Sparks from a Sword Tip

The following morning the two lie together talking, and Guts sheepishly reveals the night before was his own first time as well. Casca understands then that Donovan's abuse is the root of his discomfort with being touched, and Guts tells her she has become the one exception. She asks whether his return means he intends to stay, but he holds firm that this is only a visit and that he will move on again. The waterfall carries his thoughts back to the year he spent training.

In that memory a young woman releases a heavy bundle of logs down the falls at Guts, who lifts his sword to split them as they drop, only to be battered harmlessly and left with his blade snapped in the water. At a nearby watermill the household's lone man, Godot, mends the weapon, explaining that he lives apart with his daughter because the old bluffs, once home to elves, are rich with ore. Asked why he took up smithing, Godot says it is simply the trade he was raised in, and that he loves the sparks thrown off when he strikes heated metal.

Sitting alone afterward, Guts weighs his solitary path and contrasts his own shapeless, shifting dream with Griffith's fixed ambition of a kingdom, resolving to live purely by the sword and to fight for no one but himself. In the present he tells Casca as much, promising to remain only until Griffith is freed and the band restored before departing. She laughs that he now sounds as certain as Griffith, then turns bitter that both men's dreams are selfish and will pull them away from her, until Guts silences her tantrum by grabbing her breast. He asks her to travel with him, wanting her in his life, and they kiss in the early light. Days earlier, woodsmen in the same forest had glimpsed a monster with a man's body and a serpent's head, and the pieces of an unstoppable event are quietly falling into place.