Collapse

Beyond the walls, Luca and the Skull Knight watch a giant face in the earth multiply into many, each built from the bodies of starved refugees. She notes how they mirror the blood roaming the tower, and the knight privately reads every sign, vivid spirits surfacing outside the Eclipse, as proof that a momentous event draws near. When one colossus spots them, his horse tears between the spirits at impossible speed; he sweeps Luca onto the moving saddle and outraces them, glimpsing the egg-shaped Apostle still alive on a rocky slope.

At the tower's base, Holy Iron Chain Knights tell Azan the last cave heretics have been seized, though the captives raved about monsters. More concerned with the missing Farnese, Azan pays it little mind while the abbot dissolves into terror. Then the lower walls burst apart, and the possessed blood pours out and spreads; Azan orders an evacuation as the escaping spirits dislodge bricks and set the whole structure trembling.

Within, the ceiling caves and falling stone threatens everyone. The staircase gives way beneath Farnese and pitches her toward a gap open to the sky, until Serpico's arm shoots through the hole to haul her back. It proves futile as the tower crumbles further, dropping Guts, Jerome, Nina, Serpico, and Farnese amid the rubble. From above, Mozgus, Isidro, Puck, the twins, and the senseless Casca look on as the tower tilts back into the shape of an open hand reaching for the heavens, while a sea of possessed corpses fans out across Albion's outskirts.

This Conviction Arc chapter appeared in Young Animal issue 11 on May 26, 2000. It brings the tower's destruction to a head and gathers the scattered cast into a single collapse, the ruin's handlike silhouette and the spreading corpse-spirits foreshadowing the Incarnation Ceremony. The Skull Knight, Luca, the egg-shaped being, Azan, the abbot, Farnese, Guts, Nina, Jerome, Serpico, the twins, Mozgus, Puck, Isidro, and Casca feature.