cover the entire back of the human army in the Battle of Countless Tears. He fights off the entire orc and troll army, killing so many that the orcs use the bodies as a bridge to cross the river he was guarding. And yelling "Day shall come again!" every time he struck. Until his axe melted in his hands. He got captured, but still, biggest badass in Middle-Earth.
  • Túrin could also count as this. He defeated upwards of 80 foes singlehandedly and killed the second most powerful dragon in the verse alone.
  • Fëanor was no slouch either, remember that one time Gandalf fought a Balrog and it was a tie? Fëanor fought all of them. Every Balrog. At once, and it STILL took them hours, and a being that was on par with Sauron, meaning second only to Morgoth himself, to take him down. And this is after chasing a routed army virtually alone for hours. There is a reason he was called the greatest elf.
• The Star Wars Expanded Universe gives us a few Jedi who count as this (mostly of the Solo/Skywalker clan), but special mention has to go to Grand Master Luke Skywalker, who has the Force potential of his father, the stubbornness of his mother, and combat skills roughly equivalent to those of Mace Windu.
• The Stormlight Archive:
  • Shardbearers. Shardplate makes them nearly impossible to harm conventionally, as well as enhancing strength and speed. Shardblades are nearly weightless, six foot long blades that effortlessly cut through conventional arms and armor and pass through living tissue, severing the soul of the person cut, killing them instantly if it hits their spine. A full shardbearer can cut down dozens of normal soldiers with minimal effort while being essentially impossible to harm. Meanwhile said soldiers have essentially no way of defending from the blades and require concentrated effort to even scratch the plate.
    • That said, the books like deconstructing the trope as well. A Shardbearer isn't impossible to harm, and most armies will have tactics to combat them. If isolated a Shardbearer can quite easily be tangled up in nets and overwhelmed. While they're enough to turn the tide of the battle, they still require the support of conventional troops to be effective.
    • Oathbringer also contains the Alethi combat truism "Shardbearers can't hold ground." No matter how powerful, they're just one person. Sure they can cut through a city's walls and slaughter anyone who comes to fight them, but one person simply cannot occupy land on their own.
  • Of course The Assassin in White also proves the overwhelming power of Surgbinding. Even with just a Shardblade and no plate, he's able to take on multiple full Shardbearers and dozens of normal soldiers, generally without so much as breaking a sweat. Even an inexperienced and Shardless Surgebinder like Kaladin is able to hold off virtually an entire army as well.
  • The flashbacks also show that Dalinar was this in his youth, even without Shards. At one point one of the other Noble's jokes that they need to get Dalinar Shards, not to keep him safe, but because he makes everyone else look bad by doing what he does without them
  • Rhythm of War also indicates this is true of the Heralds. One of them is able to hold off half a dozen Windrunners effortlessly, absolutely stunning Dalinar. According to the Stormfather, this level of skill was roughly average for the Heralds. Taln was unquestionably considered the greatest warrior of the group, so one can only imagine what he could do.
• Richard Rahl from Sword of Truth, shortly after acquiring the eponymous blade, is able to defeat thirty master swordsmen who have trained from dawn to dusk since childhood.
• Third Time Lucky: And Other Stories of the Most Powerful Wizard in the World: Multiple times Magdelene defeats a large demon army all by herself, in the first case killing half with the survivors fleeing. That's what comes with being the most powerful wizard in the world.
• Tower of Somnus: Kat starts as an excellent runner, capable of outmaneuvering powerful mercenaries and samurai. Then she gets magic powers, and every mission turns into "try to sneak around, get caught, kill everything."
• The Traveler's Gate: The Travelers of Valinhall are unique in that they summon powers into themselves, rather than summoning creatures and objects from their Territory. Simon, half-trained and missing most of the powers of the House, is able to kill a dozen experienced Travelers sent to kill him. When Alin sees the destruction, he assumes Simon managed to call a small army to help him.
• It takes four hundred soldiers to take out Ripred from The Underland Chronicles. Gregor qualifies as well.
• The Unwilling Warlord: Vond's magic is so great he takes on whole armies of muggles multiple times and easily beats them.
• Violet from Valhalla finds herself alone against overwhelming forces three times in the story- The opening with the gangsters, the hazing scene with the recruits, and the climax. In all three moments, out of the lack of creativity to do anything else, she takes on the opposition herself and cuts through them like a tornado.
• War of the Dreaming's Peter Waylock, especially after he gets his hands on an Empathic Weapon. It gets better when we find out that Peter Augustus Waylock is an in-universe Memetic Badass.
  Van Dam: "At this point, we think he was giving false orders over the radio. Once we found out, he ordered a radio silence."
  Wentworth: "He ordered?"
  Van Dam: "Yes, sir. We think that's what caused the shoot-out at the cross corridor."
• Lionblaze from Warrior Cats, due to his Nigh-Invulnerability. One is example of this is at the ending of Outcast when he takes on a large group of cats who had been giving the Tribe of Rushing Water trouble throughout the book and comes out covered in blood- none of which is his.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • Rand al'Thor is a bit of a loose cannon, but as the Seanchan discovered to their dismay, he is more than capable of blowing their front lines back across several hundred miles of previously secure territory in the space of an afternoon. Even if he had help. And blew a few of his comrades up too, but hey, that's insanity for you. By the antepenultimate and penultimate books in the series, he not only is able to unwittingly affect an entire city, for good or ill, just by being there, but capable of feats unaided that make the previous, aided, efforts against the Seanchan seem mundane.
  • In the very first book, The Eye of the World, he taps into a vast reservoir of magic (the titular Eye) and uses it to annihilate a Trolloc army of maybe a hundred thousand that had been about to sack the country of Shienar. In this case he's more of a conduit than an agent, but he does at least manage to point the power in the right direction.
  • In Crossroads of Twilight, he takes out another hundred-thousand or so Trollocs, this time under his own power. Moreover, he is caught almost totally off-guard and is holed up in a farmhouse that is practically indefensible and is more of a liability than a bulwark. He does have some help from the handful of Asha'man with him, however.
  • In Towers of Midnight, he goes against several hundred thousand Trollocs, with only two personal guards. The sheer intensity of the power he shows drives every Darkfriend within a few miles completely insane. It's a rare series where the Chosen One, while insanely messed up, is clearly the Chosen One for a very good goddamn reason: he is actually so powerful and impactful to armies and the Pattern itself that you can actually believe talk of destiny in facing an ancient unkillable evil Dark One.
  • Close enough to what the Aiel call Lan, the most bad ass swordsman in the world.
  • Also Demandred in A Memory of Light, during the Last Battle.
• The Witchlands has Aeduen, whose insane Healing Factor makes him practically unkillable. Couple this with his extensive combat training, his lack of morals and his ability to manipulate other people's blood, and it's no surprise that in a Mêlée à Trois between him and two armies, he's the one who comes out on top.
• World War Z mentions in one of Todd Wainio's recounts a soldier who "was a monster with a two grand body count". They are zombies though—they aren't remotely strong against anyone with a gun, the range to use it with and decent aim, and they tend to come in crowds, meaning that high body counts are a foregone conclusion. The relatively light defense at Hope ended the battle when they created a zombie pile so big, the zombies couldn't climb it, without a single casualty. Though apparently quite a few of that monster's body count was done by hand; Todd recounted one instance where he picked up one zombie and used it as a club against a whole mob of other zombies.
• X-Wing Series:
  • He's a pilot, not a commando, but Wedge Antilles is an astonishingly good pilot who, more importantly, survives absolutely everything thrown at him ever. The series mentions kill silhouettes painted on snubfighters—as well as having half of a Death Star, Wedge has so many TIES that they're rendered in red, so that one TIE silhouette represents twelve kills, because he's taken out too many to fit on the fuselage otherwise. In a later book, a character painting up a fighter is hip-deep in infiltrating the enemy as a bombastic space pirate, and adds a ridiculous number of kill silhouettes.
  • Then again, Wedge is the only pilot in the entire Star Wars Legends to have flown against two Death Stars and lived to tell the tales.
  • In Rogue Leader, if the player knows what they're doing, Wedge can take out a Star Destroyer within a minute. By himself.
• The Zombie Knight has Gohvis, The Dragon of Abolish (or half of it, at least) and one of the most powerful reaper servants in the world. Just hearing that he was on the way once caused a Vanguard two-star general and her squad to abandon the field without a fight, and before hearing Garovel describe the guy, Hector thought the rumors he'd heard about him referred to a plague.
  Hector: Right...Hmm. Dozer has a country named after him, but why is Gohvis so famous?
  Garovel: Regicide. Genocide. And punching a hole into a volcano that then erupted and wiped out an entire Vanguardian stronghold.

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