Night of Falling Stars

Mule silently wonders about the pale wisps drifting around Griffith, and Sonia answers the unasked question again: they are the spirits of those who fell in the day's fighting, gathering serenely about the White Falcon through the night. Nearby, Mule notices people kneeling in prayer, and Sonia explains they are the families of the dead, come to bid their loved ones goodbye. Griffith extends his hand, releasing a wisp that floats to a mother and her son and shapes itself into the husband and father they lost. The reunited family shares a last few moments before the figure melts into mist, and the remaining wisps fade away with it.

Alone before the silent crowd, Griffith is greeted by Sonia, who runs to embrace him, and he pats her head in thanks for bringing Mule. When Mule asks where the spirits have gone, Griffith says only that they have gone to become one, and that Mule will understand in his own time.

Griffith rises and introduces himself, and Mule, stunned by the revelation, bows both in greeting and in gratitude for the rescue of his soldiers. Griffith deflects the thanks, crediting Mule for supplying the Band with provisions, but the young noble can barely take in the words. He had pictured a towering, muscular figure, and Griffith's slight, almost inhuman presence stirs feelings he cannot explain, a racing heart and tears he did not expect. Almost without willing it, Mule draws his sword and offers it up, and Griffith accepts the blade, inducting him into the Band of the Falcon.

At the forest's edge, hidden Kushan scouts prepare an ambush, one of them coating an arrow with poison and aiming it at Griffith's turned back. Rakshas materializes behind the assassins, warns them against disrupting the induction, and slaughters them, the sounds carrying to Zodd just beyond the trees. Far away, Guts, Serpico, and Isidro ready themselves for the nightly wave of spirits now animating corpses in a bog, and Serpico asks Farnese, who is guarding Casca, to keep their fire from dying out.

Chapter 195 runs twenty pages within the Millennium Falcon Arc, published in Young Animal issue 03 on January 25, 2002. It seals Mule's devotion to Griffith and highlights the messianic aura of the reborn commander, cutting away at the close to Guts' beleaguered party to keep both storylines in view.