Mysterious Fog

Guts, Serpico, and Isidro hold the line for Schierke, Farnese, Casca, and the black-haired boy as the crocodiles keep coming. Guts feels the Beast of Darkness pressing at his thoughts, but he tempers it by tapping only a sliver of the Berserker Armor's strength. When one reptile slips past the men and nears the shack, Schierke is locked in her ritual, so a terrified Farnese steels herself to guard the others. Instead, the boy simply meets the creature's eyes and it withdraws, leaving Farnese and Ivalera baffled.

Schierke finishes calling the Four Kings and a many-hued barrier rises around the cabin, its glow bright enough that Puck likens it to something beautiful and Serpico to an aurora. She warns the men by thought that the ward offers little against the crocodiles, whose flesh bodies let them slip through defenses meant to stop astral things. As she casts her mind out to find the puppeteer, the Beast gnaws deeper into Guts and the armor's helmet starts to take shape over him.

Serpico pinpoints the culprits first: four harashada, Kushan monks perched on the cliffs, whom he decapitates in a single stroke of his sylph blade. With their masters dead, the crocodiles revert to beasts, dropping their spears and crawling back to the water. Yet the danger holds. Fog seeps from the severed heads and briefly shapes a human face before dissolving, and a colossal form heaves out of the sea. Serpico flees to warn the group as a makara, a monstrous blend of whale and elephant, hauls itself across the beach behind him.

"Mysterious Fog" covers twenty pages of the Millennium Falcon arc and first ran in Young Animal issue 10 on May 7, 2004. It ties the crocodile familiars to Kushan sorcery, hints at the emperor Ganishka through the vanishing face in the mist, and introduces the makara that will test Guts' fraying control.