Awesome / Dead Beat

• Mavra's thorough blackmail of Harry, with plenty of Rules Lawyer.
  • Jim Butcher for having the balls to open a book with a villainous CMOA.
• Harry animates Sue the T-Rex, the one from the actual museum in Chicago, to serve as his steed as he rides into battle against an army of necromancers and zombies. It was controlled by not only his magic, but his sidekick's one-man polka suit. By the way, in the Dresdenverse, the older a corpse, the stronger the zombie, but it's also commensurately harder to reanimate. Nonhuman zombies, preferred by Harry because they're not Forbidden Magic, are weaker, but more difficult to create and control. The walking corpses summoned by the Big Bad in Dead Beat range from less than a year to maybe a few hundred years old. Sue is roughly sixty-five million years dead, and was famous several years back for being one of extremely few complete skeletons ever found. The Dresden Pen and Paper RPG includes rules for doing this yourself. The stats for Sue in particular as an opponent basically translate to "You lose."
  • The Awesomeness that is Zombie-Sue is recognized in the book when he does it: Harry doesn't make a big deal about it, but Luccio, commander of the Wardens who should by all rights be appalled at the necromancy (even if it isn't technically illegal because it wasn't a human spirit), can't quite get over her feeling of stunned disbelief. And Warden Ramirez immediately thinks it's the coolest thing ever. Not least because the first moment they see her, it's because Sue just bounded completely over their heads to stomp the hood of a car that was about to run them over, driving its engine block about a foot down into the pavement. The Awesomeness is recognized in more than the one book. More then one occasion later in the series it's mentioned that characters are wary of Dresden. It's never specified which of Harry's many accomplishments caused others to fear him (and he has quite a few), but when Harry lists the many moment of awesome that could lead to some being afraid of him he always seems to come back to Sue as the top of the list!
  • Remember that ghoul? The unstoppable ninja flesh-eater who nearly killed Harry in the alleyway?
    Sue ate him. Snap. Gulp. No more ghoul.
  • Sue is canonically so awesome...that the Erkling, who is honor bound to kill Harry? Who owns the Wild Hunt, and hunts people as a warm-up to his real targets? Looks at Harry and says "You know what...I'll let you live for now...because Zombie T-Rex." Yes, it's mentioned below, but yeah. It's that awesome.
  • Most zombies, usually made from people that died 2-300 years before, are usually compared to the Terminator. Sue... is 65+ million years old, and can shield someone from a nexus of dark energy powerful enough to create a physical god. Just by existing.
• Cowl delivering a Curb-Stomp Battle to Harry. He even shields himself from a car Harry telekinetically flipped onto him.
  • Followed by Big Damn Heroes moment of The Alphas.
  • Harry physically holding up against Kumori's attack.
    • When the reason for the above is revealed it becomes more a moment for her than Harry. She was nowhere near full power, having used the majority of her energy to save someone's life.
• Rawlins flashback of Murphy's Action Dad saving him by blowing away a supernatural creature attacking him. Clearly Murphy is a Daddy's Girl in more ways than one.
• Harry summons the Lord of the Wild Hunt, a Fae on par with the Fae Queens themselves, and binds him so that the competing armies of necromancers can't use him. Then, after the big ending fight, the Lord spares Harry because even he thinks reanimating Sue was awesome.
  • Hell, summoning the Erlking is a moment of awesome on its own. Harry summons and tries to bind one of the most powerful Fair Folk in existence. This will give said Fair Folk a personal grudge against Harry, which means the Lord will probably kill him within a day or two even if bound long enough for Harry's purposes. (Remember back in Storm Front when Harry comments in the narration that he'd never try to summon and trap Santa Claus in a magic circle because "nobody has stones that big"? Various bits of Word of God, plus the eventual appearance of "Kringle" in Cold Days, indicate that summoning the Erlking is comparable to that). And not only did Harry summon it, he'd have actually held it in the circle. To clarify, right before doing it Harry considered that he'd have needed weeks, using some pretty rare and hard to find materials to be sure the circle could keep something that strong inside it, but he has to make one in a matter of minutes. Then the Erlking tries to break the circle, and Harry (already quite battered by that point) pushes it back. Too bad Cowl was savvy, but hadn't he shot Harry, he'd have prevented the Wild Hunt.
• Corpsetaker ripping into Harry's mind, followed by her ghoul minion Li Xian nearly killing him.
  • Harry makes her regret for the above by making use of the mental link she created, by twisting his own injuries that Xian had given him, making her writhe in pain.
  • Gard's Big Damn Heroes moment saving Harry from Li Xian for Marcone.
• Harry telling Mavra, in no uncertain terms, that if she ever tries to get to him through Murphy again, he will take her down with extreme prejudice.
  Harry: I've got a fallen angel tripping all over herself to give me more power. Queen Mab has asked me to take the mantle of Winter Knight twice now. I've read Kemmler's book. I know how the Darkhallow works. And I know how to turn necromancy against the Black Court. So once again, let me be perfectly clear. If anything happens to Murphy and I even think you had a hand in it, fuck right and wrong. If you touch her, I'm declaring war on you. Personally. I'm picking up every weapon I can get. And I'm using them to kill you. Horribly. Do you understand me?
  • The best part was that she nodded and moved to leave. Harry stops her, snarling. "Say it!". Marsters used a nearly insane with rage tone that just sends shivers down a reader's spine. Fridge Brilliance makes this more awesome. She does not come back for years, and when she does, she brings serious backup.
• Waldo Butters is a 5-foot-nothing, 98-pound weakling nebbishy coroner. He is not a trained cop like Murphy, he doesn't have a connection to the higher powers like the Knights, he doesn't even have the ability to turn into a wolf like the Alphas. But, after a very crappy day involving zombies, necromancers, and psychopaths who either want what he knows or want him dead, he finds the fortitude to save Harry from a knife wielding psycho in a fist fight. He didn't do a hell of a lot of fighting, but he always put himself between the guy with the knife and his friend.
  • And never forget: POLKA WILL NEVER DIE!
  • Also don't forget that said getting between the guy with the knife and his friend involved attacking the psycho with his teeth.
    Butters skittered away from the knife, eyes wide with terror.
    But he skittered directly between Cassius and me.
    And held his ground.
    • Becomes even more awesome with the reveal in Skin Game about who sent him, and why.
  • A small thing, but Butters also manages to keep his cool enough that, during the final battle, he actually manages to use the knowledge Harry has taught him to create a warding circle to protect himself from the undead, while lethal and deadly specters are closing in on him from all sides, and also managed to draw the circle and spill blood on it without interrupting his drumming.
• Harry is being submitted to Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique via Cold-Blooded Torture. Harry lets loose a non-stop Cluster F-Bomb in various languages, to mask the footsteps of Mouse charging into rescue. The villain gets mauled to death on Harry's order.
  Harry: I told you I would kill you if I saw you again.
• Morgan, after thinking Harry turned on them and killed the Warden commander when he proves himself willing to go through above mentioned reanimated T-Rex to bring Harry to justice. He's probably able, too; see Proven Guilty.
  • Harry's reaction to this is also awesome; within the space of a second or two, he calculates all the possible outcomes of the confrontation, and realises that the only way the good guys would have a chance of preventing the Kemmlerites' victory is a Thanatos Gambit. He then simply prepares his death curse, targets it towards the weakest of the necromancers and waits for his end. Good thing Ramirez interferes.
• Thomas, riding with the Wild Hunt.
• Harry recognising Corpsetaker despite her switching bodies, and killing her by shooting her In the Back.
• And Bob, after the Big Bad necromancer puts him down, possesses Sue to come to Harry's rescue. He then uses the body to shield Ramirez.
  • Another one for Bob, manipulating the Implacable Man into making himself vulnerable. And the villain for surviving what's basically a magical bomb going off in his face.
• The Senior council was being chased through the Nevernever by Red Court vamps, demons, and at least one Eldritch Abomination. The Merlin held off the entire freaking Red Court with an impromptu ward. In the Nevernever, meaning that he didn't even have a threshold to anchor it with.
  "I guess you don't get to be Merlin of the White Council by collecting bottle caps."
• Luccio shows Harry why she's the captain of the Wardens by destroying thirty undead in under five seconds, the rest of the Wardens handle the rest and not one child is harmed in the process.
• Harry telling off Kumori for her arrogance about ending death.
• After six books of taking crap from the Council, Harry finally gets to tell them exactly what he thinks of them and why he treats them with such disdain.
• In a villainous moment of awesome (which doubles as a tearjerker), the Red Court killed off 143 Wardens in one stroke. Out of roughly 200. Yeesh.
  • They did it with the help of The Mole along with sheer ruthlessness and pragmatism. With information on their enemy's location, the vampires hammered the wizards over and over, till they couldn't advance further. And when the vampires found out where the injured Wardens were treated, they sent in mortals with a WMD, killing entire city blocks of people for a group of less than 100 people.

---