Awesome / Hazredous Interruptions

• The White Fang riot. Banesaw spots Weiss trying to put out fires and rescue civilians with the rest of Team RWBY and brings a whole horde of screaming maniacs down on her terrified head... until Zafira and Signum step in. Weiss comes out of the riot shaken but completely unscathed.
• Neo's desperate escape from dry dock six, where the majority of the TSAB staff and security crew are holed up. She teleports into a bathroom expecting an easy infiltration of a civilian facility and is met by alien military forces packing doom lasers and a willingness to use them (it's the bureau's usual Non-Lethal Warfare magic, but she doesn't know that), and is still able to fight her way to freedom despite having no idea what she's up against. Her frantic terror as she gets the hell out of dodge as fast as humanly possible goes a long way to establishing Neo as a sympathetic character too.
• Jaune gets an unintentional What You Are in the Dark moment when Ozpin begins paying RWBY and JNPR for their assistance with the TSAB situation. Jaune feels bad enough about cheating his way into Beacon with his fake transcripts but when he starts being paid for a huntsman's work his conscience puts its foot down and he confesses to Ozpin. Who knew all along, of course, and responds with a firm You Are Better Than You Think You Are speech.
  • Ozpin gets one as well for finally putting Jaune's self-confidence issues to rest, and in the simplest way possible: Ozpin knows Jaune won't accept anyone's praise as true, even his own, until he can prove his worth to himself. So he has Jaune retake the Beacon entrance exam.
• Signum and Winter's sparring match in the middle of the dance arc is quite awesome as well. Both girls quickly acknowledge each other as Worthy Opponents and take the kid gloves off, with Signum breaking out her cartridges and magic and Levantine's alternate device forms and Winter still managing to keep up and pressure her through her glyph mastery. Ultimately the fight ends in a draw, as Signum was starting to use spells powerful enough to break Lindy's containment barrier.
• Sentra Lockheed earns her stripes in full when she single-handedly fends off Cinder's assassination attempt on Amber while also covering her critically-injured partner.
• Despite all the wrenches that get thrown into her plans along the way, Cinder proves savvy enough to work around the TSAB's interference and ultimately accomplish her goals and claim the Fall Maiden's power, even beating down a heavily-weakened Nanoha, Yuuno, and Hayate more or less at the same time. Then Sentra and Rein Zwei show up and blow her the hell up.
  "Cinder Fall. This is for my partner. From me, to you. With a grudge."
• Fate, Arf, and Team RWBY get ambushed on Patch by Briar Breeze, the Maiden of Summer, along with a horde of grimm and Breeze's companion Holika. The heroes are bloodied, Fate is out of commission, and Crescent Rose is shattered... so Ruby springs for the next best thing.
  Ruby snatched the device up in frantic hands. "Bardiche!"
  The gemstone flashed once. "Unauthorized access attempt detected. Locking down."
  "Bardiche, no! Please! Don't- don't shut down!" Ruby babbled, gripping the device's silver shaft. "We need Fate's help! We need your help! Help me wake her up!"
  There was no response. Behind her, Yang shouted again, and Ruby could feel the shockwave of her semblance.
  She screamed, all of her fear coming out into her cry. "PLEASE!"
  Bardiche's gem flashed again, glowing brightly for a full second. "Guest user access granted. Magilink interface online at thirty seven percent."
  It was like a muscle she'd been clenching for years relaxed, and then a sudden weight and pain made her shoulders slump. Ruby gasped sharply as something foreign dove into her soul, meshing with her innermost self. Power surged forth from deep within, and Bardiche's gem crackled with red lightning.
  "Get set."
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Ruby then proceeds to stall Briar for a few precious minutes with flight magic and hit-and-run tactics despite being badly wounded, and it takes Holika binding her for Breeze to even land a hit. While she still loses, she buys enough time for The Cavalry to show up and save the day. And speaking of which...
• "Don't you touch her, you hot-headed bitch." Summer Rose is alive, she's the Maiden of Winter, she's pissed as hell at the villain who just maimed her little girl, and all of Team STRQ is there to back her up. Briar Breeze and her minions never had a prayer.
• The Breach goes off exactly as Cinder planned. Hundreds of White Fang troops and a horde of grimm pour into downtown Vale while the Atlas military is occupied elsewhere and nearly all of the mages and hunter teams are distracted by her other attacks. Civilians are dying by the hundreds and the chaos is utterly unchecked. Then the Wolkenritter show up with their limiters removed and their magical reserves topped off. They hit the Breach like a runaway freight train, plowing through White Fang and grimm and the stolen Paladin mechs like so much wet tissue paper. In the midst of this Banesaw tries to throw down a gauntlet and have a rematch with Signum and her response is to shatter his chainsaw and one-hit KO him in a grand total of two moves. Nowhere else in the story thus far is the unstoppable power of the Wolkenritter more on display than it is in this scene.
• Even Lindy gets a vanishingly-rare chance to show off during the Breach: with some targeting assistance from Penny and the Wolkenritter, she and Durandal unleash a wide-area frozen rain spell that coats all of downtown Vale in a thick sheet of ice and completely shuts down whatever resistance the Wolkenritter weren't able to stop.
• Hayate and Rein Zwei's rescue of Chrono, Amy, Winter, and Teams JNPR and CFVY at the CCTS relay station is no less impressive. First she has to get the call for help, which is a separate CMoA for Amy for awakening her semblance at just the right time. Then she has to force herself to teleport through Remnant's distortion field to reach the battlefield, which up until this point has been functionally impossible. The moment she arrives a giant nevermore tries to take a swing at her and she obliterates it with an Offhand Backhand. Then she takes the kid gloves off and annihilates the Spring Maiden's entire grimm army with a single casting of Diabolic Emission.
  • Mention must also be made of the events immediately preceding Hayate's arrival: Pyrrha, on her last legs and about to be crushed by a goliath, rips the wreckage of the CCTS relay tower off its perch with her semblance and brings it down like a massive hammer. The first hit snaps the goliath's back, the second hit swats aside a second goliath, and then she sends the wreckage rolling across the battlefield to kill dozens of lesser grimm before she finally exhausts her aura.
• Weiss's confrontation with her father after the Breach, which plays out very differently from their brief meeting in volume 3 thanks to Weiss's altered character development.
  Weiss backed away, clearing her throat and raised her voice, cutting into the break in the discussion provided as deftly as if she was using Myrtenaster. “I will be staying at Beacon, Father. Since you are not supporting me in my decision, I do not see the need to consider your input. Since you’re so concerned about your money,” she produced her family charge card and threw it at his feet, “you can rest assured that I won’t be using it. I’ll pay my own way-”

  “Weiss, you are making a grave mista-”

  “-without your help, without your approval, and you can do whatever you want with your precious company without me!” Weiss’ voice rose and rose until it was a shout, a strident yell, wild and unrestrained. “I am a huntress, and you will not take that from me!”
  • And then right at the end of the chapter a random bird that is totally not Qrow scoops up the abandoned charge card and flies away with it.
• Chapter 35 is a goldmine. To provide just one, Jaune ends his fight with Mercury by tearing his prosthetic leg off and knocking him unconscious with it.
• Team RWBY's fight with Adam and the White Fang. Or rather, Ruby's fight with Adam, because she mostly solos him while her team deals with Adam's minions.
  • Several moments of Cinder versus Pyrrha in chapter 36. First, Cinder takes a cheap shot at Jaune right as he enters the battlefield, forcing Pyrrha and Reinforce to do a diving save to protect him that gets them all buried under a pile of rubble. Zwei promptly rips open the seals on Eins's archives and performs a Unison with Pyrrha, putting her on the same level if not signficantly outclassing Cinder. Then, as Pyrrha struggles not to kill Cinder but to bring her down alive, Pyrrha calls in nonlethal fire support from Nanoha (who is clear across Vale and gets a CMOA of her own by setting a new distance record for fire support) and grapples Cinder so she can't escape it, getting them both Befriended.