Episode 61: Demon Dog (3)

Guts, Pippin, and Judeau lead their horses clear of the blast, which flings several Black Dog Knights through the air, and Guts pushes the group onward toward the forest despite the apparent win. Wyald and a portion of his knights crossed before the explosion, but the heavy losses force them to halt, souring Wyald's mood. When a soldier warns that the bridge is surely not the band's only trap, Wyald crushes the man's skull between two fingers.

Hearing the pursuit take up again, Guts wonders why death seems to stalk them whenever Griffith is near. He recalls Zodd's prophecy of Griffith's ruin and the Skull Knight's cryptic warning of an event called the Eclipse due in a year, a message delivered a year ago, and grasps that both foretell the same thing. Casca's voice pulls him back as she announces they have reached the checkpoint.

As Wyald's men chase them deeper into the trees, boulders are rolled down from the cliffs above, and Wyald shatters one falling rock with a bare fist. Even after these losses the Black Dogs still outnumber Casca's five, and they blunder into further traps: oil set alight by a hidden Falcon member and a storm of arrows from horsemen under Corkus and Gaston. Once Casca, Judeau, Griffith, Guts, and Pippin pull clear of the gap between the two forces, Corkus calls the charge, and the rescue force pours from the woods to engage Wyald's men. Guts turns to face Wyald, set on ending things with the inhuman warrior himself.

Wyald presses the pursuit through repeated Falcon traps, killing one of his own men to make a point. Guts realizes that Zodd's prophecy and the Skull Knight's warning both describe the coming Eclipse. The main rescue force ambushes the Black Dogs, and Guts squares off against Wyald.

The sixty-first chapter of the Golden Age Arc runs twenty pages and appeared in Young Animal issue fourteen on July 14, 1995. Zodd and the Skull Knight feature only through Guts' memories. This is the point at which Guts consciously connects the two prophecies to the impending Eclipse, sharpening the dread that shadows the arc's final chapters.