Episode 54: Reunion in the Abyss

The body on the floor is Griffith's. Starved to bone and scored with whip marks, he has had the skin stripped from his back to bare the muscle, and an iron mask shaped as a mockery of his White Falcon helm is bolted over his face. Guts rushes to gather him up and finds the same horror across his chest and sides, his nails torn away, his tongue gone, and the tendons of his limbs severed.

Too shaken to move, Casca cannot hand over the mask's key, so Judeau does instead. The pair unlock and lift the covering, but what lies beneath is so terrible that Guts orders Casca to keep her distance, and they fit the mask back into place. Griffith stirs, and on seeing Guts above him he weakly closes his fingers around his friend's throat. Overwhelmed, Guts does not notice, pulling Griffith into a trembling embrace as Griffith rests a hand over his. Charlotte pleads to approach and is restrained by Pippin, while Casca's heart hammers with turmoil she cannot voice.

The cell door abruptly bangs shut, sealing them in. The torturer leers through the grate, announcing that he has summoned the guards and relishing the prospect of fresh victims. Guts asks whether this man reduced Griffith to such a state, and the torturer proudly confirms it, describing over a year of cutting Griffith's tendons to prevent escape, then peeling nails and skin while denying him food and sleep, using heated irons and boiling water. He boasts of flaying Griffith's face the same way, then lifts a severed tongue he wears like a trophy and begins to lick it.

The sight snaps Guts' restraint. He charges the door, shatters it, and runs the torturer through on his massive sword. Holding the impaled man out over the yawning drop, Guts draws his dagger, cuts out the torturer's own tongue, then lowers the blade so the body slides free and plummets into the abyss. An arrow strikes the ground at his feet, and the party looks up to find the stair packed with soldiers demanding they surrender their weapons. Casca reads Guts' face and knows he has no intention of yielding.

Griffith is revealed alive but grievously mutilated after a year of imprisonment, and briefly regains consciousness in Guts' arms. The torturer traps the group in the cell and confesses to his cruelty, prompting Guts to break out and kill him. Armed guards then flood the stairway and order the party to lay down their weapons.

The fifty-fourth chapter of the Golden Age Arc spans twenty pages and first ran in Young Animal issue six on March 10, 1995. Griffith's true face is deliberately hidden from both the other characters and the reader here. The scene establishes the depth of Griffith's fall and marks the moment Casca's feelings for Guts begin to weigh visibly on her.