Pandemonium

Unable to receive Rickert while obligations keep him busy, Griffith leaves the veteran waiting, and Locus seizes the opening by asking Owen to lead the young man off so he can show him something. Owen resists at first, then relents once two sentries burst in warning of intruders inside the capital. He hurries away with them while Locus and Rickert slip out together.

The pair ride through a rear gate onto a lengthy span crossing a vast, mist-choked ravine. A black dome waits on the far side, which Locus names Pandemonium, the quarters set aside for Griffith's war demons while they dwell in the city. Rickert quietly grasps that these demons are creatures cut from the same cloth as Zodd and Irvine. Probing the boy's motives, Locus rattles off guesses, and his last one lands nearest: Rickert came to press Griffith about the Eclipse. When Rickert answers that he already understands what happened, Locus studies him and observes that no real hatred shows in his gaze, an observation that recalls what Guts once told him atop the hill of swords.

Elsewhere, Erica and two boys dare one another to slip into the barn behind Luca's inn, where a monster supposedly hides. Daiba, the culprit, startles them off, though an aching knee stops any pursuit. When Erica lingers to check on him, he hypnotizes her into handling his chores and steering clear of the barn. Still curious afterward, she fetches a leg brace from the wagon that carried her to the city, a piece that once belonged to her late father Godot, and fastens it around Daiba's leg. Luca scolds him for concealing the injury, then hears Erica credit Rickert as the mind behind small explosives and a rapid-firing crossbow. The girl also recalls her father hammering out a colossal blade; Daiba calls such a weapon unwieldable, even as he and Luca each silently picture the one swordsman who does swing it.

Within Pandemonium, the two visitors reach a giant coliseum where an apostle grapples with an ogre as its kin roar from the stands. Locus lays bare the place's purpose, that it feeds the monsters' appetite for slaughter. He adds that every apostle began as a human granted a fresh body and existence by causality, that they usually keep to themselves, and that Griffith has gathered them by offering belonging in return for their service as guardians of mankind. Because of him, Locus concludes, people no longer war among themselves or dread death.

Locus reveals Pandemonium to Rickert and explains that Griffith's apostles were once ordinary human beings remade by causality. Rickert connects the war demons to Zodd and Irvine. Erica presents Daiba with her father's leg brace. Locus frames Griffith's rule as an end to human warfare and to the fear of dying.

This installment belongs to the Fantasia Arc and first ran in Young Animal issue 16 on August 8, 2014, spanning twenty-five pages. Guts, Irvine, and Zodd appear only within recollections.