Awesome / Nikolai Dante

• Nikolai stabbing Konstantin In the Back as the Potemkin goes down over St. Petersburg, taking out the Tsar's sculpture of his own face. Granted, he survives, but to get the drop on a man who is a literal walking nuke is incredibly impressive.
• Katarina Dante's Dying Moment of Awesome, where she shoots Dmitri with the Huntsman. Especially karmic, considering that he raped her years before.
• Erstwhile Tsar Vladimir Makarov's final exit from the story - a game of Russian Roulette with Nikolai, copious amounts of vodka, and some heavy philosophical debate about The Chains of Commanding and how Power Corrupts that leaves the latter visibly shaken.
• Nikolai's duel with Caius Zacharovich. After winning every fight he got into thus far by, shall we say, using his wits, Nikolai runs into the one opponent who is so skilled that no amount of cheating comes even close to levelling the playing field. Zacharovich even takes some time off from kicking Nikolai's ass to give him some advice on swordfighting which our hero duly takes to heart; for the remainder of the series, no other opponent, save for Caius' protégé Jena Makarov, comes even close to besting Nikolai Dante in a straight-up swordfight.
• Dante's solution to both Konstantin Romanov and the bankruptcy of the empire is to empty what remains of the Imperial accounts and bet it all on himself in a duel with Konstantin, which he wins by disabling Konstantin's Weapons Crest, beating the shit out of him, and then shooting him in the back with the Huntsman.