Implacable Man

"He'll find her! That's what he does! That's ALL he does! You can't stop him! He'll wade through you, reach down her throat and pull her fuckin' heart out!"

— Kyle Reese on the T-800, The Terminator

Don't bother running. He'll chase you to the ends of the Earth. Don't bother fighting. He'll shrug off anything you throw at him. Don't bother reasoning with him. He wants you dead and he will have it.

This is the threat that implacably, unrelentingly comes after you. This guy will hunt you down no matter what you do or where you go, even after you try relatively ordinary measures. Bullets may hurt him, but they'll never kill him. Swords may pierce him, but he's likely to pull it out and stab you with it. Even a rocket launcher will probably just slow him down. Even if you do manage to escape, don't relax, he'll always find you. Lock the doors if you want, he'll just use Super Strength to pull you through the wall.

Unlike the Determinator, an Implacable Man is more likely powered by science or magic than willpower. It is going to take some serious Applied Phlebotinum to defeat them. The highly sought-after MacGuffin might do the trick... maybe. There Is No Kill like Overkill. If this guy's the Big Bad, you probably won't be able to either way; the most you can hope for is to fend him off until he resurfaces again. And he will resurface; it's just a question of time.

Of course, comical Implacable Men are still just as prone to mundangers as anyone else. As a result, it makes for a powerful moment when they're shown to be Not So Invincible After All.

This isn't exclusively a villain trope either. Get a hero mad enough or if they want to get you bad enough, they're just as likely to invoke this as Determinator. They will typically go into Tranquil Fury, and these occasions are normally depicted via Mook Horror Show. The Slow Walk is a similar phenomenon.

Compare the Determinator, who doesn't give up despite extreme injury as a result of Heroic Spirit, and The Juggernaut, who is to this trope what a tank is to a hunting dog — put an obstacle in the Implacable Man's way and he will inevitably find a way past it, but put an obstacle in The Juggernaut's way and that obstacle will cease to be.

Many instances will result in becoming an Invincible Boogeyman, an enemy that cannot be fought in encounters and the only option is to Run or Die. The Stock Slasher is also likely to be one of these.

See also Hero Killer, The Man They Couldn't Hang, Immortal Assassin, Perpetual-Motion Monster, and Perfect Play A.I.. Compare Super-Persistent Predator, a similarly implacable antagonistic animal. Lends himself well to being the Goliath in a David Versus Goliath situation, if a villain, or an inducer of Mook Horror Show and Villainous Valour if an (anti)hero. Often shows up in Video Games as an Advancing Boss of Doom, Invincible Minor Minions, Demonic Spiders or a Damage-Sponge Boss/Marathon Boss/some variant of That One Boss. See Inspector Javert for a law enforcement variety. A source of Neverending Terror.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Yakumo from 3×3 Eyes is immortal. The only way to kill him would be to kill Pai, and if you lay even a single finger on her, Yakumo gets unlimited power, meaning his healing ability becomes instantaneous and he can use his attack spells without restriction. Unfortunately, the same applies to his nemesis Benares, who also has the advatage of being a vastly more powerful Dragon God in human form who invented the Summon Magic used by Yakumo, making him an even more dangerous example.
• Attack on Titan: The Female Titan. Her relentless pursuit of Eren leaves a gruesome path of death and destruction in her wake, and is our first glimpse of just how terrifying humans with a Titan form truly are. She has the highest body count of any single Titan in the series, making her More Deadly Than the Male in so many ways.
• Creed in Black Cat has some Phletbotinum juice that repairs his body from anything as long as there remains a single surviving cell of his DNA. To stop him takes a Phlebotinum bullet that can destroy every cell of his body, but because the one who fired it was a merciful sweeper who does not kill people it only hit him in the wings. More Phlebotinum, this time in the form of a syringe was used this time to destroy the nanomachines that made him implacable in the first place.
  • In the original manga, Creed's only weakness is his brain, and Train would need to shoot him in the head (which would kill him, which Train refuses to do) in order to stop him. Otherwise, he's unbeatable. He takes Train's best shot, a stronger version of the attack that flattened Shiki, and gets up without a scratch. Instead, Train wins by breaking Creed's Imagine Blade (which is linked to his mind), and then having Eve purge his nanomachines while he's incapacitated.
• Roberta from Black Lagoon, who in the space of two episodes hunts the protagonists through half of Roanapur, implacably getting through, in order, one shoot-out against twenty people all intent on killing her, the building said shoot-out was taking place in being detonated (by her, while she was inside, no less!), the ensuing inferno, a car chase that ends with her car flying from a rooftop and crashing into the side of a building, hanging onto the protagonists' car with a knife as they try to shake her off at top speed, being flung from said car into the side of a cargo container, a shootout with the Dark Action Girl heroine and finally a several-hour long fistfight. Which she stands up and walks away from after drawing with a Cross Counter. And she's a maid by profession.^note Though her former life as a ruthless FARC geurilla probably helped a little..,
  • Lampshaded when the Lagoon Company directly compare her to the Terminator.
  • The El Baile de La Muerte manga arc/Roberta's Blood Trail OVA sees her go beyond even this, the whole arc being a one-woman killing spree against everyone standing in her way. In the OVA, is permanently crippled, losing a leg, an eye, two fingers on her right hand and the entire left arm to Grey Fox... And yet she keeps coming, though by the end it's ambiguous who is the hunted and who is the hunter.
• BLAME! by Tsutomu Nihei has plenty. For one, there are Safeguard agents who can not be killed, only temporarily disabled/blown into pieces/vaporized, as they actually reside in virtual reality and can create remotely controlled bodies anywhere where a certain device is nearby. Oh, and they can instantaneously generate endless amounts of brainless robot Mooks who have razor sharp claws that cut metal like hot butter, are near impervious to conventional weaponry, and are really really fast and insanely strong. And then there's Killy, Artificial Human who walks through the whole world to find what he is looking for and is really really really durable. He was once buried under tons of molten metal and concrete and his near indestructible flesh was burned to his bone, but give him 14 years and he recovered completely, ready to continue his walk.
• Bleach:
  • The Espada. One of them takes the hero's ultra-powerful, last-ditch attack which has defeated his previous opponents with ease... and gets off with a slight burn. He's not even the most powerful. Their leader, Captain Aizen, also does this: he effortlessly blocked the hero's best attack using one finger. The finger didn't even bleed.
  • Zaraki Kenpachi, who just grins after being impaled multiple times, and lets someone stab him just so he can get close enough to stab back.
• Almost every Awakened Being in Claymore. They do eventually die from Monster Threat Expiration, but boy do they take a lot of punishment. Some Claymores can as well. The Abyssal Ones are the worst of them, but they were eventually wiped out by even worse Implacable Women, namely the abyssal feeders, who were specifically designed to be relentless killers for the Abyssal Ones by the Organization, and Priscilla, who is obviously even stronger and more Implacable than the Abyssal Ones.
• Apocryphos from D.Gray-Man DEFINITELY counts as one. He or "It" is a sentient Innocence whose sole purpose is to protect the "Heart" of Innocence but upon his debut, his goal changes to assimilating Allen Walker although seeing as how he states he wants to do this to suppress the Fourteenth, this could also constitute as protecting the heart. How far is It willing to go to achieve Its goal? It infiltrated the Black Order as a yet unnamed Cardinal; "killed" Cross Marian who has so far been shown as the strongest and certainly most Bad Ass Exorcist; erased the memories of countless stooges; wiped Howard Link's memory and nearly killed him too if it hadn't been for a timely save; fought off two Noah simultaneously while trying to absorb Allen, damaging Road to the point that her "dream" was broken and she disappeared; has stalked Allen Walker for the past 3 months NONSTOP, through different cities and possibly countries; and most recently curb stomped Yu Kanda, erased his memories of the brief ordeal and may have killed Timcampy. And It's still going.
• Den-noh Coil has the anti-virus program Satchii, a Killer Rabbit who relentlessly hunts down Illegal programs and illegal program users. Satchii and the little mechanical balls, Kyuu-chans, that come from him, are the general bane of the main characters of Den-noh Coil. But once his limits are learned and Satchii becomes familiar, the even-more unstoppable version 2 hunters show up!
• Dragon Ball:
  • After Piccolo shows up, villains often come in this variety. Any time a villain is more powerful than the heroes, said heroes will momentarily get an opening and attack at full force, only for it not to work, even when they make a direct hit. Smoke Shields are often used to give the impression that the villains are no more, but come on. They'll always be fine.
  • Cell can regenerate all wounds and come back if there is even a single cell of his body left.
  • Majin Buu. He's been destroyed and vaporized, only to reform in the smoke and goes on to easily destroy Earth and nearly every character in the series.
  • Recoome from the Ginyu Force. He gets thrashed by Vegeta, takes a ki blast to the face, and while firing his Eraser Gun, Krillin knees Recoome in the back of the head. This makes him abruptly close his mouth, causing the Eraser Gun to blaze out of his nostrils! And each time, he gets right back up with ease, showing no fatigue whatsoever. Vaporized body armor, torn-up jump suit, small blood stains on his face, some patches of hair on his head were missing, and some teeth were lost... that's all Vegeta and Krillin managed to do to him. It was to the point that when Goku showed up and took down Recoome with one hit, everyone was having a hard time believing what they just witnessed!
  • For heroic example, Goku during his raid on the Red Ribbon Army to obtain two of the Dragon Balls. Nothing the army did could stop him. He shrugged off sniper fire, side-stepped rocket launchers, took down jets and tanks, could take out dozens of soldiers at once, and deflect bullet fire. Not even the ceiling crushing him or a giant power suit could stop Goku. The horrors he struck within the army inspired Dr. Gero to create the androids and Cell.
  • Spopovich, who lost quickly to Mr. Satan in the 24th World's Martial Arts Tournament, has become one in the 25th Tournament, where he No Sells every one of Videl's hits before he proceeds to pound her into the floor. The Z Fighters would've been able to beat him, but they don't get the chance, as the Supreme Kai needs him alive so that he'll able follow him back to his boss Babidi, and when he does return to his master's ship, Babidi decides that Spopovich has outlived his usefulness.
  • Jiren of Universe 11 is widely regarded as the most powerful mortal in the multiverse. He's one of the few opponents Goku is unable to match even at Super Saiyan Blue, as well as someone that Hit's Time Stop was unable to help him keep up with. Not even using Time Freeze was able to slow him down. The only thing that ever genuinely did serious harm to Jiren was Ultra Instinct, and the only way to defeat him was with a Ring Out to disqualify him from tournament he was competing with the heroes in rather than by actually physically incapacitating him.
• Diclonius in Elfen Lied are practically immune to bullets (they won't even slow them down) thanks to a large number of invisible hands that block them. They are not invincible when fighting each other however.
• Yamato from Eyeshield 21 is an inverted example. He's a fullback who wants to get away from the opposing defence and the simple fact that he can't get away from them isn't going to stop him, even if he has to drag the entire defence along with him.
• Fate/stay night:
  • Berserker had 12 lives and easily took any damage dished out to him. In the end it took some Phlebotinum to kill him. By easily took the damage we don't mean "he tanked that sword in the gut like a boss" we mean "unless that sword was at least an A-rank magical artifact it didn't even bruise his skin"... and that's before Berserker starts tanking hits like a boss.
  • Souren Araya, a Buddhist monk who's been alive for 200 years. He has charms embedded in his body, allowing him to take blows that would otherwise kill him. Cut off his arm? He regenerates it without a problem. Cut off his other arm? It'll strangle you. Stab him? He won't even get wounded. Stab him in his point of death? No effect. Stab him in his point of death a second time after falling off a building? He's still alive for around 10 more minutes to converse with Touko before fading away to dust. His origin is stillness, after all.
  • The second half of the second season of the Spin-Off Fate/kaleid liner PRISMA☆ILLYA features Bazett, who tanks everything from Luvia's Battle Butler who uses More Dakka and grenades, to a room full of gems without even so much as dirtying her nice suit. And this doesn't even involve the use of her trump card Fragarach. This is rather egregious, because Berserker above lost one life to a mere handful of gems, making her even tankier than he is.
• Kenshiro of Fist of the North Star might be a Bruiser with a Soft Center, but as the Zeed Gang, the Fang Clan, and Jackal's gang found out, nothing will stop him in his pursuit of oppressors. Not even intervening skyscrapers, which he just walks through.
• Every homunculus from Fullmetal Alchemist, thanks in part to their Philosopher's Stone giving them unbelievable regeneration powers. Some specific examples include:
  • Lust gets shot several times, exploded, and has her Philosopher's Stone forcibly yanked from her chest by Roy, and keeps on going. If Alphonse and Roy hadn't promptly cornered her and applied liberal amounts of flame, respectively, they'd all have been toast.
  • Then there's Greed!Ling unleashing his fury toward Amestris soldiers after Bradley killed Fuu, his trusted bodyguard. There's a reason Greed got called "Ultimate Shield".
• Ryudou Hishiki from Get Backers. To get you an idea of how an Implacable Man he is, in a later chapter of the manga, he's chasing Ban and Ginji on a granny's bicycle at over 100 km/h, all while tossing around police cars out of the way!
• The Necrolyzed dead in Gungrave are invincible and always get back up even when riddled with bullets. Yes even the mooks. Their muscles continue to move even when it should be physically impossible. The series' protagonist is one as well. Brandon 'Beyond the Grave' Heat won't stop until he settles his score with Harry.
• Psycho for Hire Natasha Radinov from the Gunsmith Cats OVA is directly compared to the Terminator. With a Batman-esque bulletproof coat that lets her shrug off small arms fire, she easily storms through a police safehouse and mows down a dozen or so officers and federal agents, before surviving an exploding car plummeting into a river. It takes Rally magdumping into her at close range while she's recovering from May's flashbangs to put her down for good.
• Almost all of Hellsing's non-humans, including the mooks, and at least one empowered human count as Implacable Men. Hails of normal rounds barely faze them and they heal almost instantly.
  • One extreme case is Church Militant Father Alexander Anderson, who takes two headshots from explosive .454 bullets in rapid succession and gets back up almost immediately.
  • Another is Designated Hero and somewhat Friendly Neighborhood Vampire Alucard, who gets shot to pieces on three separate occasions only to rise, heal and mop the floor with his assailants. Admittedly, both of the above are anti-heroes instead of villains, but the bad guys do get their own Implacable Men, including aforementioned army of vampire mooks.
  • The Big Bad has on his side a Werewolf who's practically Made of Iron and a Catboy by the name of Schrödinger. He got his head shot off in England. He showed up in Brazil in the time it took the Big Bad to walk down the hall. That "dead" thing? It got better. And there's the good guy's former Battle Butler Walter, as a vampire.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Tarkus from Phantom Blood proves to be this, shrugging off any damage done to him while delivering a grueling Curb-Stomp Battle onto Jonathan, with Zeppeli's sacrifice being the only thing capable of turning the tables.
  • Battle Tendency:
    • Straizo, after becoming a vampire at the beginning of the Part, takes the vampire's Healing Factor to its absolute limits. Being riddled with bullets from a Tommy Gun and completely blown up by multiple grenades only temporarily slows him down in his battle against Joseph.
    • The same Part shows another one with Kars, after he becomes the Ultimate Life Form. Now immune to almost everything, including the sun and the Ripple, and with the ability to transform any part of his body into any living thing (even when it's detached from his body,) he spends the final part of the story unrelentingly chasing Joseph (even when he steals a plane to escape) all the way to an active volcano. He gets cooked in the magma of said volcano and endures long enough to adapt his body to protect himself via an air barrier. It takes using the volcano to rocket him into space, where he freezes solid and drifts through the cosmos until he finally Goes Mad From The Isolation, to finally defeat him.
    • The Pillar Men in general have shades of this. Sunlight only petrifies them, and they need to be constantly exposed to it to keep them immobilized. Their skin is immune to the Ripple, meaning someone has to somehow puncture them and deliver the Ripple from inside, and they can absorb and digest any living thing via mere physical contact (though trying to do that to a Ripple User is a bad idea, as Joseph demonstrates against Santana). Even when someone has the means to hurt them, they're still extreme die-hards and refuse to go down (one even keeps going as a disembodied brain with tentacles).
  • Stardust Crusaders:
    • Pet Shop, DIO's villainous guard falcon. Despite having only one fight with Iggy, the bird makes itself clear that it will chase its target to the most unexpected places. Its relentless killing machine-like attitude also makes it comparable to the Terminators themselves.
    • DIO's Dragon, Vanilla Ice and his Stand, Cream. The inside of Cream's mouth is a void that destroys anything it swallows (except Ice himself), and it has the ability to turn itself inside out, effectively turning it into an invisible ball of void that simply erases whatever it runs into. Most of the fight against Ice is spent running away from him, and nobody lands a hit on him until he's already done quite a bit of damage, and even then, stabbing him through the mouth only seems to piss him off. This turns out to be because he's a vampire, which does let Polnareff figure out how to finally get rid of him: throw him into the sunlight.
  • Sheer Heart Attack, the Sub-Stand of Yoshikage Kira from Diamond is Unbreakable, a nearly indestructible tank that will always track the hottest object near it, and will not stop until its target has been destroyed.
  • Stone Ocean:
    • Yo-Yo-Ma, D an G's Stand, will stop at nothing to kill its targets, and thanks to its powerful Healing Factor, it can regenerate from just about any injury it takes.
    • Bohemian Rhapsody, Ungalo's Stand, brings characters from famous stories to life, which will then act as if they still were at the story they're from, and absolutely nothing can stop them from completing it.
  • Blackmore from Steel Ball Run, even after receiving fatal wounds, will not stop in his pursuit of the heroes, though this is mostly due to Catch the Rainbow plugging his wounds with water.
  • Tusk Act 4, the final evolution of Johhny's Stand, is this trope incarnate. When it can outright No-Sell a Time Stop, you know it's time to start running.
• Ogami Ittō from Lone Wolf and Cub is a textbook (and particularly ruthless) example. He's a master assassin who completes the job no matter what — plenty of people have tried to stop him, but nobody succeeds. And that's not even getting into his personal goal of getting revenge on the Yagyu clan, second only to the Shogun in terms of overall power — they command legions of ninja and can force entire armies to obey their orders. Ittō cuts through every last thing they throw at him.
• Lupin III is a franchise about the titular Gentleman Thief. The cop chasing him, Inspector Zenigata, is powered in his hunt by Justice. If he so much as lays an eye on Lupin, he'll start chasing the thief to the ends of the earth! Even killing him won't stop the Inspector. After being shot by the villain of Lupin III: Island of Assassins, he had been in coma for a while, and then his heart stopped. Upon seeing this, a fellow cop declared he would avenge Zenigata by capturing Lupin... And Zenigata promptly awakened from the coma, fully healed, trying to arrest Lupin, before returning to sleep.
• The personified Book of Darkness in the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's. Her implacability was best displayed when Nanoha activated Raising Heart's brand new Deadly Upgrade, pierced the Book of Darkness' Deflector Shields, blasted her in the face with an Excelion Buster at point blank range... and didn't even leave a scratch on her.
• Roberto and Inspector Lunge from Monster. One can wonder what sort of chaos would ensue should they ever have to face each other. They do. It's awesome.
• Luna's father in My Bride is a Mermaid. The guy takes a Kill Sat to the face without even flinching.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • Has a variation that can only be described as...odd. Due to an unfortunate incident involving the Power Incontinence of the World Tree and a request for a kiss, Negi gets turned into an Implacable Man with the stated goal of french-kissing somebody, and the best efforts of several mages and fighters are powerless to stop him. He turned back to normal when he succeeds in kissing Asuna, nearly killing her by suffocation in the process.
  • Jack Rakan is the comedic version of this. The man will not go down, no matter how hard you hit him. One of his many titles is "That Damn Guy You Can Stab With Swords All You Like And It Won't Do A Thing Damnit", and for good reason. The Big Bad is forced to resort to use Reality Warper powers to erase him from existence to take him out, and he puts up quite a fight. Furthermore, Rakan comes back one more time AFTER his existance is erased to shake Negi back to his senses.
• Himuro Genma from Ninja Scroll survives decapitation and more through his mastery of reincarnation. It takes being impaled by a roof timber and then covered in molten gold to finally stop him... for now at least. Theoretically, he may crawl out of the ocean someday as a homicidal gold-plated terror.
• One Piece:
  • Magellan, the prison warden of Impel Down. During Luffy's escape from prison, Magellan chases them the entire time, and it gets to the point that anybody that's caught by him is considered already dead as the prisoners run away from him, so what starts out as a riot of 5 floors and thousands of prisoners leads to less than 300 making it out alive. It's not that he's just unreasonably tough: his power is producing large amounts of poison, so that even touching him is suicide.
  • Though with that said, he did shrug off blows from Emporio Ivankov, which appeared to have bruised him up a bit but otherwise fine. He also took multiple cannon-fire like a cake-walk.
  • Soon after Admiral Akainu gives Magellan a serious run for his money. Like Magellan, touching him is suicide (made of lava), like Magellan he gives chase to the protagonists and no one seems to be able to stop him, only buy a little time before being defeated, and unlike Magellan he's actually made good on his promise to not let anyone escape by actually killing Ace.
  • Due to being partially inspired by the Terminator, Bartholomew Kuma fits here, being an incredibly resilient cyborg and being able to redirect anything you throw at him. The short range teleportation and his primary method of movement being The Slow Walk just makes it worse.
  • Luffy's rubber body and Determinator nature gave him shades of this, particularly when upset. His fight against Arlong and more so against Enel — whose powers were useless against Luffy — are good examples where he kept coming after them. Lately he's lost this status and went to full Determinator since everybody they fight has a power that can hurt him. Notably, Luffy was very much this to Rob Lucci during their fight. Late during said fight, Lucci hits Luffy with his Rokuougan technique not once, not twice, but three times! The second one floored Luffy and it took Usopp giving him a speech to stand up and fight, which gives him a Heroic Second Wind, but not before declaring to Lucci that he'll never fall to the ground again until he defeats him. Then, he gets hit by the third Rokuougan and it looks like it did the job, as we see Luffy collapsing... then stubbornly catches his footing and with his last burst of strength, desperately unleashes Jet Gatling. Luffy defeats Lucci with this powerful attack (putting the latter into a coma) and surely enough, falls to the ground shortly after.
  • Smoker is like this to Luffy pre-Timeskip, back before Luffy could hurt Logia-types, and Smoker pursued Luffy relentlessly whenever their paths crossed and they weren't forced into an Enemy Mine scenario.
  • Mihawk was this to Krieg's crew — he single-handedly sank most of his 50-ship fleet, leaving the remains of his crew fleeing from Grand Line on the last remaining ship. Then he proceeds to track them down and cut their last ship in half — and all of it, just because he was bored. If Zoro didn't call him on a duel (thus giving him enough entertainment), he would probably finish them off. He comes back to that role in the Marineford, in which his fight with the main character consists him barely putting effort into attack, with said main character desperately trying to stay alive.
• Zombieman from One-Punch Man is this, and it's what gave him a spot in the S-Class despite not having the physical attributes to compete with the other S-Class heroes. As a zombie, he cannot die, does not need to eat, sleep, breathe or drink. A monster "killed" him 200 times, and he simply got up the 201st time and came right back to kill it.
• Petopeto San has a character named Nuriko, who is a Nurikabe — Essentially, a wall monster. She is made of concrete. She only gets mad once, but the only way to stop her forward progress was to shove her off of the stage she was on at the time.
• In Pokémon: Lucario and the Mystery of Mew, the Regis fit this trope to a T. No matter how many Aura Spheres Lucario chucks at them, and no matter how many passageways are knocked down, they just keep walking slowly, inevitably, towards the heroes. Especially interesting is the fact that they manage to be implacable even while being constantly pegged by their mutual weakness to Fighting-types.
• Pokémon: Kyurem vs. The Sword of Justice, fifteenth movie, runs with this trope and combines it with Super-Persistent Predator for the titular Kyurem. The mon, in a fit of rage at their opponent fleeing, goes on a hellish chase throughout a good part of Unova to find Keldeo, pulverizing and freezing anything that even gets in his way. Any attempts to so much as stall him are absolutely ineffective.
• Randel Oland of Pumpkin Scissors becomes an implacable man when he uses his blue lantern. The twist is that he's just a large, strong, completely human Gentle Giant — he gets injured like anyone else would. It's a good thing that most of his opponents are tanks crewed by rotten shots.
• Ranma ½: Ryoga Hibiki takes this to Nigh-Invulnerable levels. Throughout the series, he has literally been smashed through solid concrete and through cliff walls and had the rubble collapse on top of him, only to emerge undaunted and continue to fight. More impressive, is his ability to traverse large distances on foot, in pursuit of his target and won't rest until he's caught up to them. Just ask Ranma.
• Rebuild World:
  • Downplayed when Akira storms The Don Rogelt’s fortress in a Roaring Rampage of Rescue, and the ex-hunter mercenaries there have functions installed in their Powered Armor to keep them fighting on the edge of death by applying Healing Potion, adrenaline, and stimulants automatically, even making one of them shrug off an anti-tank CWH round.
  • The Remote Body copies of himself Tiol makes after he becomes a Tragic Monster are like this when trying to dog pile Akira from the rooftops, some even shrugging off his bursts of CWH rounds as he flees on his Cool Bike.
  • The Remnant Artificial Intelligence of the Old World, when using an automaton body, are like this, shrugging off pretty much anything thrown as them as a One-Woman Army. It’s a testament to how powerful Halmers is as a Super Strength Differently Powered Individual that he can damage one.
• Shishio Makoto, one of the Big Bads of Rurouni Kenshin. He goes through the entire cast without stopping, takes a hit from the hero's strongest attack and stands back up, you name it. It takes his own body overheating to kill him. To be specific, he takes a direct punch from Sanosuke, hit very hard by Saito's in the forehead, and that's not even including Kenshin's attacks...
• Minako Aino in the manga version of Sailor Moon and her solo manga. Her greatest feat was when, after donating over a liter of blood while too young to do so, she finally found where the youma was and she climbed a large hospital in the middle of a heat wave to kill it, only taking the time to drink eight cans of tomato juice before the climb to restore her energies.
• Sabrac from Shakugan no Shana. His physical humanoid form is only a small part of his actual body, so he's able to recover and regenerate from any attack.
• Tokyo Ghoul:
  • Noro, a strange and silent Ghoul working directly for Aogiri's leader. Even other ghouls consider his Healing Factor to be abnormal and his lack of reaction to damage disturbing. During the battle in the 11th Ward, he's pumped full of hundreds of rounds of ammunition without even reacting, and later is stabbed through the chest and then decapitated. He merely pulls himself together and is only stopped because he's apparently called back by his superiors. Noro seems to have two default settings: "Ignore Completely" and "Reduce to Chunky Salsa". In the sequel, he's finally put down for good......but only after the Quinx repeatedly blow him to pieces and Shirazu dies helping bring the monster down. It's then revealed that Noro was actually a mummified body kept going by Eto's powers.
  • Kishou Arima, the legendary "undefeated" Ghoul Investigator. Rather than simply shrugging off injury, he seems capable of dodging literally anything thrown at him and leaves his targets with a literal Run or Die scenario. Even the strongest of ghouls have no choice but to run as far and as fast as possible to survive an encounter with him. For this reason, ghouls call him Shinigami and consider him death incarnate.
• Vash and Knives from Trigun, seeing as, in addition to just not dying, even when pushed to the very limit of their powers, they never relent in their ideals either. A potent example is when Vash fires a clip of bullets at Knives. Knives turns the parts of his body where the bullets hit into guns and fires back. They both recover.
• Ajin: Sato is technically nothing more than a human with military training who can't die (and can sometimes summon a sort of battle ghost), but his sociopathy and love of action are so extreme that he will do absolutely anything to get a thrill in battle. What makes him scary is his resourcefulness: try to kill him, lock him, incapacitate him, he will find a way to turn the table on you by some insane and unpredictable method that takes advantage of his immortality. That includes chopping his own hand, sending it in a food-delivery package to the building he wants to infiltrate, grinding himself to smithereens in a wood-cutting machine, and then reappearing inside the building when his body regenerates from the previously chopped-off hand. In other words, he effectively died and let a double of himself replace him. No one seems able to stop him for more than a minute.

Comic Books

• Superman:
  • The Man of Steel himself is a heroic example. Only if you hurt his friends and family, especially Lois, Kara, Lana Lang, his parents or Batman, and even then he won't kill you, or even try to make you suffer. But he'll definitely put you in a good solid inescapable prison cell for the rest of your life where you'll get to grow old and die on your own and won't hurt anyone ever again. At least until another author wants to use them. More importantly, it's his primary crime-fighting style. He stands there and takes your best shot to show you that fighting him is pointless, then flies after you to show you that running is also pointless. Also, if you're attacking him, you're not attacking innocent people so it's worth the risk of taking the occasional punch that could hurt him. Unless you have a bit of kryptonite with you almost nothing can stop him.
  • While technically not a man, Doomsday was flat-out created to be one of these. Aside from the fact that he's one of the few beings that can actually put Superman down, Doomsday actually becomes more powerful if (and, given how powerful he is, that's one hell of an if) he's killed. Not only will he (eventually) be revived, anything that once successfully killed him won't work a second time. The more Doomsday loses, the more implacable he gets.
  • Amalak in The Third Kryptonian. He spent centuries tracking down and killing Kryptonian survivors, and he'll not be satisfied until every last one of them is dead.
  • In "This Is Not My Life", Supergirl hunts down and captures villain Amazo, stating you "can't outrun [me]".
  • Way of the World: Dolok jumps into the timestream to run away from Supergirl and a Green Lantern, only to find that the former will follow him to literally everywhere and everywhen, she will not give him the slightest break, and she will not ever stop chasing him until he has been beaten down to her satisfaction and his time-travelling device has been taken away.
• The Incredible Hulk: The titular character, especially if you pissed him off by hurting his loved ones.
• Judge Dredd:
  • In the first appearance of Judge Death, Dredd and a squad of Judges encounter Death committing a massacre. They open fire with standard ammunition to take him down, but the Dark Judge barely reacts to being hit multiple times while gloating "You cannot kill what does not live." However, the trope is then subverted by Dredd ordering him shot with incendiary ammunition which does bring down Death's body, even if the spirit escapes for the moment.
  • Dredd himself plays the trope straight. Even suffering third degree burns all over his entire body won't stop him. Even escaping to another dimension won't stop him from hunting a crook down. His reaction to a Dark Judge with the power of driving anybody who sees his face ("Gaze into the Face of Fear!") into mind-breaking fear is "Gaze into the Fist of Dredd!"
• The Grievous Journey of Ichabod Azrael: No matter how many times either of them is killed, the Hunter will continue to pursue Ichabod across time and space to kill him over and over again, since that's his job. He even resorts to cannibalizing his own Hell Hounds to restore his own body as some sort of bloated monstrosity.
• Jei-san from Usagi Yojimbo was supposed to be a creepy one-shot character who disappears after being struck by lightning. He mysteriously shows up again with the goal of killing Usagi and gets stabbed by his own spear and tossed off a cliff into a raging river. He gets better. He is Killed Off for Real when he gets stabbed by a mystical sword, but soon possesses the swordswoman Inazuma, then possesses another person after Inazuma's death... He gets better. After Usagi's first Single-Stroke Battle with him, they both freeze in shock — Usagi because he thought his blow was fatal, Jei because he thought he was invulnerable.
• Spider-Man's enemy Morlun fits. "I hit him with everything I've got. He keeps coming. I hit him with everything I can find. He keeps coming. He doesn't talk. He doesn't snarl. Doesn't yell, gloat, preen, cackle, threaten or mock. He just keeps coming." A suitable runner-up for a trope-defining quote behind Mr. Reese if there ever was one.
• In Special Forces, autistic manchild Zone is incredibly implacable. As the Desert Wolf, the enemy he was tasked to capture, finds with horror, "He is a demon! He has no fear!"
• Walter from The Mask (comics and cartoons). Started out as an ordinary mook. Said one of his creators: "What doesn't kill him makes him Walter." In the comics, he just shrugs off injuries, even cutting himself to freak out his quarry, but in the cartoon he's more or less indestructible, and just giving him any kind of pause required heavy ordnance.
• Played with in Too Much Coffee Man #4: The Death of Too Much Coffeeman. He has a heart attack, falls down stairs, falls out of a window, is shot, and has a safe land on him, among other things. He always has a clever explanation upon returning, sometimes in THE VERY NEXT panel (aliens, robot decoy, evil twin, and so on). Leads one of the supporting characters to lose interest and remark "Eh... he'll be back".
• X-Men has the Juggernaut, who is named aptly indeed. He literally cannot be stopped (one of his official superpowers is "once in motion, cannot be stopped" — he took a mystic blast from The Mighty Thor and it only staggered him for a few seconds), he's Nigh-Invulnerable, and he officially has "infinite stamina". In other words, he never needs to stop. Ever. He doesn't eat, he doesn't sleep, he doesn't feel fatigue, he doesn't even breathe. So once Juggernaut is on your trail, it doesn't matter what you do, he will find you, and there is nothing that will turn him back. Once the demon D'spayr tried sucking all the magic and life away from Juggernaut. He managed to reduce him to a skeleton, but Juggy still kept coming, fueled by pure anger and rage.
• The Saint of Killers from Preacher. As a man he was a grim badass Blood Knight of a soldier and then later a Bounty Hunter. The only bright spot in the blood soaked misery of his life was his wife, and later their child. So when a wretched band of lowlife outlaws prevented him from bringing them medicine when they were sick, he attempted to take revenge and wipe out the entire band, and only failed because he ran out of bullets. Upon arriving in Hell, his soul was filled with so much hatred that it froze Hell solid, and when the Devil attempted to whip and beat the hate out of him, the Devil had to give up. The only way to get him out of Hell was to let him take over for the Angel of Death, who was tired of the job. Now the Saint works as God's attack dog, armed with a pair of magic guns (melted down from the original Angel of Death's sword) that will never miss, never run out of bullets, and always be lethal, even if he's shooting at the Devil, warrior angels, or God Himself. Driving a truck into him will only result in the truck crumpling like paper. Tank shells will bounce off him without him noticing. Dropping a nuke directly on him will only cause him to spit in contempt and mutter "Not enough gun." He doesn't ever need to stop to rest, or eat, he will massacre innocents without remorse or compassion, and if he is ordered to hunt you, nothing can save you. The only way out is to give him a good, honest reason to switch sides, which is about as easy as it sounds.
• Frank Castle, a.k.a. The Punisher. Chances are you if you're criminal scum, you are fair game for him and he will not stop until every lawbreaker he meets is dead.
• Another Marvel character: Drax the Destroyer. He was brought back to life with one mission (to kill Thanos), and boy if he isn't going to do it. Thus far, nothing has served to curb his desire to fulfill his "destiny," as he calls it, up to and including the lives of him, his daughter, his teammates, and the entire rest of the universe. Deconstructed in that, though Drax was powerful enough to kill Thanos when he was first created, Thanos has since been a semi-constant victim of Power Creep, Power Seep and Drax, though implacable, is no longer capable of killing him.
• Tex Willer is a hero and completely vulnerable to bullets, but if he's after you he will chase you to the end of Earth to arrest you-or kill you in the process, no matter how much time it takes. And we mean it literally: in two different occasions he moved from his turf in Arizona to the coldest and farthest areas of Canada and Alaska to track down criminals while bulldozing through any attempt at stopping him and not believing the rumours about the enemy having serious mystical mojo (he was right: Red Duck was just faking being possessed by the Wendigo, while Hamatsa, the Cannibal God, was revealed to be a "Scooby-Doo" Hoax. Not that finding out they were real would have stopped him...), and when he found where the last survivor of the gang that had killed his wife was hiding he dumped everything to murder him after about twenty years the trail had gone cold.
• In Violine, Muller turns into one after losing his arms and getting mechanical claws.
• The Vampire Lord Haputmann Constanza from Fiends of the Eastern Front can reconstitute himself from the smallest grain of ash. Getting shot with silver-plated anti-armor shells doesn't stop him, and getting decapitated by a propeller only slows him down.
• The Furies from The Sandman (1989), whom even Dream could not resist. However, a certain perky goth girl gets better results.
• G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel) gives us the Cobra B.A.T.s (Battle Android Troopers), who were built to be Implacable Men in the field. Their simple yet robust design allows for them to withstand hundreds of shots from small-arms fire with little effect. They've even been dropped from the air into a firefight without parachutes, with what's left of them after the landing still crawling and firing at the enemy.
  • They're certainly more resilient than their cartoon counterparts, who were only used there to enable a Never Say "Die" series to get away with a Mook Horror Show.
• The Disney Ducks Comic Universe gives us a heroic (more or less) example with Paperinik. No matter what happens or if you win the first round, he will come back and make you realize how stupid it was to go against him. Perfectly justified when you consider that Paperinik's Secret Identity is Donald Duck, and when he wears the mask his Hair-Trigger Temper is changed in Tranquil Fury...
  • Paperinik New Adventures provides Xadhoom, who has a genocidal vendetta against the Evronians for destroying her world... And is a Physical Goddess.
  • In The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Scrooge uses underhanded and immoral means to chase an African tribe off their ancestral land and trick their shaman, Foola Zoola, to sell it to him. Foola Zoola punishes Scrooge by sending Bombie the zombie to pursue Scrooge and shrink him. Scrooge manages to change his appearance in time to confuse Bombie, but Foola's curse keeps sending Bombie back to Scrooge, even if it means walking straight across the Arctic or along the ocean bottom for years on end in pursuit of him.
  • In the parody of Les Misérables, Javert. Aside for his classic chase of Valjean we have him going after the Beagle Boys, realizing he can't find them in the catacomb of Paris, and have said catacombs flooded to force them out, and after Valjean was pardoned halfway during the chase he still continued trying to find him because someone had to tell him and he was already chasing him.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: When Circe reanimates Artemis' bones the undead Amazon is relentless in her pursuit of Diana and any other Amazon she notices and cannot be slowed or dissuaded by talking or any damage done to her as her body will just put itself back together again. The only way to distract her is to get her sword and toss it away since that is the anchor tying her to the mortal world, but that is a very temporary solution.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon):
  • The Many can be slowed down and temporarily crippled, but they don't seem to feel anything that gets thrown at them, and in any case they will keep going under they've fulfilled their Hive Queen Ghidorah's wishes.
  • In Chapter 11, the Skullcrawlers aren't fazed in their efforts to get through a hole in the wall even when they're lit up by grenades. And the scary thing is, it's implied it's fear of what Alan Jonah's experiments on San's Ghidorah DNA have created that's driving the creatures rather than their usual Horror Hunger.
• A Hollow in Equestria: Ulquiorra serves this role, and serves it very well. Burn his skin? He quickly heals. Cut off a limb? He'll cut off his own limb just to prove a point and immediately regenerate a new one to take its place. Threaten Equestria? There's not a place on the planet you can hide that'll put you too far away for him to find.
• Child of the Storm:
  • The Winter Soldier. If you are his target, no matter how far you go or where you hide, he will find you and run you down. And then he will kill you. No ifs, no buts, you'll be dead.
  • Harry, by the sequel, who points out in one Badass Boast that while he's faced many enemies who were smarter than him, more experienced than him, and more powerful than him — some who were all three at once — not one of them has ever managed to stop him. He's just that stubborn — though the fact that he's got a Phoenix fragment within him, with the attendant Resurrective Immortality doesn't hurt.
• A hero example is Paul in With Strings Attached, who has been rendered immensely strong and Nigh-Invulnerable. He tirelessly ploughs his way through miles of skeletons and zombies in his inexorable journey toward the ruined city on the Plains of Death. What finally stops him? A pair of wraiths (turns out he has no defense against intangible creatures) who suck out his abundant life energy (except he has so much that they both explode).
• Another Hero example is Rito Yuuki's I.S. in the second (technically fifth) chapter of To-Love-Ru Stratos. Took combined salvo of all Blue Tears weapon to make some cracks on its armor (1x large beam rifle, 4x BITs, and 6x High-Explosive Squash Head missile)
  Its armor plating was excessive to say at the least, being multiple-layered, reflective, as well as having numerous generators and hypercapacitors in every single part of the I.S. made it capable of shrugging light I.S. firepower like it doesn't exist, and minimizes the damage from anything else beyond that. This is before Absolute defense is taken into account.
• The Tamers Forever Series has a villainous example in Daemon who will simply NOT. STAY. DOWN.
• The Pony POV Series has the Blank Wolf in Shining Armor's story. It is Nigh-Invulnerable, and the most you can hope for is to temporarily slow it down or be near a divine being, whom it'll instinctively avoid. Just to highlight how powerful it is, Shining at one point shoots it point blank with a flare. It eats it. Even after being rendered mortal in the Final Battle as punishment for harming a member of the pantheon (Cadence), it still takes an incredible amount of damage to finally kill it.
• In Mega Man Recut, Duo is basically invincible and can regenerate his wounds.
• A Loan Shark's Tale:
  • Like in the anime, the Necrolyzer Brandon/Grave is just as implacable, despite having lost An Arm and a Leg in the anime's finale (uses an artificial leg with weight-activated knee system to provide mobility though; his left arm is still gone). Now, working as a Loan Shark in Millennion, he lists and will hunt down those who owe him money. Most of the time, Brandon will simply break into the house (by making an entrance of his own with his Super Strength) and steal something that is of the same value to his clients' debts. When he faces a case in which his target is not at home, he simply kicks the door down and nab an LCD TV out of the house. Then, there is a client of his who launches a surprise attack at Brandon as he (the client) opens the door. The customer whacks Brandon's head with a cane repeatedly, only to have the cane snatched and snapped in half before Brandon shoves him aside and enters the house to nab a radio. However, Brandon will readily submit if his superiors order him to stop or Mika's life is threatened.
  • Deconstructed in the sequel Wintertime Business (crossover with Trigun), in which Brandon has Vash as his recalcitrant client... Bad idea. Brandon won't stop until he catches Vash out of his loyalty to Millennion, while Vash, out of his pacifistic nature, will keep running and devising strategies to tire Brandon such as knocking down public facilities 'by accident' to trip Brandon and slow him down, climbing up a traffic light, and dodging Brandon's shots, which always ends up prompting Brandon to use his Super Strength and smash his way through. Because the two refuse to submit, the pursuit wreaks havoc. The town's pavement is a mess. Various public facilities like mailboxes and trash cans are smashed. To top it all, a traffic light falls and blocks the road, causing traffic jam. The end result? Brandon catches Vash, but his artificial leg is broken and will probably result in Norton snapping at Brandon (like usual), as Brandon will spend Millennion's money to fix his artificial leg (he has been relying on Millennion to fund his medical expense after all), including the fee for prosthesis maintenance. After that, Vash can't pay his debt, which will either cause Brandon to give him more time and restart such destructive pursuit or not to let him go until he presumably nabs something valuable from Vash. Fortunately, Brandon's superiors soon issue an order to let go of Vash and forget about his debt just to avoid more damage to the town and preserve the organization's publicity. Brandon ultimately submits, resolving the conflict.
• The Bridge: Enjin is normally a Kaiju, which would already qualify him for this, but even in his human form, he seems unstoppable. He can track his target from miles away and has a Healing Factor and Adaptive Ability, making him even tougher and tougher over time. While battling the super strong human form Kaizer Ghidorah, Kaizer noted he was at a major disadvantage because he was getting tired and Enjin wasn't. Kaizer was only able to escape by breaking Enjin's neck and throwing him into a frozen lake, and Enjin simply revived and healed from it. He also shrugs off getting electrocuted and gets up moments after falling out a window and being hit by a car. It takes Kaiser!Aria obliterating his body to finally kill him, and even then Bagan is able to revive him, and it takes having his core destroyed to finally put him down for good.
• In FREAKIN GENSOKYO, Byakuren of all people becomes this during her hunt for a rather nasty (albeit pretty) Eldritch Abomination.
• In the All Guardsmen Party, the ex-Arbite traffic cop the party meets in Jack Hive is nearly impossible to shake and determined to ticket the party for the smallest infractions. He follows them between spires and into the Underhive, appears from nowhere whenever the party has a quiet moment, and papers their entire vehicle in tickets.
• Yuuka Kazami becomes this in Fantasy of Utter Ridiculousness. Nothing that Megas's crew can throw at her does more than temporarily slow her down, and it takes extreme measures on Reimu's part for any meaningful damage to be done to her.
• No stars in sight: Cuaroc is relentless in his nightly hunts for Formora and Enduriel on Vroengard. There is nothing either of them can do to hurt him, and any of the island's predators stupid enough to attack Cuaroc get effortlessly slain. No place on the island is truly safe from his reach as he always somehow tracks Formora to her hiding spot each night. Running or staying out of sight are really the only options that Formora has whenever she finds herself being stalked by this thing.

Films — Animation

• The Fabrication Machine/B.R.A.I.N from 9. You defeat its little minion cat? Screw that, it can make a flying machine from a flag and skeletons to hunt you down. Defeat that too? It's already one step ahead of you with a creepy snake-thing that will catch you and bring you back to it, where it will certainly kill you. Light a barrel of oil and set a factory aflame and destroy the building in an explosion? All you've done is piss the thing off, and it'll drag its ruined body after you to steal your soul. Even getting caught in a bridge that it just destroyed on its killing spree won't slow it down because it'll find a way to climb out. Do you think shooting it in point-blank in the face from artillery only a foot away will stop it? Fuck no! It'll just bitchslap the weapon away and continuing coming after you. But a bit of green light shot into its eye? Yeah, that makes it explode from the inside out. Go figure.
• Big Hero 6:
  • When Baymax's healthcare chip is removed and he's sent after a target, he turns into a relentless killing machine who will not let anything get in his way. Even as the others try to stop Baymax from killing the Big Bad, he just throws them off and shunts them to the side while destroying every object in his path. The only thing that stops him is reinserting the healthcare chip. And with it, he will not let others stop him from helping people who are hurt or otherwise distressed.
  • From his first appearance, Yokai, the aforementioned Big Bad, relentlessly attacks those who notice him. The Yokai, a.k.a. Prof. Robert Callahan, will stop at nothing — not even hurting or indeed killing his disciples and colleagues — to avenge the perceived death of his daughter Abigail.
• In Brother Bear there’s an interesting example: After the death of their older brother, Kenai and Denahi mourn their loss; Kenai decides to hunt down the bear he holds responsible, and Denahi follows him to make sure he doesn’t get hurt. Kenai chasing the bear is very jarring, since he has killing intent the whole time, after a fight with the bear he accidentally kills it with his spear; as punishment for this, the spirits transform him into a bear, after which Denahi sees Kenai's torn clothes and assumes this new bear killed him. With the loss of both his brothers, he decides to seek vengeance; throughout the movie he chases his brother across the land, determined to kill him. Not even steam, being thrown over a cliff, or lack of sleep or food is enough to stop him. In the climax, he even finds Kenai on top of a giant mountain, thanks to the guidance of his dead brother, and they proceed to fight to the death, but literally the split second before Denahi kills his brother in the same manner that Kenai killed the bear, their older brother turns Kenai back to human. Denahi is both horrified and shocked that he almost killed his brother.
• Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade: Fuse has a touch of this towards the end. Clad in his standard issue bullet-proof armor, he ignores bullets and rifle grenades as he implacably advance through the Tokyo sewers, gunning down any who oppose him. Any member of the Kerberos Squad could be considered one while equipped with Protect Gear. The stuff is retro-Powered Armor.
• The Sharptooth from the original The Land Before Time still goes after Littlefoot even after he is tail whipped several times into a mountain by a full grown Apatosaurus with enough force to shatter rock, falling several hundred feet into a chasm and being hit in the eye with a spiny vine. What finally does kill him is being lured into a lake then having a boulder dropped on his head.
• In Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted the main gang is chased by Chantel DuBois, vicious officer of the animal control, obsessed with catching a lion. Of course, when she sets her sights on Alex, she proves to be nigh-unstoppable. Walls in the way? She runs through them! Stuck in jail? She escapes and uses police computer to gather information! Her subordinates are too injured to follow her? She revives them with an opera! She got between two elephants slamming into each other, was thrown through a brick wall into a snake enclosure, and this barely slowed her down. Even if you manage to run away, she can track you down using her abnormally strong sense of smell. And she is not only frighteningly competent, but also frighteningly determined — after Alex was taken back into the zoo, her job was officially over, and she was going to be hailed as town's heroine and receive large sum of money as a reward for bringing him back, but she still decided to abandon all that and kill him instead.
• In Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the Wolf proves to be this for Puss, who after being defeated in their first encounter finds himself relentlessly pursued no matter where he goes or how he tries to hide. Takes on a whole new angle when he's revealed to be Death.
  Wolf: Everyone thinks they'll be the one to defeat me... But no one's escaped me yet.
• The Junkions from The Transformers: The Movie are a comic version of this trope. You can knock them down and blow them to pieces, but they'll just put themselves back together and continue the chase. Fortunately for the Autobots, they're actually friendly CloudCuckooLanders who are easily Distracted by the Shiny.

Films — Live-Action

• The Drones and Warriors from Alien. Absolutely nothing can ever seem to be able to kill off or even hurt a Drone/Warrior at all during the first Alien film as Ash describes the Drone as being indestructible and unkillable, but Ripley still manages to get rid of the Drone by sending him right out into the vacuum of space after opening up the airlock of the Narcissus while the Drone manages to survive within the vacuum of space, but Ripley manages to blast him right out into the void with the ship's engines.
• Frankenstein: Frankenstein's Monster is often stereotyped as this, even though most of the time he's simply wandering aimlessly around or trying to escape pursuit, rather than actively pursuing someone. One of the few actual examples of the Monster being an implacable pursuer is in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
• The ABCs of Death: In "S", nothing Roxanne does to the hooded man stops him, including torching him with a flamethrower. When he finally catches her, he congratulates on her leading him a better chase than any of his other victims.
• The Adventures of Captain Marvel features the title character as a heroic version of one of these. Often times the criminals will fire bullet after bullet at the Nigh-Invulnerable hero, while the Captain calmly walks forward with a 'you are SO going to get your asses kicked' smile on his face as the bullets shatter against his body.
• Played for laughs with the random assassin in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me: she survived a knife in the back, a dozen bullets shot in the back, a shot from a bazooka in the face, and a ridiculously high fall out of a window with Austin landing on top of her. A spot of Lampshade Hanging occurs when Austin cries "Why won't you die?!" A deleted scene shows that he keeps her in the trunk of his car to deflect gunfire.
• Billy Club (2013): We only see one real example of this in the movie. Billy gets a pickaxe driven into the right side of his chest, and it does absolutely nothing to slow him down. Though in the end, three baseballs to the face is what does him in.
• The Blues Brothers are a rare heroic example of this Trope. Once put on their divine mission to save an orphanage, they're shot at, bombed, and chased by every force imaginable. None of this can do anything more than slow them down.
• In the anthology film Body Bags, the killer in "The Gas Station" segment suffers a lot of abuse by the heroine, but keeps getting up each time to pursue her once again until he finally gets crushed underneath a car.
• Realistically played by the main character from Brick. Takes a few beat-downs but stands up again regardless (though his attempts to be truly implacable fail spectacularly when he swallows too much of his own blood and makes himself sick).
• Brimstone: The Reverend essentially becomes a slasher villain by the end, murdering anyone in his way and refusing to let injuries slow him down.
• The elite Marshall squad in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Butch eventually comments, "Don't they ever get tired? Don't they ever get hungry?...I wish they'd even speed up, at least it'd be different."
• The Winter Soldier in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, who devastates the fray with a cold demeanor and calculating efficiency and shrugs off blows by anyone that isn't Captain America.
• Death Warrant: The Sandman seems to be superhumanly durable. He is shot once, but keeps trying to kill Burke. Multiple gunshot wounds are just a temporary inconvenience. He even survives being set on fire.
• Colonel Reza in Duck, You Sucker!. Over the course of the film he is repeatedly blown up, only to get up and come after Juan and Mallory again and again. It takes having a machinegun emptied into him to put him down for good.
• In Duel, businessman David Mann is traveling along a desert highway when he is stalked by a mysterious tanker truck, who seems to have no driver.^note The truck was actually driven by Carey Loftin, a legendary Hollywood stunt driver. In the few scenes where a driver can be discerned, Loftin's face is not seen. No matter what Mann does to elude and shake his antagonist, the truck is always on his tail, at times speeding well above the speed limit or at a speed that is reasonably safe or what the car — a 1970 Plymouth Valiant sedan, presumably with the basic 6-cylinder engine — can endure, the driver (or the truck-with-a-mind-of-its-own(?) itself) seeming to want to brutally kill him for some unknown reason. In the end, just as Mann's car is about to break down and all hope seems lost, Mann finally is able to stage an accident at the edge of a cliff, and the truck — which heretofore had seemingly been smarter than Mann — falls for the trick, plunging over the side to its doom.
• Satan in End of Days possesses the body of a stock broker, who proves impervious to bullets and other blunt trauma. He's eventually worn down by repeated explosive blasts and being mowed down by a subway train. When he can no longer walk, he simply leaves the broker's body and possesses a new one. In the end, Satan isn't beaten, only outlasted as the New Year rings in, and he's forced to retreat for another 1000 years.
• Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13th movies is nearly impossible to stop, and it's always temporary.
  • By the time he was finally Killed Off for Real in the fourth film, The Final Chapter, by way of a pissed-off Tommy hacking his head and body to pieces with his machete, Jason had survived: drowning in the backstory, a machete to the shoulder in Part 2, and hanging and an axe to the head in Part III.
  • The sixth film Jason Lives made him explicitly supernatural by bringing him back as a Revenant Zombie, and after that, every attempt to kill him merely immobilized him. The eighth film, Jason Takes Manhattan, has him boarding a ship and then sinking it with him still aboard, then trudging through the ocean waters to follow the survivors to New York. There, he's finally stopped by getting dissolved in toxic waste, and even that merely de-ages him back to an adolescent boy.
  • Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday opens with the FBI, in full anticipation of this, going to town on him with heavy artillery and blasting him into Ludicrous Gibs. It doesn't put down his soul (which survives through Demonic Possession and Body Surfing), but it is sufficient to finally destroy his body.
  • Jason X adds a more heroic Implacable Man to the mix with Sgt. Brodski, who seems to repeatedly survive all sorts of damage on sheer force of will alone. As for Jason himself, KM-14 manages to destroy him just like the FBI did in Jason Goes to Hell (i.e. with More Dakka), but since this is the future, the technology exists to rebuild him, and when Jason's body lands on the medical station's bed, he gets revived as the even deadlier Cyborg "Uber-Jason". The ending implies that not even blowing up the spaceship with him aboard and then having him burn up in the atmosphere of Earth II managed to kill him, as we see a pair of teenagers camping on a very familiar-looking lake watch a shooting star and decide to go check out where it landed.
  • In Freddy vs. Jason, Jason proves how implacable he is even during a fight in the dream world. Despite being near-omnipotent in the dream world, Freddy finds himself unable to kill Jason, before discovering his hydrophobia.
  • Jason remains true to form in the remake, surviving a machete to the chest and his head getting shoved into a woodchipper to come back at the end for one last scare.
• The Neo-Vipers from G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra are first shown walking calmly through massed assault rifle fire with all the rounds bouncing harmlessly off. While they are later shown to be susceptible to explosives or a Moe Greene Special, it does make them look intimidating.
• Godzilla, King Kong, and other similar giant animal monsters. Guns? Tanks? Fighter jets? Nuclear weapons? Shrug. You need a seriously plot-specific item to take out one of these guys. Well, Kong was killed pretty easily, by beauty.
• Michael Myers in the Halloween series.
  • In the first film, he gets his throat slashed, stabbed in the eye with a coat hanger, stabbed in the gut, shot six times, and falls out a second-story window, and still gets right back up.
  • The second film has him take five gunshots to the chest, two more to the eyes which merely impair his vision instead of blowing off his head, and he's at the center of an explosion which, while rendering him unconscious, doesn't kill him.
  • The fourth film has him at the center of an ambulance crash down a hill, take a shotgun, get run over by a truck, then absorb a barrage of gunfire which knocks him down a mine shaft. As evidenced by the fifth film, none of this kills him.
  • The sixth film made his invincibility explicitly supernatural. Apparently, he was cursed by a Celtic pagan cult to murder each and every member of his family, and nothing will stop him.
  • Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later was a partial reboot that removed from continuity the last three films and the supernatural explanation for his invincibility in an attempt to get the series back to its roots, though he's still extraordinarily tough. After getting an axe in the chest, he nonchalantly rips the weapon out and keeps going.
  • The only person who ever beat Michael in a hand-to-hand fight, without guns, cars, tranquilizer darts, explosions, or outside interference was Busta Rhymes' character Freddie in Halloween: Resurrection — and not coincidentally, most fans try to pretend that that film never happened. Even then, in their first fight, Freddie wraps a cable around Michael's neck and knocks him out a window, but Michael does not die and simply cuts himself down. In their second fight, when Freddie defeats him by jamming a live wire into his crotch, then leaves him to die in a burning building, he still survives.
  • Halloween (2018): This reboot also does away with the supernatural explanation and Michael is in his sixties, making him slightly weaker, but he is still implacable. He shrugs off getting hit in the face with a crowbar twice, doesn't slow down after getting shot in the shoulder, and wakes up after getting hit with a car. In the final battle with the Strode family, he gets two of his fingers shot off, is shot in the jaw, and is knocked down a flight of stairs, but he still gets up. He is stabbed in the hand twice, then is only temporarly defeated when he is locked in a panic room and then the whole house is set on fire.
  • Halloween Kills: Michael escapes the burning house and continues his rampage. He shrugs off Lindsey hitting him in the face twice with a sack full of bricks, Allyson knifing him several times in the gut, and Karen stabbing him in the back with a pitchfork and then stomping on his head. He is then lured to a angry mob which gives him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown and shoots him several times, but then he gets up and slaughters them all.
  • Halloween Ends:
    • Michael was weakened by all his past injuries, enough that a kid named Corey Cunningham is able to steal his mask and go on a killing spree while pretending to be him, but Michael follows him and gets his revenge brutally. In his final battle, Laurie pins his hands to a kitchen counter with knives and stabs him in the chest before pinning his legs with a refrigerator, stabbing him in the side, and slitting his throat. He still gets a hand free to strangle her. He finally dies when Allyson saves Laurie by breaking his arm and then they slit his wrist, and he bleeds out. Not taking any chances, they hurl his body into an industrial shredder to make sure he doesn't rise again.
    • Corey is also one. He falls off a building and immediately sits up the same way Michael does. He gets shot in the chest twice and falls down a flight of stairs, but sits up again, before deciding to stab himself in the throat to frame Laurie for his murder. He still doesn't die, and when Michael shows up, he grabs his arm before Michael finally kills him by breaking his neck.
• The Golden Army of Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Even after getting torn apart, they rebuild themselves every time from near-nothing, and they're otherwise a horde of Perpetual Motion Monsters; the only way to give them pause is to challenge their controller, which engages a stand-down protocol until the control crown's ownership is resolved.
• The Hellcop from Highway to Hell will not stop until his objective is complete, whether kidnapping Rachel or killing Charlie.
• Mal from Inception is a character that suddenly invades dream worlds and attempts to assassinate the dreamer. In a sense she's even worse than her counterpart Agent Smith in The Matrix movies in that she doesn't need to possess anyone, she just appears and wreaks havoc. What's really scary is that even in constructed dream worlds with trained dream operators, she's nearly impossible to stop.
• Innerspace: Mr. Igoe will pursue you to get those chips, even if it means shrinking himself down, and entering your body just to obtain them, and who is only defeated by an ocean of stomach acid.
• The titular It in It Follows. A vaguely humanoid thing that hunts down and kills whoever is cursed with it, before moving on to the second most recent cursed person, then the next, then the next, and so on. It takes the form of random people, and nothing can kill it or permanently disable it. More a force of nature than a thinking creature (though It Can Think when it needs to), it never moves at a pace faster than a slow walk, and no matter how far the person it's chasing runs, they'll always get tired eventually.
• James Bond:
  • Jaws from The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker lives through the two movies by sheer force of not stopping ever.
  • For that matter, Bond himself. Especially in the Daniel Craig films he gets some truly epic chase scenes.
  • Nearly every Bond movie has had a Dragon who is much tougher and better in a fight than Bond that he only beats through quick thinking. And returns to kill Bond after the villain's defeat.
• Jeepers Creepers features The Creeper who, as Jezelle puts it in the first film, stops at nothing to hunt down and feed on those it likes the scent of.
• This is the reason that John Wick is The Dreaded among those who know his name (practically everyone in the criminal underworld). He's normally a Reluctant Warrior, but press his buttons enough and nothing stops him from killing the one that's responsible...even if it means gunning down a lot of mooks along the way. It's for this reason that even Jimmy, the cop that's pretty civil with him, knows not to get in his way as soon as he sees corpses in his house.
  Viggo Tarasov: [to his son Iosef] John is a man of focus. Commitment. Sheer will. Things you know very little about.
• The Hunter Van Pelt from Jumanji, once summoned from the eponymous board game, stopped at nothing in hunting Alan down. While all of the other board events summoned dangerous creatures and weather phenomena, each of those passed and didn't actively pursue the cast as Van Pelt did. Even upon running out of ammo for his oversized hunting rifle and finding out that it wasn't possible for him to acquire more (as it had long since fallen out of production), he simply purchased new, more modern armaments with which to threaten his quarry.
• The Indominus rex in Jurassic World. The only weapon that even fazes Indominus is a near-direct hit from an antitank weapon. It takes a Tyrannosaurus rex, a Velociraptor, and a Mosasaurus ganging up on her to take her down.
• In Kingsman: The Secret Service, Harry Hart becomes this at the church congregation after being driven to mindless rage by Valentine's Hate Plague, methodically killing dozens and ignoring several gunshot and stab wounds.
• The Beast from the film Kung Fu Hustle. Takes being punched through walls and flattened into the ground and still keeps going.
• Dorian Gray, as portrayed in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In an early scene in the movie, he's seen getting riddled with bullets, which only succeeds in destroying his suit and making him mildly annoyed.
  Terrified Mook: What are you!?
  Dorian: I'm complicated.
• Mobius Lockhardt, the demonic ghost in Left for Dead. Once he starts pursuing you, nothing will stop him. He is shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, and impaled; all without slowing him down. His only limitations are that he cannot pass beyond the limits of the graves, or enter the church.
• The Ringwraiths from The Lord of the Rings (see also Literature).
  Aragorn: They are the Nazgûl, Ringwraiths, neither living nor dead. At all times they feel the presence of the Ring, drawn to the power of the One. They will never stop hunting you.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Steve Rogers. His whole thing is that he just will never, ever give up - he even temporarily restrains a helicopter mid-take off. In his own words: "I can do this all day."
  • The Winter Soldier will just mow through everything and everyone in his path. When his programming is reactivated in Civil War, unarmed, he goes through Tony Stark (armed only with a small gauntlet), Black Widow, Black Panther, among others.
  • Ikaris in Eternals. In the climax, every single one of the living Eternals bar Kingo, who's team Switzerland, Sprite, who's team Ikaris, and Sersi, who's busy, has a go at him, alone and together, and he bulldozes his way through all of them. Druig, the mind-controller? Hurled into the bedrock, with a laser blast to finish him (though he just about survives). Thena, the best warrior, who slices a Deviant with the powers of two Eternals? Casual Barehanded Blade Block and a very one-sided fight. Makkari, a speedster fast enough to criss-cross the entire planet in a couple of minutes, tops, who's also enraged by the aparent murder of Druig? Does her level best to beat him to death at Super Speed, dragging his face through rock walls at mach speeds to start... and gets beaten to a pulp the moment Ikaris lays his hands on her. Phastos, who builds all the super-tech, including stuff immune to Ikaris' eye-beams? Tries to restrain Ikaris, succeeds for a short while while pummelling him, before Ikaris lets out a roar of rage and shrugs the restraints off so hard an actual shockwave sends Phastos flying. None of them even bruise him. The only person who stops Ikaris is Sersi, because he can't bear to hurt her. You don't stop Ikaris. If you are lucky, you slow him down and perhaps you annoy him. If you are very lucky, perhaps you survive him.
  • Wanda Maximoff once she becomes the Scarlet Witch. In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness she bulldozes literally everyone who tries to stop her, including a version of herself from another universe.
• Agent Smith (and the other Agents) in The Matrix. Not only are Agents ridiculously powerful and ridiculously hard to kill, but if you do manage to kill one, all the Agent needs to do is find another human to possess in order to continue trying to take you down. There's a reason that standard Resistance procedure before Neo came along was to "run your ass off" when an Agent showed up.
• The killer in Midnight Movie gets shot several times. Justified in that he's just a character from a film brought to life.
• Imhotep from The Mummy (1999). Immortal, the only way to actually stop him is to magic him back to mortality and then kill him.
• Kharis the mummy from The Mummy's Hand, The Mummy's Tomb, The Mummy's Ghost, and The Mummy's Curse, a series of mummy films Universal made in the 1940s that were vaguely Inspired by… the original 1932 The Mummy (1932). He's immortal, Immune to Bullets, and generally unstoppable, unless he's expose to flames. He'd be a terrifying villain if he was capable of moving at any pace other than a slow walk.
• Robert Mitchum's character in The Night of the Hunter. "Don't he never sleep?"
• Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men definitely counts, although the film handles it more realistically than most. The next-to-final scene proves Anton is definitely killable — he's just single-minded, completely unfettered by any conventional morality, and very good at his job. Then again his car crash at the end shows that he is not completely invincible, and that pure luck might also play a part in keeping him alive.
• The Tall Man from the Phantasm films. He can make his victims hallucinate that they killed him only to come back to torment them. He's telekinetic and super-strong, so it doesn't matter if someone's close to him or not, he can still get them and cause their weapons to misfire or remove them from their grasp. If parts are cut off of him, those parts will each become miniature monsters that will make the attacker's life hell. If frozen, his head will release an unstoppable golden sentinel sphere. Finally, if someone somehow manages to burn him with fire, acid or blow him up... an identical Tall Man steps out of a dimensional doorway and picks up the corpse of the previous Tall Man, hurls it back through the portal, and then takes over immediately where the previous one left off. And he is a Reality Warper who can undo his own defeats, and has an ever-growing legion of the undead and alien technology at his command.
• The titular Pumpkinhead is this, as it's a monster conjured forth by the rage and grief of the one that summons it, and will stop at nothing to brutally kill the targets of its conjurer's ire. The only means to stop it prior to completing its task is to kill the one that summoned it.
• The film The Punisher (2004) as well as the game, features The Russian who seems to be almost completely impervious to any kind of pain imaginable (in the game he is even immune to bullets even though he doesn't have any super powers). He is based on the Russian character from the original comics, who is a lot more talkative, but just as supremely strong and relentless; he was only defeated when the Punisher suffocated him under his obese neighbor and then cut off his head, but he still came back after having his head reattached and his skeleton augmented with powerful metal alloys (he also received a pair of breasts due to hormone injections, which he took in stride by actually dressing up like a woman on occasions).
• The killer in The Redwood Massacre takes a shotgun blast to the neck at one point and falls to the ground. A couple scenes later, he gets right back up.
• The Repo Men in Repo! The Genetic Opera are hired on the basis of their having this trait, though usually it's displayed in more... subtle ways before they get the job (for example, Nathan's relentless search for Marni's cure.)
• The titular Killer Robot of R.O.T.O.R. will not stop until it executes its suspect.
• Probably the least potent film distillation: Ro-Man, the title character of B-Movie Robot Monster. All of our weapons have failed to kill it, and it's wiped out all of humanity, save about seven people. Under some circumstances, such feats would be really scary. However, since Ro-Man is a gorilla in a space helmet, this isn't one of those circumstances.
• The Syfy Channel Original Movie Scarecrow has the title entity. It literally can't be killed, period. Shooting it, burning it, even being shredded into tiny bits do nothing but slow it down. It will always regenerate and keep coming. The only way it can be defeated is to imprison it somehow. And even if you can do that, the moment it gets loose, it'll resume it's hunt as if nothing happened.
• Drug usage seems able to confer apparent-Implacability. A lesser kind of Implacable Man appears in Scarface (1983): Tony Montana snorts cocaine and then takes on an army of assailants. Despite being shot numerous times with automatic weapons, he doesn't flinch and kills every one of his would-be assassins. Only a double-barrel shotgun blast delivered from behind at point-blank range is enough to finally take Tony down.
• Scream, as part of its Deconstructive Parody of Slasher Movie tropes, makes a point to avert this with Ghostface. The series' killers are not invincible, but only about as dexterious as a normal human being, and given that they're wearing a mask that obscures their vision, they are constantly tripped up by the heroes. When they do prove to be Immune to Bullets, it's because they're wearing a Bulletproof Vest, and a headshot will still finish the job.
• The Black Brother in Shrooms. Absolutely nothing slows him down, and he will vanish from one spot to reappear at another, often just behind his victim. But, then again, he's not real.
• Marv from Sin City. He's so tough he taunted his own executioners after they gave him his first round on the electric chair. He defeated the psychopathic Kevin by handcuffing them together and taking everything Kevin could dish out until he could get one good punch in. Throughout the film, he takes an almost superhuman amount of punishment without flinching.
• The Headless Horseman from Sleepy Hollow cannot be stopped by any means as he is controlled by the one who owns his skull. The only way to stop him is to return it to him. In fact, this is lampshaded late in the movie.
  Young Masbath: [after an explosion] Is he...?
  Ichabod: Dead? That's the problem... he was already dead to begin with...
• Another bulletproof Russian (Uzbekistani) appears in the movie Snatch., and hilarity ensues. Even when not dodging bullets, he manages to survive being hit directly by a car travelling at high speed with no real injury, then taking almost a full magazine from a desert eagle at the hands of Bullet-Tooth Tony, all while yelling "fuck you!" with each bullet that Tony puts in him. It's heavily implied by his tenacity that he would have survived if the frustrated Tony hadn't used his last bullet for a well-aimed headshot.
  Bullet-Tooth Tony: [interrogating a mook] Boris the Blade? As in... Boris the Bullet-Dodger?
  Avi: Why do they call him the Bullet-Dodger?
  Bullet-Tooth Tony: ...because he dodges bullets, Avi.
• Star Trek Into Darkness has John Harrison take half a dozen of Kirk's best haymakers to the face without so much as a bruise. In the end, a mildly-annoyed Harrison resorts to snark. Harrison also shrugs off crashlanding a starship into parts of San Francisco and is still conscious after being stunned about six times in succession with a phaser. He even successfully weathers out a Vulcan nerve pinch!
• Star Wars:
  • Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens after taking a bowblast to the gut is able to keep moving. He is able to intercept Finn and Rey and fight them both, albeit separately. Finn gets a hit in with a lightsaber but Ren is able to take him out. When Rey takes up the saber Ren keeps her on the run for most of the fight. Even when the fight shifts in her favor and she gets a couple of hits in he still keeps going. Rey has to destroy his lightsaber and give him another wound for him to finally go down. Even then he appears to want to get up and keep fighting.
  • Darth Vader also easily fits into this. IE: What he did to those poor folks on the Blockade Runner in Rogue One.
  • General Grievous is shown to be capable of tearing through regular troops with even greater ease than Vader in The Clone Wars, but his greatest show of implacability comes in his sole film appearance, Revenge of the Sith. There he engages Obi-Wan in a decently even minute-long lightsaber duel before the latter gets the upper hand. After this, he was two of his arms cut off, is Force-Pushed sixty feet vertically and into a metal ceiling hard enough to leave a crater, falls sixty feet to hit the hard concrete floor, gets hit by stray blaster fire, tumbles out of his vehicle and onto a landing pad after it catastrophically crashes, gets whacked in the face by an electrostaff, has said electrostaff stabbed into his chest, and has his chest plate ripped open by Obi-Wan's Force-enhanced strength. Even after all of this, he still smacks around Obi-Wan and is about to deliver the killing blow before his opponent quickly grabs a blaster and shoots him directly in his exposed heart. His final action is to make last attempt to inch closer to finish Obi-Wan off immediately after this, prompting Obi-Wan to fire several more shots at his vulnerable organs, finally killing him for good.
• For a non-superpowered or supernatural slasher the titular villain from The Stepfather films commonly survives things no normal man possibly could — in the first movie alone he gets shot several times and knifed in the chest, getting only a small scar from the encounter. It takes being chewed up and liquefied in a woodchipper in the third film to finally kill him.
• Perhaps the most potent distillation: the title character of the Terminator series is a killing machine, as discussed in the page quote.
  • The key example occurs near the end of The Terminator, where Kyle Reese manages to explode the fuel tanker truck that the Terminator is driving to try to destroy it. Immediately afterward, Kyle and Sarah Connor embrace with romantic music playing as they feel the crisis is over. However, the music abruptly changes back to ominous as the Terminator, now stripped to its endoskeleton frame, arises from the flames to shock both the heroes and the audience that the killer robot is still coming. Even after Kyle blows its legs off, the damn thing keeps crawling after Sarah with murderous intent, and as it's being crushed in a hydraulic press, it claws at her with its metallic skeletal hand to the very last.
  • Taken to further extremes in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, where the T-1000 gets frozen by liquid nitrogen and breaks into a million pieces...and still survives to continue pursuing the heroes^note in the special edition, however, it sustained some damage to its shapeshifting ability due to getting frozen; he also manages to continue running at the same speed as a reversing car while being shot repeatedly with a pistol. Moreso with Sarah Connor's attack on Dyson's home, where she all but becomes a Terminator herself and is halfway to shooting a defenseless, wounded man dead in front of his wife and family.
  • Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines takes the trope even further with the T-X, which treats giant electromagnets, rocket launchers and a beating from Arnold Schwarzenegger with nothing more than mild annoyance. When the T-850 hits her with a military helicopter, crushing her underneath it and reducing her to a legless torso, she keeps going in true Terminator fashion. His solution? Shove his own power source in her mouth and blow it up, complete with a Pre-Mortem One-Liner.
  • Terminator Salvation has the original T-800 chasing relentlessly after John Connor through the very factory that is building more of them. It is impervious to any kind of damage Connor throws at it even after having molten steel poured onto it, with said steel cooling off and being broken out of to continue the chase. The Harvester also counts.
• Universal Soldier: The Return: Romeo is ordered by S.E.T.H. to capture Deveraux, since only he possesses the code that can avoid the automatic resetting of S.E.T.H.'s memory. Romeo proceeds to get fired at, slammed through walls, set on fire, and run over by a truck, but nothing seems able to stop him permanently. Even when Luc managed to destroy S.E.T.H. and a majority of Uni Sols, Romeo still proved to be impossible to destroy as he managed to pummel down Luc without breaking a sweat. It eventually took the explosion of an entire building to finally bring Romeo down.
  Erin: You just flattened him!
  Deveraux: That's only gonna slow him down!
• Subverted in V for Vendetta: title character V takes a massive barrage of bullets with a comparatively very minimal reaction, has a teensy bit o' trouble breathing just afterward (after all the bad guys are completely out of bullets)... and then proceeds to completely annihilate everyone and everything, until he gets the Big Bad alone, hoists him up in the air and snaps his neck with one twitch. The subversion part comes when he opens his cloak to reveal the medieval breastplate that only "sort of" protected him. Cue long-winded Heroic Sacrifice.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • Sebastian Shaw in X-Men: First Class, most notably in the scene where he invades a CIA base to try to recruit the mutants being housed there. Getting repeatedly hit by volleys of machine gun fire doesn't even muss up his suit. He No Sells an energy blast that's later shown slicing through the walls of a nuclear fallout shelter like butter. The only thing they can hit him with that even slows him down is a bazooka, and then only because it takes him a couple of seconds to absorb the blast.
  • Ichirō Yashida from The Wolverine, in his Silver Samurai armor.
• The Killer Robot from Zathura continuously attempts to kill Walter all while getting himself stuck in a fireplace, blasting himself out of the Budwings' floating house, damaging himself upon reentry into the basement, and finally repairing himself, and once Walter successfully reprograms him, nothing stops the Killer Robot from relentlessly slaughtering the encroaching Zorgons.
• The title creature from Zeiram.

Literature

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

Live-Action TV

• Game of Thrones:
  • Due in no small part to his size, it takes quite a bit of damage from Oberyn before Gregor finally goes down, and even then, he's strong enough to turn the tables and kill Oberyn before he collapses. During his final fight with The Hound in Season 8, he takes part of the roof collapsing on him, getting impaled, and several stabs with a knife, including one through the eye. He has to be tackled out a window into an inferno to be killed.
  • Despite not giving the first toss about defending himself and subsequently being struck repeatedly by blows during the attack on Yara's fleet, Euron proves borderline unstoppable, not even slowing his pace an inch.
• The Kull Warriors of Anubis and The Replicators from Stargate SG-1. Anubis himself is a border-line example: he has the survive-anything-you-can-throw-at-him part, but since he is a Galactic Conqueror he doesn't just show up trying to gut the heroes but sends armies after them instead. Sadly, they have this trait.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The Mayor.
  • Caleb. After Glory, he's the most physically powerful villain the gang faces.
  • Glory will stop at nothing to get the Key. In her very first appearance, she brings down an entire building on top of her while having a hissy fit, and even that doesn't slow her down for long.
  • Adam, up until the spell the Slayettes use on Buffy... then Buffy turns into this.
  • Willow from during her evil magic moments.
  • Buffy did a lot of these. Subverted with the Judge. All the mystical texts declare that "no weapon forged" can stop him. However, as Xander realizes, those texts predate many modern weapons. Therefore Buffy takes out the Judge with a rocket launcher.
• Angel:
  • The Beast from season 4 couldn't walk very fast due to huge posture and massive, cloven feet. It pursued its intended targets without haste but relentlessly. Bullets bounced off of it, swords and axes broke on its skin, even a pair of hand grenades blowing up in his face failed to slow it down. Angel did try to drive a stake through its one possible weak spot, being the eye, but quickly found his strength was no match for the Beast's, who promptly caught the stake and stopped him using it.
  • Marcus Hamilton (aka Jayne Cob, aka John Casey), at least until he revealed his weakness to Angel.
• Many of Doctor Who's aliens chose to invade Earth during the late 20th century, and inevitably the army would find that bullets/bombs/missiles/tanks barely scratched the surface.
  • In the 26th-season serial Battlefield, the Brigadier shows the Doctor gold bullets for dealing with Cybermen, Teflon non-stick bullets that "go right through a Dalek" and muses that, just once, it would be nice to encounter an alien menace that wasn't Immune to Bullets.
  • The Doctor himself would seem to be a good candidate for this title. He may not be physically invulnerable, but Regeneration combined with his legendary stubbornness means that he Will. Not. Stop. The basic arithmetic of Doctor Who is this: Five million Cybermen < Four Daleks < One Doctor. This is illustrated in two episodes of Series 9 in 2015: in "Face the Raven", the Doctor threatens to "rain hell" upon the immortal Ashildr "until the end of time" if she cannot stop his companion, Clara, from dying as a result of her gambit (which wasn't good, but wasn't intended to endanger Clara.) Clara literally spends the rest of her life talking him down from this. After she dies, the Doctor is transported to a bespoke torture chamber where he issues a Badass Boast to become this towards the true mastermind behind the plot that led to the death of Clara, while himself being pursued by an implacable man ... for billions of years.
    The Doctor: "If you think because she is dead, I am weak, you understand very little. If you had any part in killing her, and you are not afraid, then you understand nothing at all. So for your sake, understand this — I am the Doctor, and I'm coming to find you. And I will never, ever stop."
• The Huntsman of The 10th Kingdom. Not only does he get caught in one of his own traps, in a world where presumably medicine is at a medieval level and magic may not be able to combat infections, he gets hit over the head (twice!), once by an extremely heavy iron torch swung with incredible force which should have smashed his skull or at least given him a concussion. And yet he still keeps waking up and coming after the heroes. His analysis? "I move slowly...but I always get what I want. Nothing escapes...the Huntsman." It finally takes a Hoist by His Own Petard moment to bring him to his Karmic Death.
• The Borg, from Star Trek: The Next Generation. You defeat one or two of them, and the rest are able to adapt to whatever you used against the first ones. We did see a submachine gun kill two Borg drones, however they probably would've adapted their shields afterwards to deflect bullets too. Their ships are far more impressive, being far beyond the combat capabilities of the series' protagonists. On top of that, putting up any kind of defense that harms them will make them interested enough to dissect and assimilate everything about their "victim". They will then pursue this goal with a Terminator-like doggedness.
  Q: They will follow this ship until you exhaust your fuel. They will wear down your defenses. Then you will be theirs.
  Q: You can't outrun them. You can't destroy them. If you damage them, the essence of what they are, remains. They regenerate and keep coming. Eventually you will weaken. Your reserves will be gone. They are relentless!
• Star Trek: The Original Series The Gorn from the episode "Arena" is pretty implacable for most of the episode, even shrugging off a small avalanche caused by Kirk. Kirk is unable to harm the Gorn or stop its attempts to kill him (sluggish as they are) until he improvises a primitive cannon.
• Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles:
  • The T-888 Terminator called "Cromartie": In the first episode he was shot multiple times, run over by a car, had a live wire shoved into his neck, is blown up as the same car that ran him over exploded and ripped in half by a terminator-destroying gun. He reactivates himself eight years later, dresses up like a post-apocalypse survivor (complete with gas mask), gets its head back, steals medical supplies, gets a scientist to help him regrow his skin, then takes the guise of an FBI agent, working to find Sarah Connor from the inside. The first season finale has him take out a SWAT team raiding his apartment(!), but spares the life of an FBI agent who is also tracking the Connor family.
  • In a Season 2 episode, a Terminator is sent back to kill the governor of California during a specific time. He is accidentally sent back to the 1920s and kills the architect who designed the building that the speech was held in. The terminator proceeds to start his own architecture firm, go to great lengths to acquire the land, and construct the building himself just so he can pull off the termination as he was ordered to do.
  • Also, in the second season opening, Cameron goes berserk and becomes an Implacable Woman as she pursues Connors, trying to kill them.
• Claire from Heroes became this. Her Healing Factor is a big help.
• Divine Assassin Kai from Lexx. Chop him to bits, and he'll reassemble himself — but he'll probably finish killing you first. Energy Weapons are completely useless, even when they're mighty enough to destroy whole planets. On one occasion, he singlehandedly fought his way through 50,000 heavily armed soldiers, killing 2,807 of them, in order to assassinate a single man whom they were guarding.
• Takeshi Asakura/Kamen Rider Ouja can't be stopped by being nearly burnt alive or acid eating at his face. Shooting squad had to put him down and that was only after he completely lost it.
• Rook from Kamen Rider Kiva is a truly frightening Mighty Glacier whose incredible toughness and intimidating appearance and reputation allow him to play the role of Implacable Man for about a third of the series. His reputation was such that when an Alternate Universe version was defeated handily by Kamen Rider Decade, fans cried foul.
• Machine Chaser/Chase of Kamen Rider Drive combines this with ridiculous strength, Stealth Hi/Bye and savviness into truly terrific foe regardless what side he is on.
• One episode of Hustle had an implacable bounty hunter (or "tracer") named Pinky Byrne.
• Red Dwarf.
  • Rimmer suggests that tax collectors are like this, and that even being three million light years from Earth in a universe where the number of surviving humans is in single figures doesn't guarantee safety from them.
  • Rimmer himself becomes one of these after being upgraded to Hard Light. This is well balanced though, because his light bee is still vulnerable in extreme situations (like potentially being sucked out into space), and he is also a complete coward with a low tolerance for pain.
  • Played straight with Hudzen 10, Kryten's replacement. What defeats him in the end is a Logic Bomb.
• Spartacus: Blood and Sand:
  • Theokoles. Besides his tremendous size and strength, he takes incredible damage without stopping. He allows Crixus to impale him so he can grab his wrist and trap him. His neck is so thick that he can't be decapitated in one strike.
  • The Egyptian is incredibly huge and strong, and he does not stop when he is shot with several arrows. In his final fight, he keeps going when he is slashed across the stomach and then the wound is punched.
• Duncan Macleod on Highlander tended to get this way when pursuing Immortals who had murdered innocents.
  "Run, little boy. I will find you."
• In the Malcolm in the Middle episode "Halloween", Reese and Dewey accidentally egg an old man who took too long to show up to the door. He spends the rest of the episode chasing them down with his walker, until he catches them in a trap. He then proceeds to throw eggs at them while they can't escape.
• Season 3 of Stranger Things gives us Grigori, a very Terminator-esque implacable killer relentlessly pursuing the heroes.
• The seventh season of The Vampire Diaries introduces Rayna Cruz, an infamous vampire hunter who will stalk her victims to the ends of the earth so she can send them to a Fate Worse than Death. She is also immortal, so killing her will just slow her down. It eventually turns into a Deconstruction. Aside from the unpleasantness of having to die over and over again it is revealed that she is driven by a constant magic-induced urge to slay vampires, even though she would rather just live a normal life.
• Grimm: Siegbarste, the typical ogres of Wesen society. Due to their tendencies to take grudges to the grave (typically the other person's grave) and being nearly impossible to kill due to their incredibly dense bones and congenital analgesia, Siegbarste number among the most dangerous Wesen and have to be killed with extreme amounts of force or rare poison that will cause their bones to shatter. Not even the typical Wesen Oh, Crap! upon seeing a Grimm applies to them.

Music

• Parodied in the Ray Stevens song "Erik The Awful". No matter how far the peasants run, Erik is on their heels the second they stop for a breath.

Podcasts

• The Silent One in Dark Dice constantly follows the party undetectably, cannot be killed, and attacks them every time they attempt to rest.

Pro Wrestling

• When Kane first debuted, he was implacable. He no-sold everything, and his first two matches were one-sided squashes against Mankind and Vader. It took The Undertaker three tombstone piledrivers to beat him, and he had to do a leg hook pinfall instead of his usual pose pinfall.
• Many "monster" heels probably count; no-selling and squashing their way to victory, up until the point a top-level face eventually defeats them.
• The Undertaker himself tended to be one such implacable man, regardless of his alignment, and defeating him tended to be treated as Defeating the Undefeatable. He best exemplified this trait during WrestleMania and WrestleMania season, when his streak was on the line. Ending said streak was said to be the holy grail, an accomplishment greater than winning a world championship, and a one-way ticket to the Hall of Fame. However, Undertaker seemed to be almost divinely empowered on Wrestlemania, shrugging off finishers, weapon shots, and anything that would in any other situation be a match ender.^note This event extended to a WWE videogame which had a special 'Break The Streak' match, where you fight a special powered up Undertaker who is explicitly an SNK Boss. Perhaps the greatest example would be Wrestlemania 28, where he ate a Shawn Michaels Superkick and then IMMEDIATELY was hit by a Triple H Pedigree. He kicked out, and it wasn't even the last spot in the match.^note Ultimately, the Streak WOULD end at Wrestlemania 30, but it still took the breaker, Brock Lesnar, three F-5 finishing moves to do it.
• Abyss gets cast in this role quite often. For a long time TNA put him in matches where he would take bumps on thumbtacks, barbed wire, broken glass, etc. and he would just keep coming.
• At the 2016 Death Before Dishonor Christopher Daniels kicked Michael Elgin in the gut while he was holding Frankie Kazarian in a stalling vertical suplex. This did make Elgin bend over, but he didn't let go of Kazarian and stood right back up with him. Daniels then manually pulled Kazarian down but Elgin ended up pulling both of them to finally complete the suplex.

Puppet Shows

• In Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, this is the basic super-power possessed by any Mysteron clone. Emphasized a little more in the original series, where their implacability was due to being Nigh-Invulnerable, but even the remake version count, as they're implacable in the sense that if you kill them, they come right back to life and come after you again. Fortunately, the main character is a free-willed Mysteron clone, so he too never stops, no matter what is done to him.
  "Captain Scarlet was killed, but is expected to make a full recovery."

Roleplay

• Ruby Quest: You can break his knee with a crowbar. You can have him impaled through the chest with a trap that is explicitly stated to be lethal. You can blow him up with a bomb that collapses several rooms. No matter what you do, Ace won't stop coming to get you...

Tabletop Games

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • A race of Implacable Men: the robotic Necrons, who can stand back up after anything — which in the Warhammer 40,000 universe starts at being riddled with lasers capable of blowing limbs off, crushed by artillery rounds the size of houses and having your head bitten off by daemonically possessed super-soldiers. Even after getting dismembered horribly, or getting turned to slag, some Necrons will get back up, and some specialist wargear means they just. Won't. DIE! The special rule for this is called: We'll Be Back.
  • As an organization, the Imperial Guard largely fits this trope. Their doctrine combines a willingness to spend human lives like ammunition with a fundamental religious devotion to utterly, completely crushing their enemies in the name of the God-Emperor of Man in spite of any losses to create this titanic, unstoppable juggernaut of raw manpower and machinery that absorbs casualties and hammers its opponents with sheer, overwhelming force until they break.
  • Commissar Yarrik is a Badass Normal example of this. He lost his arm fighting against an Ork warboss, but still managed to kill him, tear off his power claw and hold it triumphantly in front of the Ork army, causing them to flee in panic. Only then did he pass out. Later he also got his eye shot out and replaced with a bionic implant when his command tank exploded. He's dedicated his life to hunting down the Ork warlord Ghazkull Thraka and seems to have no intention of stopping despite being an old man by now. He even has a special rule similar to the Necrons "We'll Be Back", where on 3+ he simply refuses to die and stands back up with one wound. It's hinted that the Orks have seen him crush their armies so many times that they've started to view him as unkillable, and since Orks run on Clap Your Hands If You Believe, their belief is making him unkillable. Notably, Games Workshop always gives his models a slight greenish tinge in their official painting.
  • Second edition 40k had different rules for armor saves, with base armor and save modifiers. This means that the Terminator armor, at present only failing a save on a 1 on a d6 (except for armor-ignoring guns and melee weapons), used to roll two dice and fail only on snake-eyes. Even if hit by the biggest weapons in the game, they would be unscathed on rolling 9+ on two dice. Abaddon the Despoiler ramped this up into Unwinnable by Design territory by the fact that he saved on a 2 on 2d6. Unless you had a meaty gun that imposed modifiers on the save roll, you would always save.
  • Space Marines in the WH40k universe are examples of this trope. Not only do they have redundant organs, they can go into a (controlled) coma to repair damage. Their blood clots instantly, and their armour dispenses painkillers and stimulant drugs as a backup. One example had a Marine keep fighting after getting his arm blown off and his molten armour fused to his side by an energy fire. This example is relatively mundane compared to some of the stuff a Space Marine can push through.
  • While they're not much harder to kill than regular Guardsmen (and even more expendable due to their masters), the Skitarii of the Adeptus Mechanicus are designed to pursue their enemies anywhere, across any terrain. Their legs are replaced with bionics so that they will not tire.
  • Chaos God Nurgle's servants typically fill this trope within the 40k 'verse. They are so riddled with plagues and blight that they're in too much pain to feel anything other pain, and pumped full of morbid vitality (to survive their diseases) that they can survive more than anything has right to. The combination makes for units that are incredibly hard to kill, whether it be plague cultists, Nurglite daemons, or the notorious Plague Marines. Most Nurglite forces employ a slow-and-steady combat doctrine with a certain emphasis on overwhelming the enemy by trading blows and simply outsurviving the enemy.
  • The Rubric Marines used by the Thousand Sons Legion are also this. Thanks to a spell cast on them, they are essentially possessed suits of power armour and are nigh invulnerable — you have to literally blow them apart to stop them.
  • Even the relatively flimsy Eldar become like this when the Avatar of Khaine is summoned. Each and every one of them is overtaken by a kind of psychotic bloodlust when they see him up and walking about.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • The Tomb Kings are a civilisation of undead humans, reanimated by their high ruler Settra to rebuild his kingdom after it was ruined by the sorcerer Nagash. Should anyone steal even a few coins from any of their tombs and temples, they will send relentless armies of skeletons and constructs to slay the thieves, no matter how far they could go. Settra himself even went as far north as Norsca to kill the very thieves who stole his crown, and never left until it and even the coins the Norscans plundered were taken from the Chaos-worshippers' bloodied hands.
• GURPS has an Advantage called "Supernatural Durability" which makes you immune to all shock, stun, & knockout. As long as you have positive health you are immune to crippling injuries and have full move. With negative HP you have half move and can be crippled. You can only be killed in two ways: by an attack which does 10 * your maximum HP, or by using an item you're weak against and reducing you below -5* HP. For comparison A normal human has half move and dodge below 1/3 of their health. Below 0 HP they must make a roll each turn or fall unconscious, and must make rolls to not die at -1* HP, -2* HP, -3* HP, -4* HP. At -5* HP you die immediately, no save.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The game has this built right in — sort of. In earlier editions, characters simply had hit points and died only when they reached 0. Characters could be hurt, but they generally weren't bothered by it unless an effect also had a condition attached to it. Later editions made it slightly more believable, as once you reached 0 or lower, you simply dropped unconscious, and if you were at below 0, you bled out until you reached -10, at which point death ensued, but included abilities that allowed a person to be a true implacable man, able to take full actions while at negative points, until they reached -10 and keeled over.
  • One particular class, the Frenzied Berserker, takes it a step further. They are capable of completely ignoring negative hit points, even below -10, while they are frenzying. They can easily hit double- or triple-digit negatives, and if a skilled (or lucky) healer manages to get enough spells off to return them to positive hit points before the end of the frenzy, they come out none the worse for wear. The only effects that can kill them in this state are the ones that don't deal hit point damage, like suffocation or instant-death spells. The cost for this ability is that they are required to continually attack, and if they run out of enemies they start chewing through allies...
    Although if you want him to be near unkillable, you need a necklace that makes it so magic that instantly kills you doesn't work, a stone that makes it so you don't need to breathe, and finally to double up on a magic ring that makes it so — should something kill you and you'd get a save against it — you can choose to delay it for one minute, nine times for one ring. Hopefully you don't accrue enough damage that your cleric can't heal you within 180 rounds.
  • Add on a Ring of Regeneration, and you'd have someone unkillable except by having the hand with the ring chopped off and incinerated or dissolved in acid after the above is done. (This Ring prevents death from anything except spells that directly cause death as long as it stays on your finger. While fire and acid damage cannot be regenerated, as long as you're still alive they will heal back at the base rate of 1 hp per day. Obviously, if you no longer have fingers, you can't keep wearing it...)
  • The Tarrasque: regeneration 40, magic-reflecting carapace, 840 hit points (this in a game where even the luckiest — as in, win the lottery several times — non-epic tank will have no more than 600, and then only for short bursts at a time), and immunities to everything under the sun. Not only that, but to kill it, you have to reduce it anywhere from negative 10 to negative 40 (depending on edition) hitpoints and subsequently cast wish or miracle — generally the most powerful non-epic spells in the game — to make him stay that way... for awhile. To top that, the Tarrasque can flat out not be killed in 4th edition D&D. Instead he can only be driven back to the center of the earth to slumber.
  • A revenant is the victim of a cruel, unjust demise who gets back up to seek revenge against whoever killed them. Not needing food, air, or sleep, it always knows the direction of and distance to its target (even if the two are on different planes of existence) and will pursue them nonstop. It regenerates damage, and even if its body is destroyed it will just enter another corpse after 24 hours and keep going. The only things that will end its pursuit are the target's death, it running out of time (about one year), or, in 5th Edition, casting a Wish spell to force the soul to move on while it's out of a body.
  • From the Elder Evils sourcebook is Zargon the Returner, an Eldritch Abomination that sucks up damage almost as well as the Tarrasque. Unlike the Tarrasque, though, even if you actually kill him he'll just grow back around his indestructible horn within a few days. The only way to keep him down for good is to destroy his horn, and good luck with that.
  • Inevitables are Terminator expies — extraplanar constructs that enforce universal law, combining the relentless single-mindedness of a machine with the intelligence to plan ahead and strategize. They never rest, give up or compromise, and even if a foe escapes them in the short term they will simply keep following them, never stopping, until — even if years down the line — they finally catch up and resume combat. Inevitables who need to cross oceans have been known to simply walk into the waves and cross the ocean floor on foot. On top of that, destroying one will only make the forges back on its home plane reassemble it, and send it back in with the exact same mission and whatever added knowledge the last one managed to provide. Fortunately, they usually don't seek to kill, only to enforce whatever law was broken, and will punish accordingly, usually by forcing compliance through magic or handing the culprit over to local authorities. Of course, if it's the kind that punishes grave dodgers, you're probably out of luck: it'll beat you to death right then and there.
  • The recently-released "Heroes of Shadow" supplement added in vampire as a class. You start with only two Healing Surges (normal characters range from 6 for a particularly Squishy Wizard to 15+ for The Big Guy), but when you bloody or kill a foe, you can suck their blood to gain an extra healing surge. If you end a fight with more healing surges than your base, the excess burn off and you're instantly at full health. Oh, also, you do not fall unconscious when at negative hit points, but you DO have to make death-saving-throws, and you CAN still die if reduced to negative half your health (which is instant death for anyone else.) That said, a fair GM will rightly have the last remaining enemies of a fight soiling themselves in terror as everything else on the battlefield is dead or dying, yet this one mutilated, bloody thing that has been tearing their comrades apart with bare claws and teeth is still coming at them.
  • As of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, specifically Xanathar's guide to everything, barbarians may choose to become Zealots. Their capstone ability allows them to keep fighting as normal even if they are reduced to 0 hitpoints whhile raging. And when they fail their death saves, they won't until they stop raging, which becomes indefinete once they get to level 14. The only way to kill a level 15 or higher zealot is to end their rage with a spell effect. While raging they are even immune to power word kill, but they're theoretically vulnerable to spells such as sleep. But even then, spells targeting them that only restore them to life can be cast without material components.
• In 7th Sea, there is the "Man of Will" advantage, rendering one immune to any mind-altering magic, immune to fear, immune to the effects of the Repartee system (ie, no one can Charm, Taunt or Intimidate you), and immune to the effects of being Crippled. Likewise, while you can't get a Hubris with it, it does give you a discount if you wish to purchase a Virtue. Needless to say, for a point based system, it is a very expensive advantage if a starting character wants it.
• In Deadlands: Reloaded and Deadlands: The Classic Collection, there is actually no known way to stop the Reckoners (though a later game, a side story to Hell On Earth, allowed you to fight them) and most of their servitors can only be killed in one, very specific way (eg: Jasper Stone, servitor of Death).
• New World of Darkness:
  • The "Slasher" supplement brings us the Mask. Built for murder and only murder, these mindless killing machines can take a pistol magazine to put down (if you're lucky; any attack that hits it from any source, from a mere pistol shot to high-caliber weapons and even supernatural attacks, will only do one point of damage), and never need to sleep or eat.
  • Prometheans. If these guys want something, they just WON'T. STOP. EVER. Sure, you can wound them and they will feel the pain. But they won't get knocked out. They will just keep walking towards you. If you take them down(say, with an artillery bombardment)? They WILL JUST COME BACK TO LIFE 24 hours later. Don't mess with the Created if you know what's good for you.
  • To a simultaneously lesser and greater degree, the Bound can soak a full health track of damage by spending plasm and, like Prometheans, aren't knocked out by anything short of a full track of the worst damage that can be dealt (though unlike Prometheans, they do still start to bleed out at the same point mortals do). They've got more natural resurrections than the Created do (albeit at a price).
  • The Arisen have them all beaten. They're as durable as Prometheans, but have an active Healing Factor that they can pump up by various means. And unlike Prometheans and the Bound, resurrection is their personal trick. They cannot be put down permanently, at least, not by any method mortals can possibly hope to access. Even if you try something utterly insane, like tossing one into a black hole or the heart of a sun, it won't do it — they can just be called into a new body back on Earth and start everything all over again.
    • And the Deceived actually manage to take this one step further. It is, technically, possible for an Arisen of any other Guild to die and stay dead. If every remnant of their sahu is destroyed, they can only be reincarnated by someone doing the rituals to bring them back, which requires at the very least some knowledge of their existence. The Deceived, on the other hand, will be reincarnated by Fate itself if they are completely destroyed and nobody calls them back within the requisite timespan. Even wiping out the human race and destroying Earth itself would just cause the Deceived to start reincarnating elsewhere in the cosmos.
  • Vampires can do this to an extent. Under the original rules, they downgrade shooting attacks to Bashing damage and they can take care of that effortlessly with their Healing Factor, so a vampire without even a dot in Resilience can wade through a firefight. After Blood & Smoke/2nd edition was released, they began fitting this trope much more effectively. Basically, unless it's a Bane (sunlight, fire, etc) or does Aggravated damage in the first place, vampires take only Bashing damage from everything. You can shoot a vampire full of holes, then beat on them until your fists are broken, and they'll just keep coming.
  • Werewolves can be added to the list starting with the second edition, though only when in Gaurou form. Why? Because that form now heals so fast you just cannot hope to injure it longer than a few seconds unless you inflict Aggravated damages (which can only be accomplished by either silver weapons, some rare high-level supernatural powers, or managing to inflict insane amounts of bashing or lethal damages in a single turn). Otherwise, you find yourself confronted with a constantly regenerating powerhouse who will do everything to tear you apart.
• Role Master had the Dark Reaver, a black, indestructible suit of armour possessed by a demon. Usually set up as a guardian of a treasure, it would pursue thieves by simply walking after them, grabbing the stolen items and walking back with them. Any attempts at stopping them tended to be futile, since it was also carrying an indestructible axe (and knew how to use it). "You guys can have the rest — I call dibs on the black armour."
• Exalted:
  • Zsofiska the Kite Flute, a demon that can be summoned to hunt down someone you want dead. Her movement speed? Always one foot per round faster than her target. Regardless of the target's movement speed. Also there is nowhere you can go that she can't follow. And demons are killing machines, even when fighting isn't their primary thing, so good luck fighting her off. And if you, upon summoning her, don't give her a target, she'll find someone to kill. Probably anyone who's standing close to you at any time. (So if you're an Omnicidal Maniac you may as well summon the demon and just walk around without giving her a specified target.)
  • With the correct Charms, Green Sun Princes don't need to sleep, can eat virtually anything (or subsist on murder), and can outrun virtually anything, while being able to take megadamage hits clean on the chin without slowing down. Abyssals can channel the relentless inevitability of death. Lunars can be the ultimate Super-Persistent Predator. Solars can follow you anywhere, overcome any concealment and open any lock. Dragon-Bloods aren't quite as powerful, but when they hunt you down they bring friends. Even Sidereals can get in on the fun with things like One Direction Invocation.
    • Lunars in particular get a charm that lets them do the same always-one-foot-faster thing that Zsofiska does. They're also the most durable Exalt type (and that's saying something) and have another charm that lets them ignore the fact that they should be dead for a while.
• Generally speaking, in any system that allows them to achieve sufficient levels of toughness and badassery, suitably motivated player characters can easily become just this.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! usually tends more towards the Invincible Minor Minion side of things for indestructible monsters, but it has a few cards which definitely qualify:
  • Beelze of the Diabolic Dragons, a powerful Synchro monster. His effect prevents him from being destroyed by battle or by card effects. This includes all Spell and Trap Cards which destroy enemy monsters, the field-clearing powers of the Egyptian Gods and other super-cards. If the opponent tries to overpower him by attacking with a stronger monster(good luck with that, his ATK and DEF are both 3000), he gains ATK power equal to the life point damage taken, meaning that he will quickly be able to destroy the enemy monster. There are a few ways of taking him down(getting control of him and using him for a Tribute Summon or using a card that removes him from the field without technically sending him to the Graveyard), but it requires some good draws and clever maneuvering to pull it off.
  • Vampire Lord is a much less delinquent example. He can be destroyed by Spells, Traps, and Card Effects, but he will Special Summon himself back to his controller's side of the field during the Standby Phase unless he is destroyed as a result of battle with a stronger monster, although his stats are much more manageable than Beelze's.
• Legend of the Five Rings:
  • The Hida Bushi. As heavy infantry specialists, they are almost always found wearing heavy armor, they learn to naturally absorb a certain amount of damage from enemy blows, and can even learn to shrug off certain status effects for a time. Gets particularly ridiculous if they take the Defender of the Wall Advanced School.
  • More in line with the usual trope are supernatural beings with the Invulnerability trait, particularly oni and the Lost. Invulnerable entities can't take more than one Wound from a single hit unless attacked with magic or a weapon made from one of the three magical materials. A handful of creatures also have Greater Invulnerability, which means that one of their normal weaknesses no longer applies.

Video Games

• The Queen of Hearts' Executioner in Alice: Madness Returns is a giant, undead card guard wielding a scythe who will relentlessly pursue Alice once she enters the castle. At most, her weapons — from the acid-lobbing teapot to the pepper-grinder gun only make him stumble. A bite of familiar cake brings the whole chase to a very satisfying end.
• The Alien in Alien: Isolation is almost completely invincible to everything that the player has. It is incredibly fast (much faster than Amanda), and if it grabs Amanda then it's game over. The only options are to avoid it as best as possible and, later in the game, drive it off temporarily with a flamethrower. Of course, even with the flamethrower, it learns to adapt if over-relied on.
• Amnesia: The Dark Descent has a collection of Humanoid Abominations that serve only to pursue and murder the player. So you've blocked the monster's only entrance with about fifteen crates and plenty of furniture? Good luck with that.
• Arknights: Executor Federico of the Laterano Notarial Hall is depicted as this, befitting his Terminator Impersonator image.
  • His resume lampshades this.
    Be careful what you wish for, because he really can accomplish things that border on absurdity or impossibility.
  • In the chapter Survival Notorization of the event Operational Intelligence, he is seen pursuing the young huntress Vermeil through her homestead in Siracusa, disarming booby traps and catching arrows coming his way without much trouble. At the end of the event he offered to help her fight off the Ursus mercenaries coming for her, and since both of them made it to Rhodes Island as operators it's safe to assume he killed them all.
  • His profile states that executors like him are only deployed on the most challenging of missions. His work records included: killing 41 hardened criminals to deliver an item, damaged six buildings to shutter a company, killing a chief executive of a city state guard unit over a money dispute, and almost caused a war when fulfilling the wishes of the contracted citizens.
    Most of Executor's mission record is like this. It is clear that the Notarial Hall deploys its executors only to the most challenging of missions.
• Assassin's Creed: Altaïr is a mortal man. Altaïr is apparently susceptible to regular weapons such as swords, arrows, daggers, and small thrown rocks. Altaïr will slaughter his way through an ambush of roughly fifty Elite Mooks in about fifteen to twenty minutes without bothering to rest afterwards because he has sworn to remove you from this mortal coil in a timely fashion, and anything that gets in his way is just one more thing to cut down. There is a reason he is a Memetic Badass, and there is a point where a "normal person" just can't be defined as a Determinator anymore. For Altaïr, that point is probably about when he mercilessly cuts fifty-plus men into chunks (or runs them through, if he wants to spice things up), including the archers who are shooting him as he fights. Then, just to make completely certain that you know he's an Implacable Man, he goes straight from the trail of bodies to The Dragon, stopping only to accuse the man of treason and kill another twenty Elite Mooks before finally taking on The Dragon one-on-one and administering a fatal Curb-Stomp Battle. Yes, that's right. Altaïr Curb Stomps The Dragon after having spent probably the last half-hour fighting off over seventy soldiers. If you see this man◊ heading in your direction, Don't Ask, Just Run.
  
  Whether he's aiming for you or not, it generally seems like a good idea to flee from a man whose very existence tends to incite bloody battles to the death that often rage across multiple streets in a frenzy of blades and blood. You might not be his target, but you should probably get out of his path. You should start running if you see Altaïr, but...chances are you won't see him until he rams a metal spike into your neck.
  • The same goes for Ezio from the sequel. The man fights his way into the Vatican, merrily slaughtering the Pope's personal guard as he goes. He then shrugs off a blast from said Pope's Magitek staff (which incapacitates the other dozen or so people present), engages in a Magitek Wizard's Duel with said pontiff, is STABBED IN THE GUT by same, before sucking it up and going on to beat the aforementioned most powerful man in Europe to a bloody pulp with his bare hands. There is a reason he is named only one breath after Altair when someone talks about the greatest Assassins of all times.
  • Shay from Assassin's Creed Rogue. The Assassins (the deadliest people on the planet) try to kill him and fail miserably.
• Asura from Asura's Wrath, patron saint of Unstoppable Rage. He gets killed four times, and every single time he escapes the underworld, even angrier than before. Hell, the only thing that kills him off for good is killing Chakravartin, who is basically God!
• The first game with an Implacable Man was Berzerk and Evil Otto, who shows up if you are slow in clearing the room of robots. Not only was he invulnerable, but could pass through the electrified walls that would kill anything else that touched them, including the robots that were also trying to kill the player. Otto would also destroy any robots that were in his way, and in some rooms the only way to get the bonus points for killing all the robots was to lead Otto through a walled off chamber in which the last robot was hiding. Otto would gradually speed up over time, and instantly go to maximum speed (twice as fast as the player) once all robots in a room were destroyed, making death at his hands unavoidable unless the player was very close to an exit.
  • In the sequel to Berzerk, Frenzy, Otto could actually be killed by four laser shots (either from players or robots). Every time he died, however, he would return from the same spot he spawned one second later, moving slightly faster than before. Killing him was worth quite a few points, but his movement pattern (bouncing vertically like a ball viewed from the side, even though the game actually used a top down perspective) made scoring hits very difficult unless directly above or below him, and this was the most dangerous place to be while fighting him due to the horizontal screen and the bouncing movement making Otto able to cover vertical distances much more quickly. It didn't help that missing Otto with a laser blast could result in the player's death from his own beam, due to new laser-reflecting walls present in the sequel. Finally, Frenzy included some special rooms, including the nightmare inducing "Mama Otto" room, dominated by a giant (but thankfully motionless) Evil Otto. Until you set it off...
• Binary Domain: Subverted with the rank and file robot mooks; sure, they'll keep shooting no matter how many limbs you blow off, but destroy their head and they revert to their default 'protect humans' mode, convincing them to spare you and kill the other robots^note Just don't expect their backup systems to do more than walk and fire in the general direction of robots from their secondary sensors.
• The BioShock series has one for each setting:
  • Big Daddy in Rapture and The Songbird in Columbia. The former, an underwater cyborg steampunk Papa Wolf, is a loose example as he won't attack you unless you provoke him. You might assume from his dense armor that Big Daddy can't keep up a hot pursuit. You would be mistaken. There are several models throughout the game, and two variations (one with a drill, and another with a rivet gun.)
  • The Songbird, a giant robotic sparrow who patrols the tower Elizabeth is imprisoned in. It's only goal is to return Elizabeth to her gilded cage, meaning it's possible to appease Songbird by simply handing her over. It takes the entire game to finally turn Songbird to scrap metal.
  • And then there is the Motorized Patriot, who in his introductory video is actually described as being this, He feels no pain, he does not falter, no sense of self-preservation, he has no Cranial Processing Unit, so really, you can shoot at him until he's dead but he will not stop.
• Hedrox in BloodRayne is an Implacable Vampire. He is a beastial vampire monster with large claws and extremely powerful regenerative powers that make him immune to bullets and any blade damaged done to him heals very fast. Worse, if he gets dismembered, then several clones will emerge from the severed parts and create new Hedrox's that will keep pursuing you. The only way Rayne can beat him is thinking outside the box and drop him into water, which burns vampires like acid. Even then, one of his copies survives and it takes being incinerated by the demonic Big Bad to finally destroy him.
• Wilhelm in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!. Most characters, when they run out of health, go into "Fight For Your Life mode", where they slump to the ground and frantically try and gun down targets until they either bleed out or score a kill and earn a "second wind". Wilhelm's "Dreadnought" skill tree, however, has a skill called "Termination Protocols". With this, instead of a normal FFYL, Wilhelm gets a shorter period of full activity where he keeps walking and killing normally, plus electrifies the area around him — and if he fails to kill anyone in that time, he sets off a huge, if low-damage, explosion as a final "screw you" — and can score a Second Wind off any of these.
• Brain Dead 13: Fritz. No matter where you are, no matter how much distance you put between you and him, no matter what you have just done to him, no matter how many times he falls prey to the castle's other dangers and his own vast armament, Fritz is almost always five seconds away from killing you.
• Solus from Breakdown is indestructible to the point where all you can do is run, dodging laser traps only to see him just walking through them — these laser traps would kill you the second you touch them, and yet he just walks straight through them without even a burn mark to show for it.
• Chzo Mythos series:
  • The Welder
  • The invincible Tall Man. Depending on his mood, he'll just walk towards you, or teleport Dragon Ball Z style and butcher you effortlessly.
• Clive Barker's Undying: The Covenant siblings cannot be killed by any mortal weapon, only with the Scythe of the Celt. Even then, Lizbeth's head snarls and spits at Patrick before he lights it on fire and throws it off a cliff.
• Scissorman from the Clock Tower series, and the Subordinates from Clock Tower 3. The stalkers from Ghost Head/The Struggle Within as well, zombies excluded.
• In Command & Conquer, Kane has survived being shot at by a giant space laser, and also being run through by a piece of debris. He comes back for yet another sequel. Where he gets shot by the space laser again and is very angrily surprised when he finds out his followers thought it was going to stick this time.
• The King Tiger Tank in Company of Heroes. Its armor is so thick that no Allied tank can penetrate its frontal armor. It has a really powerful gun, multiple machine guns, and max veterancy. The only way to defeat it is to surround it with multiple tanks or to use its natural enemy in real life: bridges. Destroying a bridge with demo charges will oneshot it, just like anything else. There is a reason why calling this into battle is the last ability received on the [1] terror doctrine commander tree.
  • The lesser known Jagdpanther tank destroyer is also a bitch to kill.
• The Crooked Man: The titular character will never desist from chasing David until the good ending of the game is reached. He can't be killed before then due to already being dead.
• The Pursuer in Dark Souls II "will not rest until his target is slain". He backs this up, particularly in Scholar of the First Sin, by constantly dogging your steps, popping up again and again no matter how hard you put him down. In Scholar's New Game Plus you can end up killing him nine times, more if you use bonfire ascetics. (That being said, part of this is a mistranslation from the original Japanese, in which the Pursuer is a member of an organisation of similar warriors, who are presumably the ones harassing you; in English, his boss soul's text implies he is a lone warrior with a particular grudge against those with the Undead Curse.)
• Combining this trope with Rasputinian Death, the Gibbering Prophet of Darkest Dungeon is certainly made of this trope. He continuously warned the townsfolk of the Ancestor's evil and for being a harbinger of doom, much to the annoyance and worry of the Ancestor. The prophet faced Stock Punishment, was thrown into icy waters to freeze and drown, and was stabbed multiple times with various weapons, but every time the prophet would come back and continue to decry him, and wear the knives and what remained of the pillory to taunt the Ancestor. It took a Hannibal Lecture and a showing of what exactly the Ancestor had planned to finally break the prophet, causing him to Go Mad from the Revelation and end up becoming a boss you'd have to face.
• In addition to what has been mentioned about Warhammer 40,000, the Dark Crusade expansion to Dawn of War gives Eldar Fire Dragons the effective mass of super-heavy tanks without compromising their agility. Although they do not have the durability of most other examples on this page, the not-too-shabby health they possess results in a bunch of base-wreckers that can sprint through air strikes, artillery, orbital bombardment and God-Emperor knows what else without being tossed around like most other infantry. Yes, that list of infantry includes Da Ork Warboss. They form a point of contention regarding Eldar imbalance.
• The killers in Dead by Daylight are unable to be harmed or damaged in any way, although the survivors are free to disorient and slow them down using the environment. Even when caught in their own Bear Trap, the Trapper just opens it up and sets it aside.
• Dead Space has The Hunter, aka the Regenerator Necromorph, an artificial Necromorph created by the ship's resident Mad Scientist that steadily pursues you through the ship over several chapters. Notable for not only enduring all damage the player can inflict and brush off the effects of being cryogenically frozen, but after luring it into the path of a ship's thrusters and testing them, it can still be seen trying to crawl towards you as it melts to death.
  • Dead Space 2 does this again through The Übermorph in the final chapters; whilst it is still relentless and able to regenerate limbs in moments, it is presented as an Elite Mook by sudden unexplained appearance (and by it functioning primarily as an invincible mook rather than a plot device like the aforementioned Hunter).
  • Dead Space 3 ups the ante by throwing several Regenerators at Isaac in one level. He remarks that he REALLY hates those things. They're put down for good when the docking bay vents and they wind up spaced (this doesn't kill Necromorphs, but a Necromorph floating in perfect vacuum isn't in a position to kill anyone).
• Destiny has The Vex, basically a race of Terminators that can keep coming after you even if you blow their heads clean off. While they can be killed, it's implied that destroying their physical constructs doesn't really do much to slow them down since they can alter the flow of time and just call more troops in from the past, present, or future to throw at you. There is also the experiment they were working on in the Vault of Glass, which would have made their own existence and dominion over the universe a law of reality, taking them up to true implacability.
• In the Devil May Cry series, enemies on Dante Must Die and higher difficulties have a Devil Trigger power that they can use, making them nearly immune to flinching and much harder to kill. Vergil in the third title represents the Implacable Man ideal more accurately. When he uses his Devil Trigger (on any difficulty, BTW), he doesn't flinch from attacks, takes them without being scratched at all and regenerates health. While he can be knocked out of it, showing the state to be merely a brief flirtation, it is hard enough to do so. When he assumes the Super/Desperation Devil Trigger in the final fight, he can't be knocked out of it, but he does halt after some time, though not before regenerating at a higher rate than in his normal Devil Trigger.
  • This is justified in that when you DT, you get the stun resistance yourself also, as well as the regenerative factor.
  • Enemies? Dante gets impaled with his own sword in every installment. This somehow fazed him only the first time it happened. Must have been the novelty.
• In Disaster: Day of Crisis, Ray is practically this — he survives several natural disasters while fighting an elite former special forces unit, and he just still keeps coming after them on his own out of sheer willpower to save Lisa. Major Evans also has this trait, taking an ungodly amount of bullets to the face (and calls their first fight a draw after he takes so many bullets!), mans a Metal Gear expy while still taking even more bullets (or rockets) to the face, and can give Ray a hand-to-hand battle before Colonel Haynes finally shoots him square in the forehead. That guy must have a really special gun.
• The Cyberdemon in Doom can mow through masses of lesser mooks with its rocket launcher and One Hit Kills the player unless your health and armor are at nearly 200%. It takes roughly 400 bullets to be put down, which is twice as many as you can carry without a backpack, and it's resistant to missiles^note  Specifically, it is immune to the splash damage that is normally what causes most of a rocket's damage output, which are unfortunately the only kind of ammo that you'll find in its lair. It's so tough that Game Pro simply put "shoot at it until it dies" as a tip, as some players back then seemed to think it was unkillable. The fact that you don't have the BFG at that point doesn't help. Not to mention it had better stats (health, speed, pain chance) than the final boss, who shows up one whole episode later.
• This trope is completely flipped on its head in DOOM (2016) and DOOM Eternal, wherein various Codex entries make it abundantly clear that you, the Doom Slayer, are by far the most horrifying and unstoppable opponent that Hell has ever seen. Any attempt by any of Hell's leaders to bargain or plead with the Slayer is silenced without a moment's hesitation.
• In Dragon Age: Origins, the Arcane Warrior when built correctly becomes a virtual god. With right spells and a good armor, they will take practically zero damage against most enemies, even High Dragons. The rest of your party may be dead, including your tank, but Arcane Warrior will keep fighting. If you also give him/her Spirit Healer as a second specialization s/he will be practically immortal.
  • The Warden is seen as this by many of their enemies. It doesn't matter what the enemies try in order to stop the Warden, they always keep coming. In fact, they even try to stop them by trapping them in the Fade in two different ocassions. They fail. Both times. Completely.
  • Aveline from Dragon Age II is the game's resident Stone Wall. In addition to the usual warrior skills, her special tree has skills which make her immune to every status effect in the game, including critical hits. After taking enough of this, the only thing that can stop her is magically lifting her from the ground and confining her in a telekinetic prison, and she has better-than-even odds of saving against it. An illustration: in a contest between Aveline and a charging Ogre (read: horned sixteen foot wall of muscle), when the two meet, Aveline will still be standing. The Ogre will be on the ground.
  • Dragon Age: Inquisition has the Champion specialization for warriors, focused on tanking. Along with abilities that boost their defensive and guard-building abilities, they have an activated ability that makes them completely invulnerable for a short period and a passive that makes them completely invulnerable when they would otherwise be reduced below 5% health.
• In The Elder Scrolls Online, Big Bad Daedric Prince Molag Bal creates an implacable Badass Army out of the Xivkyn, a form of lesser Daedra Bal created by combining the massive and powerful but unruly and untrustworthy Xivilai with the Proud Warrior Race Legions Of Hell Dremora (who refer to themselves as the "Kyn" in the Daedric language). The result is an implacable fighting force which very nearly takes over Mundus.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 2:
    • There's Frank Horrigan, a 12 foot super mutant in Powered Armor who laughs at the idea that plasma fire can kill him. It takes concentrated fire from several turrets and an Elite Mook squad to even have even chances.
    • The Great Khans are an entire organisation of this. Go ahead: march into their base and slaughter them to the last man — this has happened twice in their history. There is always some survivor who runs off and reforms the Khans to continue their raiding.
  • In Fallout 3, one can find audio logs detailing the experiments in Vault 92 aimed at using subliminal messages and infrasound to create obedient super soldiers incapable of feeling pain. The experiments were partially successful, with the test subjects requiring upwards of 20 bullets to put down, but also becoming violently unstable and eviscerating each other with their bare hands.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • Joshua Graham, the former right-hand man of Caesar. NCR snipers have reported confirmed kills on him multiple times, only for him to reappear just fine a few days later. When he failed to win the Battle of Hoover Dam for the Legion, Caesar set him on fire and threw him into the Grand Canyon to ensure he'd stay dead. Then, just in case that didn't do it, Caesar sent assassins down after him to finish the job. That didn't do it either. In Honest Hearts, he has a Damage Threshold of 50, which is more than the biggest, heaviest, tankiest Power Armor in the game provides. His own armor is just a standard bulletproof vest worn over his normal clothes, which provides only 15 DT.
    • The PC "The Courier" also qualifies: at the start of the game, they are shot twice in the head by a 9mm at point-blank range. After spending a few days in the local clinic, they get back up march out into the Mojave and slaughter everything in their path. With the DLC's included, they also have their brain, heart and spine removed and are actually better off for it (they have synthetic replacements installed), get stranded in a poisoned city filled with other unkillable monsters (see below), and simply walk away with all the guns and gold they can carry.
    • The Ghost People of Dead Money, after years of exposure to the toxic cloud, are nigh-immortal. They silently stalk you through the city, unable to talk through the heavy clothing they wear, dragging travelers off to beneath the city to do... God only knows what to them. After being left alone for 30 seconds, a 'killed' Ghost Person will simply start up again like a wind-up Terminator. The only way to stop them is the four Ds: Disintegration, Decapitation, Dismemberment, and Dog (who eats them). And in order to get into the Sierra Madre Casino, you have to start up the Gala event. Which attracts the attention of every single Ghost Person in the city, including the ones underground. Have fun.
• In Far Cry 3 Jason Brody makes just about everyone who isn't on his side assume that he is invulnerable because Vaas' otherwise lethal bullet was deflected by a cigarette lighter. Naturally, everyone who knew about Brody's apparent death jumped to the extremely logical conclusion that he just came back to life.
  Vaas: The thing is... alright, the thing is: I killed you once already... and it's not like I am fucking crazy.
  • Technically Brody does fulfill this trope, as Vaas foiled his attempts on revenge three times: first by shooting Jason, second by kicking him into deep water tied to a cement block, third by stabbing him with a machete. Brody survives all of them and manages to kill Vaas (just a few minutes after being stabbed), where he (finally) falls unconscious and presumably nearly dies.
• A tradition of Fatal Frame series thus far goes as this: Any hostile spirit that serves as the Big Bad of the game is also unbeatable until the designated final battle against said ghost. This includes Kirie in I, Sae and the Kusabi in II, Reika in III, Sakuya in IV, and Ouse in V. (That said, Sakuya has a twist: You DO battle her weaker form early on and must defeat her to proceed, but then she Turns Red and plays this trope straight.)
• Zouken Matou from Fate/stay night. He actually gets 'killed' so often and eventually so effectively by Kotomine that he moves his soul into the Crest Worm that was in Sakura's heart, at which points she rips it out. Then crushes it. And he's still not dead. Also Kotomine, who had his heart ripped out and was still around two days later to kick Shirou's ass despite the latter's body currently turning into swords.
• Alma from F.E.A.R.. You actually do face her head-on at the end of the game... but even then, you don't so much defeat her, or hurt her, as vaguely annoy her into leaving you alone by detonating a nuke on her head.
  • It also appears to be genetic. It does not matter how many clones, helicopters, or psychic phenomena you throw at the Point Man. He'll tear through it all without so much as grunting
• The Final Fantasy series has various examples:
  • Final Fantasy VII: Sephiroth. Destroying Cloud's hometown and walking through the ensuing flames without a scratch, killing Aeris, ascending to near godhood, and trying to destroy all life shows how far he'll go to prove his desire to "inherit" the planet he feels is rightfully his.
  • Subverted with X-ATM 092 from Final Fantasy VIII. Despite its self-recovering system and its ability to ambush you during an escape from Dollet in a limited time that make you think you need to run, this giant spider can be destroyed for real, and you're encouraged to do so because of some extra See-D ranks. You just need enough firepower to blow it up before it can fully recover itself.
  • Final Fantasy X: Auron, a veteran Guardian and Badass Longcoat who died years before. He didn't like that, so he willed himself back into existence.
  • Llednar from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance received no damage at all if you try to attack him with anything. It was actually because of the "Fortune" law, so Ezel created an antilaw card, making Llednar vulnerable to any attacks.
• In Dissidia Final Fantasy NT, Sephiroth's playstyle is based around relentlessly chasing down his opponents. He can dash-cancel many of his attacks, and his EX Skill, JENOVA, slows down nearby opponents, making them easier to pursue.
• The Black Knight/General Zelgius from Fire Emblem definitely qualifies. He's invincible to all but the main character's BFS (which you get in the last few chapters of the game...), at least in the first game. A whole castle falls on him, and he comes back just fine in the sequel.
• All/most of the animatronics in Five Nights at Freddy's are this. In fact, the only thing that could stop most/all of them is getting scrapped/destroyed/burned alive. Honorable mentions go to:
  • Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, Golden Freddy and the Puppet try to kill the guard since 1983. They stopped it in 1993, only because the restaurants closed down for 30 years.
    • Bonnie the Bunny. In 1987, he lost his face and arm, but he still tries to kill the guard.
  • The Mangle. It is a victim of gigantic Body Horror, yet it still somehow walks. By 2023, the only thing found is it's mask, so you can imagine how much it took to finally stop it.
  • The main four animatronics in Sister Location are extremely desperate to escape the establishment. They eventually merge their wires and endoskeletons to become Ennard. And how do they escape once they became Ennard? Rip out our organs and skeleton only to replace it with themselves.
    • They were stopped decades later by being burned alive.
• Gloomwood: One of the things that makes the Goatman so dangerous is the fact that it will relentlessly chase the player around the area it's in. Lock the doors? It'll smash them down. Go to another floor? It will slowly home in on you and find you eventually. Try to run? It will make a mad dash forward and quickly begin to outrun you. It can be brought down in combat, but that's far easier said than done — it can survive upwards of ten shotgun blasts point-blank in a game where most enemies go down in a single shot.
• Aquiles from Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel is a mutant monstrosity who repeatedlt comes after you, again and again, no matter how many times you try to put him down. He's fought as a boss around 6 times, and it takes dropping him into a chasm of acid to kill him for good.
• Kratos from God of War. And when he does die, he just slaughters his way back to the land of the living.
  • In God of War (PS4), he finally meets his match in the Stranger, who pursues him across the Nine Realms and never gives up; even killing him three times in a row can't stop him, and the only way to progress the story is to toss him somewhere he can't get out of for a while, like the bottom of a ravine or Hel. He's Baldur, the Aesir given Complete Immortality by his mother's spell; until the enchantment is broken by him accidentally cutting himself on a mistletoe arrowhead, the worst anyone can do is toss him around.
• You as Aldo Trapani in The Godfather: The Game, despite his not-so-invulnerability in-game. Hundreds of enemy mobster corpses? Those Legitimate Businessmens Social Clubs converted to the Corleone cause? All stepping stones on the Roaring Rampage of Revenge leading to Don Emilio Barzini, the man who ordered your father's death.
• Jake and Francis Fratelli in The Goonies (NES). The sequel introduces a third brother, but he can at least be defeated.
• Assassins can become this in PvP matches of Guild Wars when they use their Shadow Form enchantment. It makes them completely invincible to every attack or spell in the game. If an Assassin using this skill targets you in a match, your only option is to run. Unless you have a signet that can remove enchantments...
• The G-Man from Half-Life is a variant: You don't fight him, but he does follow Gordon Freeman all over the place, finding routes through places that Gordon must fight through and getting to spots before Gordon can.
  • However, if you do feel like popping off a few rounds at him before he disappears round whatever corner, they simply bounce off with the bullets-on-metal sparks effect and sound (at least in the original Half-Life; in HL2, like all important or allied NPCs, he simply cannot be hit by weapons).
  • Gordon Freeman, the "Free Man" himself. By Half-Life 2 he is feared as a One-Man Army by the Combine, and worshipped as a hero by the humans in equal amounts.
• Haunting Ground: The game's main claim to fame is that the player is chased by this type of individual once a chapter. These beings have different approaches to chasing the heroine, such as their attention span or diligence in finding her hiding spots. The best one can do before their boss fight is to run away, or knock them out via dog-mauling or alchemic munitions.
  • Debilitas (The Caretaker) serves as an introduction to the game's premise. He's not as durable or persistent as later stalkers can be, and can be knocked out somewhat more easily. That being said, he shouldn't be underestimated.
  • Daniella (The Maid) is made of this trope; she is incredibly difficult to knock out, and when that's achieved, she gets up quite quickly. She will relentlessly stalk Fiona, pretend to not know where her hiding spots are and will purposely lock Hewie in rooms and attack him to draw Fiona out if she genuinely has no idea where she is. This is even lampshaded during her Boss Fight if she's knocked out:
    Fiona: [in journal] Even that didn't stop her?! What is she, the maid from hell?!
• Hello Kitty Roller Rescue has this for a final boss; to win, you have to stall it until Keroppi can destroy it with a Wave-Motion Gun.
• Death (the security guard boss) from House of the Dead 3 shows up not just once but TWICE! One of the characters comments on its one-track mind and persistence.
• Iconoclasts has two examples, late in the game near the rocket.
  • While you are trying to get the elevator working, Black can not be stopped. Defeating the boss is not an option; you must fix the elevator and get out of there.
  • A more classic version is Elro, going up against Lawrence. Lawrence can shoot Elro, throw knives, punch him if he gets too close, but unless he runs out of HP, Elro keeps. On. Coming. Good thing you're playing Elro, and your job is just to No-Sell Lawrence's attacks while you keep marching up and stabbing him.
• The eponymous heroine of Iji winds up viewed this way by the enemy troops, according to their logs — whether or not you're playing a pacifist run.
• The Beast from inFAMOUS is a huge monster in the shape of a man seemingly made of lava. The military can't stop it, it just blows them into dust and keeps walking. Cole, the Electric Man himself, can't stop it, it just gets right back up after being hit by a storm of lightning called down on it from the sky. A nuke going off in its face can't stop it, it just reassembles Doctor Manhattan-style. The only way to kill it for good is to kill every Conduit on the planet.
• Death's Hand from Jade Empire, who is also The Dragon.
• The Sheriff in Lakeview Valley is not about to let a little thing like a shotgun blast to the face at point-blank range stop him from bringing anyone he can prove has broken the law to justice.
• The Infocom Interactive Fiction game Leather Goddesses of Phobos has your henchman Trent (or, depending on a choice you make early in the game, Tiffany), who continuously dies in very unlikely ways and pops up again a few dozen moves later with an even more unlikely explanation for how he/she survived.
• Definitely fitting the description on later difficulties is the Tank from Left 4 Dead, which can survive magazines upon magazines of high-powered rifle and shotgun rounds and complete immolation for upwards of a minute. Combined with how hard he swings, he is Nightmare Fuel.
  • The amount of his HP varies from 4500 to over 6000, depending on difficulty, with a wee bit over five goddamn thousand in the Versus mode. When in doubt, Kill It with Fire.
  • Common Infected could occasionally become absolutely immortal thanks to a bug. Using a cheat engine that displays Infected health doesn't even give comforting high numbers (like 999,999), it reveals that they simply do not exist as far as the computer is concerned. A.I.s will simply give up and let the Implacable Zombie kill them, and the only way to survive is to shove it into a room, close the door, and rush through the rest of the level.
  • Due to a bug in damage collision, it's entirely possible to hit a zombie with a melee weapon (almost always a one-hit kill on anything not a Charger, Witch or Tank) and see it's head get taken clean off, only to have the game register it as a miss. The zombie in question is perfectly killable if you can land a second swing, but until then it will come at you bleeding and without a head.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
    • The Postman. It doesn't matter where you go, what you do, or what lies between you — he will bring you your mail! Even if you pull off the glitch of making him fall into the abyss of Hyrule Field, he'll STILL bring you your mail.
    • The two Wallmasters in the Palace of Twilight. You can stun it with your Bow and Clawshot, but you can't kill it and it will KEEP COMING FOR YOU AS LONG AS YOU HOLD ITS SOL. Although, it'll give up after you go to the "outside" area and place the Sol in the ground.
    • Then there's the Bublin King, who you have to fight four times. And in two of the fights he falls into a cliff upon defeat.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: The Phantoms cannot even be stunned until you get the bow about halfway through the game, and cannot be defeated until you get the necessary legendary sword shortly before the end of the game.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword:
    • The Cursed Bokoblins are described as returning from death by way of sheer hatred and will to mess up the world. And, supposedly due to a penchant for undergarments...
    • In the Silent Realm, there's two sorts of guardians; land based and flying. The land ones are faster and carry larger weapons, but they only pursue you when you're within a certain range. The flying ones, however, will never stop hunting you. They know where you are at all times and can phase through solid objects to hunt you down. They'll just keep following you until they eventually corner you.
• The Security Officer of Marathon is this trope to the nth degree. Depressurization, shuttle crashes, kidnappings, literal armies on all sides, torture, being stripped of all of his weapons and dropped on a Death World, insane A.I.s, solar systems being blown up, and the literal embodiment of chaos itself. All of them have one thing in common, and it's that they couldn't even come close to stopping him.
• Mass Effect 2:
  • Harbinger is relentless, focused, and entirely devoted to killing you, personally. Since he's remotely controlling the Collectors, he has no problems with letting you kill his current form and possessing the next one. In his own words, "I WILL FIND YOU AGAIN."
  • Then in the DLC, Lair of the Shadow Broker, there's Tela Vasir. She gets tackled by Shepard out of a four story window, gets in a really nasty car wreck, loses an enormous amount of blood, gets slammed in the face by a flying table yet she still provides one of the toughest (and most awesome) fights in the entire series.
  • The Shadow Broker himself probably counts. He fought you for a bit, got bored, and decided to activate his own personal shield, forcing you to hit him. he only dies when Liara dumps a load of plasma on his head.
  • Shepard him/herself counts given how many cybernetic enhancements and upgrades have been put into his/her body over the course of the game and his superhuman determination to defeat the Reapers. Death isn't enough stop him/her. Probably best illustrated during the Arrival DLC, when Shepard forces his/her way to consciousness through increasingly high doses of sedatives, breaks out of his/her cell without weapons, and proceeds to single-handedly destroy the entire facility to keep the Reapers at bay. The mooks are absolutely terrified by him/her. Lampshaded during the main game by Garrus pointing out that the Reapers killing Shepard only meant pissing him/her off.
  • Zaeed Massani survived being shot in the head. At the end of his loyalty mission, an enormous beam falls on his leg, which doesn't seem to affect him. He also killed a Krogan and all his Mooks.
  Zaeed: Rage is one hell of an anesthetic.
  • Garm, the Krogan in command of the Blood Pack on Omega probably qualifies as this — Garrus remarks on how quickly he can regenerate his health. In the end, it takes Shepard, Garrus and two other members of Shepard's crew to kill him.
  • Krogan in general. More pronounced in the first game where they would get back up after death unless killed by ammo that caused disintegration.
• Max Payne:
  • Max can get plugged with hundreds of bullets in the course of the games, but doesn't seem any worse off, as long as he has a supply of painkillers to dull the pain. Lampshaded by the Big Bad of the first Max Payne and again by the Big Bad of Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne:
    Nicole Horne: (Max Payne) What do you mean, "he's unstoppable"? You are superior to him in every way that counts. You are better trained, better equipped, you outnumber him at least 20 to 1. Do... your... job!
    Vladimir Lem: (Max Payne 2) What the fuck is wrong with you, Max?! Why don't you just die?!
  • In the second game, he survives being shot in the face. He doesn't become mentally disabled or dysfunctional from it, either.
• All rampant in the Metal Gear series:
  • Liquid Snake from Metal Gear Solid survives a helicopter crash, an arseload of missiles that only succeed in blowing up his Humongous Mecha while he is inside the said mech, a forty foot fall from the top of yet again the same Humongous Mecha after being punched off it during a fistfight, and then a barrage of gunfire to the face followed by a jeep crash. He is finally killed by a tailored supervirus-induced heart attack. And then he comes back in the sequel as a talking arm. But not really.
  • Vamp from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and 4. Survives being shot in the head and heart, filled with lead and dumped in a vat of no-resistance fluid, shot in the head again, stabbed multiple times (with he himself pulling a blade stuck in his chest out through his back), and shot a few more times before the Applied Phlebotinum keeping him alive is finally deactivated.
  • Ocelot (before he gained the nickname "Revolver") in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. While not entirely murderous, he seems obsessed with besting Snake after tasting humiliating defeat early in the story. However, he is hogtied by his own sense of honor, which forbids anyone else helping him (or Snake dying at anyone else's hands but his own).
  • Raiden becomes this in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. Once he learns that World Marshall is planning to create an army of child soldiers using the same training regimen that was used on Raiden, he decides to take them down. And no one, not Maverick, not enemy cyborgs, not the Winds of Destruction, hell; not even Sam could stop him in their rematch. Oh, and Raiden can now slice open his foes and steal their nanotech to heal himself completely, making him even more difficult to stop.
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has The Man On Fire, a wraith Wreathed in Flames with an Energy Absorption ability that can take any physical force you throw at him and send it back at you ten-fold. This can be anything from a sock to the face or small arms fire to taking an RPG-7, Sidewinder Missiles, and a goddamn tank shell to the face, and being barely more than fazed before he unleashes death upon whoever tried to fight him conventionally. His death didn't even come by conventional means, but after he realized that Venom Snake was not the person fueling his rage, and he basically shut himself down.
• Metal Slug:
  • Humorously done by Allen O'Neil. In the second game, he gets eaten by a killer whale upon defeat and still comes back for the sequels. When asked about his immortality, the game staff responded that the reason he never dies is because he both "has a body of steel and guts", and he has a wife and son to return to at the end of the day (a strange inversion of Fatal Family Photo there).
  • When one of your One-Hit-Point Wonder characters comes back from the dead — either through using an extra life or using a continue — all enemy soldiers on-screen briefly freak out over their inexplicable resurrection.
• Metroid:
  • The SA-X in Metroid Fusion. Somewhat more complicated in that it's a copy of the heroine, with all the Metroid-killing equipment she wielded at the end of the last adventure. The real heroine starts off pitifully unpowered by comparison, and is now part Metroid to boot. Talk about stacking the odds against you. At first you can't do anything against it and just have to run away, but later on you can freeze it to slow it down.
  • Samus herself is also an example. This is especially clear in the Prime series where you can read Space Pirate logs that speak of "The Hunter" as an unstoppable killer capable of obliterating their entire armies singlehandedly.
  • The Metroids themselves, unless you're packing a cryo-based weapon.
  • Dark Samus, a near unkillable doppelganger of Samus who thrives on Phazon and can come back From a Single Cell. Best displayed after beating her near the end of Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, where she uses the last strength she has left to crawl towards Samus and attempt to grab her for one last attack before collapsing, eerily similar to another Implacable Man. Then she returns in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, and is more dangerous than ever.
• In Minecraft as long as healing crystals are intact, the Ender Dragon is unstoppable. If placed in overworld, it can fly right though anything that's not Obsidian, End Stone or Bedrock. Still feel secure in your cobblestone home?
• NetHack has the Wizard of Yendor. He's certainly killable, but that doesn't stop him from coming back to torment you all the way through the Elemental Planes, steal the Amulet of Yendor and create copies of himself to help with this.
• Never Dead: The protagonist. Dismember him, run him over, or pierce him through. He never dies.
• The Blood Hound is an enemy from The Persistence who wanders from room to room on a deck hunting you down. It has by far the most health of any enemy and doesn't flinch upon being hit or shot in the head.
• Persona 3: The Reaper, also known as "Death." It exhibits the "slow walk" by showing up whenever you take too long to advance to the next area. Even your support character warns you that you "can't defeat it!!", and tells you to get out immediately. It can be defeated it very high levels, but even if you do, it will still come back for more.
• Pikmin 2: The Waterwraith, is invincible unless you have purple Pikmin at your disposal. Unfortunately for you, you don't have any purple Pikmin when you enter the cave he dwells, and won't get access until you've reached the final floor.
• Planescape: Torment:
  • The Nameless One, unless he wishes himself out of existence or screws up when meeting the Big Bad.
  • Vhailor plays this trope as straight as can be. He is basically an avatar of Justice who will stop at nothing carry it out. He grows more powerful when hunting those who've committed greater crimes. During your confrontation with The Transcendent One, you can inform Vhailor about who you and The Transcendent One are, which transforms him into a God of War.
• The Dahaka from Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. Subverted in that it can be killed, but there is only one weapon in the game that can actually do that and getting it is less than easy.
• In Privateer, later in the game when you find and equip the discovered Steltek gun on your ship, a Steltek drone will appear at random and attack only you. Your weapons won't scratch it, and although you may give it the slip using jump points, it will eventually show up again. You only finally get the ability to kill the drone just before the final mission when an actual Steltek comes along and charges up the mounted Steltek gun to give it the ability to harm the drone.
• [PROTOTYPE]: Alex Mercer, and he's on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge all across Manhattan. He survives being torn to pieces in the blastwave of a nuke, regenerates From a Single Cell by absorbing nothing but a crow, and states that his work is almost done. Not done. Almost done. Imagine being the guys assigned to take him down. Over the course of the game, he murders his way through what has to be three-quarters of the marine forces — by way of kicking their helicopters out of the sky, tearing their tanks to shreds with his bare hands, and ripping apart entire bases — and comes out no worse for the wear. He is the Implacable Man. And he makes sure they know it.
  Alex: NOTHING CAN PROTECT YOU FROM ME! NOT MEN! NOT WEAPONS! NOT ARMOR!
• In the MMO Ragnarok Online, the Monk character class gets access to the skill "Steel Body", or "Mental Strength" in one translation, that cuts all damage, magical or physical, to 1/10 if you have no vitality or intelligence, and if those two stats are high, any attack will do ONE damage! Another class (the tank furthermore) has a skill that does big damage in an area, but returns some to its caster. But a glitch can be exploited to make it HEAL you instead, thus doing huge damage to your foes while filling your own life gauge back up. In either case you get a nearly unstoppable character.
• Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc has a level full of these called The Desert Of The Knaaren. The Knaaren are virtually indestructible, not even flinching from any attacks, and will chase you on sight. Word of advice: RUN.
• Resident Evil:
  • Lisa Trevor in Resident Evil (Remake), though thankfully she's not after you specifically but just wants her mother — she'll chase you when you enter her cabin or her territory in the caves, and she'll attack you when you're too close to the crypt where her mother's remains are, but if you leave the area she lets you go and if you open the crypt for her she morosely takes her mother's skull and retreats by hurling herself off the ledge never to be seen again by Jill or Chris. She shows up again, no worse for wear, in The Umbrella Chronicles to chase Wesker, though this time is far more determined to hunt him down and kill him as she apparently recognizes him as one of the men responsible for ruining her life and killing her mom.
  • Tyrants (games 0, 1, 2 and Code: Veronica) also count. You will always have to fight a Tyrant at least twice, and with the exception of the Proto-Tyrant in Resident Evil 0, killing one always requires the use of high explosives. Guns, grenades and immersion in molten metal will not be enough to kill one. Given that Tyrants are meant to be Super Soldiers, this is to be expected.
  • The Tyrant T-103, encountered in Scenario B of Resident Evil 2, deserves special mention. He wants Sherry's locket, which contains a sample of the G Virus, and absolutely nothing will stop him from getting it. Towards the end Leon/Claire drops him into a smelting pit, and it only pisses him off.
    • He's even worse in the remake, where instead of scripted events where he appears, he's always somewhere in the police station looking for you^note There are still a few scripted events where he finds you no matter what, and it's rumored you can encounter two at once by happening to encounter the roaming Mr. X in the same area where a scripted encounter takes place. Always. Shoot a gun nearby and he'll come running to investigate so you'd better keep moving. Worse still, pumping him full of bullets will only drop him to a knee stunned, giving you maybe half a minute at most to run away before he gets back up and resumes hunting. It takes a lot of bullets too, and they barely even stagger him, so your best bet is to just run your fool ass off and hope you can ditch him. In short, he's become less of an Implacable Man and more The Juggernaut.
  • The Nemesis from Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. He's the only enemy in the game that can follow you from room to room and outrun you. It takes at least 14 shotgun shells to kill him on EASY MODE. No, wait, it gets better. That doesn't actually kill it. You just knock it out. Nemmy'll show up later. Throughout the course of the game, he gets repeatedly shot, blasted out of a train with a grenade, has a rocket launcher blow up in his face, passes out into burning helicopter wreckage, soaked with acid, and by the end, he's been decapitated, falls into a pit of acid designed to break down BOWs, and still doesn't stop. Even worse, is this time he's after Jill, not lashing out at all life, not trying to retrieve a locket, not "cleaning up" by killing generic cops or survivors, he wants the S.T.A.R.S. members specifically and he introduces himself by killing Brad, leaving you as the last and only one on his hit list. During the boss battle against him as Carlos, he's more than content to walk right past the mercenary and into the room where the incapacitated Jill is unless you press your attack enough to keep him focused on you.
    • On top of that, in the ending you must hit it with two shots from a railgun the size of a train car; and after that, you get the option to put six bullets right in its head. That finally kills it.
  • Resident Evil 4 subverts this with the Regenerators. From the first meeting it seems that nothing can stop them... Unless you're really lucky with blind firing or high-end explosives, as it's later revealed that they simply have hidden weak points that can be revealed with a special weapon. Bad guys like Mendez and Saddler, however, still play the trope straight, with Saddler ejecting the bullets from his body through his hands. And then there's El Verdugo, though it is possible to finish the game without killing this guy, which is probably what most players do their first few times around. The Verdugo is so hard to kill, that some players are left with the impression that he's a Hopeless Boss Fight and that he simply can't be killed, only escaped. He's more vulnerable under the effects of liquid nitrogen but it still takes a ton of firepower to take him down.
  • Albert Wesker himself. He survived being slashed/impaled by Tyrant due to his regenerative Psycho Serum, and having a load of girders dropped on him, and can dodge bullets and catch rockets Matrix style. Until he mutates into a One-Winged Angel form at the end of RE 5. Even then he can survive the heat of lava, and takes a barrage of rockets to the heart before dying for good. He plunged his hand into the container, laughing maniacally as the Uroboros swarmed up his arm.
  • Resident Evil 6 has Ustanak, the monster whose only goals are to brutally murder Jake and Sherry and try to outdo Nemesis for the coveted title of "Most Unstoppable Killing Machine". Even getting a DRILLING MACHINE THROUGH THE CHEST only takes him down for about 5 literal minutes. It also has the Rasklapanje, an expy of the Regenerator, who are fought in all the four campaigns. In a cutscene, Leon and Helena kill one only to watch it pull itself back together effortlessly. While it seems they can be killed by separating their body parts and killing each part individually, after sometime the parts revive and the creature reassembles itself. However, most of the times you meet them are in areas where they spawn infinitely, which makes going through the trouble of killing them a pointless endeavor.
  • Resident Evil 7: Biohazard: Jack Baker, the patriarch of the psychotic and nigh-indestructible Baker family. Part one of the game involves you trying to find a way out of the house while he wanders around, chasing you if he sees you, and any attempt at fighting him will annoy him and waste your resources. It's only when you defeat him in an epic chainsaw duel that you put him down... only for him to come back as a completely mutated mold creature for one more go at you. He seemingly dies for good after being calcified by a serum. In the DLC Chapter End of Zoe, The Reveal is that the Swamp Man is none other than Jack. A document in this chapter explains that Jack's unique genetic makeup allowed his Mold mutation to give him a more potent Healing Factor, more so than any of the other members of the Baker family. Calcification is the nail on the coffin for those infected with the Mold, but he was able to survive and mutate again! Later on in End of Zoe, his brother Joe decapitates him, but he reattaches his head off-screen and makes a comeback. Nothing short of a Megaton Punch from Joe with the AMG-78 to Jack's head actually kills him, causing it to explode and calcifying his remains. His wife Marguerite acts much the same way, but she usually relies on her insects to protect her and overwhelm her prey, and she's not nearly as stubborn as her husband.
  • Resident Evil Village has Alcina Dimitrescu to fill this role. After a couple of scripted encounters, Lady Dimitrescu freely roams the castle just like the Tyrant in RE2 remake and Jack Baker in RE7. Unlike them though, her regenerative abilities are so strong that you can't even take her down temporarily; she just shrugs off any and all attacks (even from New Game+ weapons) without even blinking. The only way she can be defeated is by stabbing her with a poison dagger created specifically to kill her, and even then she keeps herself alive by mutating into her One-Winged Angel form for one last fight.
• The Ballistikraft robots from Rise of the Triad. Invincible, hulking robots that roll towards you very slowly, shrugging off anything and everything you fire at it and spewing rockets at you. The only thing you can do is run.
• RuneScape had a couple of these guys that you saw that is implacable in general:
  • First one is Lucien in While Guthix Rests, an evil Mahjarrat, during a cutscene where a series of heroes go and try to fight the guy... well, needless to say most of them bit the dust for good and they DO NOT come back.
  • Second Nomination will be the Corporeal beast, a result of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero. It comes to the corporeal realm to deliver a can of whoop ass for anyone willing to take a one way trip back to Lumbridge. Before it came to the corporeal realm, it was MERELY trapped in the Spirit Realm, siphoning energy off the souls of a dead family for two quests. And then you show up. Naturally, living soul energy is much more potent than dead soul energy...
  • The final nomination will be Vampyres and Vyrewatch, monsters that can't be beaten with even a Godsword, instead until you have a silver weapon, good luck fighting these guys. Even then, merely silver weapons will only work on Juvinates, the weakest form of the species; anything higher than that has limited mind reading and impossibly good reflexes, meaning any weapon with a predictable pattern (that is, all of them except a flail) can't even hit them to begin with.
  • On the flip side, there's you, the PC. While quests generally act as if you don't die and do entire sections in one trip rather than individually (such as the finale of Dragon Slayer 2), you're known to be a warrior on par with the Wise Old Man and Robert the Strong, able to slay a Dragonkin's finest creation, which is so strong it can take out a Dragonkin itself in one blow^note Robert the Strong is famous for being capable of killing Dragonkin at all and a corrupted fragment of a god, capable of getting around any obstructions regardless of what they are, and being one of the few characters capable of canonically surviving dying.
• The Death spell in Sacrifice summons The Grim Reaper temporarily, who is treated by the game engine as a spell effect and not a creature; he cannot be targeted, shielded against, blocked, halted or damaged in any way, and will not stop hunting his target until he has killed it. If Death targets one of your creatures and you teleport away with it to the other end of the map, Death will immediately realign his course and slowly start following, ignoring everything else in his path.
• Both in and out of gameplay in the Saints Row series, assuming you do enough diversions. Blowing up The Boss just gets them pissed off, and in the second game, the full complement of perks means that The Boss can jump out of a plane, get hit by three exploding trucks on fire, and take a point-blank shotgun blast to the face without going down. Saints Row: The Third turns this Up to Eleven once you get close to max respect, with several upgrades making them immune to each type of damage. It can get to the point where The Boss can only be harmed by melee attackers.
• Scarface: The World Is Yours:
  • Tony can enter a Blind Rage, where he exhibits true Implacability. He becomes immune to attacks, doesn't flinch, gains auto-aiming and the quasi-vampiric ability to heal by attacking enemies. Although it lasts for only brief periods, it can be reused and the meter needed to fuel it can be filled up fairly quickly. For that matter, Tony in general; he's gonna take Miami back and kill Sosa, and heaven help the chazzers stupid enough to get in his way.
  • Big Bad Alejandro Sosa exhibits apparent-Implacability the way Tony did at the end of the film, taking whole clips to the chest without flinching. Even from the mighty Desert Eagle that instant-kills everyone else. A good few headshots are needed to end him.
• As an anti-piracy measure, Serious Sam 2 will set one of these loose on you if it detects a pirated copy of the game: An indestructible lightning-fast giant-scorpion creature will follow you from practically the start of the game. It can't be killed and it's too fast to escape from for long. Of course, this merely spawned a sub-set of players who seek out pirate copies just to see how long they could last against the beast.
• Fox Face from Shadow Hearts 1. If your Malice meter is filled, he will appear and hunt you down. You can beat him, but he will come back again and again, until you either clear the Malice or die.
• Most of the colossi in Shadow of the Colossus qualify for this, with the only exceptions being Avion and Phalanx. Once the others have spotted Wander, they will not stop trying to attack him until he becomes physically inaccessible, dies, or kills them. Particularly notable is Dirge, which is reputed as being unique in that it is the only Colossus who seems to genuinely hunt Wander in order to devour him rather than just try to kill him. In fact, the reason Dirge's unnervingly large eyes are always orange is because it is one of the few colossi who is constantly attacking.
• Silent Hill:
  • Silent Hill 2 has the Pyramid Head: Usually the only way to survive an encounter with him is to run your damn fool ass off, and hope he doesn't catch you. The game suggests the Pyramid Head is merely a gatekeeper whose purpose is to herd you in the right direction. He is never truly defeated; he merely strolls away menacingly or kills himself once his purpose is fulfilled. In that sense, he is closer to a Juggernaut.
  • Walter Sullivan from Silent Hill 4, at least until the boss battle when his defenses are finally lowered. The Ghost Victims of the game also apply, since they will keep chasing Henry from level to level unless pinned down by a (very rare) sword.
• Officer Carmelita Fox from Sly Cooper. Wherever Sly is, Carmelita soon follows in hot pursuit.
• In Sonic Adventure, Dr. Eggman's robot ZERO chases Amy in every level for the bird with her, and whenever Amy loses ZERO, he soon catches up. His tenacity even after his target has been obtained and is no longer of use to Eggman gets him killed.
• Played with in South of Real. Yes, the shadows are chasing Alex, but all they want is a lovely little family reunion. You happen to be still alive, but don't worry—they can fix that.
• StarCraft: The Torrasque is a special, one-of-a-kind super-Ultralisk that just gets reincarnated back at the base when it's killed, over and over and over again. It makes a return in StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm as a possible mutation for all of Kerrigan's Ultralisks: the ability to revive once upon death.
• Star Wars:
  • Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy has four levels that involve different variations of the theme of an enemy (or several) chasing you that can't simply be killed, and three of the enemies fit this trope.
    • The sandworm will eat you in one bite if you stay on the sand long enough.
    • The rancor. If you actually want to kill it, it's harder than many boss battles... and when you do kill it, another one replaces it. So you'll end up avoiding it anyway. Its powers of following you are less impressive, as it gets lost and can't fit under doors.
    • Boba Fett. He's opposed to the idea of your finishing your mission, so he'll pit his Badass Normal powers against your Jedi ones at every turn, only to fly away if you manage to damage him enough and return soon after returning to full strength.
    • And finally, the mutated rancor. It's practically Godzilla, and it's completely immune to damage, so it's actually The Juggernaut as well. Breathing poisonous gas and flailing at things, it will follow you all over the complex in the level, its steps making the floor quake, and demolish the scenery and eat the badguys who released it when it can't find you. When you find a way to sneak into the next hall through an exit it can't fit through, it will bang the wall until it yields and resume pursuit. At the end, you'll be able to kill it by crushing it on a conveyor belt between a giant crate and an energy field that only lets giant crates through.
      Jaden Korr: What did I ever do to him?
  • In Knights of the Old Republic, Darth Malak sets the entire Star Forge against the protagonist, sacrificing thousands of his own men with the sole intention that it might potentially slow them down. Part of the reason such overkill is justified is because he's facing an amnesiac Darth Revan, his former Master. Darth Sion from the sequel, who you can only kill by convincing him that his life isn't worth living. According to the KOTOR Campaign Guide, Sion was once a living man, filled with so much hatred that when he finally was killed, his hatred and strength in the dark side allowed him to keep living, AND kill his assailant RIGHT THERE ON THE SPOT. He is bound together purely by his hatred. Oh, also, according to the medical records aboard the Harbinger, his flesh has been cut into a bunch of rotting chunks that now make up his body, and and each of his bones has been absolutely splintered and pieced back together.
• Streets of Rogue: The Killer Robot Disaster has HP in the thousands, and will slowly march towards your character while shooting an unlimited supply of rocket-propelled grenades. It cannot be hacked, possessed, or bribed to leave, but it is susceptible to water — barely. Most players just try to get their chores done so they can leave the floor as soon as possible.
• String Tyrant: Has The Stranger, an ominous trenchcoated figure that will continually search for Mary. It respawns about 20 turns after defeat stronger than ever. It's finally defeated by using a church's bell to shake it to pieces.
• The Inspector and his dog in Subway Surfers: No matter how fast or far you're running, no matter how big a lead you get, thanks to a jetpack or mega-headstart powerup — one stumble and The Inspector will appear right on your heels.
• Luca Blight from Suikoden II. Just look at what it takes to finally kill him; it includes several battles against several elite warrior squadrons (plural) whaling on him, enough arrows stuck in him to build several houses with and one final duel with the opposite army's champion, and even then he goes down laughing because it took that much.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • In Super Mario Bros. 2, there's Phantos, the creepy Evil Mask that guards keys. If you take a key its guarding, it comes to life and chases you non-stop. It can't be killed (unless you grab a Starman) and the only way to shake it is to drop the key, although this is a temporary solution, because picking the key up again (and you'll always need it) causes the thing to resume the chase until you reach the key's door.
  • Dry Bones take as many jumps as you can dish out and still come back for more, that is unless you had an invincibility star or a cape from Super Mario World. In Super Mario RPG, however, jumps are considered magical attacks, which Dry Bones are very weak to. As such, they can be felled quite easily with a single jump, whereas physical attacks such as Mario's punches, hammers and shells cannot do shit to them. It's still only enough to take them down only temporarily: about 10 seconds after the fight and they'll get right back up and come after you again.
  • In Paper Mario, Jr. Troopa takes everything you can dish out and comes back for more time and time again. If you use Goombario's tattle ability, he'll keep getting more impressed with Troopa's tenacity each time. Tubba Blubba is completely unstoppable until you find his heart and make him mortal again. Mario and co. are aware of this, and immediately run for their lives in a chase sequence when he catches you in his castle. Attempting to attack him at this point is an unwinnable battle.
  • Super Mario Bros. 3: Chain Chomps don't like Mario standing there staring at them; they'll keep launching themselves at him over and over. After the 46th launch, the chain starts flashing to show it's weakening... And the 50th launch will snap the chain. The now-free Chomp will pursue you quite fast, taking huge leaps where necessary to catch up and bite you, its tormentor. Super Mario Galaxy 2's Chomps cannot be stopped except by an invincibility star.
• David Leatherhoff of Sven Co-op . Admin-controlled, he's on the players' team so friendly-fire is impossible (against him, that is). David is by no means "friendly" and will relentlessly stalk and harass the players no matter what.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • The mod "Freak Fortress" pits the entire team against one of these, which can vary from psychotic offshoots of the main characters to full-blown monstrosities, but will always be really tough, and strong enough to one-shot almost anything.
  • In Mann vs. Machine mode, some of the harder rounds feature a Super-Huge, Super-Strong, Super Unstoppable Robot—they can only be knocked back by the Heavy's Rage powerup, and (excepting Giant Scouts) will simply walk over any obstacles that they can't immediately destroy.
  • Furthermore, a Medic with the stock Medigun can make himself and his current healing target Implacable Men (or Implacable Man and Pyro) for several seconds at a time, thanks to his Ubercharge ability (though they can still be bounced around by airblasts and bombs). Heavy says it best.
    Heavy, being Ubercharged: Is good time to run, cowards!
• Tsukihime has a few of these as well.From Arcueid being cut into 17 pieces and coming back to life the next day, Roa being taken down to nothing but his ankles and immediately regenerating, and Nero having his body ripped in two only to make fun of the person who did it. They have this trope covered.
• The Player Character in Undertale canonically has the ability to load their save file upon death through Determination, meaning that killing them will only slow them down until they learn your patterns and breeze past you without you even touching them. They especially resemble this trope in the genocide route, where they will walk around in circles and kill anyone unlucky enough to cross their path and only move on once the area is devoid of life. On top of their effective immortality, they become so powerful later on that they One-Hit Kill would-be bosses with millions of damage. What most players consider to be the hardest boss in the game, Sans, knows that it's impossible to actually beat you, and instead attempts to wear you down mentally by killing you repeatedly and guilt-tripping you so that you eventually give up. As his final "attack", he simply doesn't take his turn, thus trapping the both of you there for all eternity until you get bored and quit. But even the RULES OF THE GAME aren't enough to stop you, as you push the bullet box over to the fight button and strike Sans twice in a row, finally landing a hit and one-shotting him.
• Selvaria in Valkyria Chronicles is this when her Valkyrian powers are activated. No attacks you fired at her did any damage. When she showed up, your only option was to make your units take cover and hurry to finish the objective. Even when she isn't a Valkyria, she's still pretty powerful.
• After it is released in the third section of Vivisector: Beast Within, the Overbrute Panther becomes an Implacable Man; while you can blast whole chunks out of it, it won't be slowed one iota by it, and will instantly regenerate, and unless you find some way of locking it out temporarily, it will always catch up with you and kill you with a casually-placed detonator to the chest. Oh, and it can turn invisible at will, as well, to both sight and radar, making it even harder to avoid the monster. Games designers are sadists, clearly.
• Warframe features the Stalker, a creepy-looking warrior in black carrying a decent scythe and one of the best bows of the game. He marks you for death everytime you kill a boss (killing more bosses, even for farming purposes, just adds more marks) and has a random chance to appear during almost any mission. He'll make himself known by flickering lights and taunting you over your comms, then lock you in your current room before teleporting inside. Either you kill him, either he kills you. No other alternative. And he can walk his talk, being able to tear apart players who aren't carrying high-quality gear. Think the mooks or your allies will stop him? He will just ignore or (if attacked) kill everything in the room if it means getting to you. And after you do the Second Dream quest, he turns into the even stronger Shadow Stalker.
• Wario in Wario Land, where he has infinite health. The main gimmick is that he has to hurt himself with the various obstacles and enemies in order to solve puzzles.
• You as Rubi in WET, you will regularly tear through rooms stacked to the brim with Mooks and survive. A more pure example is the ending, where Pelham sicks his pet Albino Tarantula on you. After you kill her, you come after Pelham and he tries shooting you, it doesn't work and you behead him.
• Wick features a family a murderous ghost children that pursue the player relentlessly, but special mention goes to Caleb. Once he spawns on the map he slowly, but surely digs towards the player until the hour is up.
• Asgard in Wild ARMs 3. Guns and spells? Barely fazes him. A structure collapses on him? Minor inconvenience. Sending him to the distant past? Ha ha, yeah right. The only reason you even manage to kill him was because he allowed you to kill him so he can follow his masters to hell.
• The Lobstermen of X-COM: Terror from the Deep, like their predecessors the Chrysalids, will give this impression when you first encounter one. You fill it with harpoons, your squad opens fire with Gauss pistols, you launch torpedoes at it... and you watch in horror as it somehow survives it all and proceeds to mow down your troops.
• Xenogears has Ramsus. The guy's been blown up, had his Humongous Mecha thrashed repeatedly, and nearly drowned. Yet all of that doesn't stop him from trying to fight his rival FEEEEEEEIIIIIIIIIIIIII!!!!
  • Id. If he has to "step in" to handle Fei's problems... everything in sight is going to be very dead very soon. Including an entire continent except for one person, a small village, a fortress city of The Empire, entire fully armored batallions...

Web Animation

• Red vs. Blue has the Meta a.k.a. Agent Maine. Even without his powerups, he's super-strong, super-fast, gets stabbed, shot, beaten, wrestled, slashed, blasted, blown up and impaled, and he still keeps coming. It takes a 400-foot drop off of a cliff into frozen waters attached to a Warthog to kill him, and if it wasn't for the fact his suit was punctured and he drowned as a result, there's a chance he would have survived that.
• Discussed in RWBY. When Hazel first went after Salem, it didn't matter how hard or for how long he fought her, her Complete Immortality meant that she kept coming back. The longest he could stop her was just a few hours. Only when he finally broke from exhaustion and hopelessness did she stop and offer him the chance to take revenge against Ozpin instead of her. When Yang's team rescues Oscar from Salem's clutches, it takes a combination of Hazel burning himself and Salem alive while Oscar detonates almost all the power Ozpin had spent multiple lifetimes storing in his cane just to buy the heroes a few hours to evacuate the kingdom before her inevitable return. Salem herself regards Ozpin as one, as his Resurrective Immortality means killing him doesn't stick; the reason she doesn't kill Oscar is because she knows Oz will just pop up somewhere else in a new body; moments before Hazel turns on her, she grabs Oscar by the head, snarling in frustration about the fact she can't do anything to stop Oz: like her, he just keeps coming back. For this reason, the pair have been trapped in a Forever War for thousands of years.
• Stalingrad becomes a sharp-dressed one of these in Emesis Blue, after being Brought Back Strong.

Webcomics

• AntiBunny: The NBK-2.5 shrugs off several rounds of 9mm to the face, jumping off a building, and getting hit by a semi truck.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • O-chul nearly does this in #542, in which he, in order, throws one of his hobgoblin captors into an acid-tolerant shark's cage without using his hands, stabs himself using the spikes at bottom of said cage (filled with acid) to free himself from a rope bond, gets caught by the shark but pushes himself out, then tricks the shark into grabbing him so its momentum can throw him out of the tank, and still has enough "oomph" left in him to rush at Big Bad Xykon while drawing back a fist... at which point Xykon uses the weakest of the spells in his Functional Magic arsenal to push O-chul into negative hit point territory, which causes him to finally faint. By the look of the scars on him, O-chul has probably gone through similar Death Traps multiple times, and Xykon's parting comment seems to suggest that each time he's gotten as far as rearing back for the punch. Justified, despite O-chul being a Badass Normal, in that the comic holds to the Dungeons & Dragons game's use of Critical Existence Failure.
  • When he's finally rescued, O-Chul provides the heroes with a full list of Xykon's spells, which he acquired "one saving throw at a time" — i.e., by personally enduring them.
  • O-Chul took a hit from a Disintegrate spell while running directly at an enemy...and didn't miss a step. Earlier in the series, a single Disintegrate was enough to stagger a freaking dragon. (Two reduced it to dust.)
  • The dialogue from the earlier strips also implies that Xykon is also implacable — being a lich (and thus a skeleton), he is invulnerable or resistant to most physical attacks, and if he were to die, his phylactery allows him to generate a new body. Subverted in that the only time he is destroyed is when Roy attacks him with his bare hands (though the Phlebotinum in the room did the actual destroying).
  • And, of course, there's Golem Crystal. She's a golem that refuses to die. Only adamantine weapons can WOUND her, and she has enough HP that it's a long, hard battle. She's immune to critical hits, backstab, etc. So Haley talks her to death.
• From Girl Genius, perhaps only three words must be said: The Unstoppable Higgs.
  • Well, he ended up stopped anyway. Still pretty badass. The key point here is that when an Action Survivor reaches Implacable Man levels he's going to require "Rum, lots of Rum" after it's all over.
  • What did it take to stop him? That's a bit of a story. He got his arm broken by a delirious Captain DuPree, applied some first aid to the Emperor, and then got a leg broken by DuPree. She then gave him an infected bite, and destroyed the controls to the airship. He partially fixed the controls, and then set his arm, which caused him to pass out for a few moments. When he woke up, the airship was crashing into the lake. He pulled the Emperor and DuPree ashore (with one arm), when some monsters onshore broke his other arm. When he (somehow) got them both to the nearest town, the jumpy guards shot him in the other leg. Which finally managed to slow him down. Damn. At a later point he was thrown into a wall by a robot. The one left damaged was the wall.
  • It is later revealed precisely why Higgs is so unstoppable: he's a Jaegermonster. Not only that, but he's a Jaeger General: many centuries old, incredibly tough and durable, master of infiltration and espionage, and has Seen It All.
  • Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer, fits as well despite being a simple Spark and not as mechanically adept as the others. He's very persistent, very determined (if in a delusional way) in his quest to kill all Sparks one by one, and most of all he simply never gets killed no matter what manner of lethal things put him out of commission. He fell out of the same dirigible several times and somehow kept coming back. Gil has seen him bounce back from so many things he realizes all he needs to do to get Tarvek out of his hair without killing him is to chain the two together and throw them out the window.
• All the Elite Vampires from Charby the Vampirate fit this trope as they are virtually invincible shrugging off even the most grevious damage at speeds even Wolverine would envy. To top it off they have super powers even by vampire standards.
• The Mecha Easter Bunny from Sluggy Freelance. A rabbit Terminator with a built-in arsenal of guns. Survived a bazooka blast to the face from Bun-bun with only a lost nose. Was, however, distracted by having to hide Easter Eggs.
  • Bun-bun himself, though not invulnerable, fits this trope through the sheer power of badass.
  • Captain Blacksoul from Oceans Unmoving. Followed Bun-bun so implacably he was said to be the only thing the rabbit feared. It turned out there were very good reasons for this...
  • Oasis. She can take a lot of damage before dying, and when she does, it only slows her down for a moment. Has specifically stalked Torg and Zoë as a major plot point that has lasted for years. Kusari would be the same if she were sent after you.
• Kore from Goblins. He has a reputation for being an unstoppable One-Man Army capable of wiping out entire armies of orcs all by himself, and when our heroes meet him, not even teleporting a rope through his throat was enough to kill him.
• Sarda from 8-Bit Theater. In the end, he was taken down only because he absorbed too much power and blew himself up.
  • Hilariously averted near the strips end, where the Dark Warriors are holding the four elemental orbs, threatening Sarda, who then points out that they have no idea how to use them. Bikke beans him with the Orb of Water, knocking him down, making Bikke the only one to really harm Sarda in the entire comic. Sarda responds with You Will Be Spared.
• Chelsea Grinn of Chimneyspeak, to the point that armies can't take her down.
  Chelsea: Bullets don't work on me, little man.
• Jones in Gunnerkrigg Court led the Court staff trying to catch Jack while he was infected with Whitelegs. After recovery, he appreciates efforts that saved his sanity and probably life... but still finds Jones scary. Apparently the enigmatic calm petite lady as unstoppable as the Terminator and as perfect as Mary Poppins (she can deflect sword with her face and crumble concrete like soft cheese) made a lasting impression.
• Mr. Blank from Sam & Fuzzy. Provided it's not a comedy strip, and provided he wants someone, he isn't getting stopped. When Fuzzy at one point distracts Blank by throwing what he wants off the eight story of a building, Blank jumps after it without hesitation. When Fuzzy subsequently looks over the side and fails to find any body at the bottom, his companion's comment is "He's a blankface, it will take a bigger fall than that to kill him."
• Trevor (2020): Nothing can keep Trevor down or deter him for long. You can shoot him, but it's like he was never hurt in the first place. You can run, but he's too fast. You can hide, but unless it's built like a bunker, he'll bust through to you like the building was made out of wet toilet paper. And if it is built like a bunker, that's when he gets creative. The only thing that might have stopped him was an entire military detachment that we know took massive casualties.
• Homestuck has Gamzee Makara who has absorbed at least a few hundred shots from Caliborn and a handful of sword strikes from Terezi and still continues to move onward as Terezi finds out the hard way. It's explained that because he is a clown, he is notably hard to kill and that there is not a single timeline where he is permanently put down.

Web Original

• Zoofights: The God Damned Snapture. He's a snapping turtle the size of a dump truck, which by itself would be pretty damned implacable, but he just kept shrugging off wounds that should have been fatal. Smash a billboard over his head until the board is reduced to rubble, stopping his heart? It starts back up a moment later. Expose him to concentrated time rays that kill everything else almost instantly? It only makes him stronger. Drop an aircraft carrier on his head? He punches his way out. Spent a solid month engaged in a drinking contest? He sleeps it off in an hour or two. Retcon his entire world out of existence? He'll show up in the new one, bigger and angrier than ever. Shove a nuclear bomb in his mouth? He spits out the mushroom cloud, unharmed. It finally took an equally giant iguana stabbing him in the throat, followed by a demigod knocking his soul out with an I-beam to take him down; and Word of God said he would have eventually recovered from that if all the loose souls floating around hadn't been forcibly reincarnated. If that hadn't been the end of Zoofights he would have returned the next year as a foul-mouthed box turtle, providing colorful commentary alongside Constantine.
• The Endbringers from Worm. They're tough beyond imagining, and keep attacking until driven off by something more powerful than they are (read: Scion). Even after that, they simply regenerate and attack again later. Behemoth is probably the best example; after being Stripped to the Bone by a Wave-Motion Gun that could have destroyed all of India, he continues attacking the heroes, and he is no weaker despite the injury.
• SCP-096 from the SCP Foundation. As soon as someone sees its face, or even a photograph or video recording thereof, it will relentlessly chase them down and will not stop until they are dead. It's been known to clear vast distances in record time in search of its victims, has literally dived down to the bottom of the ocean to reach someone in a submarine, and once jumped high enough to reach a plane that had someone that had seen its face onboard. The only exception is if it encounters something that's impossible to kill, like SCP-682, and, even then, their fight lasted for over twenty-seven hours straight.

Web Videos

• Parodied mercilessly by the "trailer" for The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon [2], the eponymous antagonist of which stalks his victim relentlessly... to bop him with a spoon. Over and over and over again. The trailer combines huge amounts of Rule of Funny. It's shown that the Horribly Slow Murderer simply will not die (even to several gunshot wounds in the chest, or even a fucking rocket launcher), and has dozens upon dozens of spoons stored in his coat, in case the victim tries to knock away or break his spoon. When he runs to the nearest police station or ask his friends for help, the guy disappears and nobody believes him... until he's alone again.
• The Slender Man Mythos: One of the Slender Man's defining characteristics in a lot of works in the mythos. Oftentimes, the protagonists will try to shoot him or something to that effect, and it never does anything to him. By the later parts of most stories, the characters have accepted that it isn't a question of defeating him, but rather just surviving for as long as possible. Once, a bunch of bloggers even attempted to injure him through stories, given how he seems to be linked to fiction/media/meta. Not even that worked.
• Atop the Fourth Wall has Lord Vyce. He walks through Linkara. Linkara was at this point almost entirely undefeatable, only losing once early on in Kickassia. Then again Linkara had no Zeonizer and no Iron Liz, but he still takes down Pollo in seconds, kills Pyramid Head, and takes Linkara's BFG at full strength with no damage at all. Linkara only manages to keep from dying by stealing his weapon and hitting him with it, with Vyce leaving seconds after being shot by it, Linkara being left bloodied and half dead. And then he came back in Pollo's body and is still a threat who nearly drove his ship into the Earth. Odds are good that he's still out there, fully believing that the Entity is still alive. He then returned yet again by taking over Linkara's ship.

Western Animation

• Parodied on The Simpsons, "The Boy Who Knew Too Much": Bart, on the run from Principal Skinner for truancy, cuts a rope bridge across a raging river. Skinner, maintaining a deadpan expression, marches down into the river, disappears under the water, and reappears when he surfaces on the other side. Bart exclaims, "He's like some sort of... Non-Giving-Up School Guy!" The scene is a direct parody of Westworld.
• Vilgax from Ben 10 is an extreme example of this.
  • In a flashback sequence, it's shown that Grandpa Max stuck him to a nuclear missile, shot the missile into his spaceship, and presumed that was the end of it... until the season finale, where Vilgax emerges from his regeneration tank. At the end of the episode, he winds up, again, getting blown up with his ship.
  • He resurfaces at the end of season two, at the end of which he's left trapped in the Null Void, an alternate dimension.
  • Season 3's premiere episode has Ben time-travel to the future, meeting a future version of himself who had torn Vilgax to bits. However, he then gets brought back to life by another recurring villain, who winds up taking a back seat to Vilgax for the rest of the episode.
  • Ben lured Vilgax to the sewers where his dad (Who had recently learned Ben's secret) lit a flammable substance and, after Ben turned into XLR8 and got him and his dad out, Vilgax was left to be caught in the fiery explosion.
• Iron Man: Armored Adventures: Doctor Doom. In one episode, Iron Man blasts Doom with his hand beam repulsors which Doom calls "Almost comical" and starts to approach. Even when Iron Man tries again with hand repulsors and a shoulder mounted missile launcher, Doom just keeps coming.
• In Jonny Quest:
  • Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures had Ezekiel Rage, an apocalyptic preacher who's supposedly been killed after each of his attempts to end humanity, only to return good as new. In his first appearance alone, he survives a horrific fiery car crash that kills his family, setting him on his villainous path. Even being aboard a space station that re-enters the atmosphere until it breaks up, the remains plunging into the open ocean, doesn't do him in. It took sending him back to prehistoric times and leaving him at ground zero of a nuclear blast before he was finally considered dead.
• Rampage from Transformers: Beast Wars, who is only held in check by Megatron because Megatron has the power to torture his soul if he steps out of line. Without this it's quite possible he'd simply torture, murder, and eat everyone on the planet. Frequently subject to The Worf Barrage. It's the same with Lugnut in Transformers: Animated. Especially if it involves GLORIOUS MEGATRON.
  • Optimus Primal temporarily becomes this in the Beast Wars episode "Gorilla Warfare", when he's infected with a berserker virus. Efforts by the lower-ranking Predacons to stop him are dispensed with in brutal fashion.
• Season 5 of Teen Titans (2003) features an Implacable Woman: Madame Rouge. Like the T-1000 in the Terminator films, it takes her only a few moments to reconstitute after being frozen and shattered into pieces. The episode that really spotlighted her was practically a horror movie.
  • Slade becomes this in the fourth season after having become The Dragon to Trigon. He shrugs of all attacks (except for Raven's magic) like they're nothing, even snapping his neck back into place after Robin breaks it. He was undead at the time. Even Raven fails to so much as slow him down in "Nevermore", the first time he appears as such, or even halt his speech. (Not for lack of trying; she even slams him between two walls at one point using telekinesis, and he doesn't even blink.)
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • The Combustion Man, who won't stop his assassination attempts even when the person who hired him tries to call the hit off. On his first appearance he just blew up everything that was thrown at him. He also seems to be pretty damn Made of Iron as he shrugged off a barrage of ice-shards and both a rock and a boomerang hitting him in the head (however, said head injuries did make his power backfire and lead to him blowing himself up).
  • Princess Azula is this in her first few episodes of the second season, establishing herself as a threat unlike any the heroes faced before. No matter what the heroes try, barely anything they do really slows her down. In The Chase, it takes all four of them, plus her brother Zuko and uncle Iroh for her to finally Know When to Fold 'Em and retreat. Afterwards, they adjust to her ability, though she remains a massive threat for the rest of the series.
  • The Avatar State. During the finale it punches through everything Ozai throws at it, demolishes about 50 giant rock columns and generally kicks ass without stopping, slowing or even noticing anything that would have instantly KO'd anyone else who tried to do the same.
• In the Sequel Series, The Legend of Korra, when Tarrlok attempts to bloodbend him, Amon simply powers through it and keeps on coming. Then only a minute later, Korra sends ice-spears directly at him and he doesn't even break his stride as he weaves through them, coming for her. Then there's the season finale, where he comes off like a villain from a slasher movie, complete with Menacing Stroll.
• The Beast Planet from Shadow Raiders/War Planets is an Implacable Planet Eater.
• As seen in old-school Looney Tunes, the little man from the Draft Board will not be deterred under any circumstances.
• In SWAT Kats, the Metallikats constantly shrug off most attacks on them. In their debut episode, they were particularly formidable, walking through gunfire and ignoring the Swat Kats' best attacks.
• In the Tom and Jerry short Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse, Jerry is turned into one of these by a concoction that Tom has force-fed him in an attempt to poison him; Tom tries slamming down on him with a phone book, hitting him repeatedly with a fire poker, shutting a door on him, and locking himself in a safe, all to no avail.
• Batman: The Animated Series has a good guy version of this with Batman in the episode, "The Underdwellers". First, one of the sewer kids tries to elude Batman through the tunnel system he knows like the back of his hand, only to find to his shock that The Batman is waiting for him. The Sewer King gets his own surprise in a quiet moment when he thinks that he has eluded Batman and locked the door behind him, only to suddenly have it blown open seconds later as he realizes that the Dark Knight is after him and will not stop.
• Elmyra from Tiny Toon Adventures. Nothing can stand between her and anything unfortunately cute enough to catch her attention. At one point, a sea monkey pulled a plug at the bottom of the ocean, which ended up draining the entire universe in order to get away from her. She still caught him.
• Adventure Time:
  • Ice King places a hit on Finn and Jake intending the hit man, The Scorcher, to hit them, "like on the shoulder or something". Anyways he has trouble getting the Scorcher to stop hunting them down. He does by tricking the scorcher into thinking Finn and Jake dead.
  • The Lich, to everyone. Not only does he have determination, he's got the patience and brains to the point of actually invoking It Only Works Once.
• In The Snow Queen (1995) and its sequel, the Snow Queen survives being frozen solid and being imprisoned in lava.
• Samurai Jack:
  • In "Jack and the Hunters", there were the Imakandi, the greatest trackers and hunters in the galaxy. After Aku approaches them with the offer to hunt Jack, absolutely nothing the hero does can stop their pursuit or lose them for more than a few seconds. They chase him from a city's sewers to its very highest point until finally bringing him down; fortunately for Jack, they regard it as the greatest hunt of their lives, and as such, refuse to turn him over to Aku.
  • In "Jack in Egypt" there were the Minions of Set, a trio of implacable demons. They attack swiftly, brutally and relentlessly. They do not tire and can heal from any injuries instantly. They do not stop to gloat; they do not give their victims a chance to gather their senses, power up, or otherwise prepare any kind of counter. They never stop attacking for an instant until their prey is either out of sight or dead. And even if you manage to get away, their super-senses will track you down before you even catch your breath. Jack ends up having to call upon the power of a god to defeat them.
• One episode of The Tick had Blow-Hole, who was a weird variation. A giant whale with arms and legs dressed in overalls, his goal wasn't to hurt anyone (at least not on purpose, although he did a lot of collateral damage) but he was determined for some odd reason to jog from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, and wasn't going to let anything stop him until he made it.
• Jasper from Steven Universe. Neither a spaceship crash, nor falling into a crevice, nor being punched past the horizon can keep her from coming after the heroes. She is generally shown to be one of the most durable single gems in the series, later revealed to be an exceptional specimen even among her homeworld's soldier caste.
• An interesting variation was introduced in DuckTales (2017) with Bombie the Zombie. Reinterpreting the character to be a very Solomon Grundy-esque monster, he exists as a curse on whoever is the richest duck in the world, chasing them down relentlessly until they give him the one thing they lack: humility. It took Scrooge investing all of his resources in a magical defense network to even contain the creature, and that ends up falling apart when Louie temporarily ends up with all his wealth and squanders his new found fortune to the point the Board of Directors make severe budget cuts to areas they deemed "unnecessary." When Bombie does break loose, he won't stop until Louie realizes that he's not ready to handle such a big responsibility and happily hands the money back to Scrooge, who in turn admits Louie performed far better in the role than he ever could of. Bombie is thus allowed to rest at long last.

Real Life

• Rasputin the Mad Monk, whose... well... Rasputinian Death is something of a legend. To them it was assassination; to him it was an induced nap. See the film Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny if you want to see James Frain take about five minutes to kill Alan Rickman. Even better, see Nicholas and Alexandra where Rasputin is played by Tom Baker. Take care, however, in that Rasputin's...prolonged death is legend bordering on myth; the "real" story is a little more mundane, in that the poison he was supposedly dosed with didn't work not because he resisted it, but because he barely ate anything at the table, and so his somewhat incompetent assassins took him out back and shot him twice in the chest, and once in the head, the third shot being the killer, before dumping his body in the river, and reports of him apparently trying to claw his way out of the ice were actually accounts of his corpse floating under it for a moment due to the river's slow current not immediately washing it away. These days, his more well-known death were spread and perpetrated in by his political enemies in order to make him seem like a nigh-unkillable source of evil and corruption.
• Life itself. We've found anaerobic microbes inside volcanoes and sulfur springs and plants that live in the arctic. There will probably be rats and cockroaches after we blow ourselves up. Life finds a way. Flour beetles have it up on cockroaches. Mythbusters showed that they could take a dose of radiation for 30 seconds that was 100 times that which would kill a human. Ten percent survival rate.
• Robert Henry Cain. During the battle of Arnhem, he took to destroying tanks with gusto, hip firing a 2 man Piat gun and destroying several tanks until a charge blew in the barrel. He was severely wounded, but refused morphine and returned to the tank killing, and when he ran out of ammo for his Piat, he began using a 2 inch mortar instead. His eardrums burst from the constant explosions, yet he continued attacking tanks with a mortar at point blank range. He was awarded a Victoria Cross for his actions.
• Corporal Léo Major, Canadian soldier in WWII who took a phosphorus grenade and lost his eye, but refused to go home, and single handedly captured 93 Nazi soldiers, which played a serious part in the liberation of the town of Scheldt! He lost his best friend in the battle of Zwolle, but he went on to liberate that town as well. And then also served in the Korean war and with his 20 man platoon captured a critical hill in a three day battle against 40,000 chinese soldiers! There was one extremely ticked off man with a sack of grenades and a jacket covered in machine guns routing the entire German garrison (including the Gestapo members who escaped being shot down or blown up when he kicked down the door of their local headquarters, sprayed them with machine gun fire, and then tossed in some grenades for good measure). He was supposed to be scouting the German defenses so that the Canadian artillery knew where to shoot, but he and his partner (the one who got killed before he tap-danced on the garrison's faces) got ambitious and decided to capture the town themselves so that it didn't have to get pounded into rubble.
• During the Civil War, Ulysses S. Grant was The Dreaded to many a Confederate general (many of whom were also his classmates) specifically because he just wouldn't give up. Even if the Confederates were to put up an obstacle, he would just find another way to win...and if they were to bluff, he was Genre Savvy enough to call them on it. It is no wonder then that he would earn the sobriquet Unconditional Surrender Grant.
• Humans in general. We are one of the few species that can hunt prey by chasing it to death. It's a practice called Persistence Hunting. Our two-legged gait is highly efficient compared to quadrupeds, and we have excellent heat-regulation systems (sweating), plus extremely dense muscles. To compare, an adult man weighs about as much as a jaguar. Women are, on average, about 5" shorter and much lighter than their brothers, but they still outweigh adult male wolves by about 40lbs.
• Humans under the effect of some substances, even more so.
  • The most common and notorious being alcohol: alcohol in sufficient amounts often renders people almost insensible to pain, so someone drunk may well ignore just how badly injured they are or that they are being beaten to a pulp or that they have otherwise sustained injuries too severe to be standing, much less fighting.
  • Amphetamine-based stimulants in sufficient amounts can also induce aggression and a feeling of invincibility, with methamphetamine ("meth") and the synthetic cathinones ("bath salts"/"plant food") being the worst for doing this due to fast onset, relatively low dose needed for effect, and their being used in the most immediate delivery methods (snorting/smoking/injection). Cocaine, MDMA, less effective pill amphetamines (e.g. Ritalin/Adderall/Vyvanse), and even caffeine in high enough dosages can also have the effect. Combine any of these with alcohol's pain reduction, and it becomes even more so.
  • PCP ("angel dust" or "wet") can invoke this at even very low doses because it provides both total insensibility to pain (it was originally used as a veterinary anesthetic for that reason) and aggression and a feeling of invincibility, and it also, unlike the above, can trigger hallucinations or delusions. The other dissociatives (DXM and ketamine) can possibly induce this, as they also eliminate pain, but they don't tend to cause aggressive behavior in and of themselves.
• The A-10 Thunderbolt II, also known as the Warthog, is one plane that can take a licking and keep on ticking. A-10's have returned to base with damaged hydraulics, wings and engines to the point that the pilots have needed to land the aircraft using manual wire controls. A-10's have returned with wings, engine or even large sections of the fuselage blown away by enemy fire.
• The World War II era P-47 Thunderbolt had a reputation for being nigh-on impossible to shoot down. One famous incident saw a stricken P-47 get jumped by a German Ace Pilot in an Fw-190 (which is armed with two machine guns and four 20mm autocannons, making it one of the most heavily armed fighters of its day). The German dumped all of his ammo into the P-47, but the American plane refused to go down and made it back to base. The pilot tried counting the number of bullet holes in his plane but gave up after around 200. He hadn't even moved from the wing section. some accounts of the incident assert that after expending all of his ammo, the German pilot pulled up next to the P-47, opened his cockpit, and just stared at the damage for a moment before saluting the American pilot and flying away.
• The B-29 Super Fortress during WWII. It was the first mass produced pressurized aircraft, allowing it to fly thousands of feet above enemy aircraft. Even when it was forced to come in the range on non-pressurized aircraft (which it initially had to in order to bomb accurately), its thick armor allowed it to shrug off bullets. Lastly it had four remote controlled turrets that allowed their operators greatly improved aiming. It was so ridiculously hard to shoot down that bomber formations' "fighter escort" usually left the bombers to hunt ground targets of their own. As the name implies, the Superfortress succeeded the B-17 Flying Fortress, which had a similar record. Despite flying in daylight bombing raids, whereas the British flew their bombers by night, the USAAF actually lost less bomber crews than the British, flying in the woefully under-protected Lancaster.
• During World War I, the Alpine part of the Italian front saw the Italian Alpini and the Austro-Hungarian Kaiserjäger assault each other's positions... On top of mountains, where the only available artillery were mortars and light cannons and the still infant military air forces couldn't support them. Even in the harsh winters, when they would build refuges by digging them in the mountains or the glaciers. And when they found a position too strong to be attacked, they'd just dig a gallery under it and place a bomb (this last tactic was abandoned by unspoken agreement when the final bomb, put together by the Austro-Hungarians, literally collapsed half of a mountain. The Italians had prepared an even bigger one but had been prevented from blowing it up when the Austro-Hungarian bomb was detonated a few hours before).
• Sharks. They evolved during the Ordovician Period, sometime between 455-425 million years ago. That means they've lived through all five of the Earth's mass extinctions, including the aptly named Great Dying, which saw 95% of all other marine life wiped out. In fact, they seem to have only gotten more powerful; the modern Greenland Shark has the longest lifespan of any known vertebrate, living for between 300-500 years. If there's one thing sharks should be known for, it's surviving.
• Whales, elephants, and other large animals are extremely durable. Elephants are an especially strong example. They are so tough that it's recommended that you shoot them directly in the brain with a gun strong enough to break your wrist or dislocate your shoulder if you are not careful.

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