• Fyana (Make: Melkian Government, Model: Perfect Soldier) of Armored Trooper VOTOMS is one of these, but she's as much of a MacGuffin as a character.
• Attack on Titan makes use of this trope to varying degrees.
  • Dot Pixis invokes the trope to explain Eren's mysterious ability to transform into a Titan, claiming it to be the result of a military experiment to create a super soldier.
  • The enemy Titan Shifters are a Tyke-Bomb variant, hinted to have been raised and trained to carry out their mission against humanity. All are insanely skilled soldiers even before factoring in their Healing Factor and ability to transform into Titans with unique powers.
  • While its origins remain mysterious, the members of the Ackerman family possess an unusual trait that allows them to become one when awakened. Each surviving member is considered a One-Man Army, which apparently led to the government persecuting their clan in the past.
• Alita and the other Panzer Kunst warriors of Battle Angel Alita. They are of the cyborg variety of super soldiers.
• This shows up to different degrees in the various incarnations of Birdy the Mighty, including the title character herself.
• From Burst Angel: Jo, Maria, and the other "Genocide Angels".
• The Claymores of the anime Claymore are half-human, half-youma hybrids that are generally a match for most ordinary youma. Why the Organization does not simply create an army of them (rather than their traditional 47) and exterminate the youma is never explained, though it likely has to do with the danger of too many of them slipping through the control process and becoming Awakened Ones, which have the mind of a youma and drastically increased powers. Having a lot of AOs and no more source youma from which to create more Claymores would be kinda bad.
• Cowboy Bebop: One of the key events in the series' Backstory is the Titan War, a particularly brutal conflict that ended about ten years before the series begins. During the war, both sides engaged in many unethical experiments, including ones with super soldiers; most of these ended horrifically for both the test subjects and the experimenters. One of the test subjects to survive these was Tongpu (codenamed Mad Pierrot) from "Pierrot le Fou", who came out of the process as a sociopathic walking arsenal with the mind of a child. One of the few opponents Anti-Hero Spike Spiegel actually feared, he eventually was incapacitated with one of his own weapons, at which point he broke down crying and begging for his mother until he was finally destroyed.
• General Blue in Dragon Ball is implied to be one, as he seems to have an insane amount of durability, strength, possibly speed, and has psychic powers. It wasn't enough against Mercenary Tao who simply killed him with just his tongue.
• The Headdliners of The Five Star Stories, who are not super soldiers per sé as they are born with their powers, but this is because they are descended from actual genetically engineered super soldiers. While typically serving as Humongous Mecha pilots as they're the only ones with reflexes fast enough to properly control the things, they're no slouches in hand-to-hand combat, either. Later in the story, this technology is reproduced by a couple of characters, and one of them uses it on her own son. The guy turns out so uber-powerful that he later has to move to the Alternate Universe where he's something less of a Game-Breaker.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • The manga has Olivier Armstrong being introduced to an army of artificial "humans". Souls of those killed in Amestrian wars are collected and infused into white, emaciated, nigh-immortal bodies created by alchemy. The goal of the Amestris high command was to use these puppets to replace their human armies, creating more soldiers from the souls of their fallen enemies.
  • There's also the "perfected" human chimerae. In the 2003 anime version, they are implied to be the results of both a project to make powerful soldiers and because they knew too much about the government's nasty little misdeeds.
  • Wrath is basically this: a man trained to the peak of what the human body can endure and then subjected to an experiment that increased his physical abilities ten-folds, made him more durable and slowed-down his aging. His eyes were especially augmented, being able to process information almost immediately and never missing anything.
• There are elite cyborg troops in Ghost in the Shell world who can wipe the floors with regular soldiers. Most of the show's main characters in Public Security Section Nine are former members of such teams. One of the chapter titles of the manga is "Super Spartan".
• Gundam has had quite a few of these through the years...
  • Because of its age, the Ur-Example is the Cyber-Newtype. In the mist of the increasingly powerful Newtype of Universal Century Gundam, the Cyber-Newtype was created as a means of combating them on an equal footing. Creating one was usually based on prescribing drug cocktails that would give one Psychic Powers on a par with some Newtypes along with some military training and other therapy. They are powerful but highly unpredictable while being legendarily unstable. Throughout Universal Century, there has been at least one starting with the Titan's Four Murasame and Rosamia "Rosammy" Badam. Unless...
  • The Human Reform League super soldiers from Gundam 00, made from artificially born, gene-boosted and nanotech-enhanced humans. The exact nature of the program that created them is kept in the dark to the viewers, but judging by their only surviving alumni (one sane but Emotionless Girl working in the HRL military, and one Split Personality Ax-Crazy Phlebotinum Rebel who killed all the others and destroyed the program headquarters) and the public backlash the HRL suffered after it was revealed to the world, it was not exactly the prime definition of a 'success'.
  • Heero Yuy of Gundam Wing also fits this, but actually got his ranking in this category through sheer training and force of will. Although, being able to bend steel bars with his bare hands tends to make one think otherwise.
  • The Extended of Gundam SEED and Gundam SEED Destiny are another example, created by Blue Cosmos to battle the genetically-enhanced Coordinators. Abused from birth and kept under control through drugs (and by Seed Destiny, memory wiping), they're extremely powerful (with the first batch being able to take on Kira and Athrun on a pretty even footing) but none too stable. The drugs enhance their reflexes, reaction time, and raw strength/agility considerably, but at a serious cost to reasoning power, and leaves the user dependent on Blue Cosmos; withdrawal is fatal. It's worth noting that this last part is entirely intentional: by making defection a death sentence, the Earth Forces are able to maintain control over their maddened creations.
• Gunslinger Girl plays this trope for tragedy: for the terminally-ill little girls of the title, it's either be made into a cybernetic monster that commits sanctioned murder for the Italian government, or die of sickness and Parental Abandonment.
• Dracula in the original work was already a pretty bad mofo. In Hellsing, though, experimentation by the Hellsing family has enhanced Alucard's powers to the point where he is, among other things, not worried about losing his head.
• The Artificial Mages and Combat Cyborgs in Lyrical Nanoha, which turn out to be secretly supported by the higher-ups of the Time Space Administration Bureau themselves so they can have a steady supply of combat-capable mages.
• The MDS (Most Dangerous Soldiers) of MD Geist. Capable of taking a bullet to the head in between the eyes, and surviving without any regeneration period.
• The purpose of 511 Kinderheim in Monster was to make these, in the Tyke-Bomb variety. It... technically worked. They got the monster they wanted after all.
• My-Otome may well feature the only school for super soldiers that includes embroidery and ballroom dancing as part of the curriculum. Garderobe does not skimp on the traditional survival and combat training though.
• The Jinchuuriki of Naruto are one part this, one part Attack Animal, depending on how they are viewed. It varies.
• One Piece: Creating these is one of the goals of two separate villains:
  • Caesar Clown seeks to create some kind of formula that will turn humans into giants, hoping to create an army of subservient and powerful giants with it. He soon found out that was impossible to do, but that didn't stop him from continuing his research on children and swindling Big Mom in the process; all of which eventually bit him severely in the ass.
  • The head of the Vinsmoke family, Vinsmoke Judge, seeks to create super soldiers through genetically enhancing his own children from a young age, and subject them to Training from Hell to bring out their inner potential; he could then have them lead his armies, and clone them to make even more super soldiers. While that training paid off fine with four of his kids, it seemingly failed with Sanji, who remained a “regular” human being despite his modified genes thanks to the actions of his mother, who took a drug that was meant to counteract the genetic enhancements and the effects that came with it. Interestingly for this trope though, due to being in a World of Badass where anyone can gain a Charles Atlas Superpower (to the point of being equal to or even greater than Germa's best) and Ki Manipulation at a minimum, they come across fairly average by New World standards. Especially noticeable when they face the Big Mom Pirates without the element of surprise. While they can handle some of the lower ranked ones fine, the veterans of the crew can match them or shrug them off and the top dogs of the crew soundly destroy them despite their modifications and technology. Sanji would later awaken his genetic Super-Soldier enhancements during Wano arc, on top of his Charles Atlas Super Power although due to his animosity with his family Sanji personally considers it being Blessed with Suck.
  • Another attempted example would be the artificial Devil Fruits (called SMILES) used by the Beast Pirates. In theory it gives the crew a huge amount of users who gain Animorphism powers and aren't bound by the usual restriction of just one power, allowing multiple users with the same power, meaning the crew to pump their numbers up fairly quickly (with 500 total before production was halted). While this did give the crew an army of Elite Mooks fairly easily, it isn't quite as impressive as it sounds. In addition to regular drawbacks, the artificial nature of them has caused a case of severe Superpower Russian Roulette, with the fruits being weaker than the average Zoans, and many of the said users being closer to Blessed with Suck due to their animal features manifesting in many different horrific (or comical depending on how you look at it) Body Horror situations. That said, the army in question is still at least powerful enough to overwhelm regular fighting forces.
• Mewtwo from Pokémon: The Series was cloned from Mew and then genetically altered to be the strongest pokemon in the world. They succeeded.
• The Invisible 9 of Pumpkin Scissors are nine whole units of super soldiers. For example; 901-ATT is the unit full of soldiers who can take on tanks and 908-HTT are soldiers that take down their enemies with flame throwers. However, just knowing that they exist seems to mean death...
• Tekkaman Blade: The entire point of the Radam invasion is to turn Earth into more Super Soldiers. They partially succeed, turning a large part of the population in "Primary Bodies", who can partially transform, but have no weapons.
• Tokyo Ghoul: In the sequel, the Quinx Squad are intended to be this. Described as human weapons, the stated goal of the project is to create an Investigator capable of surpassing the legendary "Undefeated Grim Reaper", Arima. That they haven't lived up to the expectations and hype causes them to be treated as the Black Sheep of CCG.

Marvel Universe:

• As ancient, advanced races engaged in a Forever War on a galactic scale, both the Kree and Skrulls have their own super soldier programs. This is further motivated by the fact that both species are "genetically locked" and are incapable of naturally evolving further as a species.
  • The Kree often engineer soldiers with Flying Brick powers, some being further engineered to remove any psychological restraints or vulnerabilities that would dampen their effectiveness in the long term like shame and guilt. Noh-Varr is from a near-utopian Kree Empire in a parallel universe and has been spliced with cockroach DNA to enable enhanced agility and Wall Crawling, has psychotropic mind control saliva, can enter a psychological state that converts all sensory information not relevant to action like pain into music, and can fire his fingernails, which are explosive.
  • The most prominent examples from the Skrulls are simply called "Super Skrulls". The most famous and likely first one has been engineered to replicate all of the powers of the original Fantastic Four, as well as Hypnotic Eyes. There have been attempts to replicate his powerset, but Secret Invasion really runs with the concept by giving the Skrull Empire an entire army of skrulls engineered to have a mish-mash of powers from Earth heroes. There was also a super Skrull engineered with the flying brick powerset along with eye beams as a pastiche of Superman. Another had energy absorption powers that made him so effective he managed to kill all the heroes and conquer the Earth in an Alternate Timeline.
• Captain America began as the first of what was to be an army of super-soldiers, but after he was altered the creator was killed and the process was never successfully duplicated. This was eventually retconned to be part of the Weapon Plus program. Has a good claim on being the Trope Namer.
  • There have been several failed attempts to recreate Captain America, none of which have worked out well. U.S. Agent was probably the closest thing to a success, if only because he's still alive and a hero of sorts.
  • And then there's Nuke from Daredevil: Born Again, who is... less so.
  • In the X-Men: Evolution adaptation, this is changed to the treatment being eventually fatal, leading Cap and Logan (later Wolverine) to destroy what they thought was the only Project: Rebirth capsule. Ironically, in this case there was a backup, which the X-Men then need to go destroy after it is discovered by Big Bad Magneto, who finds that it works just fine on mutants.
  • In the Ultimate Marvel universe, the super-soldier program was restarted in the 1990s and by the early 2000s several nations and alliances had their own versions producing Persons of Mass Destruction. The final issue of The Ultimates 2 mentions a Superhuman Test Ban treaty that is to be signed to stop the continued escalation.
    • It's implied that many of the characters in the story were born from an attempt to recreate the super soldier serum. It's stated outright that the experiments that eventually led to the creation of the Hulk were initially attempts to recreate the super soldier serum. The genetic modification of spiders that later created Spider-Man also has its roots in the super soldier project.
    • Also in Ultimate Marvel — the creation of Captain America scared the bejeezus out of the Soviet Union, who started their own attempts at creating a super-soldier. Apparently, however, there were budget considerations, so in their case it consisted of cutting bits of the Ultimate version of the Vision (who had crash-landed in Tunguska in 1908) and sewing them onto live human subjects. The results were... less than successful. After the dissolution of the USSR, the human employees eventually just left the bunker where the labs were housed, locking up and leaving the "super soldiers" to their own devices. When the Ultimates and the X-Men work their way in about a decade later in Ultimate Nightmare, the survivors are extremely disgruntled.
  • Project Rebirth 2.0 was intended to give the U.S. Government another super soldier, one who would perform more unsavory acts than Captain America (who had long since established himself as a superhero and willing to ignore orders by that point). The government managed to attain the Venom symbiote and bonded it to American soldiers. The first was killed after a trial run, while the second was Eugene "Flash" Thompson, Peter Parker's former highschool bully-turned-best friend. Flash eventually went AWOL, joined The Avengers, joined the Guardians of the Galaxy and more, no longer answering to the government.
    • It was later revealed that the Sym Soldier program predated Project Rebirth 2.0 — It actually began during The Vietnam War, when S.H.I.E.L.D. gained access to a primordial symbiote dragon and extracted five symbiotes from it. They bonded these symbiotes to soldiers, but the symbiotes eventually went feral. The soldiers who could not be separated from their symbiotes were frozen, while the sole survivor, Rex Strickland, became a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent.
• Much like ROM's Space Knights (below), Gun Runner's Enhanced are elite alien volunteers who have been cybernetically and biologically boosted to defend their world with individual weapons and powers.
• The eponymous superhero team in The Order (2007) is essentially a grouping of Celebrity Superheroes, crafted to be popular and powerful, and one of the few teams that Tony Stark had a personal hand in building. Unfortunately, these superbeings have a time-limit on their careers: each person is under contract for only one year (from a marketing perspective, because the idea would get "stale"; from an ethical perspective, because their granted powers might kill them). They also experimented with using Bannermen, mass produced super soldiers inspired equally by Captain America and The Incredible Hulk, as team members, but the idea was scrapped after Bannermen Green and Brown died fighting the Infernal Man. Also, the main twist of the series is that the villains (the Men from SHADOW — that is, Super-Human Development and Operation) were part of a government program that had tried to do the same thing with a Forty-Eight State Initiative back in the 1950s.
• Iron Man dealt with, and was subjected to, the Extremis virus, a serum developed that grants various superpowers. Tony Stark modified one version to grant him Technopathy, Super-Strength and a Healing Factor. Tony's brother Arno modified another to heal brain damage done to Bruce Banner, who in turn, used it to make the Hulk smarter, creating the Doc Green persona.
• Beta Ray Bill from The Mighty Thor was the 'winner' in a competition to create a powerful guardian for his people as they fled the destruction of their homeworld and a demonic invasion. The magic hammer simply adds to his considerable power.
• The Nova Corps, who are a mix of this and Space Police Depending on the Writer.
• ROM: Spaceknight: The Galadorian Space Knights were originally volunteers whose brains and nervous system were cybernetically hooked up into a powerful exoskeleton of Plandanium armor and given weapons/powers suited to their personality.
• Marvel UK actually has a series titled Super Soldiers in which Great Britain creates a team of spec-ops superhumans by genetically augmenting their strength and endurance. Additionally, their appendixes have been replaced with a bio-engineered organ that produces the "Red", "White" and "Blue" drugs used by Nuke. Later, the Super Soldiers add non-enhanced superhumans like the mutant Guvnor. The Super Soldiers returned in the 2010s with the limited series Revolutionary War as a tribute to Marvel UK.
• X-Men:
  • Wolverine and the other products of the Weapon Plus program (of which he was Weapon X).
  • Deadpool (another beneficiary of the Weapon Plus program) at one point faces off against Captain America with a spiel about two wary super-soldiers watching, respectful yet wary... until Boisterous Bruiser Hercules runs out of fuse.
  • Fantomex (Weapon XII) and Huntsman (Weapon XIII) were both created from nanotechnology. While Fantomex was intended to be a poster boy for a mutant-hunting superhero team, he mostly spends his time now working with X-Factor. Huntsman on the other hand was essentially a walking version of The Virus that infected anyone he touched taking over their mind.
  • The Stepford Cuckoos (Weapon XIV) were part of a mass-produced super soldier experiment for creating a Hive Mind psychic weapon. They were made by harvesting 1000 ovula from the powerful telepathic mutant Emma Frost and artificially aged up (as young as they are — physically in their mid-teens, they're actually even younger chronologically).
  • Similarly, X-23, an attempt to produce a controllable Wolverine. However, her training and skillset make her more of a super-assassin.
  • The immortal Evilutionary Biologist named Apocalypse likes to enhance his already super-powered mutant follower/slaves into armored killing machines, while giving them subtle nicknames like "the Four Horsemen".

The DCU:

• Midnighter from The Authority was specifically designed to be a super soldier. He was given extensive bionic implants which gave him superhuman strength, speed and durability plus disease immunity and the ability to determine over a million different combat outcomes.
• The Knight Templars known as Azrael, especially those created by The Order of St. Dumas.
• Batman: The Venom compound was a synthetic high-grade steroid developed for a rogue general. Combined with hypnotherapy and subcutaneous Kevlar implants, it was used to create a set of six super-soldiers on the tropical island of Santa Prisca. It also nearly drove Batman mad with addiction, before he kicked the habit and shut down the project. Unfortunately, the criminal government of Santa Prisca acquired samples of the drug, which led to testing on convicted criminals, which led to Bane... Later stories revealed that Venom is actually a derivative of Miraclo, a special drug used by the Justice Society of America member Hourman.
• Captain Atom and his Evil Counterpart Major Force were both soldiers experimented on to give them superpowers, while retaining them as part of the military.
• Hunter's Hellcats: In Our Fighting Forces #117, the Hellcats are sent to the Alps to disrupt the development of a new Nazi secret weapon. The 'weapon' turns out to be a unit of hulking super-soldiers specially conditioned to function at extremely low temperatures.
• The Manhunters (which are either androids, Super Soldiers, or Badass Normals depending on which continuity we're paying attention to this week).

• Rex the Wonder Dog, who basically has Captain America's backstory insofar as World War II and being a super-soldier goes. In this case, they were testing the serum on a dog when the scientist was assassinated, and simply made do.
• Robin (1993): Strader Pharmaceuticals is trying to create a serum to make super soldiers to sell to the military, but in the rough early stages the serum causes those who take it to become paranoid, angry and their bodies slowly degenerate. It does give them super-strength though. As their early experiments are illegal and carried out on unsuspecting Gothamites they do their best to dispose of all the evidence once Robin starts investigating.

• Superman:
  • Legion of Super-Heroes' foe Composite Man is a Durlan who volunteered to be experimented on and turned into a living weapon capable of copying the powers of those around him in addition to his natural Durlan ability to shapeshift.
  • "The Dominator War", the Xenoclone Shocktroopers are genetically engineered Dominators with metahuman DNA. They are larger, stronger and faster than their race's average member.
  • "Superman vs. Muhammad Ali": Hun'Ya is a genetically-engineered Scrubb, born in a laboratory and bred by his race's best scientists to become the perfect warrior.
    Rat'Lar: "Meet our champion, the one you must face in combat, very soon! His name, like his battle-cry, is Hun'Ya! Hun'Ya was born in a laboratory! He was molded by our scientists to be the perfect warrior! Hun'Ya has the toughest skin of any humanoid in the universe!"
  • The '90s Superboy was created because Project Cadmus wanted to make a Superman after The Death of Superman. After 12 failures, and with Lex Luthor's help, they were able to do so.
  • 52 has Lex Luthor's Everyman project, which delivers, but with a nasty catch, that being Lex Luthor holding the "off" button for all of the powers of the Everymen. That button is pressed, causing the annihilation of all the Everymen, many of them falling from the sky as they're flying and splattering all over the streets of Metropolis, because Lex discovered that he was unable to receive the Everyman enhancement and, to put it bluntly, had a tantrum.

Other companies:

• 300: Spartan warriors are portrayed this way, having been trained from childhood The Spartan Way to strip them of fear and weakness and turn them into the world's finest warriors. They are superior to other Greek citizen-soldiers and vastly superior to the Persian soldiers. Even the elite Immortals of the Persian army don't measure up.
• 2000 AD:
  • Rogue, the Rogue Trooper, is the last survivor of a unit of genetically-engineered super-soldiers who were massacred when one of their generals betrayed their strategy to the enemy, leading to a massacre. GIs are stronger and faster than humans, immune to all known poisons, and can go longer without sleep.
  • Friday, Rogue's successor, is the last of a group of GIs "tested to destruction" against three waves of attack (soldiers, armored assault, and prototype versions of his unit) after taking an enemy stronghold.
  • Zenith: The Nazis got some cheat codes from a few Eldritch Abominations on how to make a superman, the British stole that information during World War II, and afterwards attempted to recreate the process. The resulting superwarrior children came of age during The '60s, promptly rebelled and became hippies, and... well, let's just say it didn't end well for anyone.
  • The Judges in Judge Dredd are paramilitary law enforcement rather than soldiers most of the time, but the combination of training regimen, childhood recruitment and occasional use of cloning puts them in this category. The Judda, being highly genetically engineered and raised to be even more fanatical, are a clearer example.
  • Judge Dredd antagonist Armon Gill, aka "The Chief Judge's Man" was an ex-Space Corps soldier who was engineered with leopard and cockroach DNA for increased agility and endurance.
  • Lobster Random was designed for a war where a subconscious is a detriment. He feels no pain, can't sleep or dream and has a pair of massive lobster claws grafted to his hips. Turns out, they're the source of all his abilities. The placing of brain implants was only for show.
• In Camelot 3000, dissidents and criminals are involuntarily converted to Neo-Men by oppressive governments: oversized, voiceless, unquestioning brutes used to suppress riots and political unrest. Sir Percival's reincarnation undergoes this transformation within moments of having his past life's recollections restored, but retains his own mind due to the memory-restoration magic's effects.
• The creation of Serpentor in G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero was approved by Cobra Commander with the objective of creating the ultimate super soldier to be a general serving under him. Unlike the cartoon version, Serpentor wasn't explicitly created to replace Cobra Commander, but his natural charisma in leading the defense and evacuation of Springfield just moments after his "birth" made Cobra Commander realize he'd inadvertently greenlit the creation of his own rival.
• The Global Frequency story "Big Wheel" dealt rather graphically with a Super Soldier program gone very, very wrong.
• Marshal Law is a satirical look at super-"hero" veterans of a genetic war who had been enhanced and programmed for violence, then were unable to go back to normal lives.
• Micronauts (IDW) has the Acroyears: armored, genetically modified warriors armed with incredibly powerful weaponry, one of whom is a member of the titular team of heroes. He lives up to it even on Earth, despite being only four inches tall.
• Paperinik New Adventures give us many different types of super soldiers, courtesy of the Emotion Eaters of the Evronian Empire. Their supersoldiers are perhaps the best example of why the Evronians are smarter than your typical evil empire, since they have made sure to include a safety feature on each one of their experiments to prevent them from rebelling.
  • The first we hear about is Project Abomination, shown only in the technical files present at the end of the various issues. From what we're shown, Project Abomination yielded some results but was shut down when the results went out of control.
  • The first to actually show up is Grrodon. Combat-wise he's a normal warrior, but has Voluntary Shapeshifting abilities. Interestingly enough, this kind of super soldier was the only one without some safety, and in the Continuity Reboot they're implied to have assassinated the Emperor in a failed coup that plunged the Empire into chaos;
  • The most famous is Trauma, an Evronian general who had Evron's best scientist rebuild him with Super-Strength, Nigh-Invulnerability and the Psychic Powers of causing fear and then feed on it, thus transforming the victim in a Coolflame. When he was about to rebel, a warship showed up to arrest him and, after he saw through their ruse (they ostensibly wanted to bring him to the Imperial Council for some award) attacked with overwhelming force and Humongous Mechas, put him into a restraint that suppressed his powers, and — after the court martial (in which he thanked the Imperial Council for giving him such an enjoyable battle) — brought him to The Well (a prison planet, so called because there's no way to break out but you can be pulled out if Evron has some kind of dangerous mission for you).
    • The 2014 relaunch "Might and Power" brings us mass-produced Traumas: made from normal warriors, less physically strong and deployed unarmed and with large numbers of normal soldiers, they use their psychic powers as 'motivator' for prisoners.
  • Later we have Klangor the cyborg soldier, with enough firepower to take on The Well's garrison and win, energy-absorbing abilities that allow him to survive an attack capable of destroying a small warship, and a remote-controlled off switch. When he rebelled, the Evronians turned him off, put him in The Well, turned him back on and told him to behave or they'll turn him off again. Note that, canonically, this guy was built before the creation of Trauma.
  • Issue #28 gives us Raghor and his beast-soldiers, an offshoot of Project Abomination created by fusing Evronian DNA with that of the Beasts of Rangar to give them superior strength, speed and resistance to damage. During their test ride they're surveilled by a dozen times their numbers of regular Evronians, whose leader Zortag decided to put brainwashing devices in their helmets after they went on an unauthorized mission. The beast soldiers being just that good, they actually managed to overpower their guards before Zortag could activate the devices and then went to try and kill a temporarily Brought Down to Normal Xadhoom before killing their keepers, only for Zortag and his warriors to outsmart the two guards left there to surveil them and brainwash Raghor's beast soldiers in his moment of triumph. Knowing that Raghor couldn't be trusted, Zortag was about to shoot him when Xadhoom recovered his powers, at which point Zortag ran with the beast soldiers while the furious Physical Goddess dealt with the idiot who pissed her off.
  • The special about the invasion of Xerba give us a variant of the shapeshifter Evronians Kravenn the Hunter. Created by Gorthan, the same guy who created Trauma, Kravenn has an uncanny ability to track down whatever his target is, and is programmed to die should he fail his mission or rebel. Again, this one was created before Trauma's rebellion.
  • The final issue of the original series, titled "If" due containing a number of stories where something went different in the main story, give us another experiment of Gorthan, a breed of Evronian-Angus Fangus hybrids that are combat-ready at birth, capable of feeding on negative emotions without special items and strong enough to tear through tank armour bare-handed. This time the in-built weakness is an extremely fast metabolism: if they can't feed they starve and faint in less than a minute, something crippling against regular Evronians who can't feel any emotion. Or Earth soldiers who realize this weakness and start thinking about anything but them (how they were defeated when Paperinik, thanks to the first one talking too much and revealing Angus had been chosen for his ability to find, cause and feel negative emotions, realized this weakness).
  • The sequel series PK2 has the Predator, who, for a change, was not created by the Evronians but by a Corrupt Corporate Executive by taking a SeaDuck (a Navy SEAL Expy) soldiers and modifying his body until he's 80% mechanical and has enough firepower to take on a tank, plus enough conditioning to make him loyal and convince him his partner on his last mission betrayed him. As the guy was not as savvy as the Evronians, there's no counter in case the Predator rebels... something that happens as soon as Paperinik shows him a record of the executive saying that he and The Dragon had set him up.
  • The Ultimate Universe Continuity Reboot gives us another group not created by the Evronians, the Guardian Drones. Created by the Guardians of the Galaxy to fight the Evronians, they brought the Evronian Empire on the brink of collapse, sacking Evron itself, before the Guardians became appalled at the violence of their creations (that was appalling even for Evronian standards) and had them destroyed.
  • Again from the reboot, the Evronian underwater soldier, a formidable unit against intruders trying to infiltrate a base from a lake. The safety measure: can't breathe air.
• Requiem Vampire Knight has the Dracula's titular vampire knights. Each one of them were vigorously trained from Hell (literally) and received augmentations to make them hardier, stronger and as well as crueler by numbing their senses. They also gained magic powers such as being able to shapeshift, control animals and wield magic swords. Dracula's Berserkers also deserve a mention, though they are less reliable — gigantic, humanoid engines of destruction that destroy everything on their path whether it's friend or foe. They are impossible to control and once unleashed, they can never get back under their master's hold so they are all outfitted with explosive collars to detonate once there is no further use for them.
• Star Wars: Republic introduced the Advanced Recon Commando to the Star Wars Legends continuity. The Alpha-class ARC troopers were one hundred, mostly unchanged prototype clones of Jango Fett's DNA, making them smarter and more independent from the average clone, and they were trained by Fett himself. The ARC troopers were deadly and efficient to the extent that they were placed in stasis until they were needed, rather than being deployed to Geonosis with the rest of the clone army.
• Star Wars: Legacy has Darth Krayt’s Sith Troopers, an army of Force-sensitives who were taken at birth, modified with extensive cybernetics, and indoctrinated to be fanatically loyal and obedient. They wield lightsabers, and individual Sith Troopers can take on seasoned Jedi and win.
• Some of the engineered superheroes at the lower end of the power scale in Supergod, published by Avatar Press, fit this trope quite nicely. The created heroes range from this trope to Above Good and Evil to Eldritch Abomination.
• The Transformers (IDW):
  • Phase Sixers or Super Warriors are powerful enough to fight armies of other Transformers and lay waste to entire planets with ease. More Than Meets the Eye shows that they aren't created from normal Transformers, but Cybertronians who are already abnormally stronger then the usual, in a process that would kill any regular 'bot, and very nearly kills them. They also have an amazingly high tendency to turn traitor, at which point the Decepticon Justice Division, a whole crew of psychotically fanatic super soldiers, are sent after them.
  • Combiners are what you get when you take a number of ordinary Transformers and merge them mentally and physically — which also results in their total mass increasing a factor ten or so, and their total strength a factor hundred. Combiners are officially designated as super-warriors.
• Über, also put out by Avatar Press, is a comic all about the various powers in World War II gaining the ability to make superhuman 'tank' soldiers. They possess super-human strength, speed, are damn near invulnerable and have the power to distort reality using energy halos. The only thing that can possibly kill a Uber is another one.
• The Umbrella Academy has Number Five, whose DNA was altered by the Temps Aeternalis by infusing his DNA with the DNA of the world's greatest killers, in order to make him the greatest killer of all.
• Wild Storm's Team 7 was an army unit involuntarily exposed to a "gen-factor" that turned them into super soldiers. The downside was, the more they used their powers, the crazier they got. Their children were also born super-powered, forming the heroic Gen¹³ and the not so much DV8.

• The Butcher Bird has multiple varieties of these, called Augments, all created by Captain Grigori Vinci. Their abilities range from standard physical augmentations to strength, speed, and durability to technomancy-wielding cyborgs to line-of-sight teleportation and Voluntary Shapeshifting.
• The Child of Love: Gendo's genetic manipulation was meant to turn Shinji and Asuka's daughter Teri into this. It worked out, and she developed Psychic Powers.
• Harmony Theory: How Rainbow is viewed by those in the setting, 1000 years after My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
• The Pony POV Series has the Hooviets' Project Hybrid, a project devoted to creating powerful pony/deer hybrids soldiers. General-Admiral Makarov is the most successful of them and the only one still alive in modern day. He has immensely powerful magic and enough physical power to curbstomp Shining Armor. Subverted in that the experiment was supposed to be a complete failure, as even if it succeeded it'd have just resulted in pony/deer hybrids rather than Super Soldiers. Makarov's true form, a reality bending monster called the Shadow of Chernobull, altered history so that he survived. It's also revealed that Makarov was the one responsible for killing the other hybrids so he could be unique.
• Athene and her siblings from Mobile Suit Gundam Storm.
• Child of the Storm has a number of examples:
  • First, there's Steve, thanks to Project Rebirth — he's at MCU physical levels, and explicitly superhumanly fast, strong, and durable, and is implied to have a limited degree of superhuman intelligence (though Word of God has indicated that it's just a faster mental processor, so he can think faster than he otherwise would, but not necessarily better). This is also implied to translate to a considerably longer natural lifespan, as his daughter is in her early 60s and has yet to age past her mid 20s.
  • Natasha, as per mainstream continuity, is at the very peak of standard human potential (Steve being the peak of non-standard potential) and supposedly The Ageless thanks to the Infinity Formula.
  • The Winter Soldier is a cocktail of Zola's enhancement stabilised by the Infinity Formula, with a result roughly equivalent to Steve.
  • Mar-Vell is implied to be a Kree version, due to his Flying Brick abilities, which are implied to have been developed based on his study of/collaboration with Jor-El.
  • Technically, the Hulk. The jury is out on whether that one went very wrong or very right.
  • Wolverine, as part of the Weapon X program, which gave him the adamantium.
  • Extremis (both the MCU version and the Mainstream version — the latter being refined from the former) and its derivative, Project Centipede, are both mentioned.
  • Peter Wisdom also alludes to the British Super Soldier project in Porton Down, darkly noting that it's something that his companion (Psylocke) really doesn't want to know about. Since Porton Down is, in Real Life, Britain's equivalent of Area 51 with a well-earned reputation for sometimes less than ethical human experimentation and previously admitted lack of governmental oversight, this is almost calculated to be ominous.
  • The Red Room have Omega Red, described as a 'Weapon X reject', and a clone of Alexei Shostakov, the Red Guardian. Their ultimate example, however, is the Red Son — Harry, or rather, his Blank Slate body programmed into a weapon and infused with nanotechnology. He's capable of upending entire continents.
• The Bridge elaborates on Monster X's lack of backstory. He was a normal Xilian Super Soldier given a Captain America styled augmentation with the operation turning him into a Kaiju. Some of the Mysterian-Human hybrids, this world's version of the Final Wars' mutants, are also this if they aren't psychics.
• Second American Civil War: Project Dewdrop is a Southwestern project to create supersoldiers with nanotech biomechanical implants that give enhanced speed and strength, pain resistance, accelerated healing, and enhanced hearing, and a Self Destruct that kills the subject. Project Obelisk is a Canadian project to recreate and enhance the implants while removing the Self Destruct. Isabella is the last surviving Dewdrop-enhanced soldier at the beginning of the story; her implants are later upgraded to Obelisk, and Colin is given similar implants.
• In Warverse, the Alliance has the SIGMA program — 7+ feet tall, reinforced bones, nervous system, and all kind of other things. Once they meet the Turian Ghost Corps (which has all that plus a few centuries of simulated reality training), they hold their own reasonably well, but it's close enough to start a new program combining all that with The Spartan Way — 612 orphans aged six to seven are taken in secret as a first batch and are subjected to Training from Hell. Well, 611 orphans and John Shepard — his biotic talents convinced the recruiters to stretch the rules a bit.
• Many examples exist on the mad world that is Coreline, but to provide one example: the Stingray Industries "Hellsoldier Project", which takes people (living and dead) with Power Nullifier mutations and turn them into virtually unkillable infantrymen-capable of surviving the wrath of things as nasty as a pissed-off, no-holding-back Superman or supernatural monsters like Bill Cipher long enough to blow their brains out with the biggest gun they have available at the moment.
• The DC Comics fanfic With This Ring explains the origin of Xalitan Xor, "Konvikt", as part of the War Hound program operated by his government, transferring the minds of children into enhanced bodies (several meters tall, with Nigh-Invulnerability and Super-Strength), and mentally programming them with a strong sense of honor to make them loyal. Xor doesn't really resent what happened to him, he just gets upset when he discovers that their leaders are not similarly honorable themselves. When he leads the War Hounds in rebellion, though, the Alignment government doesn't have anything that can reliably put them down.
• Sixes and Sevens begins with Michael Carter being sent on a mission to retrieve the last man who could synthesize the serum used on Steve Rogers to make Britain's own Captain America. He and Emily also encounter a HYDRA agent with Hulk-like abilities along the way, theorized to be derived from a failed attempt at the same.

• American Ultra features two groups of CIA-trained field operatives taken from civilian volunteers (a surprising number of whom seemed to be ex-convicts), who underwent heavy psychological programming. The earlier group, WISEMAN, produced the film's protagonist, Mike Howell. The later group, TOUGHGUY, produced the assets he faces off against, and are mostly recruited from people with a pre-existing history of mental illness, violent tendencies, etc. While the overriding ULTRA program's techniques gave every subject heightened hand-eye coordination, reaction time, high-threshold for pain tolerance, and a bevy of other mental abilities a field operative would find invaluable,^note much like the below-mentioned Bourne series it was also driving people insane (or more insane). Eventually the process was deemed too costly (on both an economic and a human level) and Mike Howell, the most promising candidate, was put into deep mental cover and relocated to a secure residence.
• In Army of Frankensteins, Captain Walton has Lieutenant Swanson inject himself with the Frankenstein serum, which turns him into a powerful mutant intended to be sicced on the North. The Frankensteins themselves become an army of super soldiers for the Union.
• The operators of Squad 701 from Black Mask were created by the Chinese government in order to deal with the escalating crime rate caused by gang violence and drug distribution. The 701s were selected from elite military units, and subjected to a procedure known as a neurorectomy, in which they injected a chemical solution into their brain stems, chemically deadening the part of their brains responsible for pain, exhaustion and fatigue. Because of this, the 701s no longer feel pain to a large extent, nor are they affected by exhaustion and fatigue. This removes the psychological limitations on the human body, allowing for them to push themselves harder than the average soldier. They were able to hit with enough force to break through concrete, fast enough to outrun automatic gunfire and dodge it and perform other incredible physical feats. The downside to this process is that it left the 701s impaired to physical trauma and wear and tear from overexertion, meaning that it was very possible for the 701s to die from internal bleeding caused by their superhuman performance. Another downside to this process was that it left the 701s with impaired judgment and morality. Major troubles for the 701s started when one of their own went berserk and killed a bunch of police officers in the process. After this incident, the government terminated the project and had most of the 701s killed, with only a handful escaping and surviving out in Hong Kong. The Protagonist of the movie is a 701 attempting to lead a normal life but who is called back into action when his fellow 701s begin taking down gangs all over Hong Kong, causing trouble for the police.
• In The Bourne Series, it is hinted at that the operatives in Treadstone and Blackbriar, including Jason Bourne, had some form of enhancements beyond simple Training from Hell. While they don't do anything quite superhuman they have an unreasonable amount of stamina, pain tolerance and mental acuity to the point you know they aren't quite normal. The fourth film, The Bourne Legacy, actually has it as part of its plot. The operatives regularly take specific pills that increase muscle density, give them a mild Healing Factor and sharpen their minds. When cut off from that supply they suffer withdrawal and are threatened with reverting to "normal" without them. It is later revealed that the newer iterations of the Outcome operatives, the LARX operatives, had these improved traits and abilities made into permanent parts of their physiology via retroviral gene therapy.
• In Captain America (1990), it's indicated that the red face of the Red Skull was actually a disfigurement caused by the original process, first seen tested on a rat, and which is later perfected for use with Steve who comes out looking normal, if extremely powerful in build.
• In Cube Zero, the government soldiers are implanted with a chip and "reprogrammed" to feel no pain, exhibit superhuman strength, and obey orders without question.
• The Neo-Vipers from G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra stroll through massed assault rifle fire without any apparent ill effect, and one even continues on as normal even after being set on fire. More or less you have to shoot them in the eye (the only part without armor) or use anti-tank weapons to kill one. At the very least with Joe tech, aim for the head.
• David in The Guest is the product of a Bourne-esque medical experiment (and an actual cyborg in the original script) who goes rogue and hides out with a family in rural New Mexico, claiming to have served with their eldest son Caleb, who died in Afghanistan. Once a series of mysterious deaths (all David's handiwork) start plaguing the area, the teenage daughter Anna suspects that he's behind them, at which point his programming to kill anyone who might blow his cover kicks in. It's a horror movie with a super soldier as the psycho killer.
• Hanna in Hanna comes from a secret government program that develops otherwise aborted fetuses into powerful soldiers.
• The title character of Hardcore Henry is one by virtue of being a Cyborg, and he fights others.
• The Last Sentinel: Tallis, and most of his comrades. Being trained from childhood to fight and having cybernetic eyes, they are explicitly described as the last hope when all other forces have failed. They fail too at first, but Tallis manages to save the day even when the rest are dead, with only one person to help him.
• Legion (1998) is about a team of death-row convicts who are offered full pardons if they help take an enemy installation. They realize something is wrong when they find nothing but a pile of rotting bodies waiting for them. Then they start getting picked off one by one. It turns out that their entire mission was really a test of the military's prototype super soldier — the titular "Legion", who is actually one of the convicts who allowed himself to be a guinea pig to avoid execution. Legion was created by integrating lizard DNA into his genetic makeup and can shapeshift into his original human form, adapt to environments inimical to humans, and boasts enhanced strength and agility.
• The Marvel Cinematic Universe has several examples of these:
  • Emil Blonsky/Abomination in The Incredible Hulk (2008) starts out as a super soldier, thanks to work based on a certain WWII project we "later" see in more detail. When that still isn't enough for him to take on the Hulk, he injects himself with even more dangerous crap and full-on becomes the Abomination. Tony Stark later pops in to condescendingly remind General Ross why that program was put on ice.
  • There were two Super Soldiers in Captain America: The First Avenger: The first one was surprisingly Johann Schmidt a.k.a. The Red Skull. He received the super-soldier formula first. However, it wasn't perfected yet, and he was implied to have been driven even more insane than before and gained the characteristic red face as a result. The second was Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America; the Super Serum was luckily perfected by that time. The fact that they had different personality traits to start with also led them even further in different directions.
    • The movie actually adds a Surprisingly Realistic Outcome touch to this trope: for a time, Steve Rogers ends up sidelined because his military superior doesn't see him as particularly useful on a battlefield since, super-soldier or not, Rogers is just one man. (Although, given that the British had been operating successful commando operations since 1940, which Peggy Carter would have surely known about, one wonders how much of this is reality and how much is Army brass narrow-mindedness — which, as anyone who's ever dealt with any military will testify, is often also Surprisingly Realistic Outcome.) His Captain America image and the colorful costume actually originate when he's relegated to serving as the poster boy for a publicity campaign for selling war bonds. It is not until Steve proves himself by staging a one-man rescue mission of Bucky Barnes and his entire unit that Col. Phillips sees how very effective he could be.
    • Captain America: The Winter Soldier adds the eponymous soldier, confirming fan guesses that Bucky Barnes was injected with Super Serum by Zola in the first movie. He survived his fall from the train, but was found by the wrongest possible people and is now a Sympathetic Sentient Weapon owned by HYDRA.
    • Captain America: Civil War showed that six more Super Soldiers were created but were kept on ice in a Soviet-era base. Helmut Zemo uses them to lure both Captain America and Iron Man to the base where Stark learns that Bucky, as the Winter Soldier, killed his parents. Since Zemo blamed the Sokovia incident on "enhanced humans," he had already killed the other subjects in their cryo-chambers.
  • In Iron Man 3, Extremis makes people super-strong with a Healing Factor capable of regenerating limbs in minutes and the ability to produce intense heat at will. Unfortunately, the serum is unstable, and many eventually explode with enough heat to vaporize anyone nearby. Most of the volunteers are implied to be disabled veterans.
  • Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian from Black Widow (2021) calls himself the USSR's answer to Captain America and its only super soldier, and he has the superhuman strength to back up his claim. However, by the time of the movie, he's largely been forgotten by the same state that made him a superhero.
• Morgan: Morgan is an Artificial Human made to be a soldier better than normal humans, having Super-Strength and shrugging wounds off that would kill or disable them. Lee is also one, from an earlier model.
• RoboCop (1987): Alex Murphy is a policeman rather than a soldier, but given future Detroit's criminal situation, there's not much difference. He's also the only one who worked properly, as following attempts to create "RoboCop 2" ended... badly.
• Soldier, wherein a Tyke-Bomb who survives to middle age gets tossed aside by his creators... only to stomp a mudhole in a platoon of the genetically engineered "new models" when they cross paths.
• Star Wars: The Rogue One Visual Guide states that the Empire's elite Death Troopers undergo classified medical procedures that make them "somewhat beyond human".
• Grace, the Statuesque Stunner protector of Dani in Terminator: Dark Fate openly claims to be one and it's Not Hyperbole: she is a human woman with a subdermal armor that lets her match a Terminator in a fight, but only for short bursts. She also has cybernetic eyes and a reverse-engineered Terminator power cell keeping everything running.
• Universal Soldier uses corpses as the base. However, the Unisols are more than just random corpses — they're corpses of soldiers, marines and the like, who are exceptional compared to their fellow service members. They are retrieved from the battlefield and brought back to life, using a complex procedure of freezing, surgery, Bio-Augmentation and reheating using deep-tissue electrical shocks, and then doped up on performance boosting drugs and the like. They have accelerated metabolisms, meaning they have superior strength and endurance, and they heal from wounds faster than a normal human, though they also run the risk of overheating and must regularly be cooled. They then take it a step further using gene therapy in Universal Soldier: Regeneration, and further modified with false memories and mind control in Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning.

• 12 Monkeys:
  • Implied to be the case with Cole, who appears to have greater strength and endurance than normal men (from 2015 anyway). Goines' scientists, upon running tests on him, describe him as a 'molecular computer'. Perhaps the injections and treatments Cole receives in the future before he is sent back in time have something to do with it.
  • A straighter example is found in the Messengers. Introduced at the end of Season 1 as mysterious Warrior Monks in the service of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, Season 2 reveals that they were genetically engineered to be physically superior, immune to disease, and most importantly, un-aging.
• A few of these were created in The 4400. They were injected with Promicin, and the survivors of this made several appearances. However, they were "just" soldiers with superpowers, the latter of which is fairly common in this series, so they often got their asses kicked by 4400s or other P-positives.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
  • Season 1's Story Arc is built around the attempts of Project Centipede and their leader the Clairvoyant to create an army of super soldiers, by combining the Extremis formula from Iron Man 3 with various other serums and cybernetic enhancements.
  • The Inhumans are eventually established as being a Kree attempt at making a race of super soldiers.
• The Nietzscheans of Andromeda, who fight not only outside enemies, but each other, constantly. Stronger, faster and tougher than humans, with bone spikes on their forearms.
• Babylon 5:
  • Lyta Alexander after she was Touched by Vorlons. It's eventually revealed that the Vorlons originally created telepaths for just this purpose.
  • The fourth episode, "Infection", features an Organic Technology artifact that turns someone into an unstoppable killing machine.
  • Also the Techno-mages, as seen in the trilogy of books, were intended as the Shadows' counter to the Vorlons' telepaths.
• The Boys (2019):
  • Captain America expy Soldier Boy was one of the first superheroes, and served in every major American conflict between the 1930s and 1980s.
  • Homelander tries to copy Soldier Boy and seeks approval for superheroes to serve in the U.S. military, to the point that he invokes the Superhero Paradox and gives Super Serum to terrorists around the world so the government had no choice but to let him. Even then it backfires as his disregard for collateral damage briefly turns the public against him.
  • In Season 3, Vought CEO Stan Edgar creates a temporary variant of their Super Serum with the intent of selling it to the U.S. military at exorbitant rates, turning soldiers into Supes instead of the other way around.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The Initiative troops in Season 4 were chemically augmented to be tougher, stronger, and faster than ordinary humans. They were still no match for Buffy herself, however, and since they were usually going up against the same type of critters she fought, they didn't show up too well.
  • Adam was meant to be the first line in a new (and better) line of Initiative Super Soldiers to the example mentioned above, combining the advancement of technology, the intelligence and adaptability of humans, and the superior strength and emotional detachment of demons in one big badass package.
  • Buffy herself is a mystic super soldier from a long line of Slayers. They were intentionally created to fight monsters and the various Big Bads that hunt and kill humanity by a collective of shamans who evolved (devolved?) into the Watchers.
• Dark Angel: The Transgenics were genetically engineered humans designed to be soldiers. Not just rank and file soldiers either, but commanders, specialists, logistical and support staff, all custom-made for their role including:
  • The X series, comprising of nine series of varying make-up and success rates, acting as the soldiers, commandos and field commanders of Manticore's army. Powers include vary from the X5 series' feline grace and jumping ability to the X7's batlike ultrasonic communication bordering on hive mind. All the X series have increased the 'standard' super soldier boosts to reflexes, stamina and strength in addition.
  • Psy Ops only has one on screen representative, but she was capable of telepathy and mind-control.
  • Also developed by Psy Ops are the I.T. Concentrates, custom engineered to fulfill the role of a general... and his staff AND a super computer and database to boot. So good at processing information that it borders on precognition. Also engineered to be really unimportant looking as a form of protection.
  • Super medics acting as both doctors and portable blood banks. All of Manticore's trangenics are universal donors, but for their medics they decided to take a step further. Their blood contains higher levels of hemoglobin, platelets and fibrin to speed clotting of wounds as well elevated levels of pain-killing endorphins and adrenalin. The production rate is also much faster than either human or transgenic and they have a higher-than-average blood pressure required for quick transfusions. This coupled with extensive training in physiology, combat medicine and emergency battlefield surgery makes them very effective one-man medical corps.
  • On top of these are the significantly less human looking transgenics specialized by environment, including desert specialists, polar specialists, marine specialists and even a monstrous equivalent of a K9 corp specializing in tracking.
  • The South African government developed their own super soldiers in the Red Series, which uses an implant to boost a subject's physical abilities to above even an X-5's level. However, this comes at a heavy cost and, as such, the subjects used are all death row inmates, who typically only have a very short operational lifespan once implanted.
• In Defiance, the Bio-Men were secretly developed in case of an alien invasion and deployed when the Votan appeared. They look less human than many of the Votan species, being massive hulking humanoids with blue skin, no hair, numbers etched on their chests, and an "off-switch" that knocks them out until someone electrocutes them.
• Doctor Who likes this trope a lot:
  • The Daleks are an entire race of these, albeit non-humanoid after extensive bio-engineering by their creator Davros. While the "pepperpot" they are usually identified by is just extremely advanced Powered Armor, the actual Dalek has powerful life support, a neurally-integrated battle computer that helps it fight and strategize, and some severe tampering to remove any emotion that could impair its fighting ability, i.e. everything except hate (and, though they'd never admit it, fear. Specifically, of the Doctor).
  • The Sontaran soldiers are genetically engineered and cloned by millions to serve as shock troops for the glory of the Sontaran Empire. They are deployed into battle almost immediately after decanting, and are expected to have a life span of less than a decade. They are fine with that.
  • Cybermen are technically not made to be soldiers — they originally upgraded themselves in order to survive extreme conditions, and then upgraded everything else they could because they believed themselves to be an inherently superior form — but they definitely fit the bill otherwise.
  • "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances": The gas-mask zombies were created by nanomachines from a Chula battlefield ambulance. As the Doctor explains, this means they weren't just patched up, they were made ready for combat.
  • "The Doctor's Daughter": The clones created for the human-Hath conflict are born programmed with military tactics and history, knowing how to fight from the beginning.
  • "A Town Called Mercy": Kahler-Jex is revealed to have created several on his home planet in order to end a war. One of them, the Gunslinger, is still around, and quite impressive.
• In Dollhouse, one of Rossum's secret projects is to create a unit of Hive Mind-ed super soldiers using Active brain-architecture used in conjunction with neural radios. The result is.... disturbing, to say the least.
• Firefly's River Tam was physically and psychologically conditioned to be a psychic One Waif Army. Then she got away.
• The Cortexiphan kids from Fringe were trained to become this in the impending war between universes. The show notably shows the downsides to having some of these powers, such as a telepath who can't bear being near other people and must live in isolation for the rest of his life, an empath who unintentionally causes other people to feel his depression and commit suicide, or a pyrokinetic who can't control her own flames.
• Game of Thrones: The Unsullied are basically this. They are fearless, perfectly disciplined in martial arts, and immune to pain.
• Heroes had Scott, the Marine from the last couple of episodes in the third season. Notably killed a few seconds after receiving his first combat assignment.
• Kamen Rider: Most of the Showa-era Riders (the sole exception being Amazon) are ordinary people who were turned into super-powerful cyborgs; some were modified by the evil organization du jure but rebelled, others were willingly converted for various reasons (Super-1 was turned into a space exploration cyborg by NASA, V3 had his life saved by the original two Riders so he could avenge his family). The only Showa Rider to actually fight for an evil organization (ignoring the Shocker Riders and the like) is ZX, but he was quickly redeemed.
  • Kamen Rider Double had another villainous example in the form of NEVER (Necro-Overs), dead people brought back to life with superhuman abilities to serve as mercenaries. They too became a Phlebotinum Rebel, but not in a good way.
  • Kamen Rider Build: Like the Showa era, the Riders and the Smash are eventually revealed to be products of a secret project to develop military super-weapons. The organization Faust (a secret wing of the Touto government) exposed people to a substance called Nebula Gas; most become Smash, sick or physically weak people die outright, and only a rare few achieve the "Hazard Level" required to become a Rider. Faust's lieutenants Night Rouge and Blood Stalk were made to be "aggressors" who can help Riders become more powerful through combat, but have limited military usefulness since they're incapable of such growth themselves.
• In NCIS, a Marine who escapes from a mental institution (funded by a private military contractor) and is brought back in by Gibbs' team claims to have been experimented on, a claim backed up by cybernetic implants found in his body and his unprecedented ability to defeat Ziva in a fistfight. When a company official for the private military contractor demands his return, it is suspected that he was an involuntary subject of a Super Soldier project. It turns out that he'd been self-medicating with steroids, and the 'implant' was a homing device placed after his return to the US.
• In Orphan Black, the Project CASTOR clones, the male counterparts to the main clones, are part of a Government Conspiracy and have been trained from birth to be super soldiers. Somewhat subverted since, as far as we know, the clones don't have any genetic enhancements to their abilities and in fact some have genetic brain defects.
• The Outer Limits (1963): Quarlo, from the episode "Soldier", has superhuman strength and hearing. Raised by the State of a far-future era to do nothing but fight, he is baffled by the peaceful ways and world he finds himself in after being transported to 1964 in a freak accident.
• The Peripheral (2022): The Haptic Recon implants Burton Fisher and his friends are fitted with achieve a Downplayed version of this trope: they essentially turn the user into a Wetware Body, interpreting targeting data from drones or other sources to calculate precisely when and where to shoot, and manipulating the user's muscles accordingly. These abilities allow them to take down a much larger and otherwise better-equipped team of Hired Guns in Episode 2.
• The second season opener of SeaQuest DSV centered around the "Daggers" (the official term is GELF — genetically engineered life form. "Dagger" is an insult), genetically engineered warriors whose very existence was outlawed before they were a year old, and are exiled to life on a prison island. They are freed by the end of the episode, while one of them (Dagwood) joins the main cast.
• The Six Million Dollar Man (and the novel, Cyborg, from which it was adapted) is based on this concept. The pilot movie has several characters describing the concept of a bionic man in the same terms as that of "super-soldier". By extension, the spin-off, The Bionic Woman, was a continuation of the theme, but less explicitly stated.
• Lex Luthor creates one in the Smallville episode "Prototype". The episode title is appropriate, as Lex's plan was to repeat the process and create an entire army of Super Soldiers for the US military (supposedly, anyway; this is Lex we're talking about). Fortunately, the facility creating the soldiers was destroyed in a fight between Clark and Bizarro.
• First the Jaffa, an actual human subspecies that was biologically dependent on having a Goa'uld larva inside them and later the nigh invulnerable Kull Warriors (who were actually often called 'Super Soldiers') in Stargate SG-1.
• Star Trek has several:
  • TOS: Khan Noonian Singh and the other 'eugenic supermen' in "Space Seed" and The Wrath of Khan.
    • Their "brothers and sisters" made an appearance in several episodes of Enterprise when Dr. Arik Soong took augment embryos left over from the eugenics war and did a little tweaking in an attempt to make perfect humans. Unfortunately it didn't work and they still had the same ambition, ego and beliefs about genetic superiority.
    • The IDW Star Trek Khan comics have Benedict Cumberbatch's version of the character stand trial after the events of Star Trek Into Darkness and retell the story of the Eugenics Wars and why he looks nothing like Ricardo Montalban. A powerful corporation kidnapped a whole bunch of kids from slums all over the world in 1970s and, with backing by various governments, set out to train an army of Super Soldiers, genetically-enhancing them using tech unheard of outside the company, giving them a Healing Factor, among other things. Noonien Singh became the leader of the "enhanced" at the Indian compound. Eventually, all the enhanced all over the world coordinated their actions and escaped, deciding to plot a global takeover in order to keep the foolish humans from destroying the world. In 1992, they make their move by nuking Washington and Moscow and announcing their intentions. Their takeover takes a few weeks. After capturing India, Noonien Singh takes the name/title Khan and becomes the ruler of the Central Asian territory. According to him, he's the only ruler who tries to make the lives of his people better, while the others use their ambition to fight among themselves, which, in the end, allows humans to fight back and push the "enhanced" to Australia. Khan and his followers escape on the SS Botany Bay. He then gets Easy Amnesia (and plastic surgery) and is tricked by Admiral Marcus that he really is John Harrison, agent of Section 31. His memories return when he blows up Praxis as part of his mission.
  • TNG: Roga Danar and the other exiled Angosian soldiers, in "The Hunted", with a Vietnam Veteran Syndrome metaphor Anviliciously applied. Also the "drug soldier" conjured up by Q in the pilot episode as evidence that humans had remained 'savages' even as their technology improved.
  • DS9: The Jem'Hadar were genetically engineered by the Founders to be the perfect killers.
• Stranger Things: Eleven, born Jane Ives, was the product of her mother having taken part in MKUltra experiments while she was pregnant with her. Shortly after she was born, Jane was captured by the government, given the numerical designation 011, and trained from the moment she could walk and talk to be a psychic super-spy for the US government. While she isn't physically stronger than an ordinary teenage girl, her abilities include telekinesis and Astral Projection into the Upside Down, letting her observe people and events from the other side of the world.
• Taken: In "Maintenance", Tom Clarke believes that John was not an alien but a super soldier who was created using psychotropic drugs as a part of an early Cold War experiment carried out by the US government.
• Walker, Texas Ranger: In the 1998 episode "Warriors", a criminal planning to take over the world kidnaps a genetics researcher who has used DNA to create a healing medicine, with the criminal planning to use it to create an army of genetically enhanced super-soldiers. The prototype soldier is the one who menaces Walker, Trivette and others throughout the episode, and it is the scientist who helps Walker get the upper hand and defeat the prototype in the end.
• The X-Files:
  • Just when the Myth Arc couldn't get any more bungled up, they threw in Super Soldiers in the last season. Mind you, they cast Adam Baldwin and Lucy Lawless, so fanservice all around...
  • In "Eve", creepy twin girls came from a secret government's project. Its aim was to create and clone humans with superior strength and intelligence. Boys and men were called Adams, girls and women Eves. Pity the clones suffered from severe psychoses and had suicidal and murderous tendencies.

• All the children involved in The Chimera Program arc of Cool Kids Table were experimented on to create super-human weapons, but it sure doesn't seem voluntary.

• Mr. Fuji — on the November 1988 episode of Saturday Night's Main Event — claimed to have found one in the Super Ninja, saying he was unbeatable to the point of fitting this trope, and would crush The Ultimate Warrior to win the WWF Intercontinental Championship. In the end, very much averted as Super Ninja not only lasted less than three minutes against Warrior, he never got ''any'' offense in. (Super Ninja was actually Rip Oliver, a jobber for the WWF who wore a costume and was likely taking the place of a mid-to-upper card heel who no-showed.)

• The Clans of the BattleTech / MechWarrior Universe. Descended from the remnants of the Star League army that fled the breakup of the Star League, the Clans genetically breed their Mechwarriors, Infantry, and Aerospace pilots — only the top 25 individuals of a particular "Bloodline" are allowed to have children (they believe Lamarck Was Right). Clan Elementals (infantry) are 8-foot tall mountains of muscle donning a suit of even stronger, MechWarriors are of average height and weight but are immensely fit and have excellent reflexes, and the aerospace pilots have slimmer bodies and larger heads and eyes with enhanced reflexes and perceptions to give them the advantage in an Old-School Dogfight. In the game universe, this made them individually better (with a few individual exceptions), but few in number compared to the Inner Sphere pilots, born the "old fashioned way" (The same problem that eventually cost the Real Life Spartans their unbroken record of victory). The Elementals are of particular note, as they don a one-ton suit of Powered Armor (the Elemental-class battlearmor) that can rip open battlemech cockpits and soar through the air with bursts of a Jet Pack. The Inner Sphere eventually caught up and began to make even more varied (and heavy) suits of battle armor, though for the most part they are piloted by regular soldiers.
• Given the ample precedents set in superhero comics (above), naturally just about any superhero RPG can incorporate super-soldier characters without missing a beat. It's for example not at all an unusual origin for characters in the Champions setting, where canonically quite a number of both heroes and villains owe their powers to somebody's efforts to build the better mook — from villainous organizations like VIPER to the United States' own Department of Defense.
• d20 Future (the Sci-fi expansion to d20 Modern) features the Helix Warrior class, for players wishing to become super-soldiers. Also, the Genetic Engineering system presented in the book allows players to take this even further. It's possible to made a super-soldier with god-like levels of unkillability (assuming cost is no object).
• Dark Sun nomadic mantis-folk Thri-Kreen are hatched as sleepless armored death machines. Tohr-Kreen (settled variety) consist of similar races or subspecies. But they got technology more advanced than anything in inherited memories of those savages and make "zik-trin" — enforcers or scouts large and hideously powerful compared to normal Kreen, mentally conditioned to absolute obedience to their controllers. Tohr-Kreen are reclusive and as Properly Paranoid as most sentients on Athas, so their only representatives met in other lands are such modified scouts with memories of their homeland location removed, doubling as missionaries to wild Thri-Kreen packs.
• The ultimates in Eclipse Phase are trying to become these, and operate by a philosophy based on eugenics, asceticism and discipline. The problem comes when one goes over the edge and modifies himself into a predator exhuman, which could be roughly described as a Super Hunter that views everything else in the universe as targets and possibly food.
  • There are also a number of morphs designed as soldiers, most notably Furies, Ghosts, and Reapers.
• A fantasy version occurs in Exalted with the Magitek Gunzosha Commandos: these are ordinary mortals who keep up with Demigods on the battlefield by sacrificing half of their lifespan to beat up on demons, Eldritch Abominations, the aforementioned demigods, and anything else that gets in their way in a world where Humans Are Special because they're the low man on the totem pole and their souls taste better. Out of a population of millions, the top 600 most badass folks in the world are the only ones who stand a chance of becoming a Celestial Exalt (Sidereals don't count). Gunzoshas did it often enough that in the First Age they had to include protocols for what to do with them Exalting mid-battle in the manual.
  • Also, the Terrestrial Exalted were originally intended to be this; the Gunzosha were intended more to supplement their numbers than to be the backbone of their armies. Then the Usurpation happened, and the Terrestrials became the new aristocracy.
  • Solars can create these incredibly quickly with Tiger Warrior Training Technique and its expansion Legendary Warrior Curriculum. Tiger Warriors are generally considered in the fluff to be the most badass soldiers mortals can be without special equipment, such as gunzosha armour. Mix in an Infernal to use Fealty-Acknowledging Audience and By Rage Recast to grant them power-enhancing mutations, and you now have a unit that nobody wants to get in front of.
    • Lunars aren't bad either, between Wolf Pack Training technique and Burgeoning Wyld Infliction they can both train and mutate mortals into make-your-own-super-soldiers, and with the right upgrades, they can add animals and even plants to the list of potential recruits. Of course, breeding your own army of beastmen is more fun, and they easily become self-sustaining if you do a good job.
• Fading Suns had the Grimsons. This type of genetically engineered Super Soldier not only had greatly increased stats over a baseline human, a Grimson also had a random number of biomods to augment the character further. Note that because Grimsons were genetically altered, they were forbidden to procreate especially with Grimsons of the opposite sex. There was no telling what mutations may be passed on to the offspring.
• GURPS: Bio-Tech features numerous different super-soldiers created through Bio-Augmentation. A few examples:
  • Orion's: A lower tech level super soldier who has enhanced reflexes and strength (not super human but very good nonetheless), improved metabolic performance and a high pain thresh hold.
  • Artemis: A more advanced all female super soldier race. They have enhanced strength, speed, durability and senses and can reproduce either sexually or asexually but suffer from inherent overconfidence and recklessness. They are also almost always bisexual or lesbian.
  • Guardian Warriors: Created to be super commanding officers, they have the super human strength and speed typical of super soldiers, though to a lesser degree than most examples of this trope. However, they make up for it by being able to emit pheromones to manipulate others, having enhanced intelligence, an improved resistance to physical damage, poison and disease and by being universally attractive and all having sexy voices, making them all incredibly charismatic and persuasive.
  • Herakles: A very high tech level (and very expensive) super soldier, the Herakles has Super-Strength, Super-Speed, Super-Reflexes, enhanced longevity, resistance to poison and diseases and a decent Healing Factor.
• Also in GURPS, the Mass Combat rules allow to stack the generic Super Soldier modifier on a unit. Super Soldiers are more expensive than a force with equivalent firepower would be, but they are more easily transportable (A squad of super soldiers fights as two squads, costs as much to raise and maintain as three, but is as easy to transport through helicopters or Drop Ship as a single normal squad).
• In GURPS Transhuman Space most Fifth Wave nations use AI controlled robots for most of their infantry, but supported by bioroids or biomod humans wearing powered smartsuits or battlesuits for certain special operations.
• In Heroes Unlimited, this is a power type, and there are a wide variety of organizations dedicating a substantial amount of resources to building their own metahumans.
• This is the intention of the extensive training and metaphysical battle creed of the Adamantine Arrows of Mage: The Awakening. It is intended that they should be this way without the use of their magic. When they do use magic, they are supposed to be akin to living gods of war.
• Magic: The Gathering has the Metathran, genetically engineered soldiers created by Urza to fight the Phyrexians. For that matter, the Phyrexians themselves also qualify. They are born as humanoid creatures called Newts, which are already much stronger that normal humans, and are later compleated (not a typo).
• Mechanical Dream, four races are essentially all super soldiers and in the racial hierarchy they occupy the top places with the Zins being at the top and the second place is a 3-way tie by the Soleks, the Yakis and the Volkoi while all the other races fall below. The Soleks and Yakis are both nomadic tribes and their journeys into the outside Death World made them both strong and granted them special abilities, the Soleks are immune to psychic attack or influence while the Yakis shortly after birth are given a Clingy Costume, Biotech Power Armour made from the individual's placenta which had been enchanted by the tribal Awakeners (Yakis born outside of the tribe or had their armour destroyed are shunned as being permanently weak for having no armour), so both tribes are hired en masse as elite forces by the cities of the Core. The Volkoi and the Zin are both created species (the Zin were created by the Frilin to be their soldiers while the Volkoi were commissioned by the pre-Core Empress after learning of an invading force). The Volkoi are a clone race, at the cost of a noticeably shorter lifespan, are blessed with superhuman strength and size, a prehensile tail useful for combat, and an adrenaline rush that makes them even mightier. The Zin have unnaturally dense bodies giving them borderline superhuman stats. They're further made immune to ageing and are fused with a supernatural creature that lets them transorm into the true form of what possesses them.
• Rifts had several, developed by the governments of the world before it all came crashing down. Naturally, the technology to make them managed to survive, and in many places, any person with the inclination and a whole lot of cash can just pop over to the local Body-Chop Shop to get turned into a cybernetic, mentally- or chemically-enhanced killing machine. Specific examples:
  • Full-conversion 'borgs, those who choose to get their entire bodies replaced with metal save their brains; they also come in partial-conversion varieties, replacing only their limbs and some organs.
  • Crazies, who have microscopic implants in their skulls that grant exceptional strength and psionic powers, but slowly drives them mad; they're identifiable by the giant steel rods in their head, an anachronistic remnant of the old process that they insist upon, and the fact that they tend to act like cartoon characters.
  • Juicers, people who are chemically wired to operate at the absolute peak of human performance. The problem is that the constant manipulation of their blood chemistry slowly destroys their bodies; the maximum life span of a Juicer is six years. "Detox" is possible, but after five years has almost a 100% failure rate and only if done within two years will the individual not suffer from their body being partially burned out.
  • Notable examples developed After the End are Coalition States Battle Cats, Kill Hounds/Kill Cats, and Ursa Warriors, genetically engineered animal Super Soldiers. A similar project in South America resulted in the Amphibs of Tritonia, as well as two separate independent nations of primarily mutant animals.
  • A number of post-cataclysmic societies developed Magic Knight type character classes, including the Psi-Warriors of Psyscape, the Battle Magi of Dweomer, plus orders of Cyber Knights and Mystic Knights. The Coalition States has their Psi-Battalion, which consists of various psychic classes to counter threats from practitioners of magic.
  • Rifts being Rifts, nonhumans get in on the fun as well with their own Super Soldier creations. The aliens occupying Atlantis have the standard Juicers, Crazies, and 'Borgs, but they also have the Bio-Borgs, beings that are magically mutated and often enhanced with a wide variety of parasites and symbiotes. The results are often strange and disturbing, but extremely effective. The Kreeghor of Three Galaxies favor genetic manipulation: their Invincible Guardsmen routinely feature beings who have been transformed into living metal or who can change into pure light on a whim. In a larger sense, there are a number of nonhuman Proud Warrior Races who are capable of facing down most of the Super Soldiers on this list. For added fun, try applying any of the above Super Soldier creation techniques to one of these beings.
• None are full grown, but in Rocket Age the Nazis have young super soldiers in training at Festung Sieg.
• Shadowrun: Heavily cyborged individuals, physical adepts, trolls/orks and even HMMVV-sufferers like ghouls have been used in various super-soldier training programmes, usually in combinations of several of the above at the same time. Some nations and corporations will use various super-soldiers as Elite Mooks (like Renraku Red Samurai, Aztlan Jaguar Warriors, Tir Tairngire Ghosts and ARES Firewatch teams), and wash-outs are a popular background for a Street Samurai Player Character. Ultimately, though, 'super soldiers' are only capable of so much; gameplay-wise it is possible to stack so many bonuses that an NPC (or your Player Character) is immune to just about anything below anti-tank weaponry, but at that point you've sunk more time and resources into it than the cost of just buying a tank. This explains why, In-Universe, most actors with the resources to make super-soldiers simply do not bother; why sink a million nuyen into a 'superman' who, if he attracts too much heat, gets killed or crippled by a drone with an anti-tank missile costing, at best, a few thousand nuyen?
• SLA Industries have the baseline humans as the main species of the "World of Progress", but ruler Mr. Slayer needed operatives with a little more punch. He got it with the discovery of two alien races - the Shaktar who are honorable warrior much tougher and stronger than humans and the Ebon/Brain Wasters - a race that can manipulate an otherdimensional energy known as Flux. Mr. Slayer also has the Stormers developed - these were initially a regenerating living weapon that had a even higher baseline physical stats than the Shaktar, but later on new Stormer breeds were developed which differing abilities based on their purpose.
• Splicers had any of the classes that were issued "Host Armor", which meant that the character had a Biotech Power Armour suit that was symbiotically linked to them and of those classes issued Host Armour, the Dreadguards had the most powerful varieties. While the "Host Armor" classes are the most prominent, the Resistance/Splicers had other super-soldiers including the Biotics, special conscripts who have been genetically modified to the point of no longer being human. Truth is the Resistance need as many Super Soldier types as they can get since they're facing an Earth-conquering army of insane robots who had disabled all inorganic technology with a nanoplague.
• Sleeper Orphans Of The Cold War: The main premise is that the players are all forgotten remnants of the various super soldier projects during the Cold War. After being awoken from cryogenic stasis (hence the term sleepers), in the present day they now work to protect the world from more malevolent sleepers and various other forgotten superweapons.
• Decommissioned Super Soldier-types are the focus of the Underground RPG. This is a setting where a crashed alien ship in the near future provided humanity a bonanza of genetic-engineering breakthroughs in a time period when mega-corporation shenanigans, crime and international tensions has turned the Earth into a dystopian hell-hole.
• Unhallowed Metropolis has the lycanthropes given this origin. They were derived from a project to create a breed of super soldier wolf/human hybrid to help London gain ground against the undead onslaught. Unfortunately the lycanthropes were as bloodthirsty as they were mighty and quickly turned on their makers.
• Warhammer 40,000: Every faction worth their salt has at least groups of those. Examples include: Cadian, Catachan and Krieg (even more so with the Kaskrin, White Shields and Grenadiers),^note Learn to shoot before they learn to walk Stormtroopers, Sisters of Battle^note Raised in an orphanage with very intense military training, every form of Space Marines, Adeptus Custodes,^note "proper" Super soldiers created from template or personally by God Emperor of Mankind Skitarii^note Cybernetic warriors of the Mechanicus, every Eldar that walked Path of Warrior^note Creates entire new personality from scratch that is filled with only rage and hate. Sometimes the person can no longer revert to their normal persona, the Fire Caste of Tau^note Trained from birth, have minor cybernetic augmentations., the entire Tyranid, Ork, Necron and Daemon races^note They all were designed for war. Some are more elitist than the others. In this kind of universe, it's pretty much a prerequisite for survival. And sometimes even these aren't enough.
  • Space Marines (Imperium of Man): Fanatically dedicated, comprehensively superhuman, bio-engineered giants selected through decades of religious indoctrination and a form of The Spartan Way that only one of a hundred (or thousand, depending on the source material) aspirants even survive, who carry weapons firing fully automatic armor-piercing explosive-tipped rocket-boosted ammunition as their basic gun^note Boltguns are NOT rocket launchers, are strong enough to rip a man (or a cow) apart and can survive having a tank dropped on them. They are made by implanting a young male human with bioengineered organs that radically alters their development on top of giving them superhuman capabilities; this includes a second heart, a third lung, a second stomach, an organ that causes bones to coat in naturally occurring ceramite and fuses the rib cage that is solidified into one large chunk of bone, can spit acid, and a tremendously enhanced sensory apparatus. On top of their high intelligence they also have the ability to eat the brains of enemies to incorporate their knowledge. They are also "hypno-indoctrinated" to make them fanatically loyal and to give them a very narrow focus, so that all they think about is war and how to do it better, and possibly to impart knowledge on how to do just that. Depending on who you ask, they may also get genetic enhancements on top of their bodies being reworked from the ground up. Some chapters have had the genome of their bioaugmentations corrupted for some reason or another, in some cases losing out on some abilities, but just as often it gives them something like giving them razor sharp bone spurs or perfect recall. Whatever the case, every Marine has muscles so thick that they are immune to any weapon smaller than a 9mm handgun, they can breathe water, they are immune to most diseases, and they require only four hours of sleep though they can go days on end without it. If they are not killed, they will live forever, with the oldest existing one having lived over a millennium being generally no worse for wear aside from Who Wants to Live Forever? biting at him a bit. And Chaos Marines are even deadlier, possessing thousands of years of combat experience over their loyalist brethren as well as various boons and mutations granted to them by the Chaos gods to make them even stronger, tougher, faster or give them whole new abilities altogether.
    • It's worth noting that a lot of the detail around Space Marines and their superhuman and quasi-human abilities has evolved, changed, and been tweaked (i.e. retconned) over the years. Back in the 1990s, a lot of the physical enhancements were similar but less played-up; Space Marines were supposed to be the best of the best of the best transformed into even better soldiers — not true 'superhumans' that are functionally immortal (only the Primarchs could lay claim to that originally). Their weapons have similarly mutated; the Boltgun fires self-propelled rounds (rounds, not grenades) that features an explosive element behind a dense core and a diamantine tip or adamantine penetrator, allowing it to both penetrate and explode within a target. It certainly isn't a full-auto missile launcher, evidenced by the Space Marines using a shoulder-carried heavy weapon called...a missile launcher.
    • Also the various badass kinds of Space Marine: The Ultramarines, the go-to Space Marine, are Badass Bookworms and absolute masters of logistics and organisation, good not only for winning control of planets but also keeping them under control. Space Wolves are boisterous superhuman Vikings seemingly immune to Chaos corruption; back in the pre-Heresy days they were known as "the Rout" because they were the legion the Emperor called when he wanted an opponent completely crushed. The Iron Warriors are badass siege specialists, back in their pre-Heresy days a mere ten of them could control a planet with a disgruntled population of 130 million. The Alpha Legion meanwhile are effectively an entire army of James Bond/Rico Rodriguez/Solid Snake hybrids, masters of stealth and deception and launching confusing and terrifying attacks that leave their enemies scrambling to react.
  • Terminators (Imperium of Man): The Elite Imperial Space Marine — veterans of countless battles, the strongest and fittest and most capable of all marines. And they get a super-power armor (Tactical Dreadnought Armor) and even more obscene weaponry (like Assault Cannons firing thousands of large-calibre rounds per minute or Thunder Hammers that can rip tanks to pieces). They can also teleport. It's commonly agreed that a Battle-Brother becomes eligible to the First Company (where Terminators are grouped as per Codex Astartes) posting after at least a full century of service. And some chapters require even more.
    • Assault Cannons would fire thousands of rounds per minute — if said ammo supply was large enough. No terminator model or art ever looks like he's carrying around more than a few seconds' worth of assault cannon ammunition.
  • While Space Marines were Super Soldiers, the Primarchs were Super Generals. Created personally by the Emperor, they fully matured in just a few years with most of them conquering their respective planets by the time they were adults in the conventional sense. When Leman Russ met the Emperor, they had an eating, drinking and fighting contest. Emperor was displeased with such "hospitality", so he quickly ended the last contest by knocking out his son with a power fist hit. Leman Russ was tough enough to say that his headache was caused by the booze rather than by catching a hit that would rip apart a Baneblade by his skull. Lorgar, deemed to be the weakest of primarchs, was able to fight and win against the Anngrath, the mightiest Greater Daemon of Khorne ^note The single most dangerous model available at the tabletop (though it should be noted that this was the point he started really tapping into his own psyker powers, and he received the label of "weakest" for his preference for using diplomacy and faith to win campaigns, things he pushed to the side after his fall) and Magnus casually went toe to toe with Ork Super Gargants.
  • Grey Knights (Imperium of Man): incorruptible Marines who are also great psykers, have a magic-immunity shield and a spear that shoots lighting for killing giant daemons. The selection process for Grey Knights involves, among other things, the "666 rites of the Emperor", which can be best described as 666 Mind Rapes.
    • And then there are Paladins, a VERY elite group among the most elitist Space Marine chapter. There are eight trials one must endure to join their ranks, each one more grueling than a previous one. The second one involves tracking down and killing one of each of the 4 types of Daemonic Heralds serving the Chaos Gods while bearing no armor and armed only with a sword.
  • There is little known about Adeptus Custodes (the Emperor's bodyguards created in pre-Imperial times) except that they are more durable than Space Marines^note One of the Custodes' duties is to escort Culexus assassins to their objectives. Even with safeties on and the Culexus actively trying to diminish his power output, even Space Marines die when they are exposed to Culexus power for a long time. can ever be and that the Captain General of the Custodes went toe to toe with Horus (prior to his Face–Heel Turn) in a sparring match and won. There was also an Ork Horde that pushed back 3 Space Marine Legions with their Primarchs^note Rogal Dorn, Mortarion and Horus himself. In response to this affront, the Emperor himself along with his Custodes Guard deployed from the skies and finished them off in an instant. While the Emperor was fighting their boss, Gharkul Blackfang, Custodes fought Xeno hordes. More than 100,000 orks died in a matter of minutes while the Custodes only lost 3 warriors. And there is also a theory that due to the destruction of the Imperial Webway project, the Imperial Palace is under constant siege by daemonic hordes with the Custodes Guard fighting an endless and hopeless battle to keep them at bay. For the past 10,000 years they have been the only thing keeping hordes of immortal daemons from destroying the Golden Throne and creating a galaxy-wide Eye of Terror.
  • Thunder Warriors (Pre-Imperial human): The precursors of the Space Marines used when the Emperor united Terra. Stronger and tougher than their successors, but with shortened lives and none of their non-combat utility. They were dangerously insane and the Emperor had them destroyed once he conquered Terra, so he could work on the weaker but more controllable and less erratic Astartes.
  • Aspect Warriors (Eldar) dedicate every single conscious moment of their lives to training for a particular aspect of war, also utilizing the second-most advanced technology in the setting. Despite being of only average human dimensions, they can generally go toe-to-toe with the above-mentioned Space Marines.
    • Exarchs take this to the next level, as their entire existence is dedicated to combat. They never leave their shrines and have the best equipment of their respective aspect. In older editions they were Eldar heroes who had access to an incredibly wide range of badass wargear, even from outside their aspects, but they've been toned down to be more akin to Sergeants or typical squad leaders.
    • Depending on the edition, ordinary Aspect Warriors could be "usual" Eldar elite troops. Sure, they train hard for a century or so, but can freely change their occupation afterwards. Multiple Personality Disorder Eldar cultivate helps them to stay ready to don the war face once it's needed again. Exarchs are those who are lost on the Path of Warrior and can leave it no longer. And then there are Phoenix Lords. They are heroes who founded the Aspect Shrines 10 thousand years ago and they keep fighting by keeping their consciousness in their armor and by possessing the body of their successors.
    • How badass are the Phoenix Lords? Maugan Ra, the Dark Reaper Phoenix Lord, once massacred an entire Tyranid splinter fleet on his own. The current eight-feet-tall, power-armoured, genetically-engineered poster child for this trope above? Whole armies of them have been wiped out to the last trying this feat. There's also Fuegan, who curbstomped a Steam Gargant (an Ork-built Humongous Mecha) alone, and there's Jain Zar, who turned the dreaded Night Lords into the Red Shirt Army. And Emperor help you if you ever face them fighting all together as the Phoenix Court of Khaine...
  • Drukhari: The diabolical cousins of the Craftworld Eldar who operate out of an interdimensional hive city called Commorragh. An entire civilization of hyper-advanced Space Pirates, with the holdover tech from the Aeldari Empire that can annihilate you in all manner of ways that violate Clarke's Third Law.
    • Incubi are a warrior sect within Drukhari society, typically seen as bodyguards to Archons. They go through training so gruelling that it kills most of the aspirants, and their final challenge is to kill an Aspect Warrior in single combat and destroy their precious Soulstone to shape it into a psychic torture device known as a Tormentor. They are then gifted a Warsuit (one of the few examples of Aeldari Powered Armor) and a Klaive (a massive two-handed power sword capable of cleaving a fully-armoured Astartes marine in half with a single blow). Incubi are some of the most skilled swordsmen in the entire galaxy and only very few survive an encounter with one.
    • Wracks, the twisted creations of the Haemonculi, individuals dissected and refashioned into bodyguards and assistants to the profane flesh-sculptors. Modified by all manner of steroids and enhancing drugs, Wracks are almost impervious to anything short of anti-tank weaponry and their hands are removed to be replaced by razor-sharp claws, needles and sometimes more exotic equipment. Like venom blades that can kill even the hardiest living thing with a single scratch, or mindphase gauntlets that can take over the nervous systems of their victims.
  • Stormtroopers (Imperial Guard, Imperium of Man): The Stormtroopers carry backpack-powered hellguns, heavy carapace armor, and — depending on the regiment — can receive genetic enhancements. In older editions, squad leaders could even carry powerfists or lightning claws. Usually Stormtroopers are trained in Schola Progenium, the orphanage for children of deceased war heroes.
  • Sisters of Battle receive training that is similar to the Stormtroopers, but with less focus on subtlety and more on endurance. It is an army of power armored nuns with meltas, flamethrowers and bolters backed up by faith strong enough to deflect artillery fire and resurrect dead.
  • The Orkz: Orkz are an entire race of Super soldiers created by Precursors, designed for the sole purpose of fighting. They take this trope to the logical extreme, where their fungus-based life cycle creates all the secondary and even tertiary logistics any army would need (including forming livestock that fart their equivalent of gasoline!). Their Mekboys are also genetically encoded to be able to create machines from birth and their biology is robust enough to handle literal Meat Grinder Surgery, meaning none of that "training" nonsense regardless of what profession each ork prefers. Whatever else is sorted out by their gestalt psychic field, literally filling in the blanks of where any of the above would conceivably lack. All this combined results in a massive mob of drunken football hooligans going on a galaxy-spanning pub crawl. And winning.
  • Various Inquisitorial Assassins: Six Temples each with its own breed of assassin dedicated to one of six major fields of murder: Sniping, Impersonation, Terror-Attacks, Anti-Psyker, Poisoning and Electronic Warfare. They are the Vindicare, Callidus, Eversor, Culexus, Venenum and Vanus. These assassins have profiles in-game that rival/exceed that of most army leaders, are implied to be trained from birth (very little of their training procedures is ever alluded to) and can only be deployed by authorization from a sanctioned Inquisitor, and even then the Inquisitor is never allowed to deploy more than one. The Eversor stands out among them, as he is usually only deployed when the inquisition needs to make an example of someone. His modus operandi usually results in the immediate area receiving a very visceral redecoration.
    • At one time, the Officio Assassinorum decided to create the ultimate assassin. They succeeded. Legienstrasse was able to absorb the biomass of a target upon touch, completely removing the target whole. She could use this new biomass to mutate at will or to create more Maerorus assassins by laying eggs (with a single clutch being able to kill an entire Imperial Guard company shortly after hatching). So in order to create the ultimate assassin, the Officio Assassinorum created an expy of Alex Mercer from Prototype. Only a billion times worse because it's 40K. Needless to say, Legienstrasse escaped. This posed two problems. First, she was powerful enough to have a decent chance at fighting off the punitive force sent to destroy the escaped prototype. Said punitive force included Lysander, a company worth of Space Marines, an IG regiment and several Officio Assasinorum operatives. And second, no one knows whether punitive force (that was barely able defeat the monster) was able to find all the eggs.
  • Officio Assassinorum Operatives are expected to be able to cross entire star systems on their own. While a Squad of Space Marines can figuratively take over a planet, this is usually acknowledged to be a figurative speech, as the marines would be supported by, at the very least, their own air force. The Assassins themselves must not only know how to forage for food on alien worlds, but survive in them and find a way off of them, which includes up to hijacking entire starships. The only field assassin that (presumably) does not have to do this is the Eversor, whose physical biology is so messed up by the combat stimms that he must be kept in stasis between assignments or his body will collapse (and explode).
  • Often neglected, but due to application of the Caste system, every Tau Fire Warrior is trained to wage war from birth. Sure, they are physically weaker even than ordinary humans, but extensive training in tactics and fire discipline combined with the best rank and file guns in the setting makes Fire Cadre very formidable opponent. Fanatical devotion to the Greater Good cause, immensely powerful battle suits and skills in armored warfare rivalled only by Imperial Guard make the Tau Empire the most rapidly expanding force in the universe.
  • Incidentally, that bit in the description about the Fridge Logic of why such powerful soldiers would remain loyal is addressed: heaps of indoctrination and brainwashing. And many of them don't remain loyal. One of the worst threats the Imperium faces are the Chaos Space Marines: Space Marines who have given in to their selfish base desires and surrendered themselves to Chaos.
  • Speaking of Chaos, Fabius Bile is constantly trying to outdo the Emperor purely For Science!. Throughout all of the editions he has a special rule that allows him to enhance a squad of Chaos Space Marines into even more super super-soldiers (although the exact in-game benefit changed between editions). However this usually goes wrong and the marines die shortly after the battle, but only furthers Bile's drive to create even more powerful (and unstable) ones.
  • The Imperial Guard are conspicuous for being the sole exception to this trope. They're not bioengineered killing machines or ancient warriors with hyper-advanced weaponry, they're just ordinary human men and women, handed a rifle and a flak jacket, or put inside a tank if they're lucky. On a good day they'll beat any of the armies listed above, and that arguably makes them the most badass of all. However, Catachan Jungle Fighters might qualify as a Downplayed example of the trope in action: while ostensibly still ordinary humans, their homeworld has a higher gravity than Earth (which explains their massive frames and muscles) and more importantly, is the most dangerous Death World in the entire galaxy. It is home to scorpions the size of tanks, giant bats and plants that literally eat people. Only a quarter of Catachans born survive to see their tenth birthday. The survivors among those are exceptionally tough and cunning as a result.
  • Eighth Edition introduces the Primaris Marines, the culmination of 10,000 years of research to make even better Space Marines. The brainchild of Archmagos Belisarius Cawl, the Primaris Marines are equipped with Mark X Tacticus Armour, which takes the best features of previous Space Marine Powered Armor designs, the Mark II Cawl-pattern Bolt rifle as their standard firearm which is basically an improved version of the iconic Bolter, and they have even had their gene-seed modified with parts of the same process that creates the Custodes. The gene-seed modification is the most controversial aspect of the Primaris Marines, since many in the Imperium believe the Emperor's work should not have been touched. Imperial Regent Roboute Guilliman drew the line when Cawl suggested including gene-seed from the Traitor Legions in these modifications, but he suspects Cawl did it anyway.
  • The Orks mentioned above? Turns out they are actually the degenerate descendants of the Krorks, the original Super soldier race the Old Ones created to fight the Necrons and C'tan. The Krorks were twelve meter tall behemoths clad in Powered Armor that makes Astartes' Armor look like scrap. The Krorks degenerated into the far weaker though still very dangerous Orks after the Necrons went into hibernation because their physiology requires them to constantly fight powerful foes to stay in shape. That's right, despite all of the previously-mentioned threats from the other factions above, they're still not collectively dangerous enough to force the Orks back to their original prime.
    
    Older Is Better very much applies here: The Krorks were only foot soldiers in the War in Heaven, but during the War of the Beast, some Orks managed to grow nearly to Krork proportions, and they became major raid boss level threats that could give Primarchs a run for their money. And thanks to the collective psychic link between the Orks, the mere existence of these few leaders made other Orks smarter and stronger.
• Warhammer:
  • The Skaven's Stormvermin were a somewhat rare breed of larger, stronger and braver Skaven who formed the elite guard and shock troopers. In some versions (including the Warhammer RPG), the Stormvermin were much stronger than a normal human and had the muscle power to rival Chaos Warriors and Black Orcs.
  • The Black Orcs themselves were specially bred by Chaos Dwarves to be stronger, smarter and more disciplined than a regular Orc.
  • While they would be considered main troops, the Saurus especially their Temple Guards might be thought of as super-soldiers. Specifically bred for war, they are far stronger and tougher than a regular human and have scales that are tough enough to rival plate armour.
  • In Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, Sigmar creates the Stormcast Eternals to give the forces of Order a fighting chance against the Warriors of Chaos. Similar to the Einherjar of Norse myth, the Stormcast Eternals are created from fallen heroes and literally reforged in body and mind into mighty immortal golden warriors clad in sigmarite armor.
  • Blood Dragons eschew the usual Vampire cunning, sorcery and guile that the other bloodlines often rely on and instead go for pure martial prowess. This is so that they may slay a Dragon and drink it's blood (hence the name) to forever quench their thirst for blood. This, combined with their natural Vampire enhancements and literally hundreds of years of training, turned them into the ultimate undead warriors, matched by only the Champions of Chaos. In battle they would either command their own vampire armies or ride into battle as literal Blood Knight squadrons.
• Downplayed in Dark Astral, the Astrotemplars are clearly modelled on Warhammer 40,000's Legion Astartes. The fluff text states a full company of these power-armoured superhumans could wipe out entire alien worlds. The reality though is these are discount Space Marines from the bargain bins. Unlike their Master of All counterparts, the Astrotemplars are only superhuman in 1 or 2 areas chosen at creation. They don't start off with Power Armour, instead they have middling mesh armour and some clothes! They get a huge arsenal, but much of it is mediocre or pure garbage. All Astrotemplars get a decent laser rifle but after that their starting weapon choices include primitive crap like blackpowder pistol, musket, battle axe, warhammer, a shiv and compound bow alongside contemporary weapons like chainblade, laser pistol and shotgun. With Super Soldiers like these, no wonder humanity is reduced to a Vestigial Empire of one city.

• The storyline of The Incredible Hulk Coaster at Universal's Islands of Adventure involves Thunderbolt Ross attempting to recreate the conditions that transformed Bruce Banner into the Hulk, so he can potentially build an entire army of Hulk soldiers.

• Acid Rain World is Hong Kong-based toyline set in a dystopic future world war. Among the factions are the Omangans, who are an imperialistic European monarchy. Omangan military assets include the Reborn Troopers. They are genetically enhanced and then given extensive bionic modification (like being permanently fused to their heavy armor) and only 10% of those subjected to this program survive. In the mobile game, the info entry for them even gives a Shout-Out to some more famous supersoldiers "Think of those marines of the space variety and you won't be far off the mark for describing these fellas." No other infantry can match the Awakened for toughness, the Awakened are often more enduring than many combat vehicles.
  • Babel is the Mega-Corp that's the most advanced faction of Acid Rain World. Protecting the Babel towers are the Uriel, an entire army of super soldiers. Babel has taken exceptional individuals, mindwiped and then bionically augmented them before outfitting them with state of the art armor and advanced particle beam weaponry. The commanders of the Uriel are known as Archons and many ordinary people and tribals fear the Archons as demigods because of how easily they defeat would-be invaders.

• Alice and the Nightmare: It's implied that one exists — the Queens created armies of Chessmen to fight against each other thousands of years ago, and Word of God refers to those soldiers in present tense, suggesting they're still around.

• Among the Chosen has Addicaines, who are artificial transhumans owned by a Mega-Corp.
• Crankrats features the eponymous Bantarian super-soldiers (officially called Generators) who have an experimental power source implanted in their chest, giving them extreme strength and speed as well as spectacular Shock and Awe powers. Only six were made, but they were a terror in battle, with a single one capable of taking on entire battleships or troop formations. However, eventually they either rebelled or went mad with power, and the war "ended" with a treaty requiring the Bantarians to execute all the Crankrats. The discovery that a seventh Crankrat was made and is still alive threatens to reignite the war.
• Crimson Knights: All full members of the Order of the Black Rose have enhanced strength, speed and stamina that they receive from a magic ritual at the end of their training.
• Cwynhild's Loom: Cwynhild has been cybernetically enhanced, making her stronger and faster than other humans on Mars. Her reactions are also quicker, and she can interact in various ways with computer systems through an artificial right hand, including shorting them out with an electrical pulse. She can also survive being stabbed in the heart.
• El Goonish Shive: Grace was created to fight a single individual, Damien. Subverted, however — she's a sweet, naïve pacifist. Left to her own devices, she would far rather have pretend tea parties than actually fight. It was only with great reluctance, following much persuasion that she eventually began learning martial arts, and then only because she didn't want to hurt people by using her full powers against them.
• Follower: The chio(vloxen) were genetically engineered to be the perfect super soldiers for the U.S. Military.
• Freefall: Dr. Bowman mentions that genetically modified chimps were created for this purpose. He also points out some of the problems associated with this idea.
• Genocide Man features Genocide Men, who have nanotube ceramics in their bones to make them unbreakable, artificial glands that provide combat stimulants and negate many toxins, and telomere replacement therapy to mitigate the effects of aging. Many of the genetic deviants they were designed to combat were super soldiers as well: the Ugandan deviancy comprised four-year old children with claws, slitted pupils, and ridiculously fast reflexes. They killed everyone else in Jacob Doe's squad, who only survived because he was a G-Man.
• Girl Genius:
  • The Jägermonsters, "constructs" with a rather Frankenstein's Monster meets Doctor Moreau appearance. Dressed up in the shiniest of Napoleonic uniforms (Prussian style) and really nice hats. Complete with silly German accent and the habit of being loud except when sneaking. There's fangs, the claws, the super-strength, and the fact that they may well be immortal. They are also "ideal soldiers" mentally. Always ready to fight, honorable (they even have a proper duel code) and extremely loyal to their liege and creators, the House of Heterodyne. Also, good sports — they admire people who manage to beat them and so far we saw them hitting on ladies only after knocked out by the lady in question. Most of them are staunchly loyal to the Heterodynes (by choice, no less) and aren't exactly as monstrous as rumored to be. That doesn't stop normal people from trying to hang them, though.
  • Also, Airman Higgs looks a lot like this. It's eventually confirmed that he is the "sneaky" Jäger General, and an expert in disguise and able to pass as human.
  • Almost every Mad Scientist tries to build his own super soldier, thought the Jägers are the most successful. Other super soldiers tend to turn on their creators.
• Half-Man has Major Koda, a man who has been experiment on by both sides in a war lasting decades. While he has racked up an impressive body count he needs frequent medical care to keep him healthy and his biology is slowly killing him.
• Harbourmaster's Super Soldiers are humans who were imbued with DNA-level upgrades by the Aquaans to help defeat the Yogzarthu. Interestingly, Partasah made sure that those who did receive the treatment generally fell under the heading of "Reluctant Warrior"; he didn't like the idea of someone genuinely bellicose having this upgrade. Jendolyn is the main example in the series. She has no qualms about using commensurate force to protect the peace in the Tethys colony, but she'd rather not look upon violence outside of that (a bit of a nuisance considering that her girlfriend loves Masked Luchador films).
• Heroes Inc: This is the origin of the majority of the world's heroes. The story line follows them being actual soldiers and then exploring the people's lives as superheroes.
• Manly Guys Doing Manly Things: Commander Badass and his squad/family are time-travelling super soldiers from a nondescript space-future. Among other things, the Commander has punched Hitler, single-handedly won The Vietnam War, and then prevented himself from doing that after seeing the future where First Blood was never made.
• Outsider:
  • The Loroi have a special warrior caste, the Teidar (Unsheathed), who possess powerful telekinesis.
  • The Umiak use specially bred and cybernetically enhanced warriors called Hardtroops.
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • To begin with, every human supposed to fight, including most of Tagon's Toughs, has "soldier boosts" (implants and Nanomachines) that optimize metabolism (they are mostly immune to intoxication, for one) and improve reaction, strength and toughness enough that grunts can throw punches twice as strong as XX century professional boxers, without using protection or severely damaging themselves. With a Powered Armor on top of this.
    Fully inertic, flight-capable, powered fullerene uniforms: about two years salary for a grunt, assuming he has to buy them himself.
    Unlicensed soldier-boosting of the metabolism, enhancing strength, speed and reaction time: three years salary and five in prison if you're caught.
    The look on your foes' faces when you crash in from a standing start: priceless.
  • Doyt Gyo stands out as an experiment in this area, with high-end Powered Armor and implanted genius AI acting as Mission Control and using several attack drones with great precision. Later, courtesy of the "magic cryokit", he gets more biological enhancements and interface for the AI to control the body directly — Doyt may have superhuman reaction, but his intellect is the obvious weak link.
  • And then the Project Laz'R'Us — experimental nanomachine-based AI that confer virtual immortality, including an armored superhuman transitional form to revive from death. Tagon specifically calls this a "runt super-soldier".
    • The capabilities of this variety are discussed in regards to its actual value as they're still vulnerable to heavy weaponry. Later demonstrated when the Toughs face an army of Laz'R'Us super soldiers, once they lose the element of surprise they prove inferior to Toughs in heavy Powered Armor.
  • Several Earth species were uplifted to sentience in the backstory. An angry African elephant in power armour makes one hell of a super-soldier. Gorillas and bears also make a showing, although they're not generally portrayed as superior to boosted humans. (Although one polar bear that we get to know still answered his phone... after an expected 50 bullet holes... and complains about surgery adding a 64th hole...)
  • The Human Subspecies known as "Purps", for their purple photosynthetic skin, were originally developed to be soldiers who needed fewer rations. Many human governments had previously attempted to genetically engineer Tyke Bombs with more "traditional" super soldier traits like claws, natural armor, and conditioned sociopathy, but found them to be problematic for various reasons.
• Sluggy Freelance: This was the goal behind Hereti Corp's Aylee cloning project. The Oasis Project might also have similar goals.
• The Specialists:
  • Captain Victory is one of these. Unfortunately, the process killed one hundred and four men to get one super soldier. Using the same serum on women had... different effects.
  • The Nazis only managed to make two "proper" super soldiers: Phlebotinum Rebel Hartman and his (much more successful) twin brother Heinrich.
• S.S.D.D.:
  • The "Gigglers" from the future setting are mass-produced clone-soldiers who feel no pain, and get injected with "happy drugs" whenever they kill somebody... thus leading to their nickname, due to their disturbing habit of slaughtering their way through enemy forces while grinning, giggling, or laughing out loud. Of course, the guys who produce them, the Collective of Anarchist States, are generally considered the bad guys.
  • There's an example of a "turned" giggler, Lee, joining up with a group of Core Space Marines — he is of the "created like a Super Soldier, but raised like a normal person" variant, but still has certain... um... "gigglish" tendencies. He was an experiment after they managed to obtain an Anarchist Cloning Cylinder. Most clones (Gigglers) are stupid and have very little education/social conditioning, hence the implants with the happy juice. With this guy they got the process wrong. With the new systems they've been testing on him, he now has FEELING on the outside of his body, which leads to fun like "How much will it hurt if I stick this fork into my knee?".
  • The Anarchists also have heavily-augmented Elite commandos from their volunteer forces. Though most of their army is Gigglers and robots.
  • The opposing power bloc, the CORE, loves cybernetics. Some would say because they're too cheap to build their own soldiers from scratch so they're experts at patching up the troops they have. Tessa, the original protagonist of the future arcs, and the rest of her squad are experimental CORE super soldiers with Nanomachine-based augmentations that give them enhanced strength, accelerated healing, Electronic Telepathy, and Powered Armor linked to their nervous systems.
• Trevor (2020): These are what the military wanted the medical team to create, with experiments done on Trevor and other test subjects, after Trevor became the first accidental prototype of sorts, after his leukemia was cured, but he developed some other, mysterious condition that the military thought would be beneficial on the front lines. By the time the story starts, the medical team has been unable to replicate the results but keep trying because they are being paid a hefty sum to run the program.
• White Noise: It's heavily hinted that Wren might be this. He manages to fight off several armed guards despite suffering from starvation, dehydration, exhaustion and murk poisoning. In another fight another character remarks "You must be running on fumes, if you were at 100%, even 50% I'd be toast already."
• Xenospora gives us Richard Dark, who is a covert ops agent. His engineering gives him incredible stamina and makes him into an empath.

• Bosun's Journal: During the Nebu-Kadn war, the battling factions created several human strains specialized for combat. After the war ends in the destruction of both warring habitats and humanity starts its slow decline into nonsapience, these mostly become powerful apex predators.
  • One relatively mundane type are the rippers, muscular, apelike hulks created by the Nebbies. They're monstrously strong — they get their name from their ability to tear a regular human in two — and of limited intelligence, and are prone to entering frenzied berserker rages when injured or stimulated by blood. Their thick skins, dense muscle and heavy bones render them all but invulnerable to regular caliber fire, they can run at high speeds by dropping to all fours, and their fingers end in sharp claws. Notably, when not in their battle furies, they're gentle and passive beings — a trait engineered into them to make them more controllable outside of battle. After the war, they settle in small tribes on the former frontier and revert to a hunter-gatherer existence.
  • Some variants were considerably more unusual in shape, such as one designed to be essentially mammalian tyrannosaurs. These served as shock troops and terror weapons in combat, dealing damage primarily with their bites and physical bulk, using the rapid gaits granted by their digitigrade stance to quickly close in with foes, and absorbing damage from gunfire with their muscular bulks and thick bones. After the war, they primarily become tribal hunters, herders and raiders; their nonsapient descendants later become even larger and rule the wastes as apex predators.
  • The shieldmen were designed to grow hard, armor-like plates from modified hair, capable of stopping low-caliber gunshots in their tracks. As they were a Kadnean species, the ones left stranded in the ruins of Nebu after the war (Kadn was blasted to pieces by a failed nuclear test) were marginalized and forced to live on the margins of Nebu's own dying society. In time, they evolved into the nonsapient shieldbacks, bulky herbivores that retain their ancestors' tailored urge to serve as defensive troops in the form of an instinctive drive to guard smaller creatures from attack.
• Red vs. Blue: The Freelancers. All of them underwent advanced training to be elite soldiers, and most were paired with an AI fragment implanted directly into their head. Each of them also had a special armor ability (invisibility, Healing Factor, time stop). And yes, a number of them rebel.
• SCP Foundation has multiple examples:
  • SCP-2102 ("Got Shoggoth?"). The experiment that created SCP-2102 was an attempt by the Soviet GRU Division "P" to create a super soldier by increasing the speed at which the human body heals itself.
  • SCP-2664 is another GRU-P project. Designated Redline, it was a living psychic weapon intended to turn people into communists of the Soviet stripe, but which was in fact secretly used to cause people to become pacifists, even preventing the Cuban Missile Crisis from igniting nuclear war.
  • The Foundation itself has MTF Tau-5 ("Samsara"), a team of four cybernetic clones that can be reincarnated if destroyed. They’re a hugely expensive and experimental task force meant for tackling magical, telepathic, or divine threats, or combat missions in conditions no ordinary humans could cope with.
• RWBY: The Huntsman Academies train people to fight, manufacture customised weapons, and unlock their soul power to master both Aura and Semblance. Huntsmen are capable of physical feats far beyond a normal person or soldier unless their Auras run out. Their purpose is to independently protect humanity's existence from the Creatures of Grimm without being beholden to political or military interests. However, the martial kingdom of Atlas uses its academy to produce Special Operatives, Huntsman-trained super-soldiers. The other kingdoms and academies do not approve, and the Atlas Arc explores the clash between Huntsmen who are trying to protect all the people, and Huntsman-trained super-soldiers, who are being ordered to protect only the kingdom's elite.
• Whateley Universe: One of the theories about the growing number of mutants, especially in the US and Europe, is the heavy use of super soldier experiments by both the Axis and Allies during World War II; the idea is that many of the current mutants are the descendants of wartime supers.
  • It has been explained (albeit by an Unreliable Narrator) that most of the early experiments were aimed less at field troops, and more at covert operations and special forces — an army of super-strong soldiers wouldn't be much value when tanks and aircraft could accomplish more with fewer headaches, but things like enhanced strength, senses, or reflexes could give a commando a crucial edge. It is also explained that most of the super soldier experiments went badly, causing either Body Horror transformations or severe psychological disorders, which resulted in many former 'patriotic heroes' becoming super-villains in the 1950s and 1960s.
  • It was also claimed that most of the 'Flag Heroes' that were the darlings of Hollywood were actually covers for tests of these super soldiers, where their home front missions were basically used to test whether they would snap under pressure before going into the more crucial roles. Those who didn't make the cut were pumped full of amphetamines and painkillers, then dumped in a corner of the battleground on a Suicide Mission far from other Allied troops.
  • While the experience of WWII has put most national armed forces off of super soldiers for field units, experiments did continue, often with disappointing or even tragic results. As a result, focus has shifted towards elite training and Powered Armor rather than augmentation, as well as in using those who were already Differently Powered Individuals — primarily mutants, especially those who come through Whateley Academy's JROTC program. While teams such as EQUALIZER (better known as The Dragonslayers) could be considered super soldiers, they accomplished what they did through superior tactics, and at the price of staggering casualty rates.
  • However, Super Soldier forces are not unknown as henchmen for Super Villains, and even for mercenary units (who are often the same thing). Notable examples include the Paramount Guards' Catamount Troopers, the Tiger Guards' Sabretooths, the Chessmaster's Chessmen, and Dr. Diabolik's Dog Soldiers. Of specific note are the Animen, who were originally created as a breeding population for future super soldiers.
• Ben Croshaw wrote a column dedicated to explaining why Super Soldier Projects, at least those that are generally presented in Video Games, are not such a great idea.
• Taerel Setting: The kin'toni (vampires) were made in a lab to be super soldiers for the Xeara zu'aan empire at the end of the Genetic Age. This backfired, leading to the fall of the Xerea zu'aan empire, due to a Zombie Apocalypse started by the "vampire" super soldiers.

• The Supertroopers in Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers.
• The Neo-Warriors and Neo Lords in Exo Squad. The Neosapiens themselves would count, except that they were actually designed for physical labor rather than combat. Still, they make good soldiers.
• Gorillaz's Noodle was apparently raised to be one of twenty-three Super Soldier children by a secret organization in Japan, before having her memory erased and being FedExed to Kong.
• In "Lighter Than Hare", casting Yosemite Sam as a space alien sent to capture Bugs Bunny, he claims his army of Red Robots as undefeatable. Humorously averted when they are crushed against Bugs.
• In The Simpsons, a dispute over the sounds from nearby airplanes leads into:
  "Are you threatening a government official?"
  "No."
  "Good. Because we're the government. We make the laws. We print the money. And we breed the super-soldiers. So go home, learn to live with it, pay your taxes and remember, you didn't hear about super-soldiers."
• Part of The Spectacular Spider-Man's plot was the city's criminals trying to create sort of super soldiers to take on Spider-Man. But more specifically a later episode is about villains fighting for the formula that was used to create the villain Rhino, in order to make an army of super soldiers.
• The Solarian Warriors from Star vs. the Forces of Evil were created by Solaria Butterfly to destroy all monsters. They were originally ordinary Mewmans until she turned them into vicious giants wearing suits of armor and carrying huge laser swords.
• Star Wars:
  • Star Wars: Clone Wars (the 2-D one):
    • General Grievous, one of the greatest badasses in the universe, was a cyborg. His finest display of power was shown in the animated series; at the Battle of Hypori, his first public appearance in the Clone Wars, he single-handedly defeated a team of seven Jedi, including Council members Ki-Adi Mundi and Aayla Secura. He killed three of them, incapacitated another, and would almost certainly have killed the other three if a team of ARC troopers hadn't arrived at the last second and (somehow, without getting obliterated themselves) held him off. Grievous himself summed up this victory with a declaration of their imminent demise prior to the fight:
    Grievous:"Jedi! You are surrounded, your armies decimated. Make peace with the Force now, for this is your final hour. But know that I, General Grievous, am not completely without mercy. I shall grant you a warrior's death. Prepare!"
    • The team of ARC troopers managed this because they were Super Soldiers themselves (to a much milder degree than Greivous, sure, but there were a lot more of them than there were of him). They held him at bay with impressive amounts of More Dakka.
  • In Star Wars: The Clone Wars (the CGI one), it's revealed that the Kaminoans experimented with the Jango Fett clone template in an attempt to create Super Soldiers. The project was overall a failure, but four of the surviving subjects came together to form the elite Clone Force 99, aka "The Bad Batch".
• The Venture Bros.: The Action Man was a member of the original '60s/'70s-era Team Venture under Jonas Venture Sr. Dual-wielding a pair of semi-auto pistols, he seemed to enter some kind of battle frenzy in which he'd dish out There Is No Kill Like Overkill slaughters to whoever opposed him. Like most characters in the series, he is a deconstructed archetype of more heroic "super soldiers" in other media. His most infamous episode saw him pistol-whip the Harmless Villain Turnbuckle's skull in before executing him via bullet to the brain, right in front of a terrified 10 year-old Rusty. (It actually caused the Guild of Calamitous Intent to invent their "Equally Matched Aggression" system, meant to ensure that heroes and villains only battle people they're on equal terms with.) He mentions that Jonas Sr. has him on "Go-Juice", which seems to straddle the line between Super Serum and Psycho Serum, causing (or at least enhancing) his bloodlust and sociopathy, which he has since kicked, making him a more sympathetic figure by the time the series takes place.

• This article details the biological reason why science can not create a super soldier like Captain America in real life.
• On the flipside, in December 2019, VICE News obtained a Pentagon report (found here) that expressed a desire to achieve this through cybernetic enhancement.
• Although the typical fictional super-soldier is superhuman in ability, there are several real life instances that do emulate the spirit of being superior warriors:
  • If certain Scottish newspapers are to be believed, Joseph Stalin once commissioned Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov to create a breed of half-gorillas to serve in his army. It didn't work out.^note The experiment in question happened to regard a scientist attempting to breed humans and chimpanzees as a means of disproving God and ultimately the superiority of Communism. The "commission" came at a time when Stalin was throwing grants at any request that included the word "science" in it, and when he found out about it, promptly pulled the funding. This later became exaggerated by tabloids into the super soldier rumor
  • Certain units of the military of various nations around the world could qualify for the trope due to their intensive selection and training, especially compared to your average draftee. (For a sufficiently conservative value of 'super', anyway.)
  • Skeletons of English archers during the Hundred Years War period have overdeveloped bone structures in their upper body to support the huge muscles needed to draw an English longbow of the period. In fact, until the invention of repeating firearms, the longbow itself was a far deadlier weapon, with a much better rate of fire, than muskets. However, it took ten years of practice to develop the muscles needed to draw one, whilst a man can be trained to proficiency with a musket in a week.
  • The Pheidole group of ants can unlock a a bigger version of their soldier caste, which are literally referred to as super soldiers.. Scientists have even created super soldiers in species that don't naturally manifest them, which may or may not lead to a Bug War.
  • The (now abandoned) DARPA Metabolic Dominance program played about with this. DARPA started seeding some stuff aimed towards being able to boost human metabolic efficiency by a lot. If it had panned out, you'd supposedly be go at a full sprint basically forever without feeling out of breath (though it wouldn't stop your muscles from getting sore), go for a week or more with little to no sleep, and greatly diminishes pain.
  • A recent report for the Greenwall Foundation discussed the possibility of "Enhanced warfighters".
  • Apparently, Russia and China have just started attempts at enhancing their soldiers.
  • Those Wacky Nazis did this with their infantrymen and pilots in a fairly crude manner: by feeding them Pervitin-brand amphetamine pills so that they could fight longer and harder and not think about what they were doing. Soldiers often referred to them as "tank chocolate" and "pilot's salt"^note It had to be made into chocolate to mask the harsh bitter taste of meth.. Given the well-known properties of amphetamines, many German soldiers wound up with crippling addictions and health problems even before the fighting had stopped, causing Nazi health official Leonardo Conti to try (and fail) to limit use of Pervitin in the armed forces. The Allies also briefly experimented with the drug, but stopped quickly once its side effects became apparent.
  • Knights, Samurai, and other elite warrior castes throughout history are a fairly mundane version. Belonging to the noble classes, these warriors would be trained in combat from childhood, armed with the best equipment available, and fight as elite soldiers backed up by drafted peasants and semi-professional militias and levies. Because of a healthier lifestyle (nobles got more food), training and equipment they would be individually stronger and more expensive per man, but a levy led by a few knights required a lot less centralization, time and money than an equivalent force of full-time professional soldiers. Advances in combat strategy, weapons technology and societies becoming more centralized led to this version becoming a Discredited Trope in terms of real-life battles.
  • The Stargate Project was an attempt by the Defense Intelligence Agency launched in 1978 to determine if remote viewing was real, and if so, if it could be used for espionage. The goal was to train super-spies who could gather intelligence on America's foes from thousands of miles away. Ultimately, it didn't work, with most of the data gathered dismissed as either too vague or irrelevant to be useful or flat-out inaccurate, and the project was terminated and declassified in 1995. The book The Men Who Stare at Goats (later adapted into a film) describes the project in detail, and the idea behind it, often in conjunction with elements of Project MKUltra, has since been used in numerous stories about psychic soldiers and spies.