Black Swordsman

The wandering Black Swordsman comes to the town of Koka hunting an apostle known as the Snake Lord. He announces himself by cutting down a pack of thugs in a tavern and freeing a caged elf named Puck, then falls into the hands of the town guards and is dragged to the castle and tortured. There he confronts the mayor, exposing how the man has purchased his own safety by feeding Koka's people to the monster who rules them. Learning of the swordsman's defiance, the Snake Lord resolves to reduce the whole town to ash and rides out burning everything before him. The Black Swordsman, who reveals his name as Guts, rises from the slaughter to meet him. After the Snake Lord unfurls his true shape as a colossal cobra and nearly devours him, Guts blasts the demon's face with his cannon arm and splits it apart with the Dragon Slayer, leaving it to burn while Puck looks on.

The chapter opens with Guts destroying a female apostle who lures him with the promise of a tryst, firing his hidden cannon arm down her throat. In the Koka tavern he leaves one thug alive to carry word to the castle that the Black Swordsman has arrived. Freed from his cage, Puck explains the mayor's corrupt bargain with the ruler. While Guts recovers from his torture, his Brand of Sacrifice begins to bleed, warning him that the Snake Lord draws near. In the climactic duel he denies the demon a clean death, tormenting it with his crossbow so it might taste the terror apostles inflict on humans, and demands to know where he can find the God Hand. The Snake Lord dies without answering, insisting such knowledge lies beyond an apostle's station, and Puck can only whisper a single word.

This installment served as the template for the opening episode of the 1997 anime, which followed it closely while omitting both Puck and the female apostle. In that version the tavern scene instead centered on the Snake Lord's men menacing a girl named Collette and her father, an added sequence introduced the God Hand and the spirits that torment Guts through his brand, and the Snake Lord's beherit passed to Guts after the demon's death. The 2016 anime revisited the tavern scene as well, though there Guts subdues the bandits without killing them, beating them down with his prosthetic arm before rescuing Puck.