Implacable Man



""It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.""

- Kyle Reese, Terminator

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 Willpower. Compare 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'll find a way to get past it, but put an obstacle in The Juggernaut's way and he'll trample over it as if it weren't even there.

See also Hero-Killer, The Man They Couldn't Hang, Immortal Assassin, Perpetual Motion Monster, and Perfect Play AI. Usually a certifiable Badass. 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.

Anime

 * 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 some day as a homicidal gold-plated terror.
 * 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.
 * Mad Pierrot from Cowboy Bebop.
 * 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.
 * The Espada, from Bleach. 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,, 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.
 * 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. Oh yeah, and she's a maid by profession.
 * 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 basically a one-woman killing spree against everyone standing in her way.
 * Roberto and Inspector Lunge from Monster. One can wonder what sort of chaos would ensue should they ever have to face each other.
 * 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.
 * Guts from Berserk, an understandably rare protagonist example, who will not stop until Griffith and The Godhands are dead, demon army after him be damned. Also, quite a number of the series' demons either are these or The Juggernaut.
 * The personified Book of Darkness in the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha As. Her implacablity 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.
 * 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. Oh yeah, that "dead" thing? It got better. Oh yeah, and there's
 * Inspector Zenigata from Lupin The 3rd fits this bill. If he so much as lays an eye on Lupin, he'll start chasing him to the ends of the earth! A movie shows that even killing him won't stop him. After being shot by the villain of the movie using an old gun of Lupin, he had been in coma for a while, and then his heart stopped. Upon seeing this, a fellow cop declared he would avenge him by capturing Lupin... And Zenigata promptly awakened from the coma fully healed, before returning to sleep.
 * Pretty much every homunculus from Fullmetal Alchemist, thanks in part to their Philosopher's Stone giving them unbelievable regneration powers. Some specific examples include:
 * Lust, in the manga, gets shot several times, exploded, and even 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.
 * Sloth from the manga/Brotherhood. Takes countless gunshots, numerous mortars, and a few exploding vehicles and keeps on truckin'. He barely even needs to use his regeneration; the military doesn't even kill him once. The only thing that manages to stop him is getting doused with gasoline and lured out into subzero weather. And that still doesn't kill him, just makes him stop for a while.
 * Then there's Greed. There's reason Greed got called "Ultimate Shield".
 * Bradley himself. Notably he . And he did all that without regenerative powers. Damn.
 * Hell, he just lost
 * He didn't need the grenade either; the tank was rendered useless and the crew were dead. It was just for effect.
 * In the Pokémon movie 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.
 * 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 an entire clip of bullets at Knives. Knives turns the parts of his body where the bullets hit into guns and fires back. They both recover.
 * Mahou Sensei Negima 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 gets turned back to normal when
 * 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.
 * Rikiya Gaoh and Jo Tetsuma from Eyeshield 21. Tetsuma runs with the speed of a freight train and hits about as hard, all while remaining perfectly emotionless and calm, while Gaoh's just a psycho who literally can't be stopped...
 * Except by Donald Oberman, himself an example.
 * Goku becomes an Implacable Man to the Red Ribbon army. He takes out their entire force in their biggest stronghold, and nothing they can throw at him works, not even a big ass mecha.
 * Cell from Dragonball Z can regenerate all wounds and come back if there is even a single cell left of him.
 * Gohan after he is pushed over the edge during his encounter with Cell. He wins.
 * And the king of this trope, Broli from Dragonball Z. His favorite hobby is chasing someone around in order to beat them up, and no, you can't stop him. Get in his way? He'll just walk through you. Massive energy blast to the face at point blank? All the reaction you get from him is him asking you what the hell that was supposed to be. And don't bother wearing a cup—the last time he delivered a low blow, sections of building a mile away just disintegrated from the force.
 * Fuse from Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade 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 pretty much retro-Powered Armor.
 * One Piece gets 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.
 * 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
 * Due to being partially inspired by the Terminator, Bartholomew Kuma fits here, being an incredibly resilient cyborg and being able to redirect pretty much 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 even moreso 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 pretty much everybody they fight has a power that can hurt him.
 * Almost every Awakened Being in Claymore. They do eventually die from Lowered Monster Difficulty, but boy do they take a lot of punishment. Some Claymores can as well. The Abyssal Ones are the worst of them, but.
 * Berserker from Fate/stay night had 12 lives and easily took any damage dished out to him. In the end it took some Phlebotinum to kill him.
 * From the same multiverse, we have 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.
 * Dennou 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 Dennou Coil. But once his limits are learned and Satchii becomes familiar, the even-more unstoppable version 2 hunters show up!
 * Luna's father in Seto no Hanayome. The guy takes a Kill Sat to the face without even flinching.
 * Ryudou Hishiki from GetBackers. 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!
 * 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.
 * 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. Good thing most of his opponents are tanks crewed by rotten shots.
 * Yakumo from Sazan Eyes is literally 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Kazuo Kiriyama in Battle Royale. Despite being shot in the face, stabbed in the eye, hit with martial arts, he still gets back up, his expression just as dead, and shoots the offender. Egregiously shown during

Comic Books

 * A heroic example: Superman.
 * Only if you hurt his friends and family, especially Lana, Lois, and Batman.
 * 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.
 * HA HA HA HA!
 * 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 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.
 * The Juggernaut of the Marvel Universe is named this for a reason.
 * The Hulk, especially if you pissed him off by hurting his loved ones.
 * The Saint of Killers from Preacher (Comic Book) is a 24-carat-pure example. Despite appearing to be just a grim-faced middle-aged man in a beat-up duster, bullets bounce off him by the hundreds, speeding trucks crumple around him, a direct hit from a nuke doesn't even give him pause ("Not enough gun." as the Saint himself puts it). The only thing to briefly impede him was being literally trapped by a wall of the corpses of Mooks sent in to stop him.
 * In the first appearance of Judge Death in Judge Dredd, 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.
 * 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  He gets better.   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. Spidey hits him with a car and it doesn't slow him down.
 * "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, but gradually grew into an unstoppable, practically implacable juggernaut. Said one of his creators: "What doesn't kill him makes him Walter."
 * From the fourth issue of the Marvel The Transformers series, more a moment than a character - Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons, steps outside their fortress for the first time to confront the US army, and challenges them to destroy him. For fifteen minutes they fire everything they have that isn't actually a nuke at him while he just stands there. After the smoke clears, Megatron's response is "HA."
 * From the fourth issue of the Marvel The Transformers series, more a moment than a character - Megatron, the leader of the Decepticons, steps outside their fortress for the first time to confront the US army, and challenges them to destroy him. For fifteen minutes they fire everything they have that isn't actually a nuke at him while he just stands there. After the smoke clears, Megatron's response is "HA."

Fan Works

 * A hero example is Paul in With Strings Attached, who has been rendered immensely strong and Nigh Invulnerable. He tirelessly plows his way through literally 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).

Film
"Bullet-Tooth Tony: (interrogating a mook): Boris the Blade? As in...Boris the Bullet-Dodger?"
 * Perhaps the most potent distillation: the Terminator is literally a killing machine, as discussed in the page quote. The key example occurs near the end of the original film 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 his endoskeleton frame, arises from the flames to shock both the heroes and the audience that the killer robot is still coming. Hell, even after Kyle blows its legs off, the damn thing keeps crawling after Sarah with murderous intent, and even as it's being crushed in a press, it claws at her with its metallic skeletal hand to the very last.
 * Taken to further extremes in Terminator 2, where the T-1000 gets frozen by liquid nitrogen and breaks into a million pieces...and still survives to continue pursuing the heroes; 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 defenceless, wounded man dead in front of his wife and family.
 * The DVD commentary with writer William Wisher and director James Cameron provides the following exchange near the end of the movie: "It just kinda doesn't stop." "Well, it started not stopping already."
 * Terminator 3 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 totally impervious to any kind of damage Connor throws at it . The Harvester also counts.
 * The Tall Man from the Phantasm films. He can make you hallucinate that you killed him only to come back to torment you. He's telekinetic and super-strong, so it dosen't matter if you're close to him or not, he can still get you and cause your weapons to misfire or remove them from your grasp. Cut off parts of him and those parts will each become miniature monsters that will make your life hell. Freeze him and his head will release an unstoppable golden sentintel sphere. Finally you've somehow managed to burn him with fire, acid or blow him up, and his smoking corpse is on the ground, and you can take a breath....only to have an identical Tall Man step out of a dimensional doorway who picks up the corpse of the previous Tall Man and hurls it back through the portal, and then takes over immediately where the previous one left off. Did we also mention that 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?
 * Jaws from the James Bond franchise lives through two movies by sheer force of not stopping ever.
 * For that matter, Bond himself. Especially in the reboot 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * The Beast from the film Kung Fu Hustle. Takes being punched through walls and flattened into the ground and still keeps going.
 * 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.)
 * The film The Punisher 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 neighbour 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).
 * Another bulletproof Russian (Uzbekistani) appears in the movie Snatch, and hilarity ensues.

Avi:: Why do they call him the Bullet-Dodger?"

Bullet-Tooth Tony: "...because he dodges bullets, Avi.""

"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."
 * 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 clip 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.
 * Drug usage seems able to confer apparent-Implacability. A lesser kind of Implacable Man appears in Scarface: 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 manages to kill just about 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.
 * Similarly, in a Scarface-themed mission in a Hitman game, the target can, if not assassinated stealthily, snort a pile of cocaine and become very hard to kill.
 * Truth in Television, at least for PCP users. Just ask a cop who's had to deal with one.
 * Truth in Television for plain old adrenalin high. Many a police officer and crook have been killed by the person they shot and thought to be taken out of action in movie style, when actually a person who doesn't immediately succumb to a shock can act for several minutes after receiving a lethal shot, assuming it didn't hit the brain or spinal column. Dead men can shoot back at you, if you're not careful.
 * The tactic of the 'Mozambique Drill', two shots to the heart and then one to the head, evolved partly out of a gun battle between the FBI and heavily armed opponents. One of the opponents suffered a fatal shot that severed a major blood vessel in his chest, but he was able to continue shooting after being wounded for five minutes, killing an agent in the process.
 * Jason Voorhees from the Friday the 13 th movies is nearly impossible to stop, and it's always temporary.
 * 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.
 * In fact, most of the killers in slasher movies tend to fall under this trope until the Final Girl gets ahold of them (at least, depending on how many sequels there are).
 * In Freddy vs. Jason, Jason proves how implacable he is during a fight in dream world - despite being near-omnipotent in dream world, Freddy finds himself unable to kill Jason, before discovering his hydrophobia.
 * Imhotep from The Mummy 1999. Literally immortal, the only way to actually stop him is to magic him back to mortality and then kill him.
 * Arguably, Marv from Sin City. He's so tough he He defeated the psychopathic Kevin by  Throughout the film, he takes an almost superhuman amount of punishment without flinching.
 * Kazuo Kiriyama in Battle Royale. Even after brutal hand-to-hand combat with a highly skilled martial artists, a leap out of a speeding car, a spearhead to the eye, and several gunshot wounds, including one to the face, he's still on his feet and dangerous.
 * 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 more singleminded than most.
 * Robert Mitchum's character in The Night of the Hunter. "Don't he never sleep?"
 * Hancock.
 * Hellboy, as well as Kroenen (captured only due to Xanatos Roulette), Rasputin (historically tough, and made a deal with Eldritch Abominations), and Ilsa (granted immortality by Rasputin).
 * The titular Golden Army of Hellboy II. Even after getting torn apart, they rebuild themselves.
 * 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.
 * 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.)
 * Dorian Gray, as portrayed in the movie version of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen probably also counts. 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.
 * 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 and hoists him up in the air and snaps his neck with one hand. The subversion part comes when he opens his cloak to reveal the medieval breastplate that only "sort of" protected him.
 * 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."
 * 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.
 * Michael Myers of the Halloween series; in the seventh film, after getting an axe in the chest, he nonchalantly rips the weapon out and keeps going.
 * Though apparently you can convince him to go away by dressing up like him, but once the costume comes off, you're just another target.
 * To be honest it was played rediculously even as early as the original John Carpenter film. Micheal Myers gets stabbed twice in both the neck and chest (both of which should be lethal) lies still for a few minutes, than just gets up as though nothing happened, and less than thirty seconds later he gets shot five or six times and falls out of a second-story window, and still somehow gets up an walks away (though if one ignores the sequels, they could argue that he eventually bled to death).
 * The Gunslinger in Westworld, though to be fair he is a robot.
 * 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.
 * Kharis the mummy from The Mummys 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. 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.
 * The Ringwraiths from The Lord of the Rings (see also Literature).


 * The Junkions from the 1986 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.
 * The Frenchman Dredger in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes film of 2009.
 * The Fabrication Machine/B.R.A.I.N from 9|Nine. 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 an entire 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.
 * Subverted in Enter the Dragon. O'Hara is show early in the movie as being an amazingly tough and powerful fighter (a video clip shows him simply standing while two fighters repeatedly strike him in the stomache with staves) and menasingly chases down a woman in a flashback, but he's killed quite easily by Lee.
 * The Adventures of Captain Marvel feature 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.

Literature
"Bartimaeus: "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.""
 * 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.
 * The Nazgul in Lord of the Rings.
 * "Dead? No, you cannot kill them, no, no!"
 * In the Chronicles of Prydain, the Cauldron-Born are perhaps the most literal embodiment of the Implacable Man; they are actually 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.  In The Movie, The Black Cauldron, that Implacable Army can only be defeated by someone jumping into the titular cauldron—to their death.
 * 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:


 * In the Discworld book 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. Golems do have a weakness, though:.
 * Another, earlier golem example comes in Feet of Clay, in which Angua remarks that, despite its cracks, the golem would probably keep attacking even if it became nothing more than floating dust.
 * Not to mention 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.
 * Ends of the Earth? 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.
 * 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, who's spirit to live and even Divine Intervention save the day.
 * In Glen Cook's Black Company books, all magic users tend to be hard to kill, but the worst by far is . 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   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 Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, 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 even then 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 of Mistborn can only be killed by - 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 even 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 Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a chilling deconstruction 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 onto her. Literally. In the face of this monstrous behaviour the observers are disgusted.
 * Several characters from The Dresden Files, but most notably Cowl, whom . And keep in mind wizards are the Glass Cannons of the Dresdenverse. Also Nicodemus. He gets shot full of a full clip of bullets without even flincing. After the second bullet he actually started making the quintessential "can we hurry it up" gesture.
 * The Vampire Lord Haputmann Constanza from the novel sereis/2000 A.D. comic Feinds 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 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 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 the Way of the Tiger gamebook series. Everytime you killed him, he would reappear, repeating his line "I am Everyman.". After the first few fights, even if you took no damage(through fudging the dice, or just being really good at rolling them), you'd still lose hitpoints on each subsequent attempts, as "exhaustion" kicked in. The only way to get away from him:
 * The Irrha from Tad Williams' 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).
 * Conan the Barbarian in Robert E. Howard's The Hour of the Dragon when he's after the Heart of Ahriman. All right, he has to quell one Leave The Quest Test when he thinks of less complicated adventures with lower stakes, but only one.
 * Durza, the Shade from the Inheritance Cycle.
 * The Percy Jackson and The Olympians book The Last Olympian has Hyperion, Big Bad Kronos' Dragon, plus Kronos himself.  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.
 * Nearly any greater dead or free magic construct in the Abhorsen 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.
 * 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 fuctioning. 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 even tactics.
 * In the Fighting Fantasy book Knights Of Doom your character inevitably encounters the assassin's dagger, basically 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.

Live Action TV
"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!"
 * The Super Soldiers 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.
 * The Mayor, Glory and Caleb from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
 * 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.
 * The Beast from Angel 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.
 * How did it protect its eyes from the hand grenades?
 * "Angel" also had Marcus Hamilton (aka Jayne Cob)
 * 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.
 * The Huntsman of The Tenth Kingdom. Not only does he get, in a world where presumably medicine is at a medieval level and even 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. Ontop 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.


 * The Gorn from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The 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.
 * The T-888 Terminator called "Cromartie" in The Sarah Connor Chronicles. 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 (!), 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 has become 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.
 * 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.
 * One episode of Hustle had an implacable bounty hunter (or "tracer") named Pinky Byrne.
 * Played for Laughs on 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.
 * Theokoles from Spartacus: Blood and Sand. 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.

Music
"YES! And when the villagers heard that awful battle-cry "Yoooooooooo!" That's the one! They would run for their lives, fleeing over hills and thru valleys to the river, whereupon they would walk mid-stream for 37 and 1/2 miles, climbing out on the low-lying branch, shinnying down a young sapling onto rocky ground and leaping from stone to stone until they arrived one week later at a secret cave 97 miles away, and as they sat down for the first time to catch their breath, outside they heard: "Yoooooooooo!" ''OH! And this time they cut south to Paris, bought tickets on the Orient Express to Istanbul, hired a U-Haul to the Coast, jumped a Greek freighter across the Mediterranean Sea to Mongolia, hooked up with a camel caravan into the heart of the Gobi Desert, and as they paused at an oasis, to lift one handful of cool water to their parched lips, over their shoulder they heard: "Yoooooooooo!""
 * Taken Up to Eleven and played for laughs in Ray Stevens' song "Erik the Awful":

Professional 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 even then 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.
 * 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.

Tabletop Games
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.
 * Warhammer 40000 has an entire race of Implacable Men: the robotic Necrons, who can stand back up after basically anything - which in the Warhammer 40000 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. They even have a special rule for it: We'll Be Back. Space Marines and Daemons are effectively of this sort to "normals" too.
 * Well, to be fair, Necrons don't get We'll Be Back against the artillery shells without a resurrection orb -- Chunky Salsa Rule and all that. It is worth pointing out that even in such situations, the Necrons aren't destroyed. They've simply been damaged to the extent that they'll need to teleport to a proper repair facility before being in fighting shape. But they will be repaired.
 * The general character of the Imperial Guard also fits this trope; the entire organization 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.
 * Comissar Yarrik is a Badass Normal example of this. He lost his arm fighting againt an Ork warboss, but still managed to kill him, tear off his power claw and hold it triuphantly 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 and had his command tank explode. 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 "Well 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 melée 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 energy fire. This is fairly typical.
 * The Primarchs are examples of this trope. It took other Primarchs, daemon weapons or overwhelming (and I mean, overwhelming) force to kill them. One broke a greater daemon's spine over his knee.
 * A mysterious force aided humanity in the 13th Black Crusade which is rumoured to be the fabled "13th Legion" of the Space Wolves. If this is true, then they have been fighting in the Eye of Terror for over 10,000 years against all 9 Traitor Legions and all the Daemons of the Warp and are still a strong and effective fighting force. Doesn't hurt that further rumours have them being led by Leman Russ, which would make him the only currently active Primarch as all the others are dead, have become Greater Daemons or have otherwise been indisposed for the last 10,000 years.
 * Leman Russ himself showed strong traits of this when he first met the Emperor. The two fought, the Emperor in his battle armour and Leman Russ with no armour or weapons and was not only able to fight the Emperor for hours, but also knocked him clear across the room with a single punch.
 * 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.
 * For that matter, the Dungeons and Dragons 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, of course, is that they are required to continually attack, and if they run out of enemies they start chewing through allies...
 * And, of course, no conversation about Implacable Monsters is complete without 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 DnD. Instead he can only be driven back to the center of the earth to slumber.
 * 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.
 * This also describes pretty much every Lich on the planet, but fortunately their phylacteries are easier to break. Usually. It's getting them that can be a problem.
 * Inevitables are pretty much Terminator expies—extraplanar constructs that enforce universal law.
 * 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 literally tearing their comrades apart with bare claws and teeth is still coming at them.
 * 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).
 * The "Slasher" supplement for the New World of Darkness brings us the Mask. Built for murder and only murder, these mindless killing machines can take an entire pistol clip to put down (if you're lucky), and never need to sleep or eat.
 * Also in the World of Darkness, 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. And even 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.
 * And 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). And even then, they've got more natural resurrections than the Created do (albeit at a price).
 * "Ogre" from Steve Jackson Games. One player would set up the board with a layered defense of tanks, powered army infantry, and artillery. The other would have an Ogre (a large robotic tank in the style of Keith Laumer's "Bolo.") His only job was to advance.
 * Role Master had the Dark Reaver, basically an 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 has 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 basically 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.)
 * ...Except that isn't effective. At all. She does constantly hunt in Hell, but after finishing off her initial target in Creation, she's more interested in making love than war. Admittedly, this has resulted in some uber-powerful races of demons (the teodozjia, the Yozis' missionaries, come to mind), but she's hardly an unstoppable force of destruction (that would be the Exalted).
 * ...Except that isn't effective. At all. She does constantly hunt in Hell, but after finishing off her initial target in Creation, she's more interested in making love than war. Admittedly, this has resulted in some uber-powerful races of demons (the teodozjia, the Yozis' missionaries, come to mind), but she's hardly an unstoppable force of destruction (that would be the Exalted).

Video Games
"(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! (Max Payne 2) What the fuck is wrong with you, Max?! Why don't you just die?!"
 * The first example from video games is Dry Bones from Super Mario Bros. who would take as many jumps as you could dish out and still come back for more, that is unless
 * 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 kill them.
 * 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.
 * Or in New Super Mario Bros Wii,
 * Super Mario Galaxy 2's Chomps cannot be stopped except by an invincibility star.
 * Or this one particularly Badass Gearmo who instantly kills them with ONE PUNCH.
 * Can't forget 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.
 * Many games, especially Survival Horror titles, include one of these as a Recurring Boss (which will frequently turn out to be the final boss). Examples include:
 * Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2. 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.
 * Walter Sullivan from Silent Hill 4, at least until the boss battle. And even then he comes out the victor, depending on the ending. The Ghost Victims of the game also apply, since they will keep chasing Henry unless pinned down by a (very rare) sword.
 * The Ultimate Being's final form from Parasite Eve.
 * The Nemesis from Resident Evil 3 Nemesis: 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.
 * Lisa Trevor. Eventually she  And she somehow shows up again, none the worse for wear, to attack Wesker several times in Umbrella Chronicles.
 * 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 explosive. Guns, grenades and even 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 Black Knight/ 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.
 * Resident Evil 4 actually gives a kind of subversion with the . Bad guys like Mendez and Saddler, however, still play the trope straight, with Saddler  . And then there's El Verdugo. Luckily, 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.
 * Of course, this troper found he's more vulnerable under the effects of liquid Nitrogen and under more powerful weapons. It's only when he's frozen, however, when he can be harmed.
 * Also of great mention is Dr. Salvador, the Chainsaw Man (and his "The Mercenaries" counterpart, Super Salvador) . When you hear that chainsaw, your best option is to either start blasting the big guns or haul serious, serious ass
 * Big Bad 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 even catch rockets Matrix style. Even then he can survive the heat of lava, and takes a barrage of rockets to the heart before dying for good.
 * Debilitas from Haunting Ground. The three other stalkers in the game count as well.
 * The Dahaka from Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within. Subverted in that you can rather easily Kill It with Water.
 * Officer Carmelita Fox from Sly Cooper
 * 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.
 * Fox Face and the Four Masks from Shadow Hearts.
 * The Welder in the Chzo Mythos series.
 * The quite literally invincible Tall Man. Depending on his mood, he'll just walk towards you, or teleport Dragonball Z style and butcher you effortlessly.
 * Death (the security guard boss) from House of the Dead 3 shows up not just once but TWICE! One of the characters comments on it's one tracked mind and persistancy.
 * 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. Especially in the 3d games where you can read Space Pirate logs that talk about her as an unstoppable killer cabable of obliterating their armies singlehandedly.
 * The Metroids themselves, unless you're packing a cold based weapon.
 * After it is released in the third section of the PC game Vivisector: Beast Inside, 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.
 * The first game with an Implacable Man. Berzerk had 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 unles 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...
 * Fatal Frame II had the Kusabi, a guy who was unphotographable
 * 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).
 * 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.
 * Jake and Francis Fratelli in The Goonies (NES). The sequel introduces a third brother, but he can at least be defeated.
 * Death's Hand from Jade Empire, who is also The Dragon.
 * Darth Sion from KOTOR 2, who you can only kill by . I've heard of Talking the Monster to Death but this is ridiculous. 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. Isn't biology/necrology fun? And/or necrophilia?
 * The G-man from Half Life is a variant: You don't have to 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; in HL2, like all important or allied NPCs, he simply cannot be hit by weapons).
 * Gordon Freeman 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.
 * 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.
 * Of course, 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 pretty much in every installment. This somehow fazed him only the first time it happened. Must have been the novelty.
 * Luca Blight from Suikoden II. Just look at what it takes to finally kill him.
 * An enemy/creature from Pikmin, 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.
 * Liquid Snake from Metal Gear Solid survives a helicopter crash, an arseload of missiles that only succeed in blowing up his Humongous Mecha, a forty foot fall from the top of said 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 And then he
 * 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
 * Kratos
 * And when he does die, he just slaughters his way back to the land of the living.
 * The Reaper from Persona 3. Even if you do managed to kill him once you're strong enough, he still comes back for more.
 * Speaking of Scarface
 * In the pseudo-sequel 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.
 * Also in The World Is Yours, 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.
 * In addition to what has been mentioned about Warhammer 40000, 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.
 * 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 - bear in mind 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.
 * 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.
 * A little bit of Fridge Logic allows one to realise that almost all action game protagonists must appear this way to the hapless Mooks of the enemy - a lone man - or sometimes more - who just keeps killing and killing his (or her) way through whatever dregs of society and scum of the universe are thrown at him, no matter how big, large in number, high-ranking or well-armed the opposition is, on his way to the idiot who pissed him off. Admittedly, most of them are not Nigh Invulnerable, but spirit of the law and all that...
 * Then again some do legitimately end up with so much HP they can outright ignore frightening levels of damage. Imagine what the human Mooks think of the human looking protagonists of most RPGs. Samus or Link with all of their health upgrades are another example. Beam of radioactive plasma?
 * This is lampshaded in Pratchett's novel Only You Can Save Mankind where the Screewee Empire are genuinely fearful of the protagonist's ability to keep coming back every time they kill him, since they're a videogame 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."
 * Also lampshaded in the Metal Slug series. 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.
 * Asgard in Wild Arms 3. Guns and spells? Barely fazes him. An entire 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.
 * 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.
 * Humorously done by Allen O'Neille in Metal Slug. 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).
 * Max Payne can get plugged with hundreds of bullets in the course of the game, but doesn't seems any worse off, as long as he has a supply of painkillers to dull the pain. Lampshaded by the Big Bad of Max Payne and again by the Big Bad of Max Payne 2:
 * Max Payne can get plugged with hundreds of bullets in the course of the game, but doesn't seems any worse off, as long as he has a supply of painkillers to dull the pain. Lampshaded by the Big Bad of Max Payne and again by the Big Bad of Max Payne 2:

"Jaden Korr: "What did I ever do to him?""
 * In the second game he survives being shot in the face. He doesn't become mentally retarded or dysfunctional from it either.
 * The Cyberdemon in Doom can mow through masses of lesser Mooks and One Hit Kills the Doomguy unless he's at 200% health and/or 200% armor. It also takes at least 400 bullets (the maximum amount you can carry after finding the backpack) or an equivalent amount of damage from other weapons (except the rocket launcher, which needs more than the equivalent amount) to put it down. Even the almighty BFG, which can even down a Baron of Hell in one hit, takes four or so big blasts in order to take it down.
 * 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 even 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 even is capable of giving Ray one hell of a hand-to-hand battle before
 * 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  fight the guy.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Tsukihime has a few of these as well.
 * 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.
 * Definitely fitting the description on later difficulties is the Tank from Left 4 Dead, surviving clips upon clips of high-powered rifle and shotgun rounds and surviving complete immolation for upwards of a minute. Combined with how hard he swings, his implacability entered my nightmares.
 * 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 Is 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.
 * The Phantoms from The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, which 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.
 * A benign example from the same series: the Postman, particularly in Twilight Princess. 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.
 * Then there's the Bublin King, who you have to fight something like SIX FREAKIN TIMES if memory serves. Keep in mind that This was after getting knocked off a bottomless cliff.
 * TWICE.
 * Another Zelda example from Twilight Princess is 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.
 * The cursed bokoblins in Skyward Sword 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...
 * Joshua Graham, the former right-hand man of Caesar in Fallout: New Vegas. Time and again he'd be beset by numerous NCR Elite Mooks and reported dead, only to reappear days later, completely unharmed. When he failed to win the Battle of Hoover Dam for the Legion, Caesar set him on fire and threw him in the Grand Canyon to ensure he'd stay dead. And he managed to survive that and trekked his ass all the way back to Utah. In Honest Hearts, he has a Damage Threshold of 50 (not counting the armor he wears), which is arguably greater than anything the Courier could end up with.
 * Fallout 2 had Frank Horrigan a 12 foot super mutant in Power Armor who laughs (literally) at the ideal that plasma fire can kill him.
 * The Nameless One from Planescape: Torment, unless he wishes himself out of existence or screws up when meeting the Big Bad.
 * Zouken Matou from Fate/stay night. Also Kotomine, who had his.
 * 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 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.

"Sydney: So this is a Riskbreaker. Most men complacently accept "knowledge" as "truth". They are sheep, ruled by fear. But you are different. Always calm, detatched. A smooth flow of thought into action. Indeed... it is almost as if... as if you had no soul."
 * 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.
 * From Supreme Commander, is the Galactic Colossus, which without appropriate countermeasures is exactly this as it marches through your base. So is a Monkeylord if you're unprepared.
 * 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,.
 * Auron, a veteran Guardian and Badass Longcoat who died years before. He didn't like that, so he willed himself back into existence.
 * 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.
 * Bryan Wilks from Fallout 3. He will chase you across miles of post-apocalyptic wasteland, swim through mirelurk-infested waters, absorb unlimited amounts of gunfire courtesy of his Infant Immortality, all just to tell you that "things" are out to get him. And that his town has been overrun by giant, fire-breathing ants.
 * By extension, all Fallout 3 children (without mods), as they are unaffected by any and all harmful effects. You can shoot a Mini Nuke at them and they won't even blink, but any adults standing nearby will be well and thoroughly gibbed.
 * 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.
 * Llednar from Final Fantasy Tactics Advance recieves no damage at all if you try to attack him with anything.
 * Similar to the Metroid Prime example above, 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.
 * 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.
 * Ashley Riot is a Riskbreaker, a group of agents infamous for working alone, having a high mortality rate, and generally doing Parliament's dirty work. Ashley is the best of them. He's the hero of the story, and even his enemy has immense respect for him.

"Alex: NOTHING CAN PROTECT YOU FROM ME! NOT MEN! NOT WEAPONS! NOT ARMOR!""
 * There's a good reason he's in the page quotes for One-Man Army.
 * Sephiroth. Destroying Cloud's hometown and walking through the ensuing flames without a scratch, killing Aerith, and 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.
 * Two words: Wild Dog.
 * Alex Mercer, and he's on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge all across Manhattan. He survives . 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.


 * 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 the hell out of his path.
 * The same goes for his Identical Grandson (a few hundered years removed) 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 of a blast from said Pope's Magitech staff (which incapicitates the other dozen or so people present), engage's in a Magitech Wizards 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.
 * 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..
 * Shepard him/herself probably counts given how many cybernetic enhancements and upgrades have been put into his/her body over the course of the game. Probably best illustrated during the Arrival DLC, when Shepard overcomes sedation and an entire army of guards to deny the Reapers once again. Of course, lampshaded during the main game by Garrus pointing out that the Reapers killing Shepard only meant pissing him/her off.
 * Shepard takes it up a notch near the end of Mass Effect 3 when
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * Amnesia the Dark Descent has a collection of Eldritch 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.
 * 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.
 * The King Tiger Tan in Company of Heroes is a good example. Its armor is so thick that pretty much no allied tank can penitrate its frontal armor. It has a really powerful gun, multiple machine guns, and max veterancy. Pretty much 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 recieved on the terror doctrine commander tree.
 * The lesser known agdpanther tank destroyer is also a bitch to kill.
 * The Beast from In Famous 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.
 * 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.
 * Rayman 3 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * 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.
 * the protagonist of neverDead dismember him, run him over pierce him trough. he never dies

Webcomics
"Chelsea: Bullets don't work on me, little man."
 * O-chul from Order of the Stick 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. He's still pretty good though, given that 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 and Dragons game's use of Critical Existence Failure.
 * 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.)
 * And it wasn't just any enemy. It was Redcloak, who is probably the second-most powerful caster in the entire OOTS world. (The first, of course, being Xykon).
 * 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 even if he were to die, his phylactery allows him to generate a new body. Subverted in that.
 * O-Chul, having taken so much damage that he's knocked into negative hit points, gets healed by V. First thing he does?
 * O-Chul does this stuff so much that there was at one point a thread on the comic's forum for "O-Chul facts." In the Order of the Stick fandom, he's a Memetic Badass to rival Chuck Norris.
 * How did O-Chul manage to compile that list of Xykon's spells "or most of them, anyway" that he hands in after his escape? One saving throw at a time.
 * From Girl Genius, perhaps only three things 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.
 * At a later point he was thrown into a wall by a robot. The one left damaged was the wall.
 * Zola is trying to kill him. It isn't freaking working.
 * Othar Tryggvassen. Just... Othar Tryggvassen.
 * 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 & no despite all that they are still not a horde of Mary Sues.
 * The Mecha Easter Bunny from Sluggy Freelance. Basically 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. Of course, 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.
 * Sarda from 8-bit Theater.
 * 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.


 * 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 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 and 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 basically "He's a blankface, it will take a bigger fall than that to kill him."

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 three's premiere episode has Ben time-travel to the future, meeting a future version of himself who had literally 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.
 * In Jonny Quest:
 * There is a famous implacable machine, Dr. Zin's robot spy. Dr. Zin brags to Dr. Quest and Race Bannon all about his new machine since they won't be able to stop it leaving. The heroes immediately learned that Zin is not bluffing as they desperately try to bring down the spidery robot with everything on the army base from rifles to tanks, but nothing does more than barely slow it before Dr. Quest shoots it out of the sky with his Para-Power Raygun.
 * The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest 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. It took sending him back to prehistoric times with a nuke 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 and murder everyone on the planet. Frequently subject, of course, to The Worf Barrage. It's pretty much 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.
 * Brock Samson from The Venture Brothers.
 * The fifth season of Teen Titans 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.
 * Slade in the Teen Titans 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.
 * Avatar: The Last Airbender has the Combustion Man, who won't stop his assassination attempts even when the . On his first appearance he just blew up everthing 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 ).
 * This tribute video makes him appear to be basically The Terminator.
 * Also,, during the episode "The Chase."
 * Not to mention the Avatar State. During the finale it
 * The Beast Planet from 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.
 * The Sharptooth from the original 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.
 * In Swat Kats, the Metallicats constantly shrug off most attacks on them. In their debut episode, they were particularly formidable, walking through gunfire and even 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 even 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 attempts 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.
 * In Captain Scarlet, 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 versions 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.
 * Elmyra from Tiny Toon Adventures.
 * Adventure Time's 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.

Web Original

 * 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...
 * Parodied mercilessly by the "trailer" for The Horribly Slow Murderer With the Extremely Inefficient Weapon, 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), 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 is said to have these traits; in Seeking Truth, this is canon. He's implied to take a shotgun to the chest, not very long after he takes several handgun bullets to the chest.
 * Lord Vyce.
 * Red vs. Blue Has The Meta  who, even without his powerups, is super strong, super fast, gets stabbed, shot, beaten, wrestled, slashed, blasted, blown up and impaled. And STILL keeps coming. It takes.
 * Red vs. Blue Has The Meta  who, even without his powerups, is super strong, super fast, gets stabbed, shot, beaten, wrestled, slashed, blasted, blown up and impaled. And STILL keeps coming. It takes.

Real Life

 * While not exactly the same thing, Toshiba sold a VCR that once you set the time to record a show, and it started recording, absolutely nothing would stop its completion. The stop button is ignored. The remote control is ignored. Even if you unplugged the VCR for some time and plugged it back in as soon as it was reconnected to power, it would resume recording. The only way you could stop a timed recording before the time ran out was to unplug the machine and plug it back in while holding down the stop button. It was more tenacious than the Postal Service: neither rain, nor snow, nor disconnection of electricity would prevent this courier (of video tape) from the swift (or at least as long as the time period was) completion of its appointed rounds (and rounds, and rounds...).
 * Debatably; Rasputin the Mad Monk, whose...well...RasputinianDeath is something of a legend. 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.
 * Life itself. We've found anaerobic microbes inside volcanoes and sulfer springs and plants that live in the arctic. There will probably be rats and cockroaches after we blow ourselves up. Life finds a way.
 * The Tardigrade, more commonly known as the water bear. It's a microscopic animal that can survive the pressures at the depths of the ocean, boiling water, being frozen to within a few degrees of absolute zero, radiation doses thousands of times higher than what would kill a human, or being exposed for days to the vacuum of space.
 * Robert Henry Cain, During the battle of Arnhem he took to destroying tanks with gusto, hip firing a 2 man Piat gun destroying several tanks until a charge blew in the barrel, he was severely wounded but refused Morphine and returned to the tank killing, when he ran out ammo for his Piat he began using a 2inch mortar instead. His earsdrums 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.
 * Simo Häyhä. Famous enough for having over 500 confirmed sniper kills, and another 200 kills with a machine gun, he was completely unstoppable. Soldiers couldn't kill him. Snipers couldn't kill him. Specially trained counter sniper units couldn't kill him. When the Russians started shelling the areas he was known to be in, he was still fine. Entire operations were launched with the sole target of taking this one Finnish farmer out, all of which failed miserably. Eventually, on March 2, 1940, a little less than 100 days after his spree started, he was shot in the face. With an explosive bullet. He awoke from the coma a mere 11 days later, on the same day as the Winter War ended. The Russians probably heard that he'd woken up.
 * Main Battle Tanks, especially the American Abrams tank, which uses uranium armor combined with explosive reactive armor to make a tank nearly unkillable by other tanks.
 * Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is able to walk and seemingly cognizant less than two weeks after being shot through the head. Sources say she didn't die because Kenpachi Zaraki didn't want the competition for the 11th squad. And she appeared for a vote in Congress not even seven months later.
 * Corporal Leo 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 and liberated the town of Scheldt! He lost his partner at the battle of Zwolle, but still managed 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!
 * Audie Murphy-most decorated US soldier of WWII. Had to tone down his history for Hollywood—where he played himself. Had his men pull back, while he stayed to face six tanks and a ton of soldiers, driving them back, then killing the team sent to sneak up on him before he ran out of ammo, then went to his men—with an injured leg—and rallied them to drive off the Nazis. And had malaria. Oh, and he looked like a pretty average sixteen year old boy....
 * A Greek phalanx was an implacable ten-thousand-or-so men. It just kept marching until it trampled everyone in its way. At least until they met even more implacable men.