Familiars

Keeping watch through the cabin window, Guts notices fog rolling off the shoreline, and the brand on his neck immediately begins to bleed. He wakes the others and warns of an approaching threat. Schierke confirms the danger is unusual, since the talismans she prepared for Guts and Casca already repel the spirits that come each night. The door bursts inward to reveal a crocodile that stands on two legs and grips a spear. It flings the weapon at Isidro, who evades it, and Guts guns the beast down with his repeating crossbow. Reading the corpse, Schierke concludes the animal is a familiar, a creature possessed by a spirit that a hidden sorcerer commands from a distance.

Serpico spots a whole pack of the armed reptiles pushing through the mist. With the moon full, Schierke's power runs high enough to summon the ward of the Four Kings, the same protection she once raised over the church at Enoch Village against trolls. Guts binds his hand to the Dragon Slayer so his hold will not slip, ignoring her warning that fighting while injured is reckless and that a full moon unsettles the mind. Isidro's consecrated berries detonate on contact, and Serpico's sylphs turn far deadlier, lifting him aloft and shredding the crocodiles.

Isidro struggles because his usual habit of striking upward at larger foes fails against low-slung animals, so Puck advises him to daze them with berries first, a method that works but tires him quickly. Guts then wades in and fells several crocodiles with one stroke, though his hand trembles from the toll the Berserker Armor keeps taking on him. He steadies himself and readies for more, unaware that the black-haired boy cradled by Casca is fixing an intent gaze on him.

This chapter, titled "Familiars," runs twenty-two pages within the Millennium Falcon arc and first appeared in Young Animal issue 9 on April 16, 2004. It opens the seaside clash against the Kushan sorcery shadowing Guts' party and foregrounds both the full moon's boost to Schierke's craft and the strain the cursed armor keeps placing on Guts.