The Brand

Wounded and staggering through a night forest, Guts hears jeering voices overhead and spots watching spirits in the branches before drawing his blade to meet their charge. Come morning, the elf Puck arrives riding a bird, hunting for the Black Swordsman he lost track of after the clash with the Snake Baron, and tumbles from a snapped branch to land beside the barely upright warrior. Puck offers to travel with him out of fascination for a life spent killing monsters, but Guts brushes the little elf aside as too frail and walks on alone.

Reaching a road as rain begins, Guts twice refuses a covered wagon driven by a traveling priest, warning that spirits stalk him. The priest insists divine protection shields anyone in his company, so Guts climbs aboard, deciding the man's fate is his own affair. The mark on his neck stabs with pain as unseen eyes gather in the trees. Inside he finds Puck already riding along and meets the priest's daughter, Collette. When the family assumes he is a mercenary, he lets the guess stand, then wraps himself in a blanket and sleeps.

A nightmare traps Guts naked between towering walls beneath a single enormous eye, his Brand weeping blood as a giant fetal creature closes in. He wakes to a one-eyed incubus clamped to his face and drives his dagger through it, explaining that such things feed on the terror of induced dreams. With the Brand bleeding again, he leaps out to warn the others of an attack. A spear bursts from the earth and kills Collette, skeletons rise under the control of spirits, and Guts orders the priest and Puck to flee while he hacks the risen dead apart. The priest lingers too long, and Collette's possessed corpse decapitates him before turning her sword on Guts. He severs her torso, fights until sunrise coughing blood, and when the taunting voices refuse to stop he empties his arm cannon into the canopy and leaves with Puck.

Puck reunites with Guts after their separation following the Snake Baron battle. A priest, his daughter Collette, and Guts share a wagon, and the incubus feeding on Guts is exposed and killed. A spirit-driven ambush leaves Collette impaled and her father beheaded by her own reanimated body, both dying because of their nearness to the Brand of Sacrifice.

The chapter marks the debut of Collette and her father within the Black Swordsman Arc. It establishes how the Brand draws hostile spirits toward Guts and endangers anyone near him, a recurring danger throughout the arc. The nightmare imagery of the walled corridor, the watching eye, and the fetal creature foreshadows torments tied to his branding.