Returning Alive

Casca is out of harm's way, yet Guts still trades blows with a force that never seems to thin. Dozens already lie dead and just as many press him, and he questions why he keeps risking his life in the black forest for a hopeless fight now that she has fled. Still his arm keeps moving, and he reckons the struggle will run until sunrise. Casca reaches Judeau and drops spent into his arms, but she has not left Guts behind in her mind, and she guides the Band of the Falcon toward him.

The company arrives at first light to a field strewn with Adon's fallen, and Judeau can scarcely believe one man felled so many. Casca finds Guts slumped against a tree with a fresh arrow in his shoulder, and her frightened shaking wakes him. His dry warning that she will only make the wounds worse eases the mercenaries, her most of all. A stretcher carries him back to camp, where the medic warns he will be sidelined for the rest of the campaign, a verdict Guts refuses and one that both angers the healer and troubles Casca. Griffith is absent at a war council.

That evening the band feasts over the pair's safe return. Judeau draws Casca aside to reveal that Griffith, on hearing of their fall from the cliff, ordered a search over the nobles' objections, calling the two indispensable to the company. Moved by his concern, Casca accepts from Judeau a pouch of elf dust, a gift from an elf he once met in his days as a traveling performer, then slips away to find Guts seated on a hill above the camp. This twenty-two-page chapter of the Golden Age Arc appeared in Young Animal issue seventeen on August 27, 1993.