Beast of Darkness

The Beast takes a wolf-like shape with jagged, lightning-red eyes, a form drawn straight from the darkness inside Guts. Once he first dons the Berserker Armor, the fetish remolds itself in the Beast's image, its helmet twisting into the creature's snarling face.

Nothing but Guts' ugliest feelings compose the Beast: fury, spite, and above all his craving to see Griffith destroyed. As Guts slowly reclaims his humanity, the entity pushes him back toward killing, treating Casca and his new companions as anchors of a conscience it wants gone, since it reasons that their deaths would erase his morality and clear the path to revenge. Perversely, it also urges him to treasure them, certain they will die regardless and eager for the despair that will follow. It carries Guts' lust as well, drawing him toward Casca and once nearly driving him to assault her while flashing visions of tearing her apart the way Griffith did. Its loathing of the White Falcon defines it, naming him the very light that scorches it.

Across Guts' two-year hunt for apostles after the Eclipse, the Beast swells alongside his malice. Following his defeat of Rosine, the restless dead take its shape to taunt him and reveal its nature as his own darkness given form, hinting he may sink into it and become a monster no different from Griffith. In Godot's mine it presses him onward with the reminder that the blood must keep flowing. Later, worn down from caring for a mind-shattered Casca, Guts briefly surrenders to it and turns his lust upon her before recoiling in horror, an episode that pushes him to accept the fellowship of Farnese, Serpico, and Isidro. The Beast returns in force with the Berserker Armor, whose helmet warps into its visage; wearing it, Guts overpowers the apostle Grunbeld in a feral rampage and is freed only when Schierke projects into his mind and reminds him who he is. Its grip tightens as the armor's Od grows stronger with every use, until the witch can no longer reach him easily. She carves a talisman into his brand to bind the Beast in ethereal chains, yet in a fevered dream it warns that her constraints cannot last and that it will wait for his companions to die. On a remote western island it seizes him again to annihilate the Sea God's tentacles before turning on his own allies, and only the Moonlight Boy's interference lets Schierke pull him back. On Elfhelm, the armor's smith Hanarr confirms the danger, explaining that the Berserker Armor means to consume whoever wears it, a warning that echoes the Beast itself.