Like a Baby

Guts drills Isidro on the fundamentals of combat, rapping the boy across the skull with a branch to punish a reckless overhead swing aimed at a larger foe. He stresses that raw technique can be handed down but battlefield instinct cannot, leaving Isidro to earn that on his own. A short distance off, Serpico and Puck weigh the merits of the stew Serpico has cooked for the company.

Farnese, meanwhile, broods over a run of failures: mushrooms she gathered turned out poisonous, clothes she washed came apart in her hands, and a torch she swung at spirits scorched Isidro instead. Convinced she offers the band nothing, she finds herself reduced to minding Casca. She tries to reach the broken woman by piling fallen leaves alongside her and quietly apologizing for the harm she nearly did her back at the Tower of Conviction.

Reaching under a rock after a rabbit to prove her usefulness, Farnese glances up to find Casca gone and the light fading. Her frantic search carries her deep among the trees until darkness closes in and her dread turns from the missing woman to herself. Morning finds her curled unharmed beneath a tree's roots, discovered by Puck. Isidro grumbles that Serpico abandoned the night's spirit swarm to hunt for her, then reveals Casca had simply walked back to camp on her own, driven by hunger. Guts regards Farnese in silence and turns away, his disappointment unmistakable.

Beside a river later, Farnese admits to Serpico that she only weighs the group down. He offers to escort her back to their holy city, an offer she quietly refuses, preferring to keep searching for herself over being buried again beneath rank and obligation. The travelers soon meet an old shepherd who directs them toward Vritannis by the emptiest route. He speaks of allied fleets gathering there against the Kushan, of the dead king and the vanished Charlotte, and of a Midland teetering toward ruin. Guts keeps his own past with the realm to himself. As the shepherd leaves, he warns that trolls swarm the mountain trail ahead.

Guts reinforces that Isidro must develop his own sense for fighting rather than copy others. Farnese loses Casca and spends a terrified night lost in the forest, only to learn the woman had returned to camp alone. Serpico offers to take Farnese home and she declines. A shepherd reveals that war looms over Midland and that trolls infest the mountain path the company means to cross.

This installment belongs to the Millennium Falcon arc and appeared in Young Animal issue five on February 22, 2002, running nineteen pages. Its focus rests on Farnese's crisis of purpose within Guts' band, while its closing pages seed both the Vritannis war effort and the troll-plagued country that shapes the events soon to follow.