Vicinity of Hell

Pain floods Guts' Brand of Sacrifice, and the beherit in his satchel trembles and shifts its features into a new arrangement. His composure slipping, he stares into the rippling pool ahead. Schierke guides the last villagers to safety and signals Guts through thought that Enoch's people are clear, but Casca collapses at the cave mouth, gripping her own brand. Sensing the horror at the tunnel's depths, Schierke's projected consciousness recoils and drops her body to its knees before she steadies herself. Guts, meanwhile, ignores her calls entirely, transfixed as the trolls' corpses fuse into a single rising mass that stretches upward into a torso and head, resolving at last into Slan.

Snapping free of his daze, Guts hurls himself at Slan, but she beats her wings to swat his charge aside and drops him face-first into the water. She then embraces him, confessing a fascination that has followed him since the Eclipse, and urges him to drown himself in rage. Reading his surging emotions from afar, Schierke resolves with Isidro to seal the entrance against the trolls still pursuing them, allowing Guts a brief window to flee first. Slan pins Guts with tentacles of troll intestines, clamps his head between her legs, and lifts him by his wrists before slashing his chest deep enough to shatter his armor. She caresses him and taunts him to run her through, asking him to make a sacrifice as Griffith once did. A curved spike, flung like a boomerang, then shears through one of her wings, and she looks up to find the Skull Knight seated on his horse.

A twenty-three-page installment of the Millennium Falcon Arc, this chapter ran in Young Animal issue eight on April 11, 2003. It stages the full corporeal manifestation of Slan and the Skull Knight's dramatic arrival, tying the deformed beherit and the vibrating brand to the God Hand's proximity.