Fresh Blood

Battered and cut open by the apostles who outmatch and outnumber him, Guts still manages a real fight, leaping across their heads to hold the high ground until the tactic finally flings him past the edge of the giant hand. He rights himself in the air and drives his spike into the arm's wrist to slow his plunge, but the apostles crawl down after him, so he pulls the spike free and slides down on his back. His foot snags a ridge on the arm, throwing him off balance, and a second bump launches him clear of the limb entirely into a freefall.

He lands in liquid that cushions the impact and soon realizes it is blood. Around him lie the corpses of the Band of the Falcon, their blood forming this new red lake. Filled with dread, Guts cries out for Judeau, Pippin, Corkus, his old raiders, anyone still living, and gets no answer; his voice cracks when he calls Casca's name and fears the worst. At last Gaston answers, staggering over missing an arm and badly broken. He asks his former captain how it all came to this, the destruction of the whole band, recalling the unease that had gripped him ever since they first met Zodd and admitting that, looking back, Griffith always seemed too good to be true. Gaston goes limp in Guts' arms, and as Guts shouts at him to hold on, Gaston's forehead swells until his head bursts and an apostle crawls out of his neck. Guts stabs at it with Gaston's sword but misses as it slips away into the sea of blood. Kneeling over the headless body, Guts spots someone atop a nearby hill of faces and runs to him: Pippin. Something is wrong, for Pippin neither speaks nor stirs. Guts does not see that Pippin's back has been torn away and his body hollowed out, his corpse held upright by two tentacles reaching from the darkness behind him.

Guts is knocked off the giant arm and falls into a lake formed from his comrades' blood. He finds the maimed Gaston, who voices his long-held doubts about Griffith before an apostle erupts from his head and escapes. Guts then approaches Pippin standing on a hill, not realizing the body has been hollowed out and is being propped up by tentacles from behind.

This chapter of the Golden Age Arc appeared in Young Animal issue 15 on July 26, 1996, over twenty pages. It underscores the totality of the massacre through the deaths of Gaston and the desecration of Pippin's corpse.