John Rain can easily rival Jack Reacher in terms of sheer badassery. Here are some examples:
- A Clean Kill in Tokyo: The introduction kill where Rain gets a beautiful establishing character moment by utilizing the first pacemaker hack on a target. Rain's fight with the kendo-assassin. Rain's judo match with Yamaoto Toshi in the Kodokan. The entire sequence where Rain breaks-out from Conviction HQ and then breaks in again and takes out Flatnose with a handy tomoe-nage
. - A Lonely Resurrection: Rain's assassination of Ishihara, a yakuza member in his own gym, in the opening chapter. Rain's infiltration of the underground fight circuit. Rain's fight with Murakami.
- Winner Take All: Rain's fight with Nuci, the French karate-using assassin in the dark alleys of Macau. Rain's grappling match with Dox. The last few pages has Rain taking on Belghazi, a savate champion, and when it looks like Rain is about to die, Dox shows up to help out.
- Redemption Games: Rain taking on the Muay Thai fighters and subsequently Winters, an Eskrima practioner and an expert knife combatant, Dox shows up to save the day again. This time, with a chair.
- The Winters fight is even noted as an in-universe moment of awesome for Rain, with Hilger's group in The Killer Ascendant noting how impressive of a feat it was.
- Extremis: Rain and Dox teaming up to take on the two sumo wrestlers. Also counts as a huge laugh-out-loud moment when Rain tries to distract them using the only Chinese he knows. What does he say? Wau ai ni which translates to I love you.
- The Killer Ascendant: Rain's fight with Demeere, easily the best fight in the entire series.
- Dox's constant mocking of Poncho is both this and a CMOF, with the big sniper continually making wild accusations and just generally messing with him. For extra points, it's even implied that several of his insults are correct. He then tops himself by nearly beating Poncho in a fight despite being haggard and bound.
- The Detachment: The entire book is a CMOA page after page. To wit: Rain taking on the contractors in the beginning. Rain's first meet with Treven and Larison, where even though no physical action takes place you can just feel Rain and Larison trying to determine just who the top dog is. The entire sequence where they escape from the hotel in Washington. Right at the end, where all four decide to stop fighting with each other and save a school full of children from being destroyed via a drone-strike.
- Special mention goes to both Dox, who not only drops 4 opponents in as many seconds, but also shoots down the drone itself, as well as Kanezaki, who manages his first combat kill.
- Graveyard Of Memories : A young Rain rapidly goes from a low-level bagman to a formidable assassin, outwitting his handler and establishing himself as a lethal hitman.
- Zero Sum: Rain taking down the psychotic assassin Victor through a combination of psychological warfare and a freakin' katana.
- The Killer Collective: Not only does the book itself get a CMOA for assembling the Dream Team of assassins and operatives covered throughout the series, but Larison also gets one when first ambushed at Colonel Horton's house. While Hort and Rain retreat to gather more weapons, Larison sprints into the forest and hunts down a group of operatives like a hellhound.
- In The Chaos Kind, Marvin Manus (from Eisler's earlier book The God's Eye View) earns points by holding his own against Dox and Larison simultaneously in hand-to-hand combat, successfully overpowering Dox's two-handed grip with one arm. Admittedly, they were trying to subdue him non-lethally, but it's still quite a feat.
