No Holds Barred Beatdown / Literature

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• 1632: The Canon Law features the character of Quevedo. He is massive pain in the ass who orchestrates a number of plots to sack Rome and murder the pope. He eventually confronts Ruy Sanchez, the man who trained him long ago and is currently trying to save the pope. Ruy merely takes advantage of a flaw in Quevado's fighting style that he (Ruy) never bothered to fix and stabs him in the throat.
• Beware of Chicken, Jin Rou being subjected to a fatal beating by some bullying disciples results in the transmigrator protagonist ending up in his body, kicking off the plot. Later, after he finds out about the beating that (apparently) drove Rou out of the sect, Elder Ge delivers one to the disciples involved in turn.
• Poor Han Solo in Black Fleet Crisis. He is captured by the Yevetha. They try to force the Republic's hand by beating him nearly to death and then sending Leia a video of it.
• Liesel delivers one to Ludwig in The Book Thief. He pushes her too far and she takes out all of her anger and grief out on him, winning the fight before Ludwig even knew he was in a fight. The only thing that stopped her was seeing a boy who was enjoying watching Ludwig get beaten up and Liesel reached up, dragged him down, and beat him up as well.
• Borrasca:
  • Sheriff Cleary and Jimmy Prescott give one to Kyle that is so bad that it causes him to suffer brain damage and seemingly put him in a vegetative state. Subverted as he was being kept sedated for years.
  • In the climax, Sheriff Walker does this to his son Sam, with him and his men beating him to a bloody pulp, as he's going through a heroine withdrawal no less, daring his son to fight back so he can kill him "nice and legal". He also shoots and seemingly kills Kimber, before shooting Sam in the ribs, planning on having another son to replace Sam and feeding Kimber's corpse to a grinder. This goes completely in Sam and Kimber's favour as to get the Sheriff's gaurd do so they could kill him.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao:
  • Hypatía Belicia Cabral, the mother of Oscar, is viciously beaten in her younger years for having an affair with the husband of Trujillo's sister. After working her over with fists, the dictator's thugs used nightsticks.
  • Thirty years later, Oscar gets an equally brutal beating from two other police thugs for trying to pursue a relationship with a prostitute that a captain was in love with. He also survives, barely.
• Chillin' in Another World with Level 2 Cheat Powers: In their first encounter, Flio becomes so enraged when Hiya almost kills Fenrys that he brutally beats her up, and it is only Fenrys giving him a Cooldown Hug that he manages to calm down.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Harry Dresden himself is not a stranger to being on the receiving end of these. During Grave Peril, he learns through experience that being captured by Red Court Vampires isn't fun.
  • Harry tends to inspire this kind of feeling in most of his enemies, even as it's mutual. In Dead Beat, Cassius repays a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown Harry gave him with brutal murderous intent. It could easily be the Darkest Hour of the book, since Cassius explicitly says he will kill him slowly and very painfully. He gets pretty far, too.
  • In Turn Coat, book 11, Wizard Listens-To-Wind delivers one of these to a Skinwalker, which is a nigh immortal, semidivine shapeshifter that feeds on magic. He does so in a Shapeshifting duel, eventually making the Skinwalker turn into a minor Eldritch Abomination and fly away screaming.
  • The only person we know of who was able to kill one was Morgan, who did so by leading it on a chase that ended in Nevada, where he went into the Nevernever and stranded the Skinwalker there. The Skinwalker was then hit by a nuclear bomb test.
• Ender's Game has the eponymous hero deliver two of these, both to boys bigger and stronger than him. Ender doesn't pick either fight, but neither of his opponents is prepared for Ender's thorough Combat Pragmatism, and he really, really doesn't like bullies. They both end up dead.
• Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts:
  • In First & Only, Jantine Patricians attack some Ghosts with this, including Kick Them While They Are Down; they kill three and render a fourth Ghost critical, and a fifth Ghost escapes only because they take him alive.
  • In Ghostmaker, when Gilbear walks the picket and disapproves of how he finds two Ghosts, he inflicts a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, including Kick Them While They Are Down. Fortunately, Corbec interrupts.
  • In The Armour of Contempt, a gambling den sets out to beat Merrt to death in one of these.
• Drake whips Sam so badly in Gone his skin is in tatters and is in so much pain he is praying for death, even after being injected with morphine.
• In Greenmantle Hannay begins to unload one of these on Stumm. Averted in that his Unstoppable Rage evaporates once the fight is won:
  I had no particular ill-will left against Stumm. He was a man of remarkable qualities, which would have brought him to the highest distinction in the Stone Age.
• Harry Potter
  • Harry forgets about magic and simply bum-rushes Sirius Black in Prisoner of Azkaban — and it works!
  • Voldemort lays a savage magical one on Harry in the graveyard in Goblet of Fire, toying with him and making a spectacle of it for his Death Eaters before going for the kill.
  • The centaurs living in the Potter Verse's Forbiden Forest apparently use this as a method of execution as Hagrid saved Firenze from being kicked to death for "betraying them" by deigning to teach humans in Order of the Phoenix.
  • Harry and George attack Malfoy in such a rage they completely overlook the idea of using wands after he insults Harry's mother and Mr & Mrs Weasley in one go when Harry is already holding George back from attacking Draco for a previous insult towards the Weasleys and Ron in particular. Fred is furious he didn't get to partake as the rest of the team had been needed to hold him back after the first slight and none of them lost their heads at the second.
  • Snape brutally takes out Harry with magic while viciously insulting him in Half Blood Prince after he kills Dumbledore and Harry, understandably pissed, comes running after him and the other Death Eaters on his own. In this case the beating probably saved his life as it kept Harry from being taken out by other Death Eaters.
• Horton Hears a Who!: In the climax of the story when the who’s are trying to prove their existence and Horton is being roped and caged by the wickershams, it is mentioned that he is beaten and mauled by them. The [[2008 film]] isn’t any lighter on this, where as soon as Horton is caged, he is hit in the head by the door, jabbed, and then tugged on hard by the monkeys to make him drop the clover. While he doesn’t suffer any injuries, he does fall to the cage floor exhausted before the kangaroo snatches the clover
• The Hunger Games: Given the nature of the beast, it's an inevitability. Even outside the arena, Cinna receives a nasty one as Katniss watches helplessly. And they never saw him again.
• In the I, Richard Plantagenet Series Richard finally loses it at his grasping brother George, who is trying to keep Richard from his betrothed, Anne. Richard reminds George that even though Richard is smaller, he always paid more attention in fight training than George. Then, he proceeds to deliver an epic beatdown. George eventually pulls a dagger and their older brother King Edward IV comes flying down the hall and separates them violently. Then, he delivers a beatdown on George.
• Nina Tanleven:
  • In the backstory of The Ghost Wore Gray, Captain Gray was subjected to a one-man version of this, and was unconscious for two weeks as a result. He eventually died of his injuries. Later, during a trip to the South after the end of the Civil War, his doctor Samson Carter was also subjected to one by a group of men who didn’t even know who he was — he was black, and that was reason enough for them to beat him to death.
  • In the backstory of The Ghost in the Big Brass Bed, Cornelius Fletcher was jumped by a mob, beaten bloody and Left for Dead because they didn’t like what he was painting — it had gotten very political since he came back from fighting in World War I.
• In Nineteen Eighty-Four, captured thought-criminals are subjected to several rounds of brutal beatings in order to get them to confess to a Long List of mostly imagined crimes the Party can have them executed for at some future time. The real Cold-Blooded Torture begins after this.
• The Oregon Files: Any ship that goes up against MV Oregon gets on the receiving end of one of these. What looks like a rusted tramp freighter on her last legs is actually one of the most advanced warships in the world, armed with enough weapons to put down a small army. She once exchanged broadsides with a fully-armed Libyan destroyer, and suffered only cosmetic damage and some minor injuries to her crew while the destroyer saw its main batteries destroyed within minutes, its bridge mangled, and a good portion of its personnel reduced to red smears on the deck. The only reason she didn't sink the destroyer was because doing so would have caused an international incident. In later books, however, the Oregon gets to contend with some more evenly-matched ships, such as the Big Bad's railgun-equipped superyacht in The Emperor's Revenge and her own doppelganger, the Portland, in Final Option, both of which require her crew to use their wits along with sheer firepower to win the day; unfortunately, the latter ends up being her last battle as Cabrillo rams his beloved Oregon into the Portland in order to buy time for his crew's escape, and an ammunition explosion from the Portland ends up sinking both vessels.
• Gabriel's brutal beatdown of the captured Lymond in Pawn in Frankincense, the fourth novel in Dorothy Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles.
• About halfway through The Pendragon Adventure, in The Rivers of Zadaa, Saint Dane amuses himself by taking the form of a Giant Mook among the local military and effortlessly knocking Bobby around. This isn't it. Bobby, strapped for any physical response, gets under Saint Dane's skin with an impromptu Breaking Speech about how this is only a diversion from all the times he has failed, and how, in the end, he is destined to lose. In response to this, Saint Dane loses his cool the first time in the series, goes completely berserk, and beats Bobby within an inch of his life. Just to drive home how bad it is, Bobby spends a great portion of the book recovering from said Beatdown. His doctor and Loor specifically point out that normally it would take months for him to recover, and he'd never get full functionality from his body again, but beats the odds and somehow recovers fully. At first the only thing he could move without extreme pain was his toes.
• Redwall:
  • In the original, it may not happen to a hero, but it's jarring enough. So far, we've only seen normal battles in a siege, and most of the plans have been sort of comic-book level: climbing over the walls via a tree, tunneling under, etc. Then Cluny finds out he's been betrayed by the fox "healer" he keeps around, and simply has his henchmen beat her and her son, stab them to death and dump the corpses in a ditch. Her son survives, unfortunately.
  • Another one happens to a vermin Mook in Rakkety Tam, who is sent to scout out Redwall. He runs into a Long Patrol hare that's famous at boxing, and confidently thinks he can kill the "big rabbit". The hare in question beats the ever-loving snot out of him, partly as revenge for ten other hares that were killed and eaten by the mook's boss, and second for calling him a rabbit. This also happens to heroes, from time to time.
• Sisterhood Series: Let's just say that there's a lot of beatdowns.
• In the climax of Skate the Thief, Belamy is on the receiving end of one of these from Hugo, the vampire leader of the Ink. Hugo smashes the wizard hard enough to knock *skin* off him, and Belamy doesn't even bother trying to fight back during the confrontation. He's actually using the beatdown to give himself time to set up his Time Bomb traps to take them both out.
• Smoke: Invisible man Freddie gives Bueler one at the end with Geoff describing it as several minutes of it looking as though Bueler is throwing himself against pieces of furniture then dragging himself back to his feet.
• A Song of Ice and Fire. Arya Stark stabbing The Tickler to death, one of several Troubling Unchildlike Behaviors showing the supposed Plucky Girl Princess in Rags is actually a deeply traumatised Child Soldier. Eventually, she has to be hauled off by none other than the Hound, himself a brutal killer.
• Space Glass:
  • Marvelous delivers one to the professor's daughter, then one to Bob immediately after.
  • Reeva gives one to Bob after he disables the Marauder.
  • Marvelous gives another to Bob during the Chapter 10 fight.
  • He dishes one out to Ratroe, Nicora, and Bob after unleashing the World Eater.
  • And another during the Albatross battle, to Bob.
  • Finally, Bob gives one to Marvelous during their final battle.
• Survivor Dogs: In A Hidden Enemy, Alpha attacks Mulch for eating before him (or so Alpha thinks as Lucky really framed Mulch). It's not an actual mauling but it's clearly painful nevertheless (especially because Mulch has long ears prime for biting). Alpha's beta, Sweet, also joins in on the attack.
• Those That Wake has a heroic version in its sequel, What We Become. Rose viciously beats Castillo with a chair, saving herself, Arielle, and Aaron.
• In the Ultramarines novel The Killing Ground, in their third ordeal, Leodegarius defeats Uriel and Pasanius, knocking Pasanius unconscious and leaving Uriel unable to rise. Uriel, angry that this man, who should have fought beside them, is going to kill them, tells him to Get It Over With. Whereupon Leodegarius tells him that the ordeal is to lose, because the only way they could have defeated him was the use of warp-based powers. Failure has shown that they don't have them — and they are promptly hauled away from medical treatment that restores them to fitness within hours.
• Underground: In Robyn's fight against the Morrigan, Robyn ends up provoked to the extent she jumps on her opponent, sending them to the ground, and punches them until Robyn has to be physically dragged away. The damage she caused ends up majorly disfiguring her opponent's face and knocked them unconscious.
• At the start of The War Gods, Bahzell walks in on Harnak beating and raping a palace servant. Since his kind particularly believe that Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil, Bahzell leaves him with two open fractures in his ribs, nine teeth gone and four more broken enough to need pulling out, one eye swollen shut, broken nose and a lump the size of an egg in his forehead.
• Onyesonwu delivers one to Aro in Who Fears Death when he refuses to train her for the third time.
• In The Will of the Empress, Berenene decides that she wants Sandry — and her wealth — to stay in Namorn, and Sandry's foster-siblings (who are all powerful mages) to stay as well and serve her. After Sandry is abducted by a guy who wanted to marry her without her consent, all of the siblings tell Berenene to fuck off, at which point Berenene decides that they're only being so bold because they have Tris, who is one of, if not the most powerful mages on the planet, and who has incredibly rare ambient weather magic. Berenene's solution is to ask her curse-wielding second-in-command to make one for Tris. It knocks her down a flight of stairs, sending her bouncing and cartwheeling instead of sliding or tumbling, and breaks or fractures nearly every bone in her body, but doesn't kill or permanently disable her. It only makes the four even more pissed off.
• Heathcliff does this to Hindley midway through Wuthering Heights, shortly after Catherine's death. Of course, earlier in their lives Hindley had plenty of times the opportunity to do this to Heathcliff, at least once using a whip.
• A common theme in the X-Wing Series. Since it's kinda a war, shooting an enemy in the back while pretending to be one of their allies is a lot more acceptable than in other settings, but things like enhanced Ewoks wanting to slaughter unarmed scientists for torturing them is frowned upon. The Starfighters of Adumar book takes this to its logical conclusion; Turr Phennir's compliance with highly formalized and regulated but fatal beatdowns is monstrous, while Janson's beatdown of a man he disarmed to save a woman's life is a glorious Moment of Awesome.
• In "The Yellow Dwarf", the Fairy of the Desert savagely attacks Princess Toutebelle with a spear, causing her to fall into her mother's arms soaked in her own blood.

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