Bloody Night Sky

Puck and Jill scramble clear of the smoldering cave as Rosine, sealed inside the moth's giant frame, rushes headlong to spear Guts on her forehead stinger. He raises the Dragon Slayer and turns the strike aside, though the force bows him backward and flings him out of the cavern. Rosine follows into the open, hovering against the moonlit dark, her beating wings fanning the fire until the surrounding trees catch.

Once Puck confirms Jill is unharmed, Rosine dives, venting jets of air through pipes in her body to shatter the sound barrier as she comes. Guts deflects the pass but is hurled back again, unable to track her blinding approach and deafened by the booms. She strikes again and again, and each time he barely turns it away. Understanding he cannot survive parrying an attack he cannot see, he devises a plan and, on her next dive, shields his torso with the sword while his arms guard his face rather than blocking outright. Reading this as an opening, Rosine drives her horn into his flesh arm, his metal prosthetic keeping it from reaching his skull.

Believing she has missed her mark, she finds Guts dangling from her spike by the pierced arm. She lifts him high above the trees and holds still before the moon, savoring his fading consciousness, and tells him she means to fly at full speed and rip him apart. At those words his eye opens, and he completes his scheme, training his prosthetic on the moth abdomen and yanking the cannon's back-up trigger with his teeth to blast the ball clean through her. As Jill looks on in dread, both plummet from their staggering height.

Rosine attacks Guts with supersonic dives from her moth body. Guts feigns exposing a weak point, letting her impale his arm rather than his face. She lifts him to a great altitude to kill him, and he fires his concealed cannon arm through her body, sending both crashing toward the ground.

Appearing in Young Animal issue 2 on January 9, 1998, this twenty-page Conviction Arc chapter stages the aerial climax of Guts' duel with the fully transformed Rosine.