Depths of Hellfire

While Serpico and Isidro are asked to guard her motionless body inside a rope circle, Schierke prepares to reach into Guts and pull his reason back to the surface. Guts, meanwhile, turns back toward Grunbeld for a fresh clash. A cluster of newly made apostles, bored after failing to hunt down Flora, beg their commander for a role in the fight, and Guts obliges by rushing them and lopping off most of their heads mid-transformation.

A survivor lunges from behind, but Guts twists clear, gashes its flank, scrambles onto its spine and drives his blade through its skull. A second, mantis-shaped foe lands a blow that cracks several of his ribs, only to discover that the wolf jaw of Guts' helmet has clamped onto its limb, anchoring him in place long enough to bury his sword in its face. As the armor punches fresh spikes into him to knit the fractures, Serpico and Isidro look on in dread, their earlier awe replaced by unease at how feral his method has grown, all speed and slaughter with no regard for his own survival.

Schierke's glowing spirit-form slips into the churning od of the armor, a hollow space brimming with flame. Deep within she meets a towering Beast of Darkness and, certain Guts is somewhere inside it, throws herself in. She drifts past tiny glimmers that hold his memories: the old Band of the Falcon, Casca at her strongest, Griffith before the fall. Farther in, engulfed by dark, she stumbles onto one vast recollection of the Eclipse and is drawn, terrified, into it, calling out for Flora until she spots the sigil Flora inked onto the armor. That mark forms a still refuge amid the storm. Drawing near it, Schierke finds a lone human-shaped wisp of fire whose only clear feature is a left eye cut like a jagged bolt.

Schierke begins her attempt to restore Guts' sanity by projecting her spirit into the Berserker Armor. Guts slaughters a wave of Grunbeld's fledgling apostles but takes broken ribs and further spikes from the armor. Serpico and Isidro grow disturbed by how animalistic his fighting has become. Inside the armor's fiery void, Schierke passes through Guts' memories, confronts the Eclipse, locates Flora's protective talisman, and finally reaches the fire-wisp of Guts' surviving ego.

This installment belongs to the Millennium Falcon Arc and runs twenty-one pages, first appearing in Young Animal issue 18 dated September 12, 2003. Casca, Griffith, Rickert, Pippin and Corkus appear only within flashback glimpses drawn from Guts' stored memories.