Action: Fast Fighting

There must have been a switch in this desk, too. A door flew open and two men burst in, one armed with two long knives, one with a crossbow. It was quite horrible, what Mr. Tulip did to them. It was, in its way, a kind of skill. When an armed man runs into a room in the knowledge that there is trouble, he needs a fraction of a second to assess, to decide, to calculate, to think. Mr. Tulip didn't need a fraction of a second. He didn't think. His hands moved by themselves. It required, even to the calculating eyes of Mr. Slant, a mental action replay. And even in the slow-mo of horror, it was hard to see Mr. Tulip grab the nearest chair and swing it. At the end of the blur two men lay unconscious, one with an arm twisted in a disconcerting way, and a knife was shuddering in the ceiling. From The Truth, by Terry Pratchett

Action: A Siege Catapult

There was a deafening crash as a section of parapet was ripped apart nearby, sending out a cloud of dust and flinging chunks of stone into the air. Splinters whizzed around them. A soldier not ten strides away was neatly decapitated by a flying block. His headless body swayed for a moment on its feet before its knees buckled and it toppled backwards off the wall.

The missile crashed down somewhere in the Lower City, smashing through the shacks, buncing and rolling, flinging shattered timbers up like matchsticks, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Glokta blinked and swallowed. His ears were still ringing, but he could hear someone shouting. A strange voice. A Styrian accent. Cosca.

Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie

Character: Furious Dialogue

"You think I care a damn for your broken piss-pot of a town?" thundered Bayaz. And he turned on his heel and stalked across the polished floor towards the entrance, the ringing echoes of his voice still grating from the shining walls, the gliyyering ceiling.

Jezal dithered a moment, weak and trembling, then shuffled guiltily away, following the First of the Magi past the Legate's horrified, dumbstruck guards and out into the daylight.

Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie

Character: Colon 2

[he] stood very still for a while, until his heartbeat wound down from a whine to at least a purr.

Source: The Fifth Elephant by Sir Terry Pratchett