Episode 63: Roar of the Mad Beast

With the Band of the Falcon gaining ground, a Black Dog Knight urges Wyald to order a retreat, but Wyald is far too absorbed in his fight with Guts to abandon it. In a single motion he rips a huge cavity into a tree trunk with one hand, then punches the weakened wood so the tree topples onto his own fleeing knights, crushing them.

Enjoying the clash too much to end it, Wyald hurls his club into a knight's face and begins to change, to the band's shock and horror. He balloons to more than three times Guts' height, his lower half becoming the body of a headless, ape-like beast crowned by his own torso. A wide mouth gapes above the creature's chest, and three eyes stare out, one on each shoulder and a vertical one running up the abdomen. Guts notes how closely the transformation mirrors Zodd's.

In his monstrous form, Wyald tears an entire tree from the earth and swings it at Guts, who is flung into the forest canopy before crashing down senseless. Wyald then advances on Casca, singling her out as the lone woman among the male ranks of the band. Before he can seize her, a volley of arrows from troops under Judeau thuds into him, doing nothing but irritating the beast. He plucks the shafts out and hoists his tree toward them.

Wyald fells a tree onto his own retreating knights, then transforms into a towering ape-like monster resembling Zodd's apostle form. He knocks Guts unconscious with an uprooted tree and turns on Casca, shrugging off a volley of arrows from Judeau's archers.

The sixty-third chapter of the Golden Age Arc is twenty-one pages long and debuted in Young Animal issue sixteen on August 11, 1995. Wyald's transformation confirms him as an apostle in the vein of Zodd, and the parallel Guts draws between the two reinforces the supernatural stakes rising around the band as the arc nears its climax.