Revelation (3)

Three hundred mercenaries flee a single foe they call the god of the battlefield, Zodd, who cuts them down effortlessly even in his human shape. Perched afterward on the heaped dead as crows peck at the bodies, he tires of weak men and apostles and longs for a real rival, counting only the Skull Knight as his equal while his thoughts drift to the Black Swordsman rumored to have slain several apostles. A glowing white falcon then appears in a vision and speaks to him. Enraged, Zodd takes his beast form and charges, but it slips around him and flies away, and a split opens down his left horn and face.

He wakes to find the horn truly broken off and his brow torn open, and hears a disembodied voice deliver a prophecy: when the sky comes down at the sacred ground where blind sheep gather and raise a pillar of flame, the desired one will arrive. Elsewhere, Guts and Puck reach an abandoned village whose church is stacked with corpses. Wary of spirits even by day, Puck points to an ancient elven shrine of stone slabs he believes the spirits will avoid.

There Guts dreams of a great pyre topped with the Holy See's falcon, where a chained Casca is dragged by an angry mob and burned alive under a full moon. He wakes suspecting incubi, then notices the small, deformed Demon Child hiding beneath a shaded slab. Rather than answer his questions, it shifts its face into Casca's and repeats the word danger as it ignites, echoing the very prophecy Zodd heard before its embers fade. Guts realizes something has befallen Casca.

Zodd massacres an army of mercenaries but craves a worthy opponent. A vision of the Falcon of Light breaks off Zodd's horn and delivers a prophecy. Guts and Puck take shelter at an elven shrine in a corpse-filled village. Guts dreams of Casca being burned at the stake. The Demon Child appears and warns Guts with the same prophecy Zodd heard.

This Birth Ceremony Chapter installment of the Conviction Arc ran in Young Animal issue 19 in 1998. The shared prophecy, delivered to both Zodd and the Demon Child, points toward the holy ground of Albion and foreshadows the events at the Tower of Conviction.