Warrior

Bonebeard backs his crew, saying it falls to adults to teach children manners, and when one underling begs him to kill the group, the captain tears off the man's half-severed arm and bites into it as punishment for failing to address him as "Captain." Isidro's hopes of trading clever insults collapse when Mule charges the pirate without a word. Mule rains blows on Bonebeard, who matches him easily and notes his refined, aristocratic form. To expose that weakness, Bonebeard drops backward into a dinghy, where his footing on the pitching boat far outstrips Mule's.

Rocking the hull to unbalance his foe, Bonebeard disarms Mule and pins him beneath his blade, weighing ransom against selling him to a Kushan harem. Isidro leaps down and forces the captain to block, then throws himself into the duel, delighted to reclaim the spotlight. His rolling, swinging style keeps him steady across the drifting boats, and he holds his own far better than Mule did.

Bonebeard offers Isidro a place among his pirates, and while the boy refuses, the pause lets the captain spring a blade hidden in his peg leg toward his chin. Isidro barely twists away, and Bonebeard dismisses him as skilled but short on the bloodlust a true fighter needs. As he orders the children bound, Sonia stops Schierke from acting, having spotted the turning point: a knight. Isidro had landed atop a blanket hiding the sleeping, armed Azan, and the jostling wakes him in a fury. He hurls Bonebeard into the sea, storms the wharf, and wipes out the rest of the pirates while Guts watches unseen from an alley.

"Warrior," a twenty-page chapter of the Millennium Falcon arc, first appeared in Young Animal issue 22 on November 12, 2004. Mule and Sonia lead the freed Kushan children out of Vritannis, and Sonia proposes bringing them into the reborn Band of the Falcon, then extends the same invitation to Schierke, as the two boys squabble over who fought best.