Guardian Angels of Desire (4)

Slumped over a broken pillar, Guts endures the Count's mockery of his frail human body until Puck fires back that the demon is just as breakable beneath his monstrous shell. The Beherit slips from Guts' pocket, and Puck snatches it to keep it away, a chase cut short when Theresia stumbles into the throne room and recoils in terror from her father's Apostle shape. As the Count rounds on Puck, Guts' thrown knives buy the elf time. Battered but unbroken, Guts is knocked into the very pillar shielding Theresia, and when the killing blow comes he pulls the girl in front of him as a shield. The Count falters, and Guts blasts his cannon arm into that hesitation before slicing off the demon's head with his blade gripped in mouth and prosthetic hand.

Guts drives a knife into the severed head to prove the strength of a mortal, forcing a horrified Theresia to watch and threatening Puck when the elf tries to intervene. He hacks at the face until his dagger snaps and he slips in the pooling blood, then sits up laughing before the two stunned onlookers. The Count, clinging to life, whispers that he does not want to die, and his blood creeps toward the Beherit. The relic shifts its scattered features into a human arrangement and begins to weep tears of blood.

Powered by the Beherit and the Count's desperate will to survive, Guts, Puck, Theresia, and the Count are pulled into a realm made of staircases twisting at impossible angles. As the group stares about in confusion, the Count proclaims the coming of the Great Ones. All of them lift their eyes to the God Hand gazing down from the summit of a stair.

Guts uses Theresia as a shield to behead the Count and then desecrates the demon's still-living head. The dying Count's blood activates the Beherit, which weeps and opens a portal. Guts and the others are drawn into the staircase dimension where the God Hand appears.

This chapter delivers the first appearances of the God Hand members Slan, Ubik, Void, Conrad, and Femto, the last of whom is identified with Griffith. It stages the Beherit's activation and the arc's shift from a single Apostle hunt into direct confrontation with the demon lords. Guts' cruelty toward the Count marks a low point in his treatment of Theresia.