You hear a booming voice:
'Mortals, I must congratulate you on defeating me, Pluto, in my material form. I must admit that I am now powerless against you, but alas I am luckily immortal. I will now travel back to my true home, deep in the netherworld. There I will generate a new material form and regain my magical powers. I will be back to my old form in a matter of days. I tell you all this so that you will not gloat over your victory, and so that you will know that we may someday meet against if I happen to decide I want my items back before your tiny lifespans have expired. Next time I may not be so low in power. Again I feel I must congratulate you on your luck. Good bye, skums.'
He's exactly the same shape he always was, but it's like she stepped a little to the right and realised that the man everybody sees when they look at him is just a trick of perspective. From the front he looks like a human being. But from a little to the side, the human being is just the front end of something else, something huge and complex and black and ugly folded up painfully into an inadequate three-dimensional shell. A skyscraper whose ground floor is a human being but every other floor is filled with oozing alien organs and weird multidimensional sensors and wriggling feely things scraping against the metaphorical glass.
"You saw a portion of him," said Ugin. "A projection. Imagine that you reach your hand into a pond. The fish below the surface sees a five-headed monster, and cannot perceive the man attached to it. It mistakes a hangnail for an eye because the truth is beyond its imagining. You see?"
"And when you trapped them..."
"Like driving a spike through the hand," said Ugin. "The man will not die, but neither will he trouble other ponds. 'Killing' Ulamog's physical form would be like cutting off the hand. The man might be diminished, but he would survive—and he would be freed."
"And when you trapped them..."
"Like driving a spike through the hand," said Ugin. "The man will not die, but neither will he trouble other ponds. 'Killing' Ulamog's physical form would be like cutting off the hand. The man might be diminished, but he would survive—and he would be freed."
—Ugin and Jace Beleren discussing the Eldrazi, Magic: The Gathering
So... you think you hit me!? That was simply my shadow! And how did you like my Gestahl? I should've been on the stage! Well, General... You're such a goody two-shoes!
—Kefka taunting General Leo, Final Fantasy VI
"Fools! You can destroy the flesh, but never the soul! I will return!"
— Judge Fire, before being locked up inside the cargo section of an H-Wagon.
"The fire can’t hurt you, can it? You’re no more bound to that mortal form than I am. You’re pure spirit, and the scars are just for show. But I command you to be bound. Hear me now. Feel your spirit shrink until that soiled flesh measures the length and breadth of you. It is you. And it’s flammable."
— Cestis, Lucifer: Children and Monsters
