No Body Left Behind

""To die without leaving a corpse... that is the way of us Garo.""

- Garo Robe (Last Words), The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask

Something dies, as it is prone to do. After it takes its last breath, the body dissolves for no apparent reason. Often dissolves into smoke that wisps away as the body dramatically falls to the ground. Why this occurs is generally never explained and no character bats an eye at it happening. Often used in media to avoid showing the kiddies a corpse.

For video games, this is a subset of Everything Fades, though with Everything Fades, bodies may stick around for up to a few minutes after monsters die.

Not to be confused with No One Gets Left Behind, in which not one single person (or unit) is left behind when a force retreats, which is maybe the thing you're looking for. Also not to be confused with Never Found the Body, in which the subject's death was not seen/confirmed, and is most likely Not Quite Dead.

Animated Armor may be caused by this. On the other hand, you may never know. See also Disappears Into Light and I'm Melting. For the moral equivalent to this, see Self-Disposing Villain. May be the end result of No Immortal Inertia. If he takes his dungeon and doomsday devices with him, he may be a Load-Bearing Boss.

Anime & Manga

 * In Bleach, low-level hollows dissolve when they are killed, although high powered Arrancar or Shinigami usually don't (there are some exceptions, related to the manner in which they were killed).
 * Whenever anyone dies in Houshin Engi, their body disappears and their soul flies away as a beam of light.
 * Plenty of examples in Sailor Moon.
 * Nephrite is probably one of the more well-known examples, although it happens constantly to both villains and heroes. The latter obviously come Back from the Dead in season finales.
 * Averted in the first season finale: When the Sphere of Destruction from Sailor Moon's final attack starts consuming the area around the Dark Kingdom, the bodies of the four Senshi are shown still laying in the same places they fell.
 * Digimon: The Digimon dissolve as soon as they die. Though occasionally they'll revert to digieggs for plot-related purposes.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh
 * Happens in Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's when Dark Signers die—upon their death, they crumble to dust.
 * In the third season of Yu-Gi-Oh GX, people actually start dying. When this happens on camera instead of falling off a cliff, the people/duel monsters tend to glow bright white then fade into dust that blows away.
 * Worth noting that in both series they got better.
 * In Death Note when, they dissolve into sand.
 * The homunculi from Fullmetal Alchemist disintegrate into nothingness upon dying, as well as . Dismembered body parts also disintegrate as they're regenerated.
 * My-HiME
 * Whenever someone dies as a result of the HiME battles, the victim's heart stops, then their body's color fades, finally ending with slow dissolution into green sparks.
 * In the Elseworld sequel Mai-Otome, the same thing happens to any Otome/Master or Slave/Master relationship. Mai-Otome's problem is that it was porting over yet another familiar element from Mai-HiME while ignoring that the logic that series used for the sparkly deaths was specifically for raising the columns and powering the HiME star.
 * The Zoanoids in Guyver (anime & manga) are engineered to dissolve after dying, in order to leave no evidence of their existence.
 * 's body in Madlax presumably disappears off-screen as it is never shown after the episode when he dies. That is probably because he was Dead All Along.
 * Inuyasha: Happens fairly often to youkai slain by Inu-Yasha. Case in point: Hiten (the elder Thunder Brother) evaporated after Inu-Yasha delivered a fatal blow with Tessaiga. The many cases where youkai are slain by sacred arrows or the Wind Scar, et al, don't count.
 * In GetBackers, 's body dissolves into feathers after he
 * Dragonball Z
 * Goku fades away when he dies. Kami has taken it to the other world so that Goku can have his body in the afterlife for training. Otherwise, people usually stay put when they died.
 * Later, when Vegeta sacrifices himself in an attempt to kill Buu, his attack drains so much energy from his body that it turns to stone, which quickly crumbles into dust and is blown away by the wind.
 * Naturally shows up in .hack. When a monster is killed, it slumps to the ground, then vanishes. When a PC is killed, their body goes limp, and turns grey, and vanishes if there's no-one left to revive them. When someone gets data-drained, however, their sprite starts fragmenting, and drifts away piece by piece.
 * In Saint Seiya, the final barrier between the Hades and Elysium is the Wall Of Lamentation, seemingly indestructible. Only by channeling the Cosmo of the Twelve Gold Saints of the Zodiac Houses, and creating sunlight in the depths of Hades, can it be breached. All Gold Saints, living or dead, friends or foes, burn their Cosmo, there is a blinding burst of light... And Shun and Seiya can only weep, for all that is left of the heroic Saints of Athena is their Gold Cloths shining in their wake.
 * Anything that dies in Psyren dissolves into sand in a few minutes, due to
 * In Umineko no Naku Koro ni, the Stakes of Purgatory do this when they die.
 * Kira users in Nabari no Ou fade into dust when they die. Their clothes don't dissolve, leaving an interesting scene.
 * Late into the Magic World arc in Mahou Sensei Negima, a special attack is introduced that causes anyone it hits to vanish in seconds. This only affects (most) residents of the magic world.
 * Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt: When Panty and Stocking kill a ghost, it explodes. Becomes a plot point when they are tried for the murder of a friendly Ghost, as the fact that there was a body meant that they didn't do it.
 * In Samurai Deeper Kyo, this becomes a case of Chekov's corpse. When members of the Mibu clan die or are killed, their bodies vanish into nothingness. Near the end it is revealed that this happens because
 * This happens to from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in the final episode.
 * In the Naruto anime at least one of Orochimaru's test subjects dissolved into nothing. Based on his expression at the time, Orochimaru had seen it enough for it to be a common occurrence.
 * When a robot dies in Casshern Sins it turns to dust.

Films -- Animation

 * In Anastasia, Rasputin's body turns to dust and blows away as soon as his Soul Jar is destroyed.
 * The Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit features giant spiders that gave a scratchy yelp and spun away into oblivion when slain. To a high-school classroom, this is hilarious. When  dies his body remains and a veil is spread over it in a dignified manner, disappointing anyone expecting a spider-like demise.
 * In Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent becomes a dragon, gets impaled by a sword, and falls down a cliff. When the sword's shown again, it has only a cloak under it.

Films -- Live-Action

 * In This Island Earth, the Mutant dissolves after being killed. This is given a Hand Wave as its body being obliterated by the change in pressure as the ship approaches Earth.
 * Mystery Science Theater 3000: "Self Cleaning Mutant! Leaves only the fresh scent of pine!"
 * Star Wars
 * Obi-Wan Kenobi in A New Hope.
 * And Yoda in Return of the Jedi.
 * And almost every Jedi who dies in the the Expanded Universe. Sith and other users of The Dark Side, on the other hand, explode instead of fading away when they die.
 * An exception for the Sith is Darth Nihilus, whose body very visibly crumbles quietly away under his robes once the Exile turns his back.
 * In Blade, vampires collapse into ash when killed.
 * In Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, defeated Evil Exes turn into a shower of coins, as they do in the comic. This is particularly amusing considering it not only takes place in Canada, but when Scott slays bystanders their coins take the shape of their bodies on the floor.
 * In fact, the comic comments on this when and those in the audience get hit in the head with the showering coins.
 * In Elektra defeated villians disappear in a puff of green smoke, something unique in Marvel Universe films. They're ninja—it's presumably deliberate so that the Hand's secrets are kept secure.
 * Captain America the First Avenger has anyone caught within the shots of various Tesseract-powered weaponry disintegrating completely in a blue mist.
 * Harry Potter:
 * This is how Voldemort dies in the film version of Deathly Hallows.
 * The movies apparently like this trope, if the deaths of are any indication. Well, at least for villains. Good guys seem to leave behind bodies when they die (well, except for )).
 * The standard fate for most Indiana Jones villains.
 * This is what happens to  in X Men First Class immediately after taking a blast. One of his teammates even commented "We can't even bury him".
 * The probable first appearance of this in film (and the definite first appearance of the Stop Trick that enabled it) was in A Trip to the Moon. It reappears in a lot of other films by Georges Méliès.
 * In a new movie called The Darkest Hour, the main "aliens" can shred a human body into dust in a slightly disturbing manner.
 * At the end of The Rock, Sean Connery's character, an alcatraz inmate, runs off and asks Cage's character to tell the authorities that he was killed. Nicholas Cage's character does so, and when asked about the body, says that this occurred to him as a result of the bioweapon MacGuffin.

Gamebooks

 * In the Lone Wolf series, amongst others, the Darklords and Nadziranim fade into nothingness when killed. As for their undead servants, Vordaks and Helghasts, they dissolve into foul-smelling liquids when destroyed.

Literature

 * The Dresden Files is a fairly realistic urban fantasy, and, as such, most things do indeed leave the expected corpses. However, some things, such as demons and various Eldritch Abominations, manifest a body when they come into the real world, and when defeated, this body turns to ectoplasm which slowly evaporates. In other words, a thoroughly Justified Trope, used selectively for effect.
 * Likewise justified when embodied Auditors die in Thief of Time, because they build their human bodies out of molecules from dust and random debris, and can only keep them intact and functional by actively exerting their willpower.
 * In the Dark Tower series, we meet who finds that, when vampires die, they helpfully follow this trope.
 * Star Wars: in The Last Command,
 * Justified in His Dark Materials, where daemon bodies flash out of existence as soon as they or their owners die.
 * The Silmarillion: "Then [Fëanor] died; but he had neither burial nor tomb, for so fiery was his spirit that as it sped his body fell to ash, and was borne away like smoke [...]"
 * In Dracula, Dracula and his Brides are said to crumble into dust on death. Justified in text as a side effect of their unnatural preservation being removed and centuries of decay catching up with them. Subverted with Lucy, whose body remains intact, as her mortal death had occurred only a few days before her Vampiric one.
 * Draconians in Dragonlance self-destruct in various ways when they die, with the exact manner depending on their sub-species.
 * In Dragon Weather, a slain dragon rots extremely fast. Lord Obsidian notes that this is useful for making sure that a dragon is not faking.
 * In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Queen of the Black Coast", the hyenas transform back into men before crumbling.
 * The Halo Expanded Universe novels reveal that this is a regular hazard with space travel. Even when a slipspace drive is offline, nearby items and people run the risk of simply disappearing. And when the drive is active ships have a chance of going into slipspace and never returning.
 * In Dean Koontz's Phantoms, a small California town is wiped out by an Eldritch Abomination, but most of the residents are never actually found, having been eaten. The few bodies they do find suggest it's better that way.
 * Almost every monster in the Percy Jackson and The Olympians books. Sometimes a piece of the monster will remain if it was cut off before the monster died (such as the Minotaur's horn), or if severing it causes the monster to die (such as Medusa's head).
 * This also apparently happens to monsters in The Kane Chronicles, which Word of God confirms takes place in the same universe as Percy Jackson.

Live-Action TV
"Prue: I love it when they clean up after themselves."
 * The Invaders is probably the most iconic series with aliens disappearing upon death. Note that they could inflict the same thing to humans with their Disintegrator Rays.
 * Lampshaded on Stargate SG-1 in the Show Within a Show Wormhole X-treme! The lead actor is having trouble in a romance scene because the background is littered with the bodies of dead Mooks his character killed in the previous scene (which is kind of distracting, ya know). The staff remove the bodies and hope no one will notice the change in scene continuity (one writer proposes that they write it so that the alien weapons disintegrate bodies, but his idea is quickly shot down).
 * In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Joss Whedon explicitly stated that his vampires turn to dust when they die to emphasize that Buffy isn't killing people every week, and to avoid 20 minutes of cleanup at the end of each episode. And to avoid Buffy leaving a trail of corpses behind her which would result in messy law-enforcement involvement in her adventures.
 * Averted in the third season episode "The Wish". Buffy kills a demon but it doesn't fade away and the Scoobies realise they'll have to bury it. Vampires, as Buffy notes, are so much easier. Stake, dust, no cleaning up.
 * In "Hells Bells" a demon attacks Anya during the wedding and is killed by Buffy. When it refuses to go "poof" Willow suggests covering it with flowers.
 * Also averted with the Master, who only partially dissolved, leaving a skeleton. Justified because, as an older vampire, he is significantly more powerful. (And it allowed a plotline for the second season premier.)
 * Likewise in Charmed.
 * Except in episode 15 season 5, "The Day the Magic Died", all magic ceased to exist for a day, and the demon they killed left a dead body and green blood stains. They had to quickly hide it in a closet, until magic returned. Justified Trope in that it's explicitly explained that the demons deliberately set it up so that their body disappears after they die, in order to maintain The Masquerade.
 * Lampshaded in episode 8 season 1, "The Truth Is Out There and It Hurts": After a warlock from the future gets killed, he is sucked into a vortex of some kind.


 * This is very common in Sentai Tokusatsu shows. The Monster of the Week would generally vanish once vanquished with various cheesy effects—or eventually explodes, especially in older shows.
 * A good example is Uchu kara no messeji: Ginga taisen (better known as San Ku Kaï in Europe or Sankuokai in Latin America). Every villain of the week would explode (or sometimes liquefy or burn...) with color or visual related to their nature or powers.
 * Also generally used and abused in Power Rangers, where monsters tend to explode into a fine powder. But averted in Power Rangers SPD, where the villains use mecha rather than growing, and as such leave behind scrap. One early episode featured the main characters assigned to cleanup duty, picking up the massive debris left behind by the giant robot fight.
 * Semi-averted in Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue and Power Rangers Dino Thunder, where exploding monsters do leave chunks of burnt meat, which the villains then juice up to ressurect them at giant size. When they get blown up a second time at giant size though, there are (usually) no remains. Also oddly inverted at the end of Lightspeed Rescue, where Diabolico leaves behind an intact corpse for Bansheera to revive, despite his death exposion visibly reducing him to nothing but a wisp of smoke.
 * In First Wave, the invading aliens secretly use partially-human bodies as vessels. To prevent them from being analysed by humans and exposed as alien, they dissolve immediately after death, which also means anyone who sees an alien die becomes aware that something strange is going on.
 * There are never bodies left to clean up aboard the Lexx, because said Living Ship "absorbs" them (along with anything else it thinks won't be missed.)
 * In Red Dwarf, the crew are all killed in a radiation leak. After 3 million years there's nothing left of them except small, surprisingly neat, piles of dust. Lister found them very moreish until he discovered what they were.
 * Mostly averted in Supernatural. While there are monsters that turn to dust or don't leave anything to prove they existed (especially ghosts), the Hunters know how to cover their tracks, and thus get rid of a body of a monster/demon they killed. Also they don't stay too much in the same place after the "job" for the missing person to be obvious or connected to them. A FBI Bloodhound (note that this implies some greater professionalism than your typical province sheriff/cop they have to deal with) actually "tracks" the Winchesters for a year or so and all he can put on their record are some grave-disturbing crimes and murders on ordinary people they weren't responsible for.
 * The X-Files: Alien hybrids dissolve into green goo when killed.
 * In one Twilight Zone episode, three astronauts from a crashed space shuttle disappear one by one, and they vanish from everyone's memory as well, except for the remaining astronauts until they disappear.

Puppet Shows

 * In The Dark Crystal, both the Skeksis and the Mystics leave no body behind when they die. The Skeksis crumble to dust, but the Mystics simply fade away.

Tabletop Games

 * In both Vampire: The Masquerade and The Requiem, vampires rot to dust within seconds of their Final Death. This is repeatedly commented on in Hunter: The Vigil—vampires are the only type of supernatural creature to clean up after itself. Everything else leaves corpses to deal with. Usually human.
 * Titanspawn in Scion usually evaporate, melt away, or otherwise cease to exist once slain. The only part left behind is a piece or an item (called a Trophy) that serves as a reward for the Scions that destroyed it. Some of them, like the nekomata, are more complicated.
 * In Warhammer 40,000, Necron bodies will seemingly dissipate if a battle seems to be lost. This is because the bodies are being teleported back to their tombs to be repaired.
 * Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game). Several Cthulhu Mythos monsters will dissolve into liquid after they're killed, such as the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath and the Mi-Go.

Video Games
"Garo Master: Die I shall, leaving no corpse. That is the law of us Garo."
 * Virtually every video game where you destroy and/or kill enemies has them vanish a short time after being killed. This is largely due to programming and performance issues, plus piled up corpses would get in the way of characters that can't jump or RTS units that can't just walk over the artillery riddled tank. Only aversions, subversions, and extraordinary genre examples or types of fade outs (smoke, liquid, etc.) should be noted here.
 * Diablo averts the trope: not only do corpses stay behind, the bodies of acid/poison spitters can continue to damage you if you stand on them.
 * Resident Evil
 * Resident Evil 4 leaves the bodies of bosses such as Dr. Salvador, and sometimes not even them. Ganado mooks dissolve into ooze shortly after being killed.
 * The Resident Evil remake leaves behind killed zombies for good reason: Unless you burn the body, it will get back up much stronger and faster about a half hour later.
 * In Crysis, the final function of the nanosuit involves completely incinerating itself and the downed user (your character or one of his similarly-equipped Red Shirt colleagues) from the inside out to assure enemy forces aren't able to capture information from their corpse. Nifty. The Aliens do this too, their machines always self-destruct.
 * Doom
 * Averted in the first two games, where corpses remain as 2D textures.
 * Played straight in the third game, for the performance reasons listed above. Power gamers, annoyed that their rigs weren't being used to their full potential, rapidly modded the game to force bodies to stay put.
 * Averted in Primal. Corpses remain permanently, unless Jen is killed before passing the next Checkpoint. Then the corpse vanishes when its monster is respawned. There aren't enough monsters per area create an overload of corpses. Corpses also have energy for Scree to drain and may contain objects necessary to continue.
 * Oddly, this happened more often as the Tomb Raider series went on, despite the technical progress; in TR 1 and 2, enemies pretty much never disappear, 3 had them disappear after you had turned away for a little while, in 4 and every subsequent game corpses always disappear right in front of your eyes after a few seconds. However, Underworld has been confirmed to be averting this.
 * In Okami and Okamiden, your enemies turn into flowers when you kill them. Instead of spurting blood, they will literally shoot pure flowers from their veins. Issun explains this in the first game as "When a demon is exorcised, the gods power can return, and nature thrives." This doesn't explain how the flowers the Demons leave behind disappear too.
 * Since Shadow of the Colossus only has 16 enemies anyway, and they're too spread out to risk piling up, the corpses of killed Colossi remain throughout the whole game, and you can even have flashback-styled fights with ones you've already killed. The small creatures, however, such as lizards, disappear after you kill them.
 * Both played straight and averted in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. When killed, the elite FROG soldiers immediately dissolve into dust. However, when a normal soldier is killed, his body remains and must be disposed of to keep other soldiers from discovering it.
 * Spaceship wrecks in EVE Online last for about two hours before vanishing.
 * Baldur's Gate averts this trope. Everything you kill lies there dead for the rest of the game, unless you killed it in some way that doesn't leave a body (e.g. vaporizing zombies with your enchanted mace).
 * Golden Axe is possibly the oldest game that doesn't do this: in the arcade version, every enemy you defeat fades to gray and remains on the floor like that. In most ports, however, the enemies do disappear, probably because of memory constraints.
 * The first few Fallout games averted this in that corpses tended to stick around for several days unless the player managed to obliterate their opponent with certain energy weapons. After the corpses decay/presumably are eaten a pool of blood remains on the spot. Generally the blood pools disappeared after some days but those that did not sometimes hid useful items.
 * In Total Annihilation, destroyed units leave behind beaten shape of themselves, blocking way for other units and fire. Fortunately, they are easy to destroy. Or they can be recycled for resources, but this takes a lot more time.
 * Averted in Dawn of War, partially because the Necrons can re-use their corpses.
 * The Legend of Zelda
 * Mostly played straight in The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, save for one instance: Redeads. When you kill one, it doesn't vanish into flame like every other enemy, it just sort of crumples. This gets especially creepy when now, every other Redead in the area will hobble over to their dead comrade, probably to eat them. Or mourn for them, which is strangely also a horrifying concept. If you remain for a while, however, the Redead's body will seemingly sort of... melt away.
 * Also, in The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask, from which the page quote is taken, there are the Garo Ninjas, who seemingly by their own, unknown Badass Creed are required to ensure that they leave no body behind. Common Garo Robes solve this by setting themselves aflame, while the more hardcore mini-boss, Garo Master, decides not to take any risks, pulls out a bomb and blows his failing body to dust.


 * Averted in No One Lives Forever, because disposing of the bodies without detection is a major gameplay mechanic.
 * No More Heroes. In the English/uncensored version, the enemies, after being cutting in half, while stay for a few seconds before disappearing, giving enough time for blood geysers to erupt, where as in the Japanese/censored version, they just turn into dust right away. This is noticeable for the bosses. In America, the bosses won't disappear after dying. They'll just sit there, gruesomely dead, where as in the Japan, the bodies will turn to dust when needed. Special notice goes to Holly Summers, whose head gets blown off. In America, the head is gone and you bury her. In Japan, well, it's like in the cartoons where the character has black all over their face. And you still bury her.
 * Giants: Citizen Kabuto handwaves this trope by revealing that the planet you're on is host to an extremely ravenous race of scavengers who live underground, constantly awaiting fresh meat: Killing enemies greets you with the sight of hundreds of them popping up all around the newly formed corpse and rapidly devouring it before vanishing back underground, leaving only a bloodstain and a power-up.
 * Averted in Thief: The Dark Project and its sequels, which all involved hiding bodies (corpses or unconscious foes) to avoid alerting guards and other traffic (and inspired the body-disposal game mechanic of No One Lives Forever, above). With rare exceptions, such as haunts and fire elementals, all kills in Thief leave a corpse and a liability.
 * Played particularly bizarrely in The Conduit, where the enemies visibly dissolve or incinerate shortly after death—something that obviously should have an in-universe reason, as opposed to just disappearing because of engine limitations—but no-one bothers to comment it.
 * Nonhuman enemies in Final Fantasy X collapse into pyreflies (supernatural firefly-like insects) when slain. This is because they're the souls of people not given proper burial rites. Machines explode, but their parts and human enemies are subject to Everything Fades.
 * Subverted in Vagrant Story. On the island of Lea Monde, where the main game takes place, everything does fade as part of the black magic infiltrating every part of the ruins. In the prologue to the game, which does not take place on Lea Monde, the bodies of enemies do not disappear.
 * Averted in Far Cry 2, corpses tend to stick around until you leave the area far behind; then the area resets, removing corpses, replenishing supplies and guards, etc. The most obvious handwave is that the next patrol comes by, cleans up, and calls in reinforcements to restock the place, though you never see this happening. The game would quickly become super easy if everything you destroyed stayed destroyed.
 * Played with in Parasite Eve 2. Monsters melt into puddles of goo whenever you kill them, but in the last part of the game, the stage becomes populated with killer cyborgs, and their bodies do not disappear, even if you leave the room and come back!
 * A weapon in Team Fortress 2, a knife called "Your Eternal Reward," allows a Spy to backstab someone, cause their corpse to silently vanish, then immediately assume the victim's appearance, thus blending in near-perfectly with enemies who are left unaware that their real teammate is dead.
 * Due to censorship, this is cranked up to eleven in the Australian version of Left 4 Dead 2, with bodies often disappearing before they even hit the ground.
 * Both averted and played straight in the Unreal series, which is normally powered by the sheer momentum of its Ludicrous Gibs, but has "gore settings" that can be adjusted all the way down to "bodies are indestructible and digitally disintegrate when killed."
 * Tank and vehicle hulls in Company of Heroes stick around a good long while if they're not hit by more explosions or crushed by heavy tanks, and actually present cover for infantry to use. The Panzer Elite can use repair vehicles to get any Axis tanks back in action so long as the hull remains mostly intact too. Infantry also tend to take a while to fade, and can be 'rescued' by Medics from a Bunker to form a new squad.
 * Destroy All Humans! gives us the disintegrator ray and the Ion Detonator.
 * Averted in Dragon Age Origins, once you kill someone/something their corpse/skeleton will lay in the place you killed them for the rest of the game. Except for Abominations, they explode after you kill them, and Rage Demons and Shades, they disappear somewhere. Played straight in Dragon Age II, though.
 * Whenever someone dies in The Sims, they transforms into an urn (if inside) or a tombstone (if outside). As long as the urn/tombstone isn't deleted, the sim's ghost will occasionally came around at night. Some pre-made lots come with tombstones and are thus already haunted.
 * In Alan Wake, the Taken dissolve when they're killed. Alan gets freaked out by it.
 * In FHBG, destroyed enemies disappear into four little clouds of smoke.

Web Comics

 * The Order of the Stick
 * Why illusions have to fall over the wall.
 * The Demon-Roaches disappear when killed, as seen in this strip, since they are extraplanar creatures from the Abysses.
 * In Erfworld the bodies of the dead, if not moved or uncroaked, disappear at the beginning of their side's turn.

Web Original

 * In Darwin's Soldiers, Lockdown has the power to turn people or objects into anti-energy. This causes them to instantly vaporize.
 * In RWBY the bodies of slain Grimm evaporate (okay, okay, they sublimate) shortly after they are killed. This is one of the key indicators that they are fundamentally unnatural.

Western Animation

 * In Justice League, a lot of the beasties from the episode "The Terror Beyond" didn't leave bodies when destroyed, in many cases because they were incredibly squishy. The giant-claw-whale-monster-thing that dissolves into acid when killed, for some reason.
 * Code Lyoko
 * The monsters explode when killed, and whatever debris they left behind quickly vanish. There is one enemy that does this a little differently. Creepers don't just explode, but also partially melt before vanishing completely.
 * The heroes also disappear when "devirtualized". Of course, this is inside a virtual world.
 * When Jaga dies in the first episode of the original Thundercats, his body turns to dust instantly, leaving only his empty clothes.
 * In Avatar: The Last Airbender, dies to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.