Flower Storm Monarch

Guts and his companions stand overwhelmed by the spiritual weight pouring off Danan, whose identity as the elf lord has just been made plain. Schierke and Ivalera can barely stand the pressure of her presence, and Guts himself is left speechless at having finally found the sovereign he crossed the sea for. Before he can address her, she asks for a moment to deal with the pair who conspired against her rule.

She confronts Puck and Magnifico over their scheme to crown Puck as an elfin king while Magnifico sold elves off as pets. Rather than dwell on how monstrous the idea is, she picks it apart on its own terms: Puck would rule as an idle freeloader who has no grasp of the daily labor she performs tending the archmages, and peddling elves would be both a commercial failure and a scandal. She hands down a light sentence, a single day helping the brownies with chores, and the two are comically hauled away.

Turning to the real purpose of the visit, she reintroduces herself as Danan and reveals she already knows the group came to restore Casca's sanity. She welcomes Schierke, Farnese, and Ivalera to accompany her and Casca through the Corridor of Dreams, but she turns Guts away, sensing a fear of him inside Casca that could sabotage the rite. Stung but trusting, Guts asks Schierke to look after Casca in his place.

Danan leads her chosen party into a chamber grown thick with spirit-fed mushrooms and explains how the ritual works: the three women will slip into Casca's dreams and then the deepest layers of her mind, using the same astral techniques they already rely on, though here the dreamer sets the rules. Once they lie down and drift off, Schierke wakes first in a silly childhood reality where a monkey-like Isidro torments her over a hoard of honey, then finds Farnese cast as a washerwoman scrubbing their friends in the shape of their clothes. Reaching Casca's own dream, they see it rendered as crude childish scribbles, with Guts drawn only as a black silhouette, before a swarm of petals guides them toward a looming vision of the Eclipse and its blackened sun.

The closing page reads as the Eclipse yet also strongly echoes the eye of the Berserker Armor helmet and the Beast of Darkness. Magnifico's attempt to escape punishment by pleading insanity plays on the real-world insanity defense used in courts across Japan and the West. A lengthy hiatus followed this installment, running from September 2016 into March 2017.