Awesome / The Demonata

• Bran tames Vein and turns her from vicious attack hound into playful puppy. Lord Loss, who had ordered her to attack, is far from amused. Bec's party are momentarily stunned, then all break into hysterics. The Demon Master is so humiliated that he resorts to cursing them! If there's one thing our sentinel of sorrow can't stand, it's humour directed at his ghastly person. And this is the first (chronological) victory we see over the viper-hearted ghoul.
• The wee priestess, Bec single-handedly holding off a horde of demons with all manner of magic while Drust opens the tunnel, then killing the traitor Connla by splashing him with water.
• Grubitsch Grady managing to survive and outmanoeuvre Vein and Artery after his family's massacre; showing instinctive potential in empowering his strength, limited flight and self-transformation and even blasting every window out in the neighbourhood as he roars with grief. That's because ol' Grubbs is this century's only true Magician.
• Dervish shows his nephew Grubitsch that he can indeed command the mystic arts just fine when under duress by flinging an axe at his head!
• After 200 pages of nearly being traumatized into terror-stricken insanity by Lord Loss's actions, Grubbs stands firm in the face of the Demon Master's Hannibal Lecture and quips: "Stick it up your crack, you warped son of a mutant bitch!"
• Who can forget Grubbs beating Lord Loss at three out of five simultaneous chess games, with the lives of Dervish and Bill-E at stake. Not through greater skill or underhanded feints - but by utilizing the bastard's Emotion Eater powers, feeding him teenage irreverence instead of dread, sorrow and panic. Cue Villainous Breakdown.
  • Grubbs does what none of the Grady clan have done in centuries, beat Lord Loss not only through mocking his sadistic contest but by mocking chess itself. For Lord Loss, chess is Serious Business.
• The climax of Slawter, where Grubbs and Dervish fight Lord Loss and a small army of his familiars. Grubbs saves nearly two score of innocents while Dervish battles Lord Loss himself.
  • Grubbs' fast growing into his magic, he constructs selective-phase shields, a vortex, turns his arms and legs into blades to kill his first two demons, but the highlights are when he crushes Artery's throat before ripping the fire from his eyes and transporting it into the innards of Gregor the giant cockroach demon; (then blows him up from the inside). And he even saves his uncle once again by biting all of Lord Loss's eight arms off!
• Bec gains her freedom and a magnificent revenge after sixteen hundred years of spying on the Demonata's Universes. This with an eidetic memory mind you. Anyone of lesser character would have gone insane. Bec is arguably the most well adjusted of the trio of protagonists despite the fact that she has suffered the most out of any of them.
  • She makes death her bitch, refusing to allow her spirit to die by utilizing her own unimaginably painful death to infuse her soul into the tunnel between worlds. Grubbs may be the inherent powerhouse, Kernel may have ultimate freedom. But there is no limit to what Bec can accomplish when she can draw magic from the stars themselves; who are literally gods. Demon Masters are small time in comparison; as she proved when she first ripped a hefty dose of magic from Lord Loss himself, who later claimed he had given it to her.
  • When Lord Loss decides to destroy everything the Gradys love she manipulates a moon-addled Grubbs into gradually opening the cave and siphoning his power to increase her own strength, and later helps tip a vengeful Bill-E into providing an unwitting blood sacrifice to re-establish the connection.
  • She brings Kernel and Grubbs together to unite the Kah-Gash, humiliating Lord Loss once more and drawing enough power from Grubitsch to obliterate several greater demons that gave even Beranabus pause. Lord Loss grudgingly admits that she is far more powerful than both Magicians.
  • Her plan culminates in riding the untamed energies of the tunnel back in time to when the demons would finalize the connection on her end; freeing her from the earth's embrace, saving the world and all its inhabitants from two crossings and rescuing the Grady bunch all at once.
• This is topped off with her using Bill-E's dead body to obliterate Artery and disintegrate Femur into nothing, transmute the flesh of a descendent into her own, then make Lord Loss wail and run for the hills. She's back indeed.
• Grubbs finding the courage deep within him to stop the sacrifice, not through altruism but for love of his brother.
• We find out that Beranabus hunted down his demonic father and, for conceiving him by the rape of his mother, massacred him on the spot and took his head. Then he used it as a bed-pan.
• A depressed and neglectful Dervish is about to give Bec the cold shoulder again after half a year of treating her like an uncooperative crystal ball when she whips a short sword off the wall and flings it into his office door, slamming it shut in his face.
  • "We. Have. To. Talk."
• Both Dervish and Beranabus have back-to-back Big Damn Heroes, when they save their girl Bec from a set of second deaths.
  Dervish: leave my girl alone, you crazy bitch! (blasts Juni Swan off the roof)
• Beranabus, after three millennia of life, wanderings and endless battle, masters the demon heritage within, cuts loose, and goes down swinging with Death Incarnate, as the greatest hero who ever lived. He sought to annihilate every last one of his father's kind to avenge Bec's murder and in the end he sacrifices All to protect his beloved and her home.
• Followed up moments later when Sharmila gives up her life gladly for the group.
• Grubbs releasing his wolven side and taking over the Wolf Island pack as the new alpha, turning them against the Lamb faction working with Juni. Then leading them into conflict against demons on several continents.
• Kernel deciding to return to Earth and join up with Bec and Grubbs for the final battle instead of staying the shepherd of a paradise world made by the Old Creatures. Now that takes guts.
• The trio uniting and controlling the Kah-Gash for the first time, obliterating a whole advance battalion of demons within an instant.
• Grubbs, Kernel and Bec ripping Death apart from the inside out thanks to Kernel opening a special window into its intangible realm of a body; freeing all of the deceased spirits it's comprised of, including Bill-E and Beranabus.
• The huge army of a million demons that the trio, Dervish, Meera and Kirilli fall into and have the mother of all scraps with.
  • Kirilli goes from Dirty Coward to Cowardly Lion and cuts through hundreds of demons with a Sinister Scythe, then uses the bones of the fallen as a nail bomb cascade to protect Kernel.
  • Bec's aerial grapple with Lord Loss, using her memory sponge powers to turn the Demon Master to her side.
  • Meera detonating the last remnants of her magical force to splatter Juni all over the place.
  • Grubbs and Dervish's instances of Use Your Head.
• Death!Bec, who has absorbed the Shadow into her with secret aims to destroy it, hunting Kernel and Grubbs down across the universe, flipping the tables on the Old Creatures and tearing their quaint little idea of the second ark to pieces. Thus averting the science fantasy nonsense that infested the first three quarters of Dark Calling.
• Bec is the original Wild Card. With her cunning and inherent powers, Bran's experience and Lord Loss's self interest, their Gambit Pile Up brings an end to the Shadow and the Demon Masters; while Kernel and Grubbs may be relegated to bit-parts next to the importance of memory they still all earn their happy endings as the Trinity of the new world.