Awesome / Reaper Man

• Death decides to fight back and spends some time sharpening his scythe. He tries a grindstone, oilstone, hessian, calico, linen, satin, then silk. It's still not sharp enough so he sharpens it with cobwebs, then the morning breeze and finally the first light of dawn on a mountain top. It turns out to be so sharp that it cuts the blacksmith's finger when it was still inches away. "He wondered if something could be so sharp that it began to possess, not just a sharp edge, but the very essence of sharpness itself, a field of absolute sharpness that actually extended beyond the last atoms of metal."
• Bill Door's John Henry-style race against the Combination Harvester with just a scythe. "Bill Door was on his second row, and still accelerating."
  • A small addition, he was not only accelerating, but also cutting each stalk individually.
• Miss Flitworth gets one when she loans Death some of her time to find a weapon because the smith didn't kill the ultra-sharp scythe like he was supposed to.
  • It's easy to understate the awesomeness involved with this moment: she was able to work out how to summon her own life timer and transfer her life force from herself to Bill Door simply because she'd seen Death do it once!
• Death getting angry is always awesome in itself, so his fury when he sees that the new death wears a crown and sees himself as a ruler rather than just someone with a necessary job to do is a sight to behold. It's also one of the only times in the series that he uses an exclamation mark. The following passage is simply one of the most badass things that Pratchett ever wrote in his entire long career:
  • "But Bill Door was already rising and unfolding like the wrath of kings. He reached behind him, growling, living on loaned time, and his hands closed around the harvest scythe. The crowned Death saw it coming and raised its own weapon but there was very possibly nothing in the world that would stop the worn blade as it snarled through the air, rage and vengeance giving it an edge beyond any definition of sharpness. It passed through the metal without slowing. No crown, said Bill Door, looking directly into the smoke. No crown. Only the harvest."
• Azrael's answer to Death's question. What can the harvest hope for, if not but the care of the reaper man? And then you turn the page...
  • YES
• Death risking his newly mortal life (which he's terrified of losing) to save a little girl from a fire.
  Death knew that to tinker with the fate of one individual could destroy the whole world. He knew this. The knowledge was built into him.
  To Bill Door, he realized, it was so much horse elbows.
  Oh, damn, he said. And walked into the fire.
  • Right before that, he calmly tells Miss Flitworth that children die all the time. It is simply the nature of the universe. Flitworth is having none of that. She gives Bill Door a slap in the face (noting that the impact felt oddly hard), tells him to be out of her farm by morning, and turns around to organize the firefighting.
• When Windle and co. get trapped in the monstrous shopping mall and all hope seems lost, the day is saved by Schleppel the bogeyman with self-esteem issues finally coming out from behind the door he's been carrying, and completely curb-stomping the mall's Combat Tentacles. Even the good guys are so terrified of him that they immediately try to persuade him to hide again.