Warning, unmarked spoilers below.
Lost for Words
- John gives each of the Trio a dog tag to summon him if they're in danger.
- In Lost for Words 1.z
the Trio turn up to the Hungry Choir's ceremony. Despite being warned only to observe, they use all the tricks and items they've acquired so far - including John's dog tag, the weapon-making ring, Avery's super-jumping sneakers and her boy-yeeting hockey stick - to fend off the Hungry Choir and manage to save one of the participants from being eaten. Unfortunately they can't save everyone.- There's also the fact that they only have runes- no implement, familiar, demesne or summoned beings- and they haven't even figured out their specialty as practitioners yet, but they went up against the Hungry Choir and did a damn good job.
Stolen Away
- Avery takes on the Forest Ribbon Trail. Despite having only become a practitioner recently, and despite memory not being her strong point, she does an admirable job, handling Others, a cryptic companion and an eldritch location really well for a newbie.
- After Nicolette Belanger steals Snowdrop, Snowdrop proceeds to set Nicolette's study and much of the rest of the building on fire, stole her agenda and then ran for it- because Nicolette foolishly believed that Snowdrop, like any Other, would only tell the truth.
Out On A Limb
- It's not shown, but John Stiles managed to stop Nicolette from reaching Kennet in her car/finding Snowdrop along the way by taking Matthew's car and running Nicolette off the road.
- Lucy and Guilherme have a duel that turns out to just be a massive distraction for Avery and Verona to get away with Brie.
- Zed and his team manage to bind Yalda, the leader of the Hungry Choir, despite being forced into the ritual with the animal being dozens of venomous snakes. And Brie, the one non-practitioner of the group, defeats Yalda by weaponising the benefits of winning by eating Yalda alive.
Leaving A Mark
- Avery gets back into being a Finder by taking on a new Path, Zoomtown. Despite the PTSD the Forest Ribbon Trail gave her, she does a great job (admittedly with help from both Snowdrop and Jude) and completes the Path with no problems.
- After Verona's bag containing various magical items gets stolen by Melissa and the trio goes looking for her and their other classmates, they end up having to fight the mullet man contained within Zed's "Crying Cold Tears" tape being commanded by their classmate Hailey unwittingly. Towards the end Verona leaps on his back in order to scratch a rune on them using only her fingernails, allowing John to defeat it by stabbing it through the eye socket.
- Interlude 4.x has Snowdrop get on the bad side of the Blue Heron's Institute's brownies by inadvertently insulting them, leading to a chase scene with Snowdrop being one step ahead of them right up until running into Nicolette, who informs her about their exact deal.
- 4.9 has a flashback of two weeks prior where Lucy gets trained by Guilherme, spars with John Stiles, and while she loses, doesn't do too badly—which is pretty damn good considering John is a spirit of war incarnate.
Back Away
- Back Away 5.3:
- Verona manages to defeat or neutralize several Others trying to break through the perimeter not through fighting, but through successful negotiation or outsmarting them. Upon meeting Sharon, she tears apart her worldview by laying bare how pathetic and sad a person she really is.
- John saves Verona from an enraged Sharon holding her at gunpoint by knocking her out from behind.
Verona: "I thought she canceled you out."John: "She does. But I don't need what she takes from me."
Gone Ahead
- In 7.1, Toadswallow fakes out the practitioners trying to kill or bind him by leaving behind a pig carcass dressed like him.
- The 7.3 Extra Materials has Alexander casually tell Wye how he's planned things for Bristow to fail for about five years before Bristow even knew they'd be enemies, uses the body parts of a sparrow living in Bristow's vicinity he's sacrificed in order to copy Bristow's Sight and vow that Bristow will be dead or worse by summer's end, and goes over to his apartment complex to screw with the binding he has on his tenants by simply talking to Clem.
- In 7.8, Verona pulls a magnificent act of gambitry by allowing Bristow to gainsay her while using her phone to record what he says and transcribing it, which gives her his statement on the record that he's happy with how everything's worked out so far. She then turns this against him by declaring that he has a choice: he can either admit he regrets how things have worked out, thus losing their contest, or he admits that he's happy with the actions of the brownies, which would put him at their mercy. And to make it even better, she declares this as he's in the middle of his face off with Alexander.
- In 7.x, John manages to get the drop on and kill Alexander with a headshot just as he's preparing to kill or enslave Ted.
One After Another
- In One After Another 10.2, Melissa chooses to stand in the way of a Witch Hunter attempting to shoot Lucy dead while she tries to get the grave bullet out of John, despite the very real danger of her just getting killed first, and Lucy trying to make her leave her and John behind.
False Moves
- In 12.2, Avery goes full magical girl by calling various goblins to her side, binding them to take their weapon forms (all of which have their own names) and proceeding to utterly wreck the Fae courtroom.
Summer Break
- Despite his eventual loss and unmaking, John with the help of his fellow Dogs manages to defeat a pack of Other wolves, a familiar tainted by a demon and stealing power from a god, and a superior goblin formerly belonging to none other than Gerhild the Redcap Queen's host.
Fall Out
- In Fall Out 14.z, Crooked Rook throws a magnificent spanner in Musser's works by tricking Basil into a game, offering him a healing poultice for an infected wound on his arm, and then slipping Bridge the body-snatcher under the poultice, allowing him to possess Basil and become a Lord and an infiltrator in Musser's circle.
Left in the Dust
- In Left in the Dust 16.2, we learn of an in-universe book called 100 Years Lost. The book relates the experiences of a woman named Hazel who ended up on the Paths, and then proceeded to travel the paths for 104 years straight, pursued by her abusive husband / the Wolf, and getting by on wits, instinct, and Lost she befriended before returning to Earth. There, after a brief visit, she returned to the paths, never to be seen again. In her time on the Paths, she apparently witnessed places that promised boons as far-out as a true Wish, and even the levers and cogs of reality.
- In the extra materials for 16.4, we get excerpts from 100 Years Lost, cementing Hazel's awesomeness. She gets onto the Paths by means still not understood, used the Paths in ways confirmed to work by Augurs but which still can't be replicated, spends more time on the Paths than any other Practitioner ever, collects countless boons and so becomes incredibly formidable, tackles the Wolf from one Path to another, befriends several beings so important they were once theorized to be the literal Architects of the Paths, enters and solves the riddle within a construct that nobody has been recorded entering before or since, and, again, witnesses the levers and cogs of reality. In the editor's notes, it is remarked that before Hazel, Finders were only a niche Practice. She was a major pioneer of a whole field of strange and extremely dangerous Practice that people are still trying to emulate.
- Verona claiming the House on Half Street as her demesne in 16.7, 16.9 and 16.10. To prepare, she prepares as much practice material as she can before clearing the Undercity version of the house by curbstomping the Stuck-Arounds that had been squatting there. When she begins the ritual proper, she makes her claim over not only Kennet Above, but also Kennet Below and the future Lost Kennet that the Trio and Kennet Others were planning to make. Not only does she manage to hold onto her claim over the Kennet Below portion of the house (beating the Foreman and the Family Man), she withstands trials designed by the Judges to test her claim over and resolve to create the Lost Kennet. While she did have Lucy's help for some of the Undercity fight, most of the trial was entirely on her own skill and conviction.
- Exemplified in this Badass Boast:
Verona: “I don’t want to embrace the darkness. That leads to- to the Family Man. To Charles, even. What he wanted to do with the living ritual, before it mutated and became the Choir. I will embrace it, as a tool, just not as my first priority...I don’t want to fight the darkness. That leads to Witch Hunters. Cleo. That’s not to say I won’t fight the ugliness and evil out there. I will. But not as my first priority...I want to understand it, so I can unravel it, redirect it, fix it.”
Gone And Done It
- In 17.a and 17.b, we see what happens when Kennet has to repel invaders. The trio, the local Others, a bunch of new Others they'd recruited and the Undercity collectively take on a group of very strong practitioners they don't know much about, including a problem-solver who's near Durocher's level, one of the gore-streaked Hennigars and a ritual killer. While it isn't a total win for Kennet, they come out of it without having lost anyone and with the invaders retreating, all while Miss' impending arrival dominates the end of the fight.
- In 17.15, Verona manages to easily defeat Easton and the Graubard sent against her, and when Miss is coming down to create Kennet Found, Verona uses her claim to literally smack Liz aside when she tries to gain influence on the newly created Realm.
- Through Musser's POV chapter we find out what he can really do in a fight (while he may be an arrogant villain, he's not bluffing about having the power and expertise to back up his claims) only to then find out that Charles has utterly outmanoeuvred him; as a Practitioner Charles specialised in making Others, and becoming the Carmine Exile has super-charged that ability, and now that Musser brought himself and all his heavy-hitters to Kennet at once and most of them are trapped there since Miss created Kennet Found, he's unleashed them all to depose the second-stringers Musser left as Lords and pledge fealty to the Judges. Charles doesn't even bother to turn up and gloat about it, he just has Maricica tell Verona to pass on to Musser that most of his allies have just been slaughtered, the rest of them are trapped, and his grand plan for Canada is in tatters.
Wild Abandon
- Having been previously warned that he'd be forced to take Edith as a familiar, in Wild Abandon 18.5, we see Matthew's response: since he has to give Edith room in his home by the rules, and since his new demesne is officially considered his home, he moved out, had the goblins fill his demesne with slate and then turned the slate into a giant slab, leaving barely an inch of room between the walls and the rock, neatly outmanoeuvring Edith. What's equally satisfying is the Carmine Exile and Maricica refusing to help her.
- Outraged by Anthem Tedd effectively cutting Liberty out of the family and refusing to talk to her, Lucy challenges him. What follows is an awesome battle for both of them, where we finally get to see that the stories of Anthem Tedd's badassery are not exaggerated, so Lucy even managing to turn a Curb-Stomp Battle into a Curb Stomp Cushion is quite an achievement for her.
- And then it turns out she was just keeping him busy long enough for Toadswallow to let seemingly every goblin in Canada know that Anthem had been a dick to their beloved queens, and Tedd's only option to avoid facing an entire horde of angry goblins is for him to agree to undertake one of Miss' civility classes with his daughters for a month, forcing him to spend some time with them.
Crossed With Silver
- At the end of Crossed with Silver 19.17, Durocher turns against Musser after discovering that he killed Timothy Crowe and gives him an incredible Breaking Speech promising to destroy the empire he's built for himself right before he's banished from Kennet altogether.Durocher: "I won’t kill you, Musser. But I will see what you’ve built broken...If you create something, I will send something to level it. A house, a business, a group of practitioners. I will make sure people know what you are. And what you aren’t."
Let Slip
- Avery and the Garricks take another run at the Station Promenade and manage to pull it off despite how dangerous it is and the added interference of Wunderkand. The boon they get at the end is awesome: everywhere they go, doors will appear and open onto other Paths, giving them ways to travel that are beyond anything they've previously had. And Avery and the Garricks become famous among Finders afterwards.
In Absentia
- The trio take down the Alabaster. They're on the run and they've only been practicing for a few months, but they managed to summon a complex spirit on short notice, keep Charles out of the way with some creative uses of the Laws, and presented a successful argument that the Alabaster was doing a terrible job. They've come so far.
- In Absentia 21.12: Lucy and Anthem Tedd vs Grayson Hennigar and Abraham Musser Senior. Not only is it an amazing fight, but Lucy manages to win by targeting Abraham Senior and Grayson's biggest strength. Abraham Senior and Grayson do really, really well in long, drawn-out fights, so Lucy fills the arena with smoke and pulls the breathable air away from them, so they can't keep going without suffocating and their tricks don't work.
Go For The Throat
- In 23.d:
- Bubbleyum reveals she has the ability to turn into a horrific monster using goblin-altered krokodil and PCP to go to town on the Ordinary Family. Even without the drugs, she kicks even more ass by being really good at coordinating the other goblins and combining their weapon forms to make them considerably more powerful together than they would be alone.
- Even if Charles manages to make the victory moot, Lucy manages to defeat the Family Man, while Melissa manages to singlehandedly stop nine people who managed to get past Lucy from entering Kennet Above.
- 23.e shows us that Lucy managed to beat the Family Man six more times - at least once while blind and suffering from the hemophobia curse that the trio laid on him. It's gotten to the point where Lucy wins, the Family Man invokes Charles' aid - and, while the aid is granted, he's stopped bothering to show up in person.
- Dorian, hosting the spirit Florescence, manages to help take down the Girl by Candlelight by throwing down flowers at just the right moment to let the Turtle Queen and Montague essentially bitch-slap her to death.
Finish Off
- In Finish Off 24.10, Sheridan takes out Lenard Lily- she wanted to help, so she Awakened as a Loser, the opposite of a Finder, and does a ritual to strand him on the Forest Ribbon Trail without assistance.
- In the same chapter, several of the Kennet Innocents agreed to host Florin Pesch's jockeys, giving them firepower that Helen Kim couldn't see coming, and manage to take her out.
- Clementine summons what is, in essence, a kaiju-sized Tamagotchi creature to take on Tenmercy. What makes this even more awesome is that the creature constantly targets her, not him, but she still manages to use it against him without getting hurt herself.
- Crooked Rook's not-plan finally pays off by linking together prior bits and pieces of the story: the girls took the railroad spike that had linked Maricica to the Abyss and gave it to Hollow Yen, a living embodiment of the damage done by the Hungry Choir. They then hid Hollow Yen within Julette, which let him get close enough to Charles to stab him with the railroad spike. As mentioned at the start of the story, it'd take something like a region's worth of power to kill a Carmine... like, for instance, getting stabbed with a spike linked to a goddess whose sphere of influence was all over that region, and who'd been poisoned.
- While Charles and the Aurum try foreswearing the girls on trumped-up pretenses, their allies rally, Tashlit in particular using her god-begotten abilities to demand an audience, and their repeated calling out of Charles' hypocrisy causes the last of his Self to be consumed by the Carmine Role. The Carmine proceeds to fight with the Aurum Coil when he still tries foreswearing them, locking the two in perpetual combat.
