Snow, Flames, and ... (2)

Serpico's recollections carry into adolescence. As Farnese matures into a striking young Vandimion, suitors circle her at every ball, all of them hoping to marry into the family's wealth. She spurns them and dances only with Serpico, whose common birth invites jealous rivals to challenge him to duels. He wins each one without effort but never truly commits, and Farnese punishes his indifference with the whip, growing fascinated by his scars. When she bites deep into his arm to taste his blood, he understands her feelings have turned into something far past a master's regard, though she never learns they share a father.

His mother's illness worsens until he can no longer tend her alone and places her in a sanitarium, where her delirium makes her mistake her son's face for the lover who abandoned her. Meanwhile Federico III returns to announce a marriage arranged for the sixteen-year-old Farnese, chosen purely to protect the house's standing. She submits, but that night Serpico finds her waiting naked at her crematorium, begging him to run away with her. He pushes her off, and moments later she sets the mansion alight, laughing, until he tackles her clear of a falling chandelier.

The scandal ends the engagement. Rather than watch over his unstable daughter, Federico ships her off to a monastery and sends Serpico along to guard her. The bitter irony is not lost on him: her old wish to leave together has come true, yet her affection has evaporated and she treats him as a servant once more. At the monastery she is chosen to head the Holy Iron Chain Knights, a post tradition reserves for a woman, and she throws herself into hunting and burning heretics with a zeal that delights the Holy See.

Those heretics prove to be nothing worse than a poor sect that preached sharing wealth, and Farnese condemns whole families alongside them. The horror peaks when she brands her own sanitarium the sect's headquarters and Serpico's mother a heretic. His mother, seeing only her long-lost lover, fails to recognize her son. Farnese thrusts a torch into his hands and orders him to burn the woman to prove she is not his mother, and the two of them grip the flame together. Three years on, the memory closes and the pair press on through the snow after the Black Swordsman.

Chapter 186 closes the two-part Serpico origin within the Millennium Falcon Arc across twenty-three pages, published in Young Animal issue 07 on March 23, 2001. Federico III and a young Guts appear in flashback, and the chapter reframes Farnese's obsession with fire as the engine of her later fanaticism.