Boy in the Back Alley

Only feigning sleep, Griffith overhears Casca and Guts and slips into a vision. In an endless white expanse he lies in his mask and bandages until a shadow falls across him: a robust, proud version of himself in full armor, who plants a falchion in the ground and points toward the distant castle he had longed for as a boy. Leaning on the sword as a crutch to lift himself, the frail Griffith watches his childhood self dash past insisting their game is not finished, and the void reshapes into the city of his youth as the boy runs off into a bright light while Griffith moans after him.

Guts and Casca are stunned to see the horses hauling Griffith's cart away; Casca guesses he overheard them and took the reins to escape. Doubting the leader could manage such a feat, Guts nonetheless mounts another wagon to give chase while Casca runs to alert the rest of the band. With a riding crop clenched in his teeth, Griffith pursues the vision of his younger self until a wheel strikes a large rock and hurls him from the cart. Sailing through the air, he falls into a second vision in which a healthy Griffith shares a quiet domestic life with Casca, the band's insignia hanging on the wall and a small boy named Guts playing outside with a dog.

The peaceful scene turns when a beherit rises out of his soup and jolts him awake, lying in a shallow river with his arm broken and bone jutting from the elbow. He bursts into laughter, then lays his neck over a sharp branch protruding from a nearby log and forces himself down, but pulls back at the last second and takes only a shallow puncture. Trembling and thrashing in the water as the sun sets, he notices something familiar on the riverbed and yanks it free: his crimson beherit, hanging from his wrist by the cord he once wore as a necklace. The chapter belongs to the Golden Age Arc and first ran in Young Animal issue 2.