Golden Age (3)

Gambino dies with Shisu's name on his lips, and his falling body knocks over a candle that sets the tent ablaze, drawing the rest of the mercenaries. Certain that Guts has murdered their leader in cold blood, they curse him as a traitor and drive him from the camp. He flees on horseback, and a pursuer's crossbow bolt catches him in the back, sending him over a cliff into shallow water, where the mercenaries leave him for dead. Guts wakes beneath the night sky with no direction, and when a wolf pack closes in he is ready to let them finish him, only for his body to fight back on instinct until the beasts scatter and he collapses. He is then taken in by another roving band in need of a fighter. Four years later, during an assault on a fortified castle, that band's advance stalls before a giant named Bazuso, a feared warrior said to have slain thirty men and a bear. When no one dares face him, a fifteen-year-old Guts, now grown and bearing a greatsword, volunteers for seven gold pieces. He outmatches the astonished Bazuso with startling speed, shatters his battleaxe, opens a mortal wound at his waist, and brings his blade down through the pleading knight's skull.

Guts' flight from the mercenary camp nearly ends his life, as a crossbow bolt and a fall leave him for dead in the shallows below a cliff. His survival hinges on instinct alone when wolves surround him and his body wards them off without his willing it. The chapter's second half leaps four years ahead to his debut as a mercenary in his own right, where his defeat of the renowned Bazuso in single combat announces the fighter he is becoming.

The installment closes the account of Guts' boyhood and his break from Gambino's band, and it introduces Bazuso, the veteran whose defeat establishes the teenage Guts as a formidable sword-for-hire. His demand of seven gold pieces before the duel marks the hardened sell-sword he has become.