Ambitious Boy

Farnese lingers alone before the smoldering remains of the three burned heretics, her guards quietly noting her habit of watching the fire until it dies out completely. Knights arrive with pressing news: a captive can point them to a heretic hideout in a nearby cave, and a lone warrior has just cut down four of the Holy See's Hunters. Farnese orders the march on the cave, but a final detail stops her, Azan and Serpico cold, since the intruder loose in Albion is unmistakably the Black Swordsman. Azan's instinct is to go after Guts, yet Farnese reminds him that arresting the man is no longer their charge. She turns to the battered, terrified Joachim, who knows the cave's whereabouts, and tells him to guide them there. Her real motive is to keep her distance from Guts, whom she still dreads after their last meeting.

Isidro has trailed the kidnappers into their cavern lair, hiding among the rocks along its rim. He watches the cult's leader address a ring of naked followers, preaching that the Holy See has lost the true meaning of the Falcon of Light while insisting the real truth is that power alone decides the victor. To prove it he presents Casca, hailed as a mighty witch, crowned with thorns and borne on a litter by four men, the only clothed figures besides himself.

With Puck's help, Isidro confirms the woman is Casca. The leader then has the naked Nina dragged in, intending to slaughter her and tear out her heart in Casca's honor before the goat-masked man consummates a union with the witch. Horrified, Isidro cannot allow either fate to unfold, so he improvises: he sends Puck back to fetch Guts while he stays behind pelting the cultists with stones to keep them off both women. His self-sacrifice is not entirely selfless, since he hopes it will win Guts over into teaching him.

The heretics scramble up toward Isidro's perch only to be driven back by his relentless barrage, and the boy daydreams that his lonely year of wandering will pay off in mastering Guts' style, complete with fantasies of Luca and her girls falling for him. As the cultists are drawn off, Nina dashes to Casca hoping to flee, but recoils at the sight of Casca's Brand bleeding as she clutches it in pain.

A sudden rush of noise turns every eye to the cookpot at the cave's heart, now spewing dense black smoke that molds itself into countless human faces. Above ground, Farnese orders the knights to converge on the cavern, guided in by Joachim. They watch naked figures stagger out without a fight, the foremost man's face bitten away before he crumples before the revolted soldiers. Inside, the released spirits have seized roughly half the cult, driving those bodies to butcher the rest around the panicked Casca and Nina. The chapter escalates the cult subplot into open supernatural horror.