Main story
- Chapter 11: Mags using all the skills she'd listed off to Museida to survive throughout the Games. She dives right off the launch pad and swims off towards one of the smaller boats (out-swimming a shark mutt in the process), kills three of the career pack with poisoned soup, makes a flail out of fish hooks, and uses a boat she'd woven with wire scavenged from the various shipwrecks littered about to survive the floods and hungry sharks.
- Chapter 13: Shunt building a flamethrower to fight the Careers with.
- Chapter 18: Rook and his ally from District 3 using cannons against their opponents. Also, Rook's masterful Bait-and-Switch gambit, tricking Olga and his district partner into letting him be the leader of the career pack — only to rob the pack of most of their supplies and meet up with his true ally instead.
- Chapter 19: When five opponents corner Isobel, she keeps thinking about how unfair this is, only to reveal that she means unfair to them, as she unleashes her hidden karate skills, killing two of them and making the other three flee after a short fight.
- Jack is always pulling off another large-scale Phantom Thief heist (often just for the heck of it, but sometimes for a greater purpose like to get Johanna sponsor money) without leaving behind any evidence, even though the whole nation knows that he is a thief and people are always keeping an eye on him.
- Chapter 25:
- Motor Mouth candy maker Crown proves himself to be tougher than he looks by leaving some delicious looking candy filled with acid in a strategic location at his camp so that any attackers will notice and eat it.
- In a rare genuinely impressive moment for Olga and one of her tributes, she sends a boy some chemicals to make a mutated razorback hog more docile, and he then uses it as a war mount.
- Chapter 26: Vercingetorix killing Serial Rapist Linen after a prolonged duel where they use chainsaws like swords.
- Chapter 28: Amoral lunatic or not, Dragon manages to win the Hunger Games after breaking his own arm just so he can enjoy the experience of fighting one-armed, managing to inflict more than one Curb-Stomp Battle against impressive opponents despite his disadvantage.
- Chapter 30:
- Crimson randomly marks lots of trails that she and her allies take to confuse the Careers into thinking that those paths have some meaning.
- Crimson electrifies a whip she is using to shock a crocodile mutt to death.
- Chapter 36: Surfer Dude Librae attaches spikes to a surfboard and uses it as a weapon while expertly surfing across sand dunes to avoid the blows of her opponents. Her dying District partner praises this as the coolest thing he has ever seen.
- Chapter 40: Despite only being 14 years old and being in a Games specifically rigged to end in his death, Rhyder comes out of the 39th Hunger Games alive after using a shield to block the blows of a much stronger and better-armed opponent and, through cunning and persistence, getting his opponent to gradually back up until he falls off a ledge and into a mound of ant mutts.
- Chapter 41: Lammy rigs complex traps that kill all six Careers without her even having to be within a mile of any of them, even after they figure out what is happening and go on high alert for more traps.
- Chapter 43: Spool pulls a Twin Switch to save his brother Tag, fooling all of Panem save for his family (and Lammy, who he slips up in front of). And he keeps it up until after the Second Rebellion, with nobody else any the wiser!
- Also in Chapter 43 (and Chapter 23 of the Perspective Flip story The Acidic Forest), Mare from District 10 duels sword-wielding (albeit Dented Iron) Career Asterix with just a crowbar for several minutes and wins.
- Chapter 49: All twelve female tributes in the 48th Hunger Games form an alliance to chase after Neon in revenge for his sexually harassing them earlier (only failing due to blatant Gamemaker interference), and it is glorious to read.
- Chapter 53: Anchor betrays his fellow Careers at the bloodbath, then hunts down the remaining tributes in less than a day.
- Chapter 54:
- At Blight's reaping, he notices a large "hive" (actually nest) of tracker jackers growing on a tree to next to the twelve-year-old girls' section of the square, and tells the escort who read his name out to wait for him to remove the nest before anyone else ends up dying. Not only does he successfully remove it (though not without being stung once), but the cameras of Panem focus on him as he does so.
- Blight's 1v4 final showdown against the Careers involves him lobbing a nest of collected tracker jackers at them. Most of the Careers take the brunt of the swarm, and while Ferrus, the boy from Two, runs while he still could, Blight manages to achieve a Victory by Endurance by yanking out two of the stingers before he passed out.
- Chapter 56: Trevy swaps place with a willing Death Seeker right before his Games start and thus becomes the only known non-Victor to survive the Hunger Games. He makes Snow and his security look stupid and, to top it off, spends about twenty years hiding in the catacombs without ever being caught.President Snow's face [when he found out] was certainly a sight to behold. Red face, near animalistic snarls and nothing short of pure black hatred in his eyes... it was like the spirit of Orion had came on by for one final rampage.
- Chapter 57: Functional Addict Porsche spends days of training setting up a plan to pose as a statue in plain view of the Gamemakers to show off her stealth skills. Then, in the train yard arena, she re-routes a train to run over the Career pack.
- Chapter 66: As Finnick airs Capitol secrets, a group of Peacekeepers arrest a woman who repeatedly and horribly abused Finnick, Numi, and Crimson for committing an Inheritance Murder and then execute her on the spot. The Peacekeepers who suggest the execution are a disguised Spool and Numi, who seamlessly blended in with their enemies while going undercover for their revenge.
- Chapter 70: Hunter of Monsters Skinner ignoring the other tributes in the 69th Hunger Games to focus on killing mutts with athletic use of poison-coated weapons. At one point he takes on fifty venomous snake mutts at once and wins, and when a behemoth genetically engineered to be un-killable is released into the arena, he goes hunting for it and brings it to the point of death (later finishing the job when they face off again in the 3rd Quarter Quell).
- Chapter 71: Before blowing up himself and the dam in the 70th Hunger Games, the boy from District 3 looks up at the sky and cusses the Capitol as loud as he can.
- Chapter 75: Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Burly District 4 Victor Ron ties Anchor The Quisling to his chest to be a human shield while fighting the Peacekeepers, and Anchor does indeed absorb the bullets aimed at him, while Ron has no trouble fighting despite that bulk across his chest.
Side stories
- In The Howling Island:
- Ratchet manages to hide in the Cornucopia throughout the bloodbath and sneak out with jumper cables for an electric trap.
- Cherri dodges a blow from the boy from District 1, stabs him in the shoulder, knocks him down, and kicks sand in his eyes.
- The boy from District 7 escapes a pursuer by using his axe as a zip line handle and then using it to cut the line before shouting an insult at his now-distant pursuer.
