Monstrous Priest (1)

The force of the ramming flings both Guts and Mozgus into Albion's outer wall, blasting away a broad section and terrifying the refugees beneath it. Guts rises from the debris still on the parapet, and the crowd, taking him for a black demon, panics at the thought that Mozgus has fallen.

Guts is thinking of something else. During his run down the Tower he glimpsed a small figure slipping the other way, and he looks up expecting the Demon Child. What he sees instead is one of the twin disciples streaking toward Casca. He is too distant to intervene, but Isidro has also caught the threat and hauls Casca down by the arm, slipping past the pseudo-Apostle. The second twin comes on behind it, marked by both Guts and Isidro, and then Mozgus stirs, heaves himself upright at Guts's back, and strikes, the blow barely parried.

As the other twin dives for Casca, Jerome is waiting and clips it with a single stroke, driving it off its line to rejoin its sibling aloft. Mozgus, already imposing as a man, now looms even larger. His transformation is complete, closer to a reptile than a bird: scales sheathe him, his muscles bulge, and his wings have coiled into massive bludgeons while his clothing shreds apart.

His mind, though, is his own. He vows to chastise Guts for the affront and draws out his scripture, all but severed by the earlier blow that it absorbed, the reason he still breathes. He directs the twins to take Casca and kill Jerome, Nina, and Isidro while he handles Guts, driven at once by faith and by vengeance for his slain disciples. The two strike together; Mozgus's wing whiffs while Guts lands a hit on his skull that does nothing against the scales. As the twins bank toward his allies and pull his attention, Mozgus reveals a concealed weapon, spreading wings whose every feather is bent into a fist and driving them all at Guts at once.

Guts and Mozgus smash through the wall, and the crowd fears the inquisitor dead. Isidro and Jerome fend off the twin disciples' strikes at Casca. Mozgus rises fully transformed into a scaled, club-winged brute who has kept his sanity, protected by his scripture. He splits his forces to hunt Casca and the others while battling Guts, then unleashes a barrage from his fist-shaped feathers.

The first half of Monstrous Priest ran in Young Animal issue 17 on August 25, 2000, across twenty pages. It stages Mozgus's full apostle-like metamorphosis, a scaled and near-invulnerable form that keeps his human reason, raising the inquisitor into one of the arc's most formidable threats.