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Stepping Stones In The Sky
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A version of Colossus Climb controlled by the Rule Of Cool. A character somehow jumps and runs along a rain of falling debris or projectiles — none of which are actually attached to anything — not only to dodge but to gain altitude, sometimes to reach the area firing the things in the first place. A very good way to not only show off a character's agility but also their speed.
Technically due to Newton's Third Law of Motion this isn't actually impossible, it just requires superhuman strength and speed.
Examples:
- A lot of 2D Platformer video games did that, either with "perpetual descending elevators" or random falling things (like logs in a waterfall in a level of The Lion King).
- Project A Ko, the title character on a wave of missiles.
- Sonic X regularly has the titular character performing a similar action, and in his newest self-titled XBox 360 and PS3 game, he performs this in the Wave Ocean stage.
- See also the opening to Sonic CD.
- Near the end of one episode of the short-lived Spider-Man Unlimited series, Spidey easily executes this to escape a Collapsing Lair, with Venom and Carnage right behind.
- He also did a variant of this in the third movie: he used falling rubble to go down faster.
- Video game example: Dante from Devil May Cry has done this a few times in cutscenes, and can actually do it in-game.
- Beautifully parodied in the movie Kung Fu Hustle: during the final battle, in order to gain enough height to execute his Finishing Move, the hero uses a bird in flight as a stepping stone.
- Video game example: Sly 2; Sly races down the large chunks of Arpeggio's airship platform as it crashes and breaks apart, in an effort to reach and save his teammates.
- In Teen Titans, using her name-implied superpowers, Terra performs a visual interpretation of the trope to get Badass Normal Robin into the face of a giant robot worm.
- Robin himself used this method several times over the course of the series.
- Partly used in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, in which characters leap into the air and throw Cloud further upwards - and again in the final showdown between Cloud and Sephiroth, where part of the fight literally takes place on, in, and through falling rubble from a destroyed building. To be fair, Advent Children has very screwed-up physics.
- While not using stones, the samurai in Samurai 7 tend to leap from huge flying cyborg to huge flying cyborg, slicing apart as they go.
- The last chapter of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann features Stepping Galaxies In Outer Space!
- In InuYasha, the character Koga, whose speed and agility are enhanced by magical jewel shards in both his legs, demonstrates the ability to run up rockslides, even while carrying another character. The title character sometimes does so, too, though it usually takes the only slightly more plausible form of leaping from one large, plummeting boulder to another.
- The Flash can get away with this because he's not just quick, he's supersonic. Running up the side of a building is a standard Flash trick. But Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, didn't stop there; he took this trick (and so many others) to truly hilarious lengths. Barry would routinely run along things like smoke particles and — no joke — light beams.
- Similarly taken to extreme in Bleach, in which Shinigami are able to use particles of spirit energy to stand in mid-air.
- One of the bosses in Super Mario Land attacks Mario by throwing boulders at him, and the only way to get close enough to defeat him is to jump from boulder to boulder (in which the preceding levels have provided ample practice, but with less of the "In The Sky" factor).
- The end of the anime film Mind Game has the main characters escaping their prison in the stomach of a giant blue whale by running up the water pouring in when it surfaces. Then they run up planes, subway trains, boats, and a large amount of other things being swallowed by the whale with enough power to launch them far into the sky. Earlier the main character outruns God.
- Jiyu and Freeshia from Jubei-Chan spend a portion of their final title bout duking it out on top of a falling redwood which, for bonus points, they'd just sent flying in the first place.
- Tai Lung's prison break in Kung Fu Panda involved clawing his way out of a bottomless pit by leaping from bit to bit of the falling debris that would have crushed him.
- Sort of used in an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, Spongebob and Sandy are chased by, and eventually end up riding, a huge Alaskan Bull Worm. It heads toward a cliff and after it begins to plunge off the side, they run back up the falling worm and end up safe and sound on the cliff's edge.
- Used in Skies Of Arcadia when after Zelos was awakened, the whole lower structure of the Dangral Island complex attached to The Very Definitely Final Dungeon starts to collapse including the rail lift that took the Heroes there, so they had to run all the way up to the start of the rail lift while it was crumbling. At the end it resulted in a full Body Catch after the last of them got off at the start of the rail lift.
- The Xen of HalfLife is an (annoying) embodiment of this trope.
- In Kingdom Hearts 2, you can do this with fragments of buildings. That you cut into pieces yourself.
- In Irish myth it was said that Cuchulain could throw three spears at three targets, leap to the last spear thrown, from there to the second, then to the first, then to the ground to slay his oppenent even as the spears hit their targets. Making this Older Than Feudalism.
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