Awesome / The Third Faction

• Arturia vs. Siegfried vs. Karna. With Avalon returned to her, Arturia is easily able to go toe to toe with two of Apocrypha's heavy hitters, with Karna noting that while she lacks the relative invincibility of either him or Siegfried, she's healing so fast that she might as well have it.
  • It also counts as one for Karna as well since Shirou defeats Gordes and forces him to have Siegfried ally with them for the fight he shows no more concern now that his two foes have teamed up, fully confident he can still defeat them both.
• The Hanging Gardens attack (powered via Command Seal) vs. the combined might of Excalibur & Balmung.
• Achilles using Akhilleus Kosmos to negate the combined might of Excalibur & Balmung.
  • Made even more awesome when you realize that he never uses it himself in canon.
• Shirou transforming into EMIYA & legitimately competes with the Servants.
• Atalanta using Crossing Arcadia to jump on to Hrunting, thus exploiting its one weakness: Hrunting cannot strike itself.
  Shirou: One of the most impressive applications of skill indeed.
• An Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Siegfried returning Avalon to Arturia offscreen during Chapter 16 after they fended off the Hanging Gardens. There is a reason Arturia is wholly unconcerned by the actually 'fight' part of her battle with Mordred from her perspective. Word of God admits that the reveal of just how badly Mordred was actually outgunned would work better.
• Rin gets to show how much of a bad ass mage she really in Ch.18 when she faces off against Celenike, Gordes, and Fiore at the same time. In a 3 vs. 1 fight it's Rin that ends up winning with Celenike dead and Gordes and Fiore alive but taken out of the fight.
  • Fiore gets to show of her battle prowess as a mage against Rin. Though she ends up losing, Fiore manages to put up a better fight and managing to stonewall and land several good hits on Rin.
• Shakespeare really get this when he uses his Noble Phantasm: First Follo on Shirou to bring his conflict of being a Hero of Justice to the forefront & to make him Amakusa's perfect foe.
  • And it works! To sum it up, The Red-Robed Kiritsugu, the reality of the ideal, destroys the Kiritsugu that saved Shirou, the origin and dream of the ideal, as well as Rin and Saber from that day in the park, the dream he didn't think he deserved back then. And then, by showing Shirou's parents, it's a nail to remind Shirou just how much he's changed from when he truly was a person, how much he's lost, and how much he will continually give up if he sets his mind to be a sword. At the end, Robed Kiritsugu eggs Shirou on to be a full Hero of Justice, Archer lambastes him and mourns that he's failed to accomplish what he set out to do at the end of their encounter, and Child Shirou (who Shirou has specifically stepped over or ignored throughout the First Folio) demands to know why he can't just give it all up and go the Heaven's Feel route of just giving up his ideals and living life as a person. This being Post-UBW Shirou, he is not receptive to this plea and he doubles down on his ideals in response, relapsing from the progress he'd made after his battle with Archer and setting himself to fully become a Hero of Justice.
• Shakespeare gets another moment of this, when upon the conclusion of First Follo, Shirou gets so angry to the point that he genuinely attempts to kill the former for messing with his head, something that would not be expected from a character as mild mannered as Shirou. The number of times that Shirou loses his temper completely is few.