Awesome / Heretical Edge

• The very first chapter has Flick showcasing her investigative skills and blossoming Guile Hero abilities (as well as a fair amount of recklessness) when she uses the information she spent the summer gathering to trick her drug dealing boss into an Engineered Public Confession.
• The unnamed (and apparently ordinary) medieval noble from Flick's vision when she goes through the Heretical Edge. While being held captive along with two peasants by a group of eight foot tall hog-men, he proceeds to escape, steal a weapon, and kick their asses single handed, giving the two peasants time to escape.
  • The female peasant gets a moment of her own when she escapes the fight with an injury on her own (because the other peasant, Flick's ancestor, ran away) and eventually goes on to become Baroness Gaia Sinclaire, the Living Legend headmistress of Crossroads Academy.
  • Flick's cowardly ancestor ends up becoming Seller, another powerful and influential Heretic at Eden's Garden.
• Flick's first taste of real combat has her doing... okay. Not great, but good for a first-timer. Her roommate Avalon, on the other hand, proves herself a badass when she calmly starts killing the swarm of peridle's set up to kill them.
  • Professors Katarin and Dare earn one of their own when they come in and slaughter the remaining peridles that Avalon and Flick were having trouble with.
• Avalon continues to be awesome in the First Hunt arc. Her and Flick's team is, as the title implies, sent out on their first Stranger hunt. Avalon quickly takes charge of the group and leads them to efficiently kill the majority of the monsters they have to deal with and the way-outside-their-weight-class amarok that shows up.
  • Immediately after that, the team gets ambushed by a group of Eden's Garden students led by a guy named Trice who's looking to kill Avalon for killing his brother (who had been sexually assaulting her at the time). The rest of the team doesn't hesitate to stand up for her, even as she tells them to save themselves.
    • Special mention has to go to Sean's response to Trice's assertion that Avalon "owed" his brother Torv for everything that he had done for her in the past.
    Sean: Okay, look, uhhh, Assface. Can I call you Assface? I’m gonna call you Assface. Mostly because every word that comes out of your mouth just reminds me of one massive flatulence problem. So here’s the thing, Assface. Being nice is not a god damn currency exchange. You don’t get to trade being a decent fucking person for future fun times. You earn one thing from being a relatively good person, just one. And that’s help from other relatively good people when you need it. That’s all you get. Anything else is just blind fucking stupidity, and if your brother thought treating a girl with a little respect meant she owed him anything more than friendship, then he was a piece of shit who got what he deserved.
    • Flick and Sands (along with help from the mysterious voice giving them instructions) taking on Doxer of the Garden Heretics in a largely even fight that leaves Sands and Doxer exhausted. They likely would have won from simple attrition, as Flick absorbed virtually limitless stamina from the amarok she dealt the finishing blow to while Doxer was losing a lot of steam.
    • The fight ends when Scout wakes up from the initial part of the ambush and starts sniping the Gardeners.
    • And in an Offscreen Momentof Awesome, Avalon managed to take on the older Trice alone, while the rest of the team had to deal with their enemies in pairs. She wasn't winning, but she was still fighting at the end of it. And her response to Trice telling her that he'll be back?
    Avalon: Bring It.
• Asenath makes her entry into the story proper when she ends Ammon's attempt to torture Flick by busting in through a window and sticking a knife in his nine-year-old chest before Super Speeding Flick out of the house.
  • She gets a less violent, but no less awesome moment in the next chapter as she calmly deconstructs the Crossroads line that all non-humans are Always Chaotic Evil monsters. Then she backs up her assertions by preventing Flick's dad from committing murder on Ammon's orders.
  • As Flick breaks down after her encounter with Ammon's father, Asenath continues to be awesome by providing gentle yet firm comfort and a shoulder to cry on. And then she promises to help Flick protect her dad and kill Ammon's father to save her mom. Bear in mind that they met only a few hours earlier, tops, and that Flick is a part of an organization that exists to kill supernatural beings like Asenath. She doesn't care. She just knows that this girl needs help.
  Asenath: It's what I do.
• When Vanessa Moon was seven years old, her family was ripped apart and sent to separate worlds while she remained on earth. Ten years later when Vanessa Moon is seventeen, she is recruited by Crossroads Academy and realizes that, contrary to the assertions of the authorities who thought she had been delusional, everything she remembers from that day really happened. She immediately dedicates her life to finding and reuniting her family.
• Details about Joselyn Atherby's revolution make it sound awesome. First off, it started more or less immediately after the founder left Crossroads Academy. Six years later, it was still small, containing a mere handful of Heretics even as they raided Crossroads to free Alter "research specimens." But the founder was Charismatic enough to pull Heretics and Alters to the cause. It ended up lasting over seventy years before it was finally ended. Over thirty of which were after the founder was imprisoned. And they didn’t actually lose either. The establishment Heretics had to resort to casting a worldwide memory spell to make the revolutionaries forget why they were fighting. Fortunately, the spell wasn't quite as effective as the Heretics think.
• Flick, Sands, Scout, and Columbus vs a horde of zombies. Featuring Columbus blasting dead heads, Scout sniping them from over the top of Sands' walls, and Flick taking on a whole bunch at once with her staff.
  • Then, when it looks like they've lost, Nevada shows up and shreds her way through the remainder.
  Nevada: Yeah, hi there! Here’s the thing. Those are my students you’re trying to eat. Do ya wanna know why that’s a bad idea? Lemme show you.
• The flashback in Asenath's second interlude has her winning a vicious fight against a Heretic in the middle of a burning building to save the Alter children trapped in the room (and the human child, but the Heretic probably would have saved her). It ends when Asenath picks up his sword (which burns her hand as the anti-Stranger defenses kick in) and decapitates the bastard. The moment becomes decidedly less awesome when it turns out the Heretics accomplished their goal, but the fight itself was solid.
• Flick and Shiori vs a group of sand-goblins. The goblins never had a chance.
• Fossor is evil. There can be no question about that. He alone is dangerous enough to justify a lot of Crossroads' xenophobic stance against Strangers. A list of his deeds will horrify pretty much anyone. He's a monster, but he's just so good at it. There's some dark corner of your mind that can't help but be impressed you hear about him conquering worlds and pushing entire races to the brink of extinction more or less single handed.
• Joselyn's faction managed to subvert the Heretical Edge itself. It's not supposed to work for Alter hybrids. The reason it does? They got a Djinn to wish into to doing so. Twenty years after Joselyn was imprisoned.
  • The Djinn then wished herself human, is made a Heretic, and is now in position as a teacher at the Academy to teach a less hardline stance while also being able to move to protect students, hybrid and not if anything goes wrong. Even after Joselyn's memory has been wiped, her work continues on.
• Baroness Gaia Sinclaire proves that she knows how to make an entrance when she straight up hijacks the Meregan's alien teleporting tech from another planet and casually steps onto their ship.
  Gaia: Well. I believe we now have many things to discuss.
• The Big Badass Battle Sequence in Arc 9, consisting of Flick's team, with Shiori as a Guest-Star Party Member, tearing through a literal army of Alter soldiers to get to the Meregan kids. The standout moment is Flick taking on a group of Rakshasa swordsmen all by herself and winning.
• Vulcan pulls a Big Damn Heroes to save Flick and Shiori from Ammon. Sean sent him ahead after putting two and two together to guess that a robot dog like Vulcan would be immune to Ammon's Compelling Voice.
• Wyatt managing to singlehandedly break down the Fomorian blood shield that the rest of the Crossroads staff combined couldn't figure out how to get past. Gaia brought him on to work with the school for a reason.
• Roxa is cornered, weaponless and alone, by a werewolf that's both stronger and faster than she is, and she actually manages to fight him off with nothing but her bare hands and a big rock. She would have killed him if not for his packmates showing up to rescue him.
• Deveron's Big Damn Heroes moment, saving Flick and Avalon from an outside-their-weight class Heretic by coating himself in Instant Armor, throwing the assassin's own fireball back at him, and engaging in a rapid-fire exchange of blows that Flick compares to The Matrix.
• Flick's busy fighting the dangerous Truman Hyde on her own while Doug is injured and Wyatt is busy trying to disarm Hyde's trap. She manages to hold her own for several minutes while knocking around the desks in *just* the right way to use her wood-walking power to teleport behind him and kill him. Doug had previously been considering cornering Flick alone and demanding answers about what happened to Roxa, but seeing this makes him abandon that plan as he realizes he's outmatched.
• When Pace attacks Wonderland, Flick and Shiori engage her. Flick manages to use a combination of her and Shiori's sand powers to pin Pace down and set her up for a full-force Jekern lightning bolt from Shiori. If one of Pace's packmates hadn't intercepted Flick, they might have taken Pace down then and there.
  • The werewolf has Flick pinned to the ground, and Pace taunts Flick, saying that it's time for her to say bye-bye. Flick starts saying bye-bye, snaps her fingers to summon her silver knife, and kills the werewolf pinning her down, all before she finishes saying bye-bye.
  • Even more wolves show up, putting Flick and Shiori in dire straits. And then Seth Dozeran, Wonderland's Tiebreaker, appears and shows off why he got the combat-based position, slaughtering the three-wolf rear guard without getting a scratch or letting any of the other wolves notice. This ends up scaring the entire pack into running.
• When Lincoln Chambers (with assistance from Calafia and Gabriel Prosser) breaks through the Bystander Effect.
• For the first 22 arcs, we're never given a chance to see what a high level Heretic can do. That comes to an end in Interlude 22C, where we see two Committee-level Heretics destroy a (replica) city as they fight each other with neither one able to gain the upper hand.
  • The context makes it even better. The fight was between Gabriel Ruthers and Joselyn Atherby not long after they were both added to the Committee's power-sharing link. Unaware that she had received the same upgrade, Ruthers was expecting a Curb-Stomp Battle. Watching him lose himself to his fury as Joselyn matches everything he does is very satisfying.
• Interlude 23: Bastet effortlessly slaughters a dozen veteran heretics to protect forty-odd Alter children and avenge their parents. Highlights include subverting the safeties on a Heretic's machine-gun that prevent friendly fire so they force it instead, killing another by forcibly teleporting another into his friend's attack and decapitating a man with his own sword faster than he could see her move. And this is her holding back to drag things out and let the Heretics suffer.
• Suspects 24-07: Flick and Roxa have their epic showdown against Lemuel and Pace. Roxa survives being stabbed in the heart because she has an extra one, while Flick steals Pace's choker and tricks her into thinking it's been destroyed.
• Investigations 25-06: The real Pace seizes control of her body back from Lies for long enough to keep Issac from killing a random pixie and very nearly kill Issac.
• Interlude 30: Sariel Moon manages to toss a giant spanner into the Seosten's plans from halfway across the universe by showing Larissa Mason how to make people immune to Seosten possession, starting with Felicity Chambers.
• New York Minutemen 27-04: To open the chapter, Flick figures out that Tabbris is on her side and completely trustworthy near instantly. To close it? She launches Charemeine in Columbus across a room with her staff after crashing through the window feet first.
• New York Minutemen 27-05: The entire battle with Charmiene. Highlights below.
  • Roxa enters the fray, having saved Douglas and recovered Paul's body, exposing Fetch.
  • Avalon is set on fire ... and promptly punches Charmiene-in-Columbus in the head without slowing down, while on fire.
  • Flick forces Charmiene out of Columbus by getting Avalon to cage Columbus, predicting Charmiene would switch places with Roxa, and starting the attack run before the switch even happened.
  • Columbus recovers enough to launch Charmeine out a window with a eye beam while she's distracted by Flick explaining how it's all Charmiene's fault that Flick even knew to look for Seosten moles.
  • And Flick finishes Charmiene by jumping out after her and running her through in mid-air.
• Uprising 29-03: Flick and Sands give Jazz a Dare to Be Badass speech convincing her to trust Jokai and do what is right rather than what the establishment wants.
• Uprising 29-06: Flick needs a distraction while the slaves the team freed from a Seosten empire labor camp escape. What does she do? Sneak in and possess one of the Seosten, then blow up the comms array. They're then too busy panicking over having their own trademark power used on them to focus on the escapees.
• Uprising 29-09: The team has control of the bridge of the starship they're hijacking and is ready to escape when Radueriel's battleship shows up. They haven't a chance of fighting the thing, and surrender is worse than death. Their response? Flick tells Jokai to go ahead and try to ram it, so they all die free and fighting.
  • Then Larissa Mason teleports in and teleports the entire mile-long asteroid mining ship to another system.
• After standing alone in the jungle and screaming for The Conspiracy to take a free shot at her only to be met by a wandering Harper Hayes, Avalon notices a small bit of blood on a tree, implying that Harper/Guinevere/Lancelot dealt with another very real attempt to murder her. And then the chapter's tags confirm that implication.
  Tags: Considering The Number Of Enemies ‘Harper’ Had To Put Down Without Letting Avalon Hear Or Notice Anything – Leaving One Spot Of Blood Was Impressive.
• A Different Kind of Hunt 31-06: Radeuriel cuts off Flick's escape route and effortlesses crushes her hand when she attacks him. It looks Flick is going to end on Radeuriel's vivisection table after all ... and then Athena breaks her cover in one of Radueriel's mooks and punches him across the room.
• A Different Kind of Hunt 31-07: Athena versus thirty of Radeuriel's puppeted troops. One Seosten goddess of war versus thirty elite soldiers fighting with absolutely perfect coordination. Should be a good fight, right? Actually, no, Athena effortlessly slaughters them all.
• Interlude 31C: Wyatt counters a swarm of vampires by using portals to bring the sun to them. One prepared gadget, thirteen kills.
  • Scout uses the portal function of her rifle to make a wall of bullets.
  • Avalon executes her abusive father. It's not a fight. Not even a curbstomp. She activates a sonic stun gadget she built and leaves him flopping on the ground while she delivers a crushing speech, then cuts his head off.
• The ending to Hoc Est Bellum 34-08: Sariel's free and ready to kick ass. She starts by putting glass shards through the eyes of a telekinetic who had been stomping on Flick, Vanessa, and Tristan.
• The first section of Hoc Est Bellum 34-09: Sariel wipes at least a dozen Seosten soldiers and sends the rest running in terror in a matter of seconds - while freshly out of stasis.
• Desperate Measures 37-08: Sariel kills Manakel via possession suicide.
• Exodus 44-06: Gaia and Flick destroy the Revolution Eraser. Joselyn's War is back on!