Golden Age (1)

While traveling, a company of sellswords under a leader named Gambino stumbles onto a leafless tree strung with the hanged. A newborn is found in the gore below one of the dead women, seemingly delivered after she had already died, and the men take the infant for a corpse. Gambino's partner Shisu, still grieving a miscarriage of her own, lifts the child and is scolded for it, but when the baby is dropped it wails and proves itself alive. Against the objections of superstitious men who read the birth as an ill sign, Gambino permits her to keep the boy for solace.

The child is named Guts, and three years on he can only watch as Shisu is claimed by plague. By age six he trails the fighters into battle hauling Gambino's gear, and his handler beats him with a spear shaft when he is too slow with a swap. Sword lessons begin soon after, forced upon him with a full-sized adult blade since no child's weapon exists in camp. When Guts nicks his teacher's cheek, an enraged Gambino answers with a slash that opens a long wound across the boy's nose. That night Guts falls asleep hugging the weapon, and the next morning his guardian, uneasy with guilt, hands over a healing salve.

Three more years pass. At nine, Guts stands in the front rank beside Gambino during an assault on a fortress, struggling against a far larger foe yet claiming his first kill; Gambino cuts down an enemy about to strike him from behind. Afterward the boy turns over the raid's earnings and receives a single coin for his effort. That night, unable to rest, Guts spots a shadow at his tent. A fellow mercenary called Donovan, who had earlier put a request to Gambino, slips inside, overpowers the boy, and pins him down beyond reach of his sword.

Guts is born beneath his hanged mother and rescued from among the dead by Shisu. She dies of plague when he is three, leaving him alone in Gambino's rough company. Forced into swordplay with an oversized blade, Guts scars his mentor and is scarred across the nose in return. At nine he scores his first battlefield kill during a castle raid. The chapter closes on Donovan sneaking into the boy's tent and pinning him helpless.

This opening installment of the Golden Age Arc runs 49 pages and first appeared in Animal House issue 08, dated August 1991. It establishes the grim origin of Guts and his formative bond with Gambino. The final scene with Donovan sets up the trauma explored in the chapters that follow.