Vash spends his first appearance fighting a horde of chimeras with only a sword, and he obviously has a ton of fun doing it. And then he comes out of the fight with only minor damage!
After Kendal is gravely injured while fighting the sentinel, Alinua comes to his rescue to repay the kindness he had shown her. She stops holding back and her life magic breaks the sentinel in half.
In chapter 5, the Storm of Magic disappears, leaving Windscrest without the constant wind that it relies on for its industry. What does Alinua do about it? She grows an enormous tree with highly-nutritious fruit that doesn't need to be watered, just to help the town while they rebuild their infrastructure. And it only takes her four minutes.
Falst vs the Trio is a wild fight that starts with Erin being the distraction until Alinua has secured the MacGuffin and proceeds to hit him hard enough with Life Magic to leave a mark on the notoriously magic resistant Ferin. And just as Falst is about to go on the offensive again and give her a fight, Kendal performs a Punch Catch and ends the fight.
The moment Jolon's spelleater is yeeted away by Falst, Alinua grows a plant colossus while unconscious. Turns out, making chimeras is a good way to royally piss off Primordial Life.
Life: You TWISTED me. You warped these creatures against their nature!
Erin finally gets a moment to show his heroism when he gives up his research and rushes to save his sister as well as his friends from Shrike's hunters. He effortlessly incapacitates every bounty hunter with Stone magic, then just as easily escapes with all of his friends after tearing into Shrike for her weak excuses regarding her pursuit of Tess and Falst.
Tynan: Next time, take a cue from Vash. Build it to last.
Tynan's assault on Zuurith is the crux of many Awesome moments, as our heroes need to figure out how to fight a god.
The party has been made absolutely miserable by the situation with Zuurith's prison, so when Alinua grows a tree large enough to crack the mountain open and frees the prisoners within, it's immensely satisfying. Then the Arenamaster has a wonderful villainous breakdown over it, before Dainix knocks him out from behind, looking very cool in the process.
Tess, during her and Erin's Big Damn Heroes moment, tags in against Tynan, who had gradually worn down Kendal thanks to his lightning step, his swords being able to damage him, and being able to hit him with lightning. Tess, being a lightning-mage who can sense and redirect lightning without harming the target as well as a physically prodigious Metal-caste, No Sells every one of his attacks and punches him into scraps many times over.
Erin's plan to defeat Tynan deserves some mentions. Not only is cooling the air that the storm resides in an elegant way to buy enough time to deal directly with Tynan, but his idea to let Tess, who he notes is the best person for this task along with Kendal, fight Tynan's incarnation while he boils the clouds of the storm away was so good that the author needed to find a new way for Tynan to fight back in order to keep the fight interesting.
While he's literally in the clutches of the storm god, Erin manages to blind Tynan's dragon form with a big explosive fire/lightning spell, dropping a one-liner right before.
Erin: ...The last dragon I dealt with... didn't have to try this hard to scare me.
Tess jumps onto Tynan's back and punches HARD on the spot where his neck meets his wings.
While Falst's self-destructive stubborness is worrying, his determination is commendable. He not only kept Alinua safe while an entire mountain crumbled on her, breaking his arm in the process, but he also took a fireball from Erin in the face and still got back up in time to warn Alinua that the Void Dragon was possessing Erin, then to save Dainix from a void blast.
The Void Dragon gives us a villainous moment of awesome after Erin is knocked out against Tynan. He uses Alinua's distraction to blast her with void energy, but keeps her awake in order to prevent Life from interfering. He then, with a wave of his hand, nearly kills Tynan, all the while relishing the latter's suffering and giving a short Eviler than Thou speech to the storm god.
Dainix, having noticed that the Godzilla Threshold has been passed, transforms into his full Crucible form, which the Void Dragon dismisses as a simple fragment from the Fire Primordial before reducing him to scraps. The awesome moment comes when Dainix reforms, unharmed, and continues to attack, driving the arrogant Primordial into a panic as he realizes that none of his attacks can do anything to him.
Vash's return is about as triumphant as you'd expect. After taunting Tynan and boasting a little, he easily evades all his attacks, reveals the true potential of the starmetal, then destroys Tynan's body and his storm in one burst of starfire. He then threatens Zuurith into taking care of all his people properly and Tynan into behaving himself, which is effective enough to make the former reconsider his method of ruling and stop the latter from attacking again until Tahraim deals with him.
At the end of the dungeon arc, having bullied/reasoned the Void Dragon into submission for the time being, Erin becomes the first mage to heal Cave Corruption, long believed to be entirely incurable. He acted on a theory, then confirmed, that Cave Corruption was in fact Void corruption, only different from other forms of elemental corruption in that, before him, there were no Void mages to purge the element from a body.
Tess showing off her lightning-wrangling skills by single-handedly recharging a weather sensing array that Tynan had apparently drained.
