Black Swordsman Arc

The Black Swordsman Arc launches the manga and introduces Guts as a brooding wanderer waging a solitary campaign against apostles and the demonic God Hand. Though it stands first in publication order, its events fall in-universe between episodes 94 and 95, slotting the story between the Golden Age Arc and the Conviction Arc that follows.

Traveling by night toward the town of Koka, the swordsman slays a monstrous female creature along the road. On arrival he announces himself brutally, cutting down a group of local thugs in a tavern and leaving a single survivor to warn the town's ruler that the Black Swordsman has come. He also frees a captive elf named Puck, who repays the kindness by healing him after Koka's men jail him, and he offers the elf his name: Guts. When the bloodthirsty Snake Lord tears through Koka burning everything in search of his challenger, Guts intercepts the apostle, cripples it, wrings information about the God Hand from it, and leaves it to burn.

Later, in another land staging heretic trials, Guts targets its ruler, the apostle known as the Count. He scatters the town guards and mutilates their commander Zondark before fleeing into a lab with the diminutive Vargas, who reveals a hidden passage into the Count's castle and the beherit he stole years earlier while escaping torture. A possessed Zondark ambushes them, wrecking the lab, and Guts parts from Vargas after claiming the beherit for himself.

Once the Count captures and executes Vargas, Guts storms the castle through the secret passage, finishes Zondark, and battles toward the Count, who mutates into a colossal slug-like horror. Overpowered at first, Guts turns the fight by seizing the Count's daughter Theresia as a hostage and landing a devastating cannon-arm blow. Desperate, the Count activates his dropped beherit and summons the God Hand.

The appearance of Femto, whom Guts furiously names as Griffith, drives him into a doomed assault that the God Hand member swats aside with ease. When the Count refuses to sacrifice Theresia, he is hauled into the Abyss, and Guts is dragged down as a branded sacrifice before blasting himself free with his cannon arm as the junction closes. Back in the physical world, he stops a suicidal Theresia from leaping to her death, deliberately steering her grief into hatred of him so that she chooses to live for revenge. He accepts her vow and departs, though Puck notices the usually stoic warrior is quietly shaken. The arc feeds directly into the Conviction Arc. Its screen adaptations condense or omit much of this material, with the 1997 anime folding it into a single opening episode and the 2016 anime blending it with early Conviction Arc elements while cutting the Count's full storyline. The arc runs to roughly 623 pages.