Episode 55: A Way Through

Ordering the others to stay tight behind him, Guts throws himself into clearing a route back to the surface. The cramped stair prevents the guards from surrounding the group, letting him cut them down one after another. Lost in a wordless rage, he uses the corpses of fallen soldiers as shields against the arrows loosed from above, and soon no defender is left standing.

Casca has the powerful Pippin shoulder Griffith for the long climb up and out of the dungeon. Another body of guards waits just beyond the tower's mouth to cut them off, but the door bursts outward with explosive force, hurling dead men through the frame, and Guts follows drenched in blood that is not his own. Winded and near collapse, he pays no heed as the guard captain calls for him to be encircled, throwing himself back into the slaughter while Casca, Charlotte, Judeau, and the Griffith-bearing Pippin follow close.

A volley nearly finds them, until the king of Midland, looking markedly older since he assaulted his daughter, forbids his men to shoot for fear of harming Charlotte. Spotting Griffith on Pippin's back and realizing the two are fleeing together, the king buckles with rage. He then gives the order to summon the Bakiraka.

Guts single-handedly clears the prison stairs and blasts through the guards at the tower entrance, allowing the party to escape with Griffith carried by Pippin. The king halts his archers to protect Charlotte, then collapses in fury on seeing her flee alongside Griffith, and calls in the Bakiraka assassins to give chase.

The fifty-fifth chapter of the Golden Age Arc runs twenty pages and debuted in Young Animal issue seven on March 24, 1995. The king's visible aging underscores the toll of his obsession with Charlotte, and his summoning of the Bakiraka sets up the pursuit that dominates the following chapters.