Battle

Beneath a stormy sky split by lightning, the Band of the Falcon lines up opposite the massed Tudor army. In the tense hush before combat, Casca hides a cramping ache in her stomach, brushing off Judeau's concern as nothing. Griffith gives the order and the two forces slam together in a furious melee. The armies look evenly matched, yet the seasoned Falcons cut down their foes with ease, with one exception: Casca, hampered by her pain, only barely fells a hulking opponent before a towering, heavily armored warrior named Adon steps into her path.

Word of Casca, the lone woman leading hundreds under Griffith, has reached Tudor's ranks, and Adon taunts that she must have earned her rank in Griffith's bed. Enraged, she strikes wildly, but he shrugs off her blow and cracks her skull with his trident, sending her tumbling from the saddle. The head wound piled atop her stomach trouble leaves her drained, unable to mount any real defense.

Adon offers a grim bargain: surrender as his captive and become his army's plaything, or take his next strike as her last. Casca spurns him and steels herself for the killing blow, only for the trident to be stopped by Guts, who has arrived just in time and asks why she is not acting like herself. He swats Adon back with a single stroke, and the two men square off to fight in earnest.

The chapter runs twenty pages within the Golden Age Arc and first appeared in Young Animal issue 10 on May 14, 1993. It sets up the duel between Guts and Adon Coborlwitz.