Awesome / The Black Company

• The lady's plan to defeat the rebels. Draw them in to a trap which they can't leave and then unleashes a plague on them.
• Croaker's master plan to defeat Longshadow's armies. Its too awesome to spoil it here — read it yourselves. Croaker plays a long con that pays off. He and Blade pretend they had a huge falling out over Lady, and Blade defects to Longshadow. Blade then spends years being one of Longshadow's most trusted captains. When the decisive battle begins, Blade immediately orders his division off the battlefield, and his soldiers follow him because they trust his orders. He then surrenders to Croaker, while they laugh at what they pulled off. It leaves Longshadow without 1/4 of his troops, and they were some of his most veteran troops at that.
• During the first chapter of the series, the Company decides to face off against a forvalaka - a bestial, vampiric monster terrorizing their client's city. Despite Croaker's, their leaders', and all four of their wizards' complete fear of it, the Captain organizes a squadron to try and take it down. They only manage to damage it, but the sequence is both heroic and horrific.
• In the first book of the series, the Company sends a team to infiltrate a Rebel fortress city, Roses, that one of the enemy generals was using as a base. With the help of Soulcatcher, a powerful sorceress, they set the following trap: a large enchanted table with a mid-sized fortune underneath it, bearing the inscription "He who would collect this wealth shall place upon this slab the head of the creature Raker." The Moment of Awesome comes a bit later when the Company men kill Raker, himself a very powerful sorcerer, and steal the treasure themselves, lying to Soulcatcher's face about it afterwords.
  • It should be noted that Soulcatcher was not "a powerful sorceress." She was a powerful sorceress. (Also, addendum: it may go without saying that part of the enchantment was that if you tried to take any of the treasure without providing Raker's head, well, don't.)
  • At the end of the incident Soulcatcher hints to Croaker that she's figured it out and she doesn't care.
• Later on, the company's Annalist (keeper of the histories and our narrator) Croaker and soldier Raven get a joint one - as two Badass Normal soldiers ambush and take down a pair of ubermages in about 10 seconds.
  • Admittedly, they had magical arrows.
  • Raven did. Croaker had a blunted arrow to take one of the two mages prisoner. Which only worked partially, meaning Croaker had to sprint across a clearing and finish beating the mage unconscious personally.
• Croaker's ambush of the Limper in "Shadows Linger". Not only does the Company take down a Taken all by themselves, they do so with only a few dozen or so men.
• Later on in the series, in "Bleak Seasons", one of the Company's hedge wizards, an old, stunted man who goes by One Eye, carefully crafted a lethal artifact weapon to try and break the siege of Dejagore: a rune-studded black spear that killed magic users by pulling their own power into itself and channeling it back, the hard way. Only barest chance let the enemy wizard survive: it hit his magically bred horse, missing him by less than a foot, at a range of almost a thousand yards.
  • Scratch one badass horse though.

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