Awesome / Nightside

• In Just Another Judgment Day, our hero is thrust up against the wrath of God incarnate in a human being, who can only lose his powers if he steps off the path of God. Even the Punk God of the Straight Razor fails to stop him (though he manages to walk away from the confrontation). How do you force the Walking Man to stop walking? You stand in his way, refuse to move, and offer no resistance or any other reason to kill you. This forces him to try and kill an innocent man, which costs him his powers. And the best part? John wasn't even sure it would work.
• When facing his mother Lilith, John finds and wants to use the Speaking Gun. This thing is an evil weapon, that whispers in his mind, wanting him to use it further. Rather than do that, John forces it to speak its own name backwards. What's more, he takes it up again AND forces himself not to use it in Judgment Day, thus making him the only person to hold the gun more than once and turn down its dark offer.
• Razor Eddie:
  • In his first appearance, John takes him up on an owed favor to help him out on his case. Eddie does so, but doesn't charge him a favor. Instead, he makes the favor taking care of the Harrowing, the faceless humanoids with drug-syringe fingers that keep coming after John. Did we mention that he's implied to be one of the only individuals who can take them in a fair fight? And that the only time John beats them in the series, they're weakened by Merlin's magic?
  • Razor Eddie has also used the Speaking Gun. To redeem himself, Eddie did something unspeakably nasty on the Street of the Gods, so bad that the Gods were running out of the Street, crying, for the better part of two books. And he Took a Level in Badass while he was at it. Which is saying something.
  • Three men have fought the Walking Man and lived. A holy monster hunter and truly good man is one. John Taylor, a reasonably innocent man (at least, that time) was two. The third was Razor Eddie. Who fought the Walking Man to mutual exhaustion and only lost because the latter took the razor and chucked it into the distance, temporarily shocking Eddie.
• Suzie arguably gets one every time she gets past her trauma with John. It takes a lot of willpower to overcome what she went through, but she does it.
• Cathy gets something of a Badass Normal CMoA in Serpent's Tooth, when John, Suzie and Eddie rescue her from kidnappers. Revived and released, she doesn't flinch or even act embarrassed by her circumstances, but immediately walks up to her captors, head-butts the woman hard enough to break her abductor's nose, then kicks the man full-force in the nuts. Suzie quips admiringly to Taylor that he's had a bad influence on Cathy.
• The Oblivion brothers' mom only has one scene, but it rates as one of these because A) it turns out she's a former costumed adventurer who taught Ms. Fate everything (s)he knows, and B) she told Walker, who was being a snot about duty trumping love or family or regret, to fuck off to his face. Taylor nearly applauded.
• In Hex and the City, The Sinner stood up to a barrage that could hurt, or eventually kill, even him, to protect his one true love...despite knowing that she was a succubus demon from Hell, and well able to look out for herself. The succubus had followed him back out of Hell to find out what this "true love" thing was—and suddenly found that she could not bear to let him sacrifice himself for her, so she moved in front of him to protect him. This self-sacrifice, and having found out what love is, removed her "fallen" nature, reverting her to the angel she had been before, and she took Sinner to Paradise.

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