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Volume 1

  • Episode 2 gives us our first taste of Spearhead Squadron in action, and it's one hell of an Establishing Character Moment for them. Every member of the team is coolly confident in what they're about to do, and instantly lets us all know this team is made up of Experienced Protagonists who have spent years doing this. Then topped off with Undertaker destroying a whole column of Löwe tanks on his own.
  • The fact that Lena musters up the courage to call Shin back after being exposed to the Black Sheep's voices, an experience so terrifying that 5 previous Handlers either went crazy, quit the military immediately, or committed suicide. The anime even changes the callback to make it so that everyone in Spearhead is present when Shin takes her call, and captures their stunned reactions perfectly.
  • Spearhead Squadron survives despite the best efforts of the Republic and Legion to kill them. Even sending the last five members on a one way suicide mission deep into Legion territory isn’t enough to dispose of them, as they manage to reach a friendly nation against all odds.
    • Part of it comes from Lena: early on Shin was about to be killed by Rei's Dinosauria, the others were facing a veritable horde of the Legion, and suddenly Lena links in, synces to Raiden's eye uncaring it could get her blind, and directs an artillery barrage that annihilates the bulk of the Legion before using precision shelling to support Shin in his duel, also slapping back sense into Rei. All of this knowing she's going against any order and regulation of San Magnolia's military (and she does get demoted for it), and after emotionally blackmailing the previously apathetic Annette with the fact Shin is in Spearhead Squadron to get both the ability to sync eyesight and control of the mortars.
  • A villainous one for the Legion who give the people of San Magnolia the karma they so richly deserved.
  • Following the Legion's invasion of San Magnolia, Lena rallies all remaining 86s to mount a counter offensive against the enemy. She managed to hold them off for two months by using the best practices of city-based guerrilla warfare, neutralizing the Legion's numbers advantage, before the other nations came to their aid.

Volume 2

  • The Federacy has not only held the bulk of the Legion off for the better part of a decade, but even managed to push them back. This is in spite of being outnumbered and technologically outmatched. It goes to show that Giad’s status as the continent’s dominant military power is well earned. They've got some pretty sweet powered armor too which allows even regular infantrymen to put up a fight against the Legion by allowing them to unironically hipfire 12.7mm machine guns as if they were lightweight assault rifles!
  • The Legion’s large scale offensive was their Hail Mary move aimed at crushing the last pockets of human resistance. However, Shin’s warning allows the Federacy to deploy its forces in time to meet the surprise attack. What results is a massive and chaotic battle that sees an endless tide of Legion crash into the overstretched human defenders. And somehow against all odds the line holds.

Volume 3

  • The Morpho elimination operation is a last ditch effort by several surviving nations to destroy the Legion’s dreaded rail-based railgun before it can be repaired. Casualties are expected to be astronomical and the odds of success are slim. Failure is not an option, as the fate of humanity itself is at stake. Yet despite all of this, all of the nations pull out all of the stops and fight with near-fanatical determination, resulting in the success of all of its objectives and even sees the allied forces push much deeper into Legion territory than they had originally planned. Special mention goes to the armies of the Federacy and United Kingdom for making an additional two-pronged, overnight advance even deeper into Legion territory to draw more Legion forces away from the Nordlicht squadron and try and get close enough to catch up and support them directly. While they aren't able to catch up quickly enough to provide fire support, they do manage to arrive in time to save every member of Nordlicht except Shin, who is saved by the surviving forces of the Republic of San Magnolia led by Lena. They provide critical artillery fire on the Morpho directly, giving Shin an opening to perform a Colossus Climb and use his one remaining shot to deliver the fatal blow. Lena and Cyclops then arrive just in time to save Shin from a lone Ameiss that Kiriya had transferred to to try and finish a helpless Shin off. Thus, unbeknownst to anyone in the operation, the joint efforts of everyone involved result in an even better success than their best case scenario due to the exceptional bravery and skill of not just the three nations in the operation, but also Lena's faction of the Republic's forces surviving against all odds and providing crucial support at the final battle without even knowing exactly what was going on. This allows the Alliance to link up with the Republic, which in turn saves the Republic from their desperate struggle to hold out.
  • Kiri gets a villainous moment of awesome when he successfully deduces a weakness in Shin’s ability to detect the Legion and uses it to lure Shin into an ambush. It illustrates why even a Shepherd as mentally unstable as Kiri should never be underestimated. He has another one when he nearly catches Shin off-guard by using his massive, super-heavy behemoth of a Legion unit to almost take out Shin with close-combat maneuvering—it's only Frederica's realization and last-second warning to Shin that saves him.
  • Shin’s final battle with the Morpho is a truly epic confrontation. It seems almost like a battle from myth and legend of a knight facing down some primeval monster. Still the fight seems hopeless until Lena, who Shin had assumed was dead, unexpectedly provides supporting artillery fire, combined with Frederica having her own moment of awesome in which she runs out into the open with Shin's pistol, fires it into the air, then holds the gun to her own head with her finger on the trigger, to distract Kiriya, all of which gave Shin the opening he needed to finish off the metallic beast.
  • The fact that Lena and the remaining 86 are even around to provide support retroactively makes the sacrifices of the deceased 86 more meaningful. They didn’t just die for nothing, rather their sacrifices allowed their comrades to survive long enough to make a vital contribution to an operation that saved the whole of humanity. Doubly so for Shin's generation of the Spearhead Squadron, who passed on their ideals and determination to go all out until they die, even if it's hopeless, to Lena—and she in turn worked against the government and superior officers of her own nation to organize and prepare the Republic to face the all-out assault by the Legion, rules and laws be damned. All of this results in saving many of the people of both Alba and 86, something no one had even thought possible, and meaning that the five surviving members of Spearhead are not even close to the only 86 to survive.
  • Each of the Spearhead Five get moments of awesome during their final pursuit of the Morpho.
    • Anju suffers from tumbling down a near-cliff in her Reginleif from the blasts of Lowe fire—and as a testament to the far more rugged and protected design of the Reginleif over the Juggernauts, her mech is still able to move and fight. Fido drops a container full of spare missile pods for her, and she proceeds to take on at least five Lowes and a horde of Ameiss on the high ground by herself and then survive the subsequent enemy reinforcements until help arrives.
    • Theo stays behind in a large town to hold off another group of Legion from catching up because of his talent for combat in urban environments, and proceeds to take them all down by himself, though he isn't able to catch up afterwards—it's later shown that his Reginleif is seriously damaged and partially dangling from the side of a building by one of its grappling wires. Given that he wasn't finished off afterwards, he'd either managed to take out the last Legion unit in that last maneuver, or help arrived just in time.
    • Once the Morpho starts using scattershot at short range to take out the remaining Spearhead members, Kurena jumps onto a hill and starts using her howitzer to engage in an artillery duel with the Morpho at short range, using her Reginleif's mobility to narrowly dodge the counterbattery fire. A minute later, the Morpho fires a powerful artillery round to her position, resulting in a large explosion. She survives.
    • One last scattershot barrage by the Morpho hits Raiden's Reginleif, damaging two of its legs, preventing him from keeping up, and he urges Shin on ahead and for Frederica to hide inside of Fido's last storage pod. He later shows up at a crucial moment during Shin's battle with the Morpho, limping along and using his autocannon to knock out two of the Morpho's rotary cannons just as they were about to shoot Shin. Kiriya uses his main gun to fire a low-powered shot to kill Raiden, but Raiden dodges well enough that his mech is sent tumbling and is only knocked out of the fight, not obliterated.
    • Shin takes on the Morpho by himself, undaunted despite the absurd matchup—the Morpho is so large and well-armored that even his 88mm cannon can't penetrate anything he can shoot at, and the Morpho's rotary cannons and energy-whips make even getting close impossible. It takes Raiden's heroic charge, surprise artillery fire from surviving Republic forces, and Frederica using her connection with Kiriya to distract him twice to give Shin a chance to get close, and as he does, his Reginleif weathers several glancing blows by the energy-whips but manages to keep going. He then performs a Colossus Climb even as the energy-whips keep attacking him, with more hits dealing more damage, knocking off two of the Reginleif's legs before he makes one final leap straight onto the vital point where Kiriya's AI core is located, mortally wounding the Morpho with the one shot he had left.

Volume 4

  • Volume 4 introduces the Phönix in a suitably brutal fashion when it effortlessly wipes out a squadron of veteran 86. Shin only barely manages to defeat it after he abandons his Reginleif and ambushes the damned thing with an assault rifle.

Volume 5

  • The second battle with the Phönix goes much better than the first due to them having time to develop countermeasures against it. The Legion's most dreaded unit doesn't go down without a fight though, as the combined Federacy and United Kingdom forces are forced to throw everything but the kitchen sink at it. Vika even brings a goddamned elephant gun to the fight. They only manage to pin it down after Shin and Lerche pull a Bait-and-Switch on the machine by exploiting its obsession with Shin.

Volume 6

  • The Dragon Fang Mountain Operation starts off with a literal bang as Roa Gracia's obsolete bomber fleet is loaded with explosives and sent crashing into Legion lines. This is followed up by a massive artillery barrage which utterly devastates the Legion's frontline units. The attack even causes the Shepherd commanding that sector to straight up have a panic attack as the artillery strikes trigger memories of its own "death".
  • The final battle against the Phönix is suitably epic. Shin's "rival" discards all pretenses of stealth and adopts a form optimized for high mobility combat. Their duel takes place above a pool of lava with both combatants fighting on increasingly narrow footholds. The battle ends when Shin manages to knock the machine into the pool of molten material, killing it for good in a manner similar to the T-1000's death.

Volume 7

  • While this volume is largely devoid of battle outside of the Action Prologue, Shin does face off against Olivia Aegis in a training simulation... and the match ends in a tie. The rest of the squadron is absolutely amazed to find there is a another pilot out there who is every bit as good as Shin. What helped him greatly was his ability to see 3 seconds into the future.

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