Battle to Capture Doldrey (5)

Guts is in desperate straits: his sword lies snapped and he has been thrown from his horse. Fighters on both sides pause to watch his clash with Boscogn, and far off on a cliff a mysterious rider sits watching from the saddle.

Inside Doldrey's walls, Casca fights off sleep from the toxin coating Adon's arrows. She narrowly evades his thrusts, one of which strikes her helmet away, until he pens her against the outer wall. Improvising, she plants her sword and vaults over his spear, flipping past him, and on landing lays a single slash across his face that splits his cheeks and stretches his mouth. Reeling from shock and blood loss, Adon drops dead, and Casca orders the watching soldiers back to the assault.

Boscogn readies a charge at the wounded, isolated Guts. Several Band of the Falcon soldiers try to block him and are cut down without slowing him. All seems lost until the distant horseman flings his enormous cleaver of a sword across an impossible span, planting it in the ground before Guts and startling everyone present. Griffith recovers first and shouts for Guts to take it up. He does, meets Boscogn's charge with the new blade, and with one mighty swing strikes off both the commander's head and his horse's.

Tudor's army, save for Gennon, buckles under the loss. Gennon commands them to fight on, but their will collapses further when they see that the Band of the Falcon has seized Doldrey.

Casca vaults over Adon's spear and kills him with a single facial slash, then rallies her soldiers to press the raid. A mysterious swordsman on a distant cliff, later revealed as Zodd, throws a huge cleaver-like blade to the disarmed Guts. Wielding it at Griffith's urging, Guts beheads Boscogn and his horse in one stroke. Tudor's forces lose their morale as the Band of the Falcon captures Doldrey.

This is chapter 27 of the manga, part of the Golden Age Arc, spanning twenty-five pages. It was published in Young Animal issue 24 on December 10, 1993. The oversized blade thrown to Guts here foreshadows the Dragon Slayer he later carries.