Super-Toughness

"Not enough car."

"Any sufficiently durable individual is indistinguishable from immortals."

— Anonymous

The power of unambiguously superhuman durability, ranging from being "merely" Immune to Bullets to getting hit by a nuke and finding it to tickle a bit, and even beyond that.

This is a Required Secondary Power to be able to do anything with Super-Strength; without it, Newton's Third Law would result in you ruining your hand every time you threw a super-punch, and every bone and muscle would snap/tear under the tension of lifting a car. Of course, that doesn't mean characters with Super Strength are always shown having Super Toughness in any other context.

Extreme forms overlap with Nigh-Invulnerability (specifically, the Made of Diamond type). Compare Made of Iron, where an explicitly non-superpowered character can take a lot more punishment than is normally possible for no apparent or explained reason, though Charles Atlas Superpower can blur the line between Made of Iron and Super Toughness.

This applies to a lot of superpowered powerhouses, Flying Brick-type characters, as well as many of those who utilize extensive cybernetic enhancement, Ki Manipulation, Supernatural Martial Arts, and/or Functional Magic. It's sometimes a side-effect of particularly adaptive Healing Factors. Most Super Soldiers possess it, and it can also be achieved with Mind over Matter.

Combine it with Super-Strength, and you're likely to end up with the Implacable Man. Usually results in a No-Sell. Often part of Super-Speed users as well as per Required Secondary Powers, as anyone with otherwise ordinary human physiology would literally tear themselves apart very quickly. When it's just their skeleton see Unbreakable Bones.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Armitage of Armitage III can take bullets, stab wounds, and head-on grenade hits and keep going, with only cosmetic damage to her flesh. She even managed to survive her own self-destruct mechanism.
• Attack on Titan has the Female and Armored Titans. The Female Titan has no skin and all her muscles are exposed, yet she takes horrific injury without a sound and it barely ends up slowing her down. Given that she can and does react to serious injury occasionally, it would seem that these wounds do hurt in the normal fashion, but she may have been trained to work past it, along with the other shifters. The Armored Titan shrugs off cannon fire, attacks from the Rogue Titan, and explosions that decimate an area for miles, without a scratch, and its introductory scene shows it demolishing the fifty-meter wall in front of it and still having to slow and stop itself afterwards. The Rogue Titan would qualify, except that its injuries do cause it some detriment as it tends to be so single-mindedly focused on murdering its target that it attacks without regard for the critical state its body is in and usually ends up worse for it.
• Bleach
  • Shinigami life force is affected by their spiritual power. The more spiritual power they possess, the harder it is to even scratch them, let alone kill them.
  • Arrancar possess Hierro ^note Spanish for Iron, a supernaturally tough skin which makes it difficult to injure or kill them. Nnoitra is singled out for having exceptionally hard Hierro even by the standards of other Espada.
  • Quincies possess Blut ^note German for "Blood". Pure-blood quincies possess it from birth, impure-blood quincies learn it with training. Blut Vene channels reiatsu through their veins via reishi manipulation to massively increase their defensive power, making it very hard to injure or kill a Quincy. Cang Du and Mask de Masculine can further use their Schrift powers to shrug off attacks even Blut Vene can't cope with.
• In Brave10, Seikai can turn blades with pure muscle. Jinpachi is then introduced blocking Seikai's strike with one hand.
• In Delicious in Dungeon Falin, as a chimera, shrugs off damage that would normally kill any of her components — in her case, a slashed throat and stab wounds to her heart, right lung, and kidney — either because they're no longer vital organs for the whole, or because she has redundancies.
• Virtually all Digimon Rookie level and above have some level of this (for instance, Garurumon, a mere champion level has fur that's described as being far harder than steel, and he's not even a particularly durable Champion level), but Mega level digimon take the cake. They can shrug off the attacks of even groups of Ultimate level digimon^note  who, it should be noted, are often compared to nuclear weapons in terms of destructive capacity, and can often casually change the effects of the weather over large areas of land without so much of a scratch, being momentarily inconvenienced at worse. Secondary and tertiary evolution Mega levels (occasionally referred to as "Ultra" or "Super Ultimate") exaggerate this: Omnimon is capable of shrugging off thousands of mega level attacks with a flick of the wrist, The combined attacks of WarGreymon and MetalGarurumon don't even move Alphamon, and Susanoomon can basically No-Sell Lucemon Falldown Mode's Paradise Lost Punch.^note  which is powerful enough to easily shatter celestial bodies
• Dragon Ball:
  • Goku is shot by Bulma in his first meeting with her in Dragon Ball, and it only stings him. As the power levels get higher and higher, not only guns but rockets, tank fire, and pretty much anything else have 0 effect. In fact, it's a Running Gag in the series for the Earth's entire armed forces to launch an all-out assault on the arc villain, only for them to laugh it off. This happened as early as King Piccolo, and by the time of Dragon Ball Z, the very first villain, Raditz, is introduced by catching a shotgun round and flicking it back at the attacker far harder. All the main and supporting heroes (yes, even Krillin) are strong enough to laugh off entire armies worth of ordnance.
  • Even among the cast, there are two standout examples: Vegeta and Frieza both take incredible amounts of punishment even by Dragon Ball standards, yet they will frequently continue to stand up again and keep fighting. Frieza was still alive cut in half, blasted through the ground, had a planet explode beneath him, and drifted in the vacuum of space for an unspecified amount of time. He also survived a point-blank Energy of Destruction to the face as well as repeated pummeling from the Pride Troopers and survived a 1-hour beatdown against Broly. Vegeta, meanwhile, continues to get up after a beating by Majin Buu so many times that Buu is actually briefly afraid of him, the only time Buu shows any fear in the series.
  • This is the gimmick of most of the Non-Serial Movie villains as Garlic Junior, Doctor Wheelo, Lord Slug, Turles, Cooler, Super Android 13, Bojack, Janemba, Beerus, Golden Frieza, Cell Max and especially Broly just No-Sell some of the strongest attacks the Z-Fighters throw at them and some i.e Broly and Super Android 13◊ don't even flinch when they get hit.
  • Subverted however if you consider Ki Manipulation plays a part in a lot of these instances and the heroes and villains can quickly become Glass Cannons if they aren't already guarded e.g Goku in his strongest Super Mode (Super Saiyan Blue) was taken out by a simple laser beam in Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F'. Another time in Super Goku Black when he was unaware was knocked down by Mai using a sniper rifle (albeit with a special bullet), similarly Goku and Krillin were both hurt by bullets fired by Muggles signifying they needed to train more.
• Shizuo Heiwajima from Durarara!! was born with Uninhibited Muscle Power which sent him to the hospital whenever he used it. Eventually, though, recovering from those injuries has made him as tough as his is strong. Someone once shot a ballistic knife into his chest at almost point-blank range. It went in about half a centimeter. Being shot with an actual gun does knock Shizuo down and make him bleed, but it doesn't do any lasting harm and mostly just annoys him.
• In Ghost in the Shell, Mokoto Kusanagi, courtesy of bionics. In the various animes, Batou was even more so, though in the original Manga he only had a few bionic parts rather than having a full prosthetic body like the Major or his anime incarnations and therefore wasn't substantially tougher than a normal human.
• In Inuyasha, Yokai and Hanyou can take more damage than a human can.
• My Hero Academia has Eijiro Kirishima, whose Quirk is Hardening, which lets him harden his own skin and therefore become super tough. He thinks this Quirk isn't flashy enough, but by Season 3 he comes to realize his Quirk doesn't lend itself to being flashy; you can be a cool hero simply by showing just how much you can take (true enough, his Super move ends up being just becoming even more invulnerable). Come Season 2, we have Tetsutetsu Tetsutetsu, whose Quirk, Steel, lets him transform his skin into steel (which, in essence, makes him similar to Kirishima, much to their dismay).
• One Piece:
  • A World Government assassin squad, CP9, has among its arsenal the special ability "Iron Body" ("Tekkai", or "Iron Mass", in Japanese). It made their bodies as hard as iron to resist damage. The downside was that you couldn't move when in Iron Body. Jabra is the one exception as a master of the Iron Body ability he can move while using it making him a definite Lightning Bruiser, Sanji had to burn through Jabra's Tekkai to actually beat him.
  • "Color of Armament" Haki can also be used to this effect protecting the user's body against blows and bladed attacks as well doubling striking/cutting power. Usually it just affects relevant parts of the body rather than all of it at once, but Vergo and Pica each demonstrate a full-body hardening at respective points.
  • King is indestructible, period. It's not even a Devil Fruit ability or usage of Haki: he's naturally, inhumanly durable. "Inhumanly" being the operative word here; King is a member of the Lunarian Tribe, whose durability and pyrokinesis led people to once believe that they were Physical Gods. However, King's super toughness has a weakness: when the flames on his back go out, he loses his durability in exchange for a massive increase in speed. Zoro exploits this weakness to defeat him.
  • Some people are simply incredibly tough by nature or training. While examples abound, the best ones are the Yonko (Emperors of the Sea).
    • Whitebeard: During Marineford he sustained 267 sword wounds, 152 gunshot wounds, and 46 wounds from cannonballs, and got a portion of his head blasted off, resulting in 465 injuries in total... and he didn't fall down once. And he was sick and old too, what a badass.
    • Big Mom: She's known affectionately as a "Iron Balloon" as guns, cannon balls and massive dynamite explosions◊ don't even bother her◊. Even before that Nami used Big Mom's Shock and Awe powers against her and hit Big Mom with a massive thunderbolt◊... it didn't work◊. When Law and Kid defeat Big Mom by dropping her from thousands of meters in the sky into active volcano's magma pool, as she's falling she expresses complete confidence that not even that will kill her and that she'll come back for revenge against them.
    • Kaido: His Establishing Character Moment is an attempted suicide by way of jumping from a floating island 10,000 meters above the ground, leaving a huge crater and getting back up with a mild headache. The Marines have given up on trying to execute him, and he's taken up suicide attempts for fun because he's that indestructible. It even drives his Death Seeker tendencies, as he's so curious as to whether he can be killed in the first place that he's willing to try everything, including igniting a war that will set the world on fire to see if any combatants can finally end his life. When Luffy in Gear Fourth tries all his strongest attacks on Kaido, it merely annoys him◊. Later Luffy uses advanced Armament Haki that damages the target’s insides and Zoro uses a special Cool Sword that respectively hurt Kaido for real, but even then all they accomplish is for Kaido to start taking the fight somewhat seriously with his Half-Human Hybrid Super Mode.
• One-Punch Man:
  • This is Saitama's other power alongside Super-Strength and Super-Speed. Throughout the story, he never takes a hit that seems to cause him any actual pain or damage.
  • Boros has a potent enough case of this that, coupled with his Healing Factor, he actually survives a punch from Saitama. Several, in fact. He still dies once Saitama decides it's time to be serious about this.
• The eponymous Bean Bandit of Riding Bean is tough enough to stop an accelerating car bare-handed and lift it off the ground; he's also able to withstand being shot in the head, though it did knock him out for a moment.
• Slightly downplayed with Sanosuke from Rurouni Kenshin. His Establishing Character Moment involved him being completely unharmed by a much larger man trying to stab him in the head with a small iron dagger (the man attempting to do so broke his own arm from the attempt) and he's the first opponent Kenshin faces who can stand up a hit from Kenshin. During the course of the series Sano often endures serious punishment in his fights and keeps pushing through, sometimes to victory, sometimes not. He in not entirely unaffected by all the punishment he endures, but he bounces back and heals remarkably fast. The most notable occasions where his toughness failed him were his first encounter with Saito, during which Saito beat him into a coma to showcase what a threat Saito was, and later when his incomplete mastery/overuse of a martial arts punching technique threatened to permanently cripple his hand.
• In Sonic X and Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie, most of the anthropomorphic characters have this, in stark contrast to their One-Hit-Point Wonder status in the games (although this is mostly game mechanics to be fair.) For example:
  • In the former, Sonic and his cohorts constantly take blows that would turn human beings into fine paste, such as being hit by a skyscraper-sized Giant Mecha, while barely flinching. When Sonic and Shadow go Super they inch closer to full invincibility, only ever being hurt by each other, and the attacks of Dark Oak. Shadow takes the cake with this even outside of his super form; unless he runs out of stamina he's almost impossible to put down, surviving even being pulled on by a planet-sized being at one point no worse for the wear.
  • In the latter, both Sonic and Hyper Metal Sonic clashing together is shown to cause huge damage to the surrounding landscape, even at one point causing a mountain sized stalactite to break off and fall from the sky, and yet for the most part, they aren't injured by this. Sonic's body does start to give out before Metal's, but he takes a lot of punishment first. Metal himself is ridiculously tough, shrugging off all of Sonic's attacks like they are nothing. It took hacking into his system hitting him with a point blank spindash, being ground zero in a huge explosion (causing his already damaged body to rip in half), and submerging him in molten lava to finally kill him.
• Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Zentraedi were designed to be much tougher physically than a human being. Lampshaded by Breetai, who had just been Thrown Out the Airlock without a spacesuit and came back in:
  "I am not built as weakly as you are."
• Goes hand in hand with Aiko "Torako" Torasawa's inhuman strength in Torako, Anmari Kowashicha Dame da yo. Multiple people have tried to attack her with varying degrees of seriousness and not only does Torako barely notice most of the time, but the attackers either hurt themselves in the attempt or break whatever they were attacking her with.

Comic Books

• Aquaman: Aquaman is able to take machine gun fire, but it does cut his skin and draw blood, so he wears Atlantean scale armour.
• Brit: Being completely invulnerable is the sole power of Brit, to the point that one mission consists of strapping a nuclear bomb to his chest, setting it off to kill the superpowered henchmen of a villain, and then taking a beating from the guy until his enemy was completely exhausted.
• Brother Power the Geek: The title character, being a cloth dummy that is filled with rags and supported by an internal wire framework, is extremely pliable and resistant to pain.
• The Incredible Hulk: The Hulk is famously durable◊, as are many of his gamma-irradiated allies and foes. Helped by the fact that like his strength, his durability increases with his anger◊. One time Hulk and Fantastic Four's The Thing were having an arm wrestle and got nuked by the military and weren't even slightly bothered.◊
• Invincible: the titular protagonist aka Mark Grayson and most of the cast are super tough. When time Invincible finds himself in a scuffle with a Batman archetype and the poor dude breaks his knuckles punching Mark’s face. Subverted when Marks is up against other members of his race the Viltrimites and other strong alien who do succeed in beating him bloody and in one case making his intestines flop out. Fortunately Mark has a Healing Factor.
• Iron Man: Iron Man, depending on the Powered Armour, can No-Sell all sorts attacks including bullets◊, punches from Spider-Man◊ (who hurt his hand) and Storm's lightning◊. In fact, Tony's suits are tough enough to withstand blows from Sentry◊, Hulk◊, Thor◊ and can even tank several nuclear explosions◊.
• Jessica Jones: Jessica Jones from Alias and The Pulse has this power as a part of her Flying Brick power set. She was capable of taking a severe beating from Iron Man and the Vision (two very powerful heroes) which resulted in damage to her neck, nose, spine, and retina. She's later shown withstanding a venom blast (a burst of concentrated electricity) from Spider-Woman that causes her noticeable pain before she gets back up and decks the other woman in the face. In a flashback, she receives a slash across her back with a knife that cuts her skin, but the only medical attention she required was a bandage. While threatening a group of armed men, Jessica's internal monologue reveals that she isn't quite sure if she's bulletproof. The Pulse revealed that Jessica's internal organs (including her uterus) are also super tough, which was good news for her after the Green Goblin attempted to blow her up while she was pregnant. Bottom line, she may not be invulnerable, but she can take a beating and keep on fighting.
• Luke Cage: Luke Cage is incredibly durable to the point of outright bulletproofness; leading to many referring to him as the man with unbreakable skin. He's even tanked hits from Hulk, Namor, and Proxima Midnight, one of Thanos's Elite Mooks. He does have limits, though: repeated blunt force injuries will cause him internal damage, at which point his unbreakable skin becomes a liability.
• The Mighty Thor: Thor, being a Physical God, has walked off things that would turn most of his Earth hero buddies into mush or a smear on the ground. He’s casually rammed into planet busting nukes, flown through suns and even shrugged off blasts from Galactus. He can still be damaged and knocked out, but it usually takes some powerful magic, cosmic power, or a ludicrously strong foe like the aforementioned Hulk, Juggernaut, or Thanos to damage the Son of Odin.
• Preacher:
  • The page image is of the Saint of Killers. He's notable for not being hurt by anything that's thrown at him throughout the story, be it bullets, tank shells, a multi-megaton nuke, or the armies of heaven. And at the very end, God himself can't do anything to him- because the Saint is sitting on the Throne of Paradise.
  • The guy next to him is Cassidy, an Irish vampire, who is a downscaled example- he can take hits far above a human's level (in one case getting shot a dozen times by a high-powered rifle), but in his case, it very much hurts- and then there's the whole catches-fire-in-sunlight thing.
• Robin (1993): The villain Impervious who showed up to try to collect on the bounty the Penguin placed on Robin's head is impervious to harm, but doesn't have any other powers like super-strength to go along with it. Luckily for Tim, she was intercepted by the Veteran, who has the same power set plus a lack of aging, who was able to detain her before she reached Tim both times she tried it.
• Silver Surfer: Thanks to being empowered by the Power Cosmic, the Silver Surfer is most certainly this, as She-Hulk discovered the hard way when first met him and slugged him. She rubbed her hand in pain afterwards.
• Spider-Man: While not as conventionally invulnerable as guys like, say, Thor or Colossus, Spider-Man can still take insane amounts of punishments that would kill ordinary men with little more than superficial bruises. While he can be hurt by conventional means such as bullets or knives- Depending on the Writer- his resistance to impact forces is more consistently something to behold. Even guys like a pissed-off Hulk and the Juggernaut haven't killed Spidey with just one of their blows. He also often makes up for not being on the same level of invulnerable as more powerful superheroes by sheer determination, e.g in Avengers vs. X-Men where he survives a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from a Phoenix Forced-possessed Colossus.
• Strikeforce: Morituri: Hardcase can increase the density of anything he touched to produce this effect, and use it to incapacitate enemies.
• Supergirl: Supergirl is a nigh-invulnerable Flying Brick on par with her more famous cousin.
  • In Supergirl vol 1 #3, a giant mutant venus fly-trap tries to swallow Linda/Kara whole but it ends up spitting Supergirl out because it can't bite her skin.
    Supergirl: This brute may become a vegetarian now! Trying to chomp down on my invulnerable body would ruin the appetite of any meat-eater!
  • In Supergirl Vol 2 #1, she shielded several men from a shower of molten steel with her body.
  • In Supergirl Vol 5 #21, Kara got a locomotive dropped on her. It knocked her out for several seconds. Then she woke up and threw it out of the planet.
  • Post-Flashpoint Kara, first discovers that she is very, very hard when she gets caught in an explosion and she doesn't get harmed.
  • In the first Supergirl (Rebirth) arc she gets punched out of a city.
  • In The Supergirl from Krypton (2004), Kara's body is extremely tough. When she loses a sword fight and her sparring partner is about to stab her, Superman overreacts until Wonder Woman reminds him that Artemis' sword would've shattered on impact.
  • In Red Daughter of Krypton Kara gets hit by missiles, punched into a moon, and hurled into the Sun. She endures everything.
  • In Demon Spawn, Supergirl endures the heat of a burning building and flies through a wall without getting hurt.
  • In Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade Linda is nearly invulnerable. Unfortunately, her power tends to fail at inopportune and comical times.
  • In Bizarrogirl, a Planet Eater smashes Kara through a planet (albeit to be fair, Bizarro World is significantly smaller than Earth)
• Superman: Superman is one of the most iconic comic book examples. Most of his enemies also have this ability to better justify their ability to throw down with him.
  • In Krypton No More Superman fought one-time villain Protector that can change his body into diamond to become extra-tough.
  • In Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man a Lex Luthor's robot slams Superman into a building. The blow is strong enough to bring down a chunk of the wall, but Clark barely feels it. Spider-Man's hide is not so tough, but he takes several metallic tentacles to the face when he fights Doctor Octopus, and he doesn't even get knocked out.
  • In War World:
    • Martian Manhunter hits Superman with strength enough to shatter rocks, but Superman endures their blows.
    • Shortly later, Superman and Supergirl endure the impacts of Warworld’s planet-killing weapons. Supergirl rams through Warworld at inconceivable speed. She knocks herself out but she doesn't suffer further harm.
    • And Superman flies so fast that he bursts through the barriers of reality. The narration notes that strain would reduce other beings to shapeless paste.
  • In the first chapters of Kryptonite Nevermore, Superman tanks cannon fire several times. However, he loses most of his invulnerability throughout the story.
• Thanos: Thanos, while capable of getting stabbed when he was younger in his origin clearly has become this in later years. He’s tanked blasts from Silver Surfer and even Black Bolt's OP vocal talent which can destroy entire planets, only succeed in giving the Mad Titan some Clothing Damage.
• Wonder Woman: Wonder Woman. Being a Flying Brick on par with Superman means she's got toughness to spare. While its often inconsistent about whether she needs to use her bracelets to defend against things like bullets and energy blasts, the fact that she can take hits from people like Superman and the like puts her firmly in the nigh-invulnerable category.
• X-Men:
  • Rogue, When she was the Trope Namer for Flying Brick (due to a certain instance of power absorption), was usually very tough but not fully invulnerable. One comic had her taking a bullet to the head, which knocked her out (whereas such things would simply bounce off of other Flying Bricks). She often referred to this as "nigh-invulnerability". The "nigh" part was meant to mean that there were indeed still things that could hurt her, so it's not the Nigh-Invulnerability we speak of in trope-speak. She's closer to nigh-invulnerable nowadays thanks to absorbing Wonder Man's powers, e.g The Falcon punched her and broke his hand.
  • The Juggernaut, almost nothing can stop him. Spider-Man learned this the hard way in the seminal The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #229-230 where he literally pulls out of every trick in the book including zapping with a million volts of electricity and ramming into Juggernaut with a gasoline trunk which explodes but it's all reduced to The Worf Effect, forcing Spidey to trick Juggs into stepping into wet concrete and sinking just to temporarily get rid of him. Later comics have dialed it up further with the entire X-Men throwing everything at him to no effect, Thor blasting him with Godblast to no effect, and even an unstrained Optic Blast from Cyclops that would quote "rip a small planet in half" to again no effect. Hulk's son Skaar once punched Juggernaut all the way to Mars and he was no worse for wear. What's most terrifying is knowledge that even when you do seriously hurt Juggernaut e.g remove all his skin and organs with magic, he'll still keep going as a big scary red skeleton. Played with though, as Juggernaut is still susceptible to Telepathy and strong mystical attacks which may count as a Drama-Preserving Handicap.
  • Sunspot of New Mutants and some other X-Men-related series is an interesting aversion. The sun gives him Super-Strength, but not any enhanced durability, requiring him to be a lot more careful. He could toss a tank as surely as Colossus, but if that tank were to hit him with a shell before he reached it, he'd be chunky salsa!

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): In this Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) fanfiction; even when the hybridized San and Vivienne Graham are in their small, weak and severely crippled first form, ammunitions, and explosives which would obliterate a person barely slow the hybrid down.
• In Amazing Fantasy, Peter says the resistance to blunt force and the minor Healing Factor he got from the spider bite are the only reasons why he isn't permanently hospitalized given all the punishment he takes. It also provides a level of safety for Izuku when he's busy running into a wall while trying to get his Intangibility power to work or jumping off a fifty-foot Ferris wheel to start web-swinging for the first time. It doesn't mean it won't hurt in any case.
• In Atonement, villain Hatchet Face is incredibly resilient.
• Child of the Storm
  • The Asgardians (who tend to minimally have Golden Age Superman levels of durability and largely ignore bullets), and Grey Court Master vampires, with AIM-120 missiles merely qualifying as painful.
  • Thor, meanwhile, is the gold standard for every character that isn't explicitly cosmic, being capable of walking on stars.
• Fate of the Clans:
  • A Servant's Nigh-Invulnerability aside, putting enough pressure to knock them back is much harder than for humans. Punching the back of a Servant's head with enough power to crush a human skull will only move their head a millimeter.
  • Even a Servant hitting the Greater Grail as hard as it can is unable to scratch it. Noble Phantasms would be a different story, however.
  • Cú Chulainn can use rune magecraft to reinforce his internal organs.
• Fate/Reach Out has Shirou, who combines Persona-given buffs with Reinforcement magecraft to make himself invulnerable.
• A Force of Four has Power Girl, who can easily dive in magma without harm.
• The Future Flash has main character Bart Allen, a half-Kryptonian speedster who is suitably nigh indestructible.
• The Good Hunter: Wilmarina notes that all Heroes blessed by the Chief God, herself included, can shrug off most injuries. Downplayed in practice, for she is no match for Cyril and his clod of iron, but she doesn't get a concussion after receiving a blow to the back of her head — her skull would've been caved in (plus the nasty stuff that happens to the brain) if she were a normal person.
• Hellsister Trilogy's main character can shrug an exploding star off. Yet still, when she punches Darkseid in the face with one of her super-strong blows, he just takes it.
  She sped towards him again, ducking under the twin eye-blasts that came from him, and rocked his world with an uppercut that would have taken off the top of a mountain. To his credit, Darkseid was tough enough to take it, but went off his pins again.
• Hive Daughter has Taylor, thanks to her upgrades. In one timeline Coil shot her in her exposed face and it only really mildly annoyed her.
• In I am Superman, The Iron Giant is completely unfazed by any of Lung's attacks.
• Last Child of Krypton: Shinji Ikari has Kryptonian DNA, so it doesn't come as a surprise when he gets hit with one dozen nukes and survives.
• The Last Daughter has Taylor. The only thing shown to hurt her is the explosion from killing Behemoth. Even suplexing Behemoth from outer space doesn't hurt her in any significant way.
• Level Up (MHA): Early on, Itsuka gets a talent that improves her damage resistance based on her strength. Then she gets One For All. As a result, Itsuka is basically immune to nearly every form of damage.
• The Loud Awakening:
  • Lori's dragon scales are stated to be tougher than steel, titanium, tungsten, and inconel combined. Even her "normal" skin is described as tough enough that she could take a point-blank shotgun blast and come out with a minor scrape.
  • While not as extreme, all of the Loud children inherited superhuman increase in durability, to the point Lincoln and Lucy while suppressing their powers could survive being hit by a shockwave from a mech that would have killed a normal human.
• In Marionettes the title androids have this on account of being constructed out of mithril (an extremely durable, but light weight magical metal). Lightning Dust slams face-first into a tunnel while on top of a speeding train and only loses her false skin and one of her eyes while being knocked offline for a short period. During her fight with Masquerade, Trixie is repeatedly thrown and smashed through walls without any serious damage. Ace and Teddy, the two G2 Marionettes, are made of steel, and just a little less durable than their 'little siblings'. Ironically, the reason for the choice of materials in both cases was the Generation 1 Marionettes lacked durability.
• In The Parselmouth of Gryffindor, the Dementors' bodies (unlike their robes) are utterly indestructible by anything short of Fiendfyre, even being able to No-Sell the Trolley Witch's claws.
• Derpy from the Pony POV Series is implied to have a form of this, as her special talent appears to be 'being a Determinator.' Dark World!Derpy, however, is upgraded by becoming the new Element of Loyalty, which takes this to the point getting hit with lightning doesn't even seem to affect her. This seems to be a Required Secondary Power of her Super Mode, which otherwise would tear her body apart.
• Superwomen of Eva 2: Lone Heir of Krypton has half-Kryptonian Asuka Langley Sohryu, who becomes aware of her invulnerability when she accidentally crashes into and through a building.
• Superman of 2499: The Great Confrontation has the whole House of El. Their invulnerability varies after centuries interbreeding with humans and sometimes Amazons. The direct descendants of the first Superman and the original Supergirl are virtually undamageable; their relatives tend to be less tough.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Solvernia has Zerael's ganman, the Adamastor. His defenses are so resistant that allow talking to be a free action.
• In The Vampire of Steel, Zol-Am is impervious to traditional vampire-killing methods due to his Kryptonian heritage, so the team have to seek alternate means to deal with him.
• In Survivors, the main character and her cousin have this power, as proven when she got shot and didn't even notice the bullets.
• White Sheep (RWBY): Jaune's nature gives him tremendous Aura reserves. A full-on swing from Cardin's two-handed flanged mace hitting him on the arm only stung a bit, left a bruise, and reduced his Aura by a minuscule amount.

Films — Animation

• The Incredibles:
  • Besides Super-Strength, Mr. Incredible has this going for him. Especially since he seems perfectly fine mere feet next to boiling lava.
  • The Omnidroid series of robots get progressively tougher with each model until v.10 can only be really hurt by itself.
• In Turning Red, this implied for Mei while in panda form. During the fight against the Kaiju-sized Panda-Ming, Mei gets knocked around quite a bit and even falls several stories but is no worse for wear afterwards. She also manages to headbutt her gigantic mother with enough force to knock her out but stays conscious herself.

Films — Live-Action

• The Hidden: Any human host that the evil parasite possesses becomes durable enough that they need to be shot over fifteen times before it decides to swap it for a better meatsuit. The cops note that one vacated host simply bled to death because the alien wasn't around anymore to keep it alive.
• I Come in Peace: The two aliens are much tougher than ordinary humans. The cop still lives for quite a while after half his torso is shot off, and the drug dealer isn't even fazed when Jack tries to kick his ass, while gunfire barely slows him down.
• To King Kong, Godzilla, and other Kaiju, human weapons are puny.
• Lots of characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Thor Odinson:
    • In the first Thor he only gets excited at a Frost Giant nutting him in the head and punching him a yard away. In the climax he tanks Loki blasting him with Odin’s Gungnir, the same spear which could atomise a few aforementioned Frost Giants.
    • In The Avengers, Thor pretty much no-sells Iron Man punching and blasting him, even returning Tony's headbutt with his own stronger one. Although in total fairness, Thor is still somewhat pained by Iron Man's attacks and judging by facial expressions clearly wasn't expecting a mortal man in a can to give him any trouble. Thor also handles Hulk's blows, although unlike with Iron Man, Hulk manages to draw blood.
    • In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Quicksilver decides to Speed Blitz Thor. We see that Pietro can send the likes of Hawkeye and Captain America flying when he runs at them, and in the climax at top speed Pietro breaks Ultron bots to pieces by sprinting through them. When he runs at Thor, however, Pietro bounces off a nonplussed Demigod like a milk dud.
    • In Avengers: Infinity War, during the forging of Stormbreaker we witness Thor endure the full blast of an ignited star. He's burned to a crisp but still alive and thanks to Stormbreaker's magic heals quickly.
    • Subverted in Avengers: Endgame. Thor volunteers himself to be the one who wields the Infinity Gauntlet with all six Infinity Stones, citing his durability as the strongest avenger. Except Tony vetoes it, not as an insult to his friend's power but out of compassion, as Thor in the years since Infinity War has become obese and manically depressed and is in no state to handle that level of blowback. It's entirely possible he could've survived the Stone's energy, but it was better not to risk it.
  • Drax the Destroyer:
    • In Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), he takes a blast of engine exhaust to the chest without injury and manages to survive being rammed with the Milano (Rocket was trying to hit Ronan, who was choke-throttling Drax at the time), although the latter left him unconscious for a brief time, and he is clearly sore and limping afterwards.
    • In the sequel, he is dangled out the back of the Milano on a cable during a crash-landing through a forest, smashing into trees. He seems to have enjoyed the ride once we see him on the ground.
    • Briefly Played for Laughs in Avengers: Infinity War, when he's got Iron Man's cannon to his face. Iron Man threatens to open fire on Drax point-blank if Quill shoots Spider-Man, and Drax is unfazed and insists Quill attack, as he claims he can take it. Both Mantis and Strange immediately call him on it, though. Later, during the battle on Titan, he takes quite a bit of repeated punishment from Thanos and it's only a direct blast from the Power Stone that takes him out of the fight.
  • Spider-Man
    • Already hinted in Captain America: Civil War, where he takes a Shield Bash to the face from Captain America, a blow that would have certainly concussed an ordinary human. He's also swatted aside by Giant-Man into a bunch of crates and while knocked out for a brief time, survives with little more than a few superficial bruises.
    • Becomes very obvious in Spider-Man: Homecoming: Peter's resistance is fully superhuman. The amount of punishment Spider-Man endures throughout the movie would easily kill an ordinary human, and even badly maim a Super-Soldier. Notably, he gets bounced up and down by an Anti-Gravity gun, dragged behind a van and repeatedly slammed against trashcans and brick walls, supports the full weight of two halves of a ferry for a few seconds without his arms tearing off, is slammed into — and then through — a bus by the Shocker, is buried under a whole warehouse crumbling into him, and then survives a plane crash followed by a thorough beating from the Vulture, without even having to go to the hospital afterward. The suit Tony provided Peter with also counts, as it takes most of the same abuse and doesn't have so much as a scratch, or even any of its features disabled.
    • In Avengers: Infinity War, he's shown functioning at high altitudes with little in the way of protection, with only some difficulty. He also takes hits from Thanos himself and still stands, despite the Mad Titan beating up the Hulk himself. (Justified somewhat, given that he's wearing the Iron Spider armor.)
    • Once again demonstrated in Spider-Man: Far From Home: Spider-Man survives injuries and accidents, which while painful, is far above ordinary human capability and would be fatal to any human being. He's still conscious after bonking his head multiple times against an iron bell and survives the impact of a high-speed train at full speed, which leaves him bloodied and bruised, but he recovers and heals fairly quickly after some rest and a quick medical patch-up.
    • In Spider-Man: No Way Home, he even survives having the Green Goblin knock him through several walls and floors of an apartment building, after which he's still able to get back on his feet with only some bruises and possibly broken ribs at worst.
• In the case of RoboCop, this is arguably his main superpower, with super strength and justified Improbable Aiming Skills as his secondary ones.
• The Terminator, especially in its debut film. It's not indestructible, it takes damage throughout the film. Actually getting what's left of it to stop is another story.
• David Dunn of Unbreakable. The limits of his durability are left vague. David himself believes he wouldn't be able to survive being shot point-blank, and given the quasi-realistic tone of the movie seeing him come out unharmed from something like that would feel a bit odd, but that's never tested, and nothing else is ever enough to hurt him. He discovered that he has this power when he was involved in a train crash:
  ER Doctor: And, to answer your question, there are two reasons why I'm looking at you like this. One because it seems in a few minutes you will officially be the only survivor of this train wreck, and two, because you didn't break one bone, you don't have a scratch on you.
• Werewolves Within: The werewolf only stops temporarily when stabbed twice (even in the neck the second time) before finally being killed by a crossbow quarrel in the heart.

Literature

• The Brightest Shadow: One common use of sein, ranging from making someone slightly tougher than normal to Catai shrugging off bladed weapons to Xetsu ignoring an entire group trying to kill him.
• Cassandra Kresnov: GIs' construction means they can survive hits that would incapacitate or kill a human. In Crossover Sandy crashes a motorcycle at very high speed and hits the ground running, while in Killswitch she's gut-shot and only suffers blunt-force trauma. She also explains to Vanessa in Crossover that her equivalent to a carotid artery and jugular vein are housed inside her spinal column, so a Slashed Throat doesn't work on her either.
• The Elder Scrolls In-Universe Books: In The Hope of the Redoran, in accordance to an omen read at his birth, Andas is immune to blades, magic, disease, and poison, and not one drop of his blood ever spills on the ground. It turns out, however, that his Nigh-Invulnerability works like Luke Cage's: during a Duel to the Death, his cousin Athyn beats him to death with a club, having guessed the loophole that Andas's toughness doesn't extend to internal injuries from blunt force trauma.
• In The Faerie Queene, A sword blow strong enough to dismember a man fails to even draw blood on Disdain's leg. It only causes a few cracks to form, as if his leg were a stone pillar.

• Werewolves in The Howling (1977) are highly durable, due in part to their supernatural healing factor. Karyn shoots a werewolf in the head with a shotgun at close range and while it blasts off its ear, she notes that it should've been a lot more seriously injured. Pam repeatedly beats a werewolf with a wooden stick she's using as a crutch, hard enough to snap the stick, and it doesn't even faze it besides making it mad. When Chris comes to Karyn's rescue, he runs over two of the werewolves with his car; he notes that they should've been crushed, but they just twitch a bit before getting to their feet and glaring at him.
• Into The Broken Lands: The mage-crafted Human Weapon Nonee is immune to almost any harm except for other mage-craft, meaning the claws of a small magical monster can break her skin when a thrown boulder can't. Even for those injuries, she has a Healing Factor.
• Numerous spells can accomplish this in The Magicians, as is demonstrated when Quentin successfully walks to the South Pole — naked. At one point, a crevasse opens beneath him and he barely even notices — he just hits the bottom and climbs back up without missing a beat.
• In Mistborn, allomancers who can use pewter can increase all of their body's physical abilities, which includes not only strength and speed but also resistance to injury (and a mild Healing Factor). The drawback of this is that an allomancer who turns his or her pewter off without seeking medical attention first can simply keel over on the spot, from injuries that were trivial in their enhanced state but are much more harmful (or even fatal) to an ordinary human body. The Inquisitors, who have pewter but also a ridiculously strong Healing Factor thanks to mixing all three of the setting's magic systems, not just allomancy are considered all but unkillable.
• The Perfect Run: While Augustus takes this up to eleven, all Genomes are tougher than baseline humans, and are resistant to most toxins and diseases. This means STD Immunity, and ten times the average alcohol tolerance at minimum.
• In Ravelling Wrath, the Stern God's will protects Justicar from all physical harm. In their first fight, her opponent manages to strike her face with a blade –- and it doesn't even leave a mark on her cheek.
• The Saga of Arrow-Odd: Over the course of his feud with Arrow-Odd, Ogmund Eythjofslayer gets every bone in his body broken, his face torn off, his buttocks sliced off, and jumps from an 80-yard cliff into the North Atlantic. Yet he survives all and recovers every time, even if gruesomely scarred.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, this is one of the powers granted by Lifebinding. Daylen uses it to avoid injury whenever he can, though the sheer number and power of the threats in the world means that he often has to rely on his Healing Factor when the force becomes too much even for his Super Toughness.
• In Robert A. Heinlein's The Star Beast Lummox shrugs off a shot from an anti-tank rifle, consumes poisons happily, and survives an attempt at drowning. The Sheriff who wanted to kill him considers tricking him into eating explosives, but fortunately doesn't get the chance, seeing as her race might have destroyed earth if their lost princess were killed.
• Star Trek: Federation: When power from the warp engines was redirected into the structual integrity field, it made the hull of the USS Enterprise-D almost as hard as the material found in the cores of neutron stars. Doing so enabled the Enterprise to ram an attacking Romulan warbird and survive more or less intact while the unfortunate warbird was reduced to bits of debris no larger than a computer chip.
• In the Tales of Kolmar trilogy, Varien is cut with a sword, but rather than getting his arm cut off as everyone else expected, he actually stops the sword with his arm and manages to still fight the guy. It's because he used to be a dragon, and his bones and muscles are still as strong as they were in his dragon form.
• The Traveler's Gate: One power of Valinhall is the "stone gauntlet," which makes the Traveler nearly indestructible while it is active. It only lasts for a couple seconds, as it is only intended to help survive one or two hits, but the power recovers quickly and can be used again soon.
• The Witchlands: Aeduan is superhumanly tough, and even if something manages to break through his skin, he still has his Healing Factor.
• Wild Cards: a fairly common power among aces and even jokers.
• Worm: a common trait of Brutes.

Live-Action TV

• On The 100 Clarke empties a clip of bullets into a rampaging (possibly mutated) gorilla. All that does is slow it down for a few seconds; it then gets back up and keeps attacking just as hard as before, with seemingly no ill effects.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel:
  • Buffyverse vamps, Slayers and many species of demons. All of them can take quite a beating, ranging from being able to take a full-force beatdown from someone with super strength to needing a specific way to be killed. Get hit by a car? Walk it off. Fall from a skyscraper? Continue with your day. Have a bomb explode in your hands? Lament on how it ruined your jacket. Get zapped by a live wire in water? How's my hair?
  • Also, while Slayers are actually a little stronger than vampires, vampires can take a more thorough beating because they're technically not alive and thus don't have to worry about things like internal organ damage.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): With the exception of being beheaded, vampires are unaffected by physical damage inflicted by humans. In "In Throes of Increasing Wonder...", a mortal Louis de Pointe du Lac stabs the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt several times in the back, but this doesn't stop or even slow down the latter in any way. After receiving the Dark Gift, Louis becomes Immune to Bullets, as shown in "Is My Very Nature That of a Devil".
• A very funny episode of Perfect Strangers, "Call Me Indestructible" centers around Balki and Larry being given this superpower (in Larry's dream). After being "rescued" from a falling airplane by the Myposian God of protection, Teflonos, they are granted the power of indestructibility for 30 days. Hilarity Ensues as they perform extreme stunts and generally make a mess of things with the knowledge that they cannot get hurt.
• In Star Trek: The Next Generation Data is an android who possesses this ability, on top of being The Needless. In Star Trek: First Contact for instance, he casually shrugs off machine gun fire. He is, however, seemingly still vulnerable to phasers.

Manhwa

• This is one of Shioon's martial arts powers in The Breaker. Sure, he can bleed (a lot), but he doesn't stay down. Most conversations with him or about him contain No One Could Survive That!, What the Hell Are You?, and Why Won't You Die?. On top of that, he heals very quickly and comes back stronger from all the extensive beatings he survives.

Myths & Religion

• According to The Achilleid and works of Classical Mythology written after it, Achilles' limbs can't be pierced by steel because they were dipped in the River Styx. Since The Achilleid ends before Achilles can get into a fight, this remains an Informed Attribute in that epic.

Roleplay

• Daigo from Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, thanks to his vampiric superpower granting him an accelerated Healing Factor. Getting his nose broken, his arm cracked, and stabbed twice in quick succession does little to deter him.

Tabletop Games

• Any superhero RPG or universal system will quite naturally feature at least one way to model this.
• Ars Magica: Downplayed with Hermetic mages, whose magical studies actually make them slightly more resistant to various sources of damage — even without casting spells, an adept in Playing with Fire can resist fire damage, The Beastmaster can withstand animal attacks, Earth magic users can absorb damage from stone or metal weapons, and so on.
• Available in The Dresden Files RPG in various degrees of the Toughness and/or Recovery power (potentially up to all-out Physical Immunity). These are only available to characters with a suitable high concept — i.e., actual supernatural creatures, which in many games will be primarily NPCs — and must be assigned at least one "catch" that bypasses them (like the classic example of silver for werewolves).
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • The Barbarian class is pretty much this trope given flesh: they have a d12 Hit Die which is the highest Hit Die available among the classes of choice, and they also have at least one other class ability that helps them thrive in melee combat, though the specifics of said abilities vary depending on the edition being played.
    • Barbarians in the 3(.5) edition can eventually develop Damage Reduction/-, which reduces Bludgeoning, Slashing, and Piercing damage they suffer. This ability gets better as the Barbarian grows in levels.
    • Barbarians in the 5th edition start their adventuring life off with Unarmored Defense and Rage. The former allows them to use their Constitution modifier along with their Dexterity modifier to Armor Class if they forego body armor, while the latter grants them resistance to Bludgeoning, Slashing, and Piercing damage, cutting it in half. Rage can be upgraded as early as 3rd level to resist every damage type except Psychic if the Barbarian chooses the Path of the Totem Warrior as their Archetype and picks the Bear option.
  • It should be noted that all player characters will inevitably be inhumanly durable compared to the average person. A Commoner has 4 hp, and an adventurer is likely to have several times that before even reaching Tier 2.
• Sentinels of the Multiverse:
  • Legacy, if he has the right cards in play, can reduce a 5-damage hit down to 1 damage...and that's if he doesn't have Next Evolution out to just No-Sell it entirely.
  • The Scholar with three Flesh to Iron cards out (making him quite literally Made of Iron) has a ridiculous damage reduction of 6, which gets very silly when combined with his ability to heal up. While it costs him a lot of cards to keep this up for any length of time, he can absorb a ridiculous amount of damage.
• Vampire: The Masquerade:
  • The discipline of Fortitude is explicitly this, giving characters a larger 'dice pool' (i.e. a larger chance) to 'soak' (reduce or ignore) damage. It also allows those who have it to partially soak damage they normally couldn't, like a vampire reducing damage from sunlight or fire. Fortitude is not an automatic reduction, however, and a bad roll of the dice means you can still get just as carved up with a knife as anyone else. There's just a lesser chance you will.
  • It shows up in Vampire: The Requiem as Resilience. Activating it grants a temporary increase in health levels, and allows a vampire to downgrade a certain amount of aggravated damage to lethal.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Plague Marines are among the toughest regular infantry an army can field. On top of being a genetically engineered super soldier armed with power armour, they have been touched by the "gift" of Nurgle, and turned into a walking pandemic too inured with pain to feel it anymore and too necrotized too rely on their natural physiology anymore. In terms of shots from a bolter, (roughly) 1 in 20 will actually manage to kill one. To put that into perspective, a regular human would be lucky to survive 1 in 3 shots.
  • One of the more well-known Plague Marine Headquarter choices, Typhus, takes this to a ridiculous degree. In the game he can be, and usually is, one of the most durable HQ choices, befitting for a Nurgle champion. With Toughness 5, Terminator Armour, and 4 Wounds, he can weather over a hundred STR-4 BS-4 shots with AP-3 or worse. In fact, since that's the profile for a Hot-Shot Volley Gun wielded by a Tempestus Scion, and hence of interest, the exact number of shots (remember, it's Salvo 2/4) it takes to kill him on average is 108.

Video Games

• Bloody Battle: With the Shielded perk, a player can reach up to 255 hit points. While only 55 of those are real health, resulting in a weakness to piercing weapons (weapons that ignore shields), it still allows for being able to take on amazing amounts of damage. Such as: surviving a Bomb even if they are only studs away, being able to take on serious fire damage, the different kamikaze attacks, and more. The perk becomes even more effective when using the Swap game pass, letting the user swap some of their stats around. By swapping their shield and real HP, they can do away with the weakness to piercing, making those types of weapons the worst to use against them. The only things that can reliably instantly kill users of this perk are things designed to instantly kill everything.
• Devil May Cry:
  • The descendants of Sparda shrug off many attacks and also have a massive Healing Factor to explain how they quickly recover from stuff that can injure them.
  • Pretty much every demonic enemy that can be encountered is very tough. HOW many hits with a BFS does it take to kill even a single one of them? This is later demonstrated with a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome in Devil May Cry 5: As Red Grave City is invaded by demons, the soldiers with ordinary firearms find it hard to even kill the weakest Mooks.
• In Earth and Sky, Austin's earthsuit gives him super strength and super toughness.
• Master Chief of Halo fame is a Spartan-II who can survive atmospheric reentry and subsequent impact with the ground almost unaided. The fact that he didn't turn into a squishy soup-like mixture is a testament to his Super Toughness. It helps that his armor was upgraded immediately before Halo 2 (and that he has Plot Armor). In Halo: First Strike, a group of Spartan-IIs tried that in the last-gen armor and half of them died.
• In I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, maxing out the Toughness skill gives the protagonist the Super Toughness perk, which protects them from getting injured.
• Kirby: For such a cute little guy, Kirby is EXTREMELY durable. Thanks to his pink, stretchy body, he can survive being flattened, electricity, rocket flames, cannonball explosions, atmospheric reentry, sharp blades, and in Kirby: Triple Deluxe, a planet-sized explosion!
• Mass Effect:
  • The absurd durability of krogans is something of a running joke. Due to evolving on a Death World where they were a prey species until they invented gunpowder, they have second and often third copies of nearly every organ in their bodies (including a redundant nervous system), thick hides, a camel-like hump that stores nutrients, and great strength. As a result they can shrug off things that would kill other species, and BioWare never lets us forget it.
    • In Mass Effect 2, the description of the M-98 Widow anti-materiel rifle states that it's intended for use against "armored vehicles and krogan."
    • Nakmor Drack in Mass Effect: Andromeda is only now starting to hit the limits of krogan biology, after a warrior career 1,400 years long and the loss of most of his redundant organs and two limbs to various injuries.
  • Thresher Maws are also known to be incredibly hard to kill, to the point that it needed heavy weapons and armored tanks just to have a chance to kill them. Kalros, in particular, not just had survived a nuclear winter, she become the top predator in the same Death World that give birth to the aforementioned Krogan.
  • It is telling that many people, including some krogan, think this about Commander Shepard. In the finale, s/he even takes a full-on shot from Harbinger's battleship-destroying main gun, and, while injured, gets up and continues. S/he's a badass human with cybernetic enhancements but survives more danger than Krogan. Shepard can also win a "dominance headbutt" with a krogan on Tuchanka, much to the krogan's astonishment.
• Senator Armstrong from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has nanomachines, son. They harden in response to physical trauma. The part of his body that hardens becomes black temporarily. Even Raiden, with all his cyborg upgrades and equipment, can barely damage him. That is, until he gets Sam's HF Murasama, which levels the playing field. Armstrong's nanomachines also let him heal and grant him Super-Strength.
• [PROTOTYPE] gives us Alex Mercer. He isn't unkillable, but multiple RPGs, choppers, tanks, and zombies aren't going to do the job unless the player is playing the game wrong.
• [PROTOTYPE 2] protagonist James Heller, who gets infected by Alex, gains the same toughness. Furthermore, the player is given the option to render him completely bulletproof via a purchasable upgrade.
• Albert Wesker from Resident Evil has this, probably as a Required Secondary Power to his strength and speed. It's generally overlooked and he can be damaged by gunfire or sufficient force, but a ton of girders on the head, RPG exploding in his hands, or falling from a plane would reduce a human being to bloody smear, not disorient them for half a minute — Healing Factor or not.
• In Shuyan Saga, Jade's special skill is called Iron Skin. However, it fails if her concentration wavers too much, and since she has serious anger management issues, that's a problem.
• Ghat from Zeno Clash, due to his particular mixture of human and chimera ancestry, can take blows that would shatter bones and crush organs. Though in Zenozoik, being at least Made of Iron is the baseline.

Web Animation

• This a common occurrence in DEATH BATTLE! as one character will often prove to be super tough compared to other characters guaranteeing a victory.
  • Goku wasn’t able to make a dent in Superman due to Ki unlike Kryptonite and Magic having no effect on Supes and in addition to the amount ridiculous things Superman has bounced back from in the decades of comics, even Goku’s strongest attacks wouldn’t do more than hurt Supes slightly. Whilst Superm’s attacks such as X-Ray Vision lobotomy could kill Goku.
  • On the flip side in the Hulk’s fight with Broly he eventually was disintegrated by Broly’s Ki, despite having similar ridiculous Super-Toughness feats as Superman. The reason being Hulk has no resistance to Ki energy (as proven by Iron Fist) and Broly’s toughness as shown by his latest movie was great enough to No-Sell hits from Goku in his God forms whom in his fight with Beerus almost destroyed the universe with the shockwaves caused by the clashes of their fists.
  • This is the primary reason why Lobo (who’s ironically beaten up Superman frequently) couldn’t damage Ghost Rider in the slightest as the latter’s level of toughness far exceeded Lobo to point where only holy weapons could actually hurt GR. Unfortunately for Lobo, he doesn’t have any holy weapons in his arsenal and there was no way he could leave the fight to find any, as Ghost Rider could chase him across the universe. Things didn’t end well for the Main Man.
  • This also factored in Dante vs Bayonetta’s fight. Both characters could survive getting shot and clobbered by god-like baddies on a daily basis, except Bayonetta has been taken down with a stab wound courtesy of Jeanne’s dagger and in general avoiding attacks is Bayo’s specialty. Dante on other hand has survived getting impaled (even with special weapons) on numerous occasions and his Royalguard Style meant even Bayonetta’s most powerful tricks like Madama Butterfly couldn’t put a dent in him. Leading to Dante wearing Bayonetta down and stylishly reducing her to Ludicrous Gibs with Lucifer.
  • In Mario’s rematch with Sonic, the plumber’s toughness along with his greater strength was why he was able to kill Sonic this time round. While Sonic is tough himself, he has never survived an explosion worth 2.4 megatons without any power-ups like Mario has in Super Mario Tennis. This meant when Sonic and Mario super modes eventually ran out, Mario could endure Sonic’s Rolling Attack and kill him.
  • This is one of the reasons why Genos in his fight with War Machine couldn’t remotely harm the latter as even the biggest Wave-Motion Gun was ineffective against Rhodey’s Powered Armour. Genos on the other hand has broken apart frequently in his own series and War Machine was able to reduce him to a head by the end of the fight and stomp him into mush.
  • This ability served Yang well in her fight against Tifa even though Tifa was physically stronger and more experienced in battle, the combination of Yang's Aura and natural toughness meant she could tank Tifa's attacks before eventually finishing her off.
  • This is what helped Cloud in his rematch against Link, while both he and Link had survived all sorts of attacks and beatdowns from Physical Gods Demise/Ganon and Sephiroth. Cloud had survived Sephiroth’s Supernova which according to the manuals is real, and since Link has never had to contend with anything like that, Cloud had the toughness advantage in addition to the strength and speed advantages. As a result, Cloud could survive all Link’s tricks and overwhelm and kill him with the Fusion Swords.
  • A big factor in "Terminator VS RoboCop", since both have it. The outcome of the fight basically comes down to the fact that RoboCop has survived just about anything thrown at him, whereas the Terminator will run into something that can destroy its body by the end of a given movie at the latest.
• Many people in RWBY qualify, thanks to Aura functioning as a protective personal force field. Yang takes it a step further than most: her Semblance allows her to absorb the force of the blows she takes, effectively giving her immunity to impacts that could level buildings (as long as her Aura holds out). Being punched through a concrete pillar by a house-sized Humongous Mecha really only succeeded in dazing her for a few seconds... and making her really mad.

Webcomics

• Alice Grove from her comic of the same name fell off a windmill and was perfectly fine. She later took an explosion to the face and it only angered her.
• The Winslow from Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire is completely indestructible. You want to find a Winslow on a planet but don't have time to comb the surface? Destroy the planet and sift through the rubble. There is no known force in the universe that can even harm it, to the point that a character suggests it may be stashed in a nearby sun when it goes missing.
• From El Goonish Shive: While it's unclear exactly how durable Elliot's superheroine form is, being knocked out of the sky by a large explosion, and into a busy street is merely enough to knock him out for a few minutes.
• In The Far Side Of Utopia, the character Mium seems to be this. While a mage jumps off a building a floats down, he just drops off the edge and leaves a dent in the concrete below, apparently without a scratch. Earlier he blocked a bullet with his hand, but it's not clear if that was just being tough or magic.
• Achilles from Grrl Power is completely invulnerable, even on a sub-atomic level. (And despite the alias, his heel is not an exception). The cast page rates the various character's superpowers on a five-point scale — he's the only character with a power rated at a six.
  • Most people with innate powers get some level of super toughness, although the sliding scale is pretty vast. Harem and Heatwave can withstand getting punched with little issue, but they certainly can be injured. Maxima is nearly invincible but can sustain injuries from very powerful villains. And notably, anyone with Super-Strength has Super-Toughness due to Required Secondary Powers.
• In Peter Parker: Foreign Exchange Student, Peter has a measure of resistance against blunt forces. It's enough to let him walk away after taking a hit that left him in a large crater in the floor, albeit with him groaning that his everything hurt. When controlled by Venom, Izuku's Full Cowl-enhanced punches barely faze him.
• In Tower of God, this is one of the powers practically everyone except innocent bystanders have to varying degrees, increasing as they climb up the Tower. For example, Khun Ran was advised that if he was to ever fight a member of the Arie family, he shouldn't even try to avoid their special swordsmanship, but should just take the hits with the durability that comes from being from the Khun family (and probably the other Ten Great Families as well). Someone once states that Princesses of Jahad are supposed to have bodies tens of thousands of times as durable as ordinary people. Meanwhile, low-level Super Toughness is no defence against high-level attacks; a mere Regular from the Great Families would be instantly destroyed by a stray attack from a battle between powerful Rankers. At the more extreme end of the scale, High Ranker Ha Jinsung once took a hit from a Wave-Motion Gun that destroyed the landscape around him and came out unharmed in spite of not even bothering to make a shield with Shinsu.
  • The Hero Bam, as an Irregular, has a limited ability to penetrate anyone's invulnerability completely regardless of how much more powerful they are. So basically he can make a scratch (though not more than that) on people whom people much more powerful than himself couldn't.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation:
  • Instances of SCP-1627-A and SCP-1627-B ("Mushroom Wars") are invulnerable to physical damage.
  • And, of course, there's the Foundation's beloved SCP-682 ("Hard-to-Destroy Reptile").
• In The Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles, all Canadians build up a "physical and spiritual" toughness by surviving the harsh Canadian winters. This allows them to shrug off injuries that would incapacitate or kill an American — for example, leaping from a sixth-story window, then getting bludgeoned by a 13-pound football-on-a-pole in midair.
• Plenty of supers at Superhero School Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe, but Peril is a good example. He field-tested an inventor's jetpack. It exploded at two hundred feet up (so he took the blast and then the fall). He's fine now.
• Worm:
  • Many capes with a Brute classification (though the term could signify anything that enhances durability, including Healing Factor or Deflector Shields). Examples include Weld, who is literally Made of Iron, Aegis, whose body is filled with enough redundant parts that injury doesn't really bother him, Alexandria, whose body is in a form of temporal stasis preventing it from being injured or otherwise changed, and Siberian, who is a combination unstoppable force and immovable object.
  • The Endbringers's bodies are composed of multiple layers, each one stronger than the last, with a central core that surrounds and protects their only vital components. With the data provided in the story, fans have made some calculations on just how tough they are, which have been confirmed by Word of God. One result was 30.3 trillion MPa of pressure to destroy their limbs and 560 novemdecillion MPa to destroy their cores. For the record, the latter measurement is more pressure than all the matter in the entire observable universe could provide.

Western Animation

• Rabbot from Aqua Teen Hunger Force has never been injured or even mildly inconvenienced by anything in all its appearances, to the point that it lives through both "The Last One" and "The Greatest Story Ever Told", episodes partially dedicated to killing off past villains en masse.
• Dracula from Castlevania (2017), as seen when Trevor tries fighting him hand-to-hand and his punches to Dracula's face don't even make the count flinch◊. The only response Trevor gets is an amused "You must be the Belmont".
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Being covered in scales and living rather rough lives in the Dragonlands, dragons are consistently shown to be extremely sturdy. Besides being immune to fire and regularly bathing in lava, they can weather things that would put most other races in a hospital. Even relatively young specimens like Spike can endure impressive amount of punishment, and end up winded at best.
• South Park gives us the Member Berries, intelligent grapes that continue to talk solely about how great Star Wars was and neo-reactionary ideology even after being baked into a pie, being set on fire, or doused in acid. As soon as the stimulus is ceased, they resume talking as if nothing happened.
• Steven Universe:
  • Gems are generally much more durable than humans, being barely annoyed by things like falling stories, getting thrown through walls, or freezing in a block of ice. Even Peridot, who does not have any Super-Strength, was barely hurt when spending a day falling off cliffs and getting squashed under boulders. This is before getting into their ability to regenerate even when they are injured. At least part of this can be attributed to the fact their bodies are Hard Light constructs that don't have anything like internal organs to worry about damaging.
  • The half-human/half-gem title character is also quite durable, getting barely scratched by a falling boulder to the face, and says he's never had to go to the hospital. When he eventually does go to a hospital a few years later in the sequel series, we learn he has gotten plenty of injuries — Steven's bones have been broken repeatedly — but he has innate healing powers that have made up the difference.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Bebop and Rocksteady, former humans who are respectively warthog and rhinoceros mutants, are generally as tough as you'd expect them to be, although the degree of effectiveness that's shown depends on how competent they are as villains. But on the few cases where they're really dangerous? It shows. ^note To elaborate: in Shredder's Revenge, they put up a stubborn resistance, in the 2012 series, the initial post-mutation encounter with Rocksteady has about as much effect as a sentence running into a full stop, and in the IDW comic, the initial post-mutation fight with both required 10 people and a collapsing building to do so much as slow them down.
• Total Drama: Rodney is strong, but his body's ability to do impact damage is more pronounced. In "So, Uh, This Is My Team?", he obliviously sinks up to his knees into the beach when he lands while the sand doesn't give way to anyone else. As well, when he's blasted off the island by means of the Cannon of Shame in "I Love You, I Love You Knots", he hits a battleship and sinks it.

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