As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
- Quite common. In one particularly notable example, Itto gets an assignment to take down O-Yuki, a female fighter who has gone on a killing spree through the ranks of a feudal lord. During the encounter, Itto finds out that she is killing the many samurai in order to draw out a samurai officer who previously raped her. Even though he is bound by contract to kill the woman, Itto compares her quest to his own and stands back, allowing O-Yuki to kill her tormentor, getting her revenge. Out of respect she then faces Itto in formal duel, even though the result is obvious. After having slain his target, Itto states that she can finally be at peace "in a place where nobody will ever harm her again". He then grants her a warrior's funeral and sheds Manly Tears.
- Headless Sakon was once a Master Swordsman who gave up his social standing as a samurai to live as a street performer simply because he could not abide being a complacent part of the inherent injustice of the aristocratic class system in which he lived. He challenges Itto to a duel not because Itto has a contract in which he is tangled up or because he cares about the price on the Lone Wolf's head, but entirely because he is concerned for Daigoro and wants the boy to grow up with a proper father, whether it is Itto or himself, and cannot talk Itto into giving up his life as an assassin. When the two meet, and he narrowly loses because Itto proves to be less of a samurai than Sakon, because he is willing to hurl his blade as a missile weapon, symbolically abandoning his honor, Sakon talks shop with him for a minute, before begging him in moving terms to think of his son, and to abandon his dark path to be a father rather than chasing after a revenge that is just as fleeting and impermanent as human life. Itto weeps stoically as he and Daigoro leave, declaring him, essentially, a Buddhist saint, and seemingly causing him to rethink things, given the next chapter is a flashback that finally reveals his past.
- Ittou's speech to Daigorou shortly before the final battle. ("Though my eyes shut, my lips close... do not fear. In that world of rebirth, I'm still your father. In that world and all worlds, you are my son!") Daigorou remembering this speech at the end of the battle, when realizing his father is dead, is even worse.
- At one point Itto passes through the lands of his former student Lord Masatsune, who has been ordered to stop him at all cost. No points for guessing how that works out. The scenes of slaughter are contrasted with flashbacks of the two in happier times, finally culminating with Itto facing his former student and acknowledging him (posthumously) as a full-fledged Suio-ryu master. The normally stone-cold stoic Itto then promptly loses it and falls to the ground weeping. Daigoro cries with him; so do we.
- For bonus points, Masatsune and his army go out of their way to avoid injuring Daigoro while doing everything they can to stop Itto.
- Yagyu Retsudo is an evil, scheming murderer, but it's hard not to feel for him after Itto kills all of his children. There's an especially tear-jerking scene toward the end in which Retsudo thinks back to the time when he trained them when they were children and cries himself to sleep
over their deaths. - On the way to his final showdown with Retsudo, Itto is often assisted by the Yagyu retainers who, after escorting him for a part of the trip, then feel obligated to challenge him to a duel on behalf of their master. Itto acknowledges them as worthy adversaries and laments that every man he kills is another true samurai gone from this world.
