To the Holy Ground (1)

Before dawn, Puck slips free of the sleeping Erica and drifts downstairs, where Rickert is already at the anvil. The elf praises his diligence, and the boy credits Puck for lifting Erica's spirits amid Godot's failing health and Casca's disappearance. Rickert is more grateful still that Guts held onto his mind; without the elf along for the journey, he suspects the swordsman would have drowned in bloodlust, and Guts' worry for Casca is proof enough that he remains himself.

Godot then forces himself up, dresses, and comes down to work the forge while strength allows. Handing his guardianship of Erica to Rickert, he recounts taking the girl in after the Hundred-Year War claimed her family and home, a whim that gave his blacksmith's life its one softer thread. He mends the battered Dragon Slayer and asks that a message reach Guts: do not become what he has. Come morning, Guts collects his renewed gear, the great blade looking freshly born and his armor lightened, and Rickert gifts him an improved repeater crossbow and a new gunpowder device. Told that Albion, a three-day trek northeast crowned by the Tower of Conviction, is the nearest holy ground, Guts sets off, shouting a farewell to Godot, who quietly believes he will never see the Black Swordsman again.

A month earlier, Farnese steers the Holy Iron Chain Knights, hundreds of refugees, and a heavy steel wagon toward Albion. Azan notes that some of those they shepherd fled Wyndham after the Kushan Empire seized it. Serpico wonders whether they should act, since the invaders oppose the Holy See and now hold Midland right up against Albion's frontier, but Azan tells him to wait for orders from above.

Farnese relives her summons before the Holy See in Vritannis, where she was grilled for losing the Black Swordsman after two years of pursuit. Her plea that the order was unready to face so fearsome a foe was branded insolence, and she was blamed for the deaths of highborn men under her banner. Only her family's enormous wealth spared her rank, a bargain struck with her father of the Vandimion line, and her hunt was suspended pending a fresh assignment. Leaving, she caught the officials trading interpretations of a shared vision of the Falcon of Light. Haunted too by her possession and the shameful act she forced on Guts, she rides on as the refugees marvel at the armored carriage bearing the inquisitor Mozgus, whose torments are whispered to rival the death tolls of war. As the column skirts a ridge, hidden men loose crossbow bolts that clatter uselessly off the iron shell.

The chapter runs twenty two pages, sits within the Conviction Arc, and first appeared in Young Animal issue 22 on November 13, 1998. It opens the two-part introduction of Albion and the inquisitor Mozgus.