Feeble Flame

Erica and Rickert guide Guts up a snow covered rise beside Godot's forge. At the summit the swordsman finds the ground bristling with blades, every one distinct and buried point down. Rickert reveals that he spent the past two years hammering them out to sharpen his craft, planting one for each comrade lost during the Eclipse, though the count still falls far short of the true toll. The contrast stings: while Guts chased revenge and clung to grief, the boy quietly laid his friends to rest, one sword at a time.

The group descends into the hollow that once sheltered Casca. Puck, sensing it as only an elf can, confirms that his kind truly lived there long ago. Guts agrees to pass the night inside, shielded from wandering spirits, while Rickert restores both the Dragon Slayer and the artificial arm. Before parting, the swordsman admits he had no standing to snap at the boy and offers an apology, and the others head off.

Alone by his campfire, Guts cannot rest. Two years of nightly ambushes have wired him to brace for attack in the dark, and he sleeps poorly without a blade in reach. Godot's counsel echoes in his head, yet the last sight his ruined eye ever caught, Griffith assaulting Casca, keeps forcing its way back. When the cavern wall seems to twist into the shape of the wolf spirit known as the Beast of Darkness, it murmurs at him to keep on killing, but he turns and finds only bare rock.

Piece by piece he accepts a hard truth: he walked away from the Band of the Falcon, so avenging its dead was never his charge. He recalls Corkus condemning him for leaving, Judeau warning against a return once he had cut himself loose, and Casca urging him to chase his own dream even in solitude. What kept him from vanishing entirely into bloodlust, he admits, was his feeling for Casca. Fearing he abandoned her the way he once left Griffith kneeling in the snow, and remembering the Demon Child's warning, Guts commits to saving her whatever the price.

Once he learns Rickert was the child rescued by the same performing troupe he had joined, Puck breaks the fourth wall by echoing Void's line about all things resting within the currents of causality, first spoken back in Episode 76.

The chapter runs twenty three pages, belongs to the Conviction Arc, and first ran in Young Animal issue 21 on October 23, 1998.