Episode 90: Sprint

Tearing the wrappings from his face, Guts crashes through the woods in a blind, screaming run that startles the wildlife around him. He has no goal in mind, only the faces of his dead crowding his thoughts: Judeau and their first night's talk, Corkus and his habitual sneer, the silent Pippin, Gaston and the raiders devoted to their captain, Casca and the family the band had become, and at last Griffith. He vaults ravines, tumbles from ledges, and lets branches tear his bandages loose and his wounds open again, heedless of the damage.

Guts runs on through his tears until nightfall drops him to his knees, spent, in an open field. As rain begins, he stares upward and sees the image of Femto looming in the sky. A sudden stab of pain pulls him upright: the Brand on his neck is bleeding on its own, and whispers rise from the swaying grass around him.

Small, near-transparent shapes no taller than the blades of grass close in, and Guts stands to meet them before a far larger presence at his back makes him spin. It is the Skull Knight, who tells him he now dwells in a realm neither entirely strange nor entirely known, the Interstice, where the world of the living borders that of the dead.

Appearing in Young Animal issue 21 on October 25, 1996, this twenty-page Golden Age Arc chapter follows Guts' flight from the cave and his first waking brush with the spirits drawn to his Brand, opening the haunted existence that now awaits him.