< Horus Heresy

Horus Heresy/Awesome


  • The opening book, Dan Abnett's Horus Rising has Garviel Loken rush in and avenge his senior commander Sejanus. After killing tons of invisible baddies, he meets the "false Emperor" who proclaims that the Imperium is wrong in its doings. But Loken rebuts it perfectly by pointing out that the Imperium had before tried reasoning with the planet.
    • Loken himself is just full of awesome. One memorable moment: After one of his commanders (Jubal) is possessed and kills another marine (which is a cardinal sin, by the way) what can Loken do? He can't shoot Jubal that would be breaking the oath of the Imperium. So he does the next best thing he wrestles the gun out of Jubal's hands and nearly gets thrown off a cliff. Right after he gets up Jubal draws his knife. And thus it breaks into a knife fight. After even beating Jubal, Loken tries to keep him alive. Before he is forced to kill him.
    • Whilst in a sparring match with a Lucius (the proud sword-fighting member of the Emperor's Children). Loken beats him by grabbing his sword hand and punching him to the floor.
    • Which is not to say that Lucius doesn't have his moments. Lucius challenges Loken to a rematch in the next book, and wins. Also, during heavy combat with the Megarachnids, Lucius picks up a limb of one of the fallen, and uses it as a weapon.
  • Saul Tarvitz (who eventually befriends Loken) survives an attack by bladed-spiders and vicious birds.
    • A particularly interesting moment. Tarvitz accidentally destroys the source of the transmission jammer when he uses explosives on trees because he didn't like the way the body's of soldiers were hanging on them.
  • Nero Vipus slices off his arm after it was injured saying that he "threw it away"
  • In Legion a soldier named Dinas Chayne, head of a special bodyguard squad, manages to STAB Alpharius with an unpowered sabre, through his power armour, and causes him to bleed a little. Of course Alpharius simply cuts him in half lengthwise after that, complete with a pithy one-liner.
    • Can we just clear this up: a Badass Normal fences a post-human demigod to a standstill, but then gets his sword stuck in his opponent's Nigh Invulnerable power armour whilst injuring him - an opponent who can shrug off blows that would liquify Chayne. Fucking badass. Unfortunately, futile.
    • Iacton Qurze yes he was treated like a doddering old fool of a space marine but he was actually a lot smarter than he looked and on his own managed to break the back of a megarachnid invasion wave.
    • The sheer Magnificent Bastardry of Alpharius' meeting with the Cabal. First, he recieves the undying loyalty of Grammaticus' best friend and his lover. Next, he equips them both with teleporter beacons so that, when Grammaticus "escapes" to warn the Cabal of their millitary incursion, he leads the Primarch and his best troops straight to them.
    • Three words: "For the Emperor."
    • At the climactic naval battle, an entire Imperial Fleet is desperately fighting a single Alpha Legion battle barge. After losing dozens of vessels to this single threat, the commanders try to escape. Cue another Alpha Legion ship.
  • In Graham McNeill's Mechanicum, the Emperor himself gets one, although it's told second hand. In the 11th century, the Emperor manages to defeat and BIND the Void Dragon. It ought to be mentioned that the Void Dragon is the most powerful of the C'Tan star gods (just to put it in perspective, a weaker C'Tan, the Nightbringer, was capable of defeating the collective Eldar race and their actual Gods in combat). All the more reason why the Emperor is a walk Moment of Awesome.
    • Of course this is after the Void Dragon got hit by some planet destroying super-weapons that weakened it a bit.
      • That's just an excuse the Void Dragon tells the Tech Priest he now hangs out with.
    • It gets better. While the Emperor's paranoia and arrogance hand him the Idiot Ball on various occasions afterwards, here he's in perfect Magnificent Bastard form. He knows, by prescience, that many technically-oriented people will come to Mars in the millennia to come. So he binds the Void Dragon there, in a place few will go, just constricted enough that its technology-focused influence will inspire great works of engineering and seed the idea of a Machine-God without enough contact to make the resulting Machine Cult actually loyal to the Void Dragon.
  • The last words of Huron-Fal, the Death Guard dreadnought in Flight of the Eisenstein. He's been betrayed by his Primarch and his Legion, the city he's in is being hit with a virus so potent that it liquifies those it infects, and he's been infected, so what does he do? What any good Space Marine would do, of course! overload his reactor, saying "This death... this death is ours. We choose it. We deny you your victory".
  • Battle for the Abyss Fifty loyalist Space Marines aboard a small fleet of ships which is quickly destroyed vs the most powerful Mechanicus created warship ever devised, containing alpha level psychers and tens of thousands of Word Bearers. You better believe that some serious COMAs happen.
  • After De'shea is in its entirety a Moment of Awesome for Kharn. And it's not his martial prowess he earns it with, but his brain. After Angron, freshly brought to his flagship from a Last Stand that killed all of his old comrades, in the grip of guilt and rage, killed the first seven Captains of the War Hounds, Kharn (the 8th Captain) manages to get through to him and convince him to accept the War Hounds as his legion and to reverse his opinion of the Emperor. While being flung around like a rag doll and being beaten within an inch of his life and never fighting back. All the more impressive because while they talk the same language, Angron grew up on a primitive world as a gladiator slave - and as such doesn't understand most of the concepts Kharn takes for granted. And Kharn manages to bridge the cultural difference and translate. While every bone in his body is being shattered.
  • The First Heretic gives us our first view of Corax in combat. Beating down a dozen daemonically possessed Word Bearers he proceeds to almost kill fellow Primarch Lorgar, all the while demanding he explain his treachery and is only stopped by the intervention of the Night Haunter.
    • To complement that moment we have Lorgar ignoring the words of his tutors and rushing off to save his Possessed Space Marine sons form being slaughtered by Corax and unleashing his full psychic potential. Doubless as a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming.
    • Incarnadine's Big Damn Hero moment near the end. Sure, it failed. Sure, it was on the side of Chaos. But facing down three Custodes, giving them a fight for their lives, and killing one of them is one hell of a feat.
    • "I always hated you, Xaphaen"
      • Let's give some context for this one. After all the other Custodes had been killed by the Possessed World Bearers, Sythran faces down the remaining six and, before accepting his inevitable demise, hurles his spear through Xaphen, who had been a Jerkass throughout the book. Then he takes off his helmet and breaks his vow of silence to deliver a Bond One-Liner before the others kill him. AWESOME.
  • So, how many characters do you know who have set a whole planet on fire? Because I only know of one: Horus mother****ing Lupercal.
  • The end of Prospero Burns when The Chaos Demon reveals itself, cutting its way through the Space Wolves, only to be stopped by Bear. Bjorn is one of the greatest heroes of the Imperium for a reason
  • Iron Within is Moment of Awesome for Warsmith Dantioch.
    • Let's mention how he and his 30 loyalist marines, one Dreadnaught, a platoon of Imperial Armymen and some gene-spliced miners managed to hold off the might of the Iron Warriors, multiple traitor Army forces, and at least one Legion of Titans ("The God-Machines") for over a year. This was achieved by building a base on a hostile planet... down a hole that could only be accessed by dropships for twenty minutes at a time, from a cavern BELOW the base, which could at will be FLOODED with burning promethium, constructing the base so that each segment was autonomous and could hold out indefinitely, then, when the enemy forces were at their most committed, detach the base from the ceiling of the cavern, plunging it into a burning lake of oil. Then escaping and stealing his enemy's flagship. Oh, did we mention he did this whilst artificially aged to the point where he should have been dead?
  • At the end of the Age of Darkness, Lion El'Jonson faces off against Konrad Kurse, who explains that after the heresy, since Jonson led his legion on a crusade to hunt down the Night Lords, and not participate greatly in the Heresy, that none shall know where his loyalties lie. Jonson's response is to calmly ask Konrad's forgiveness, for stabbing the Night Haunter when he was preoccupied and then to declare that loyalty, even if it is doubted, is its own reward. Then followed up by the most Badass line by a Space Marine: I left my blade in a Primarch's back.
  • The Priest in The Last Church seeing through the Emperor's talk revealing him for what he is. He knows the Emperor better in a space of an hour than others do in years.
  • Know No Fear is absolutely crammed with this:
    • Roboute Guilliman vs Kor Phaeron: While Kor Phaeron is waxing over how he will use his athame to corrupt the Primarch of the Ultramarines to the service of the Chaos Gods, Guilliman says that Phaeron made the mistake of not killing him. Roboute Guilliman then plunges his Power Fist (which should have lost power at this point) into Kor Phaeron's chest, then shows the Master of the Faith his own black heart. An impressive moment for someone who has been suffering the fandom's hatred for several years now.
    • The horrific but amazingly demonstrated effect of what an accelerated ship alone is capable of. The Campanile, taken over by daemonic forces and manipulated into Calth local space, is accelerated to its maximum with void-shields active. It manages to tear through several Ultramarine ships and the Calth orbital hub, decimating everything in the area as a prelude to the Word bearer assault. Beautiful, breath-taking, terrible.
    • The last chapters of Know No Fear is one gigantic Heartwarming Moment for the Ultramarines, the Imperial Army, and the loyalist forces of the Mechanicum, culminating with this single line:

This is a dynamic combat shift. This is the game changed. Hesst would approve. Guilliman would approve.

      • This is preceded by a vanguard of Ultramarines, Mechanicus Skitarii, Imperial Army soldiers and assorted armour have taken a Data Engine that can retake control of the Calth orbital defense weapons. Unfortunately, they are being rapidly curbstomped by an entire warhost of Word Bearers. When Imperial forces, the scattered remnants of Ultramarine companies, Army battalions and a Titan armour unit begin returning the curb stomp in an unprecedentedly well co-ordinated assault that changes the estimated time of annihilation of the Ultramarines from three minutes, to well over an hour. And then the orbital weapons are returned to Ultramarine control.
    • A special shout out goes to Ultramarine Sergeant Thiel, who singlehandedly organised survivors on Guilliman's flagship armed them with the relic weapons from the Primarch's personal archive, and counter assaults the Word Bearers with a fury and tactical prowess normally seen from Captains. It should also be mentioned he is awaiting censure and discipline for running simulations and writing treatises on how to fight other Astartes. Thiel's censure markings are then repurposed- as the markings of Sergeants and section leaders for easy identification.
  • The escape of the Raven Guard from the Isstvan system in Deliverance Lost. Spending hours dodging continual weaponsfire from a small fleet of enemy ships, with nothing but their stealth systems to protect them, Corax decides that rather than just flee he is going to get some measure of revenge. He slowly positions his battlebarge over the Word Bearers flag vessel of the pursuing force, decloak and jump away. This drags the enemy ship unshielded into the warp, where its crew last just long enough to realise what has happened to them.
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