Gambino

Gambino is a blonde-haired man hardened by the mercenary's trade. After a cannonball tore away his right leg, he was left to lean on a crutch, his fighting days effectively behind him. He met his end at the hands of Guts, the boy he had raised.

For all his experience in battle and command, Gambino was quick to anger, careless, and often drunk. His cruelty ran deep enough that he once sold the young Guts to the mercenary Donovan for a single night in exchange for three silver coins. Losing his leg only sharpened his bitterness, and he came to blame the boy for the death of Shisu and for his own ruin, branding him a bad omen and a devil's child for having survived his mother's death in the womb. That resentment eventually drove him to attempt murder. Even so, he was not wholly monstrous. He trained Guts in the sword and the mercenary's life, passed on hard, practical lessons, and once cut down a man about to strike the boy from behind. As a fighter he was a skilled swordsman and a capable spearman, and as a leader he proved shrewd and ruthless.

Gambino led a band of mercenaries, and it was among a cluster of bodies strung from a tree that his company found a newborn still alive at a dead woman's corpse. Shisu, a grief-stricken woman traveling with them, insisted on keeping the child, and though Gambino dismissed the baby as dead until it cried, he relented and let them name him Guts, over mutterings that the find was an ill omen. When plague claimed Shisu while Gambino was away at war, he laid the blame on the boy. He put Guts to the mercenary's life young, striking and berating him on the battlefield, yet also drilling him in the sword. When the boy insisted on a blade too big for him and once cut his cheek in training, a furious Gambino gashed Guts across the nose, leaving the scar he would always carry, then handed him medicine the next morning.

Harsh lessons followed. Guts was slipped into a decoy squad that ran headlong into an arrow ambush, and only he survived, wounded, whereupon Gambino congratulated him on learning that a man must live and fight for himself or be exploited and killed. In one of his cruelest acts, Gambino sold the sleeping boy to the pederast mercenary Donovan for three silver coins, then feigned ignorance of the assault afterward. A cannonball soon took his right leg, ending his career and eroding his standing as a leader, and he again heaped his misfortune on Guts, striking him with his crutch when the boy brought him a reward. That night, drunk and consumed by hatred, Gambino stole into Guts' tent to kill him, ranting that the boy had doomed Shisu and himself and confessing that he had been the one to sell him to Donovan. As he swung, Guts drove a fatal wound through his throat.

Gambino haunts Guts long after death. In a nightmare following the swordsman's first meeting with Griffith, he looks on from a hill of corpses beside a dog wearing Shisu's diseased face, reminding the boy that his leg and his death were Guts' doing, and his and Shisu's skeletons declare that Guts should have died in his place while the boy begs forgiveness.