Dragon Slayer

The Dragon Slayer is the enormous sword that has become Guts' trademark arm since he endured the Eclipse. It is so oversized, thick, and rough that early descriptions dismiss it as little more than a lump of unrefined metal rather than a proper blade.

Its origin traces back to Godot's youth, when the smith still lived in a castle town rather than the mountain hut of his later years. The local king ordered his vassals to produce a weapon able to kill a dragon, and Godot's lord passed the commission to him. Weary of crafting decorative arms for nobles chasing elegance, Godot poured himself into the work and produced the colossal, impractical Dragon Slayer. Furious at how crude and unwieldy it was, his lord threatened to kill him, driving Godot to abandon the town and take up residence at his mine.

Given its staggering weight and breadth, the weapon behaves closer to a bladed maul than a conventional sword, yet Guts still shears clean through his targets with it. The momentum alone can rend an enemy apart in one pass, frequently cleaving several foes at once. Even apostles in their true shapes struggle to withstand it, often left with shattered bones and pulped organs. That same mass makes the blade versatile: Guts flattens opponents with its broad flat and raises its width like a shield when he needs cover.

Under the Berserker Armor his savage, near-inhuman strength multiplies the sword's effect, so that ordinary apostles fall in seconds and far larger creatures drop just as fast. In that state the blade punches through Grunbeld's cannon-repelling barrier and even splits the corundum hide of the dragon-apostle's true form, a skin reportedly tougher than steel. Because the sword has cut down so many apostles, pseudo-apostles, and other vile astral beings, their malice has hardened it, leaving it able to injure even lofty entities such as the Sea God and the manifested forms of the God Hand.

Guts alone truly wields the Dragon Slayer. It sat forgotten in storage for years until he seized it mid-fight against a roaming apostle and slew the creature in two effortless strokes, stunning Godot, who believed its weight made it useless. When Slan takes rudimentary shape in Qliphoth, the Skull Knight explains that accumulated malice has made the blade able to wound her, and Guts runs it through to scatter her form. During the clash with the Kushan general Daiba at Vritannis, Schierke channels a fire spirit into the sword, letting Guts blast apart the Kundalini's watery body. No one else manages the weapon: two Holy Iron Chain Knights strain merely to lift it, and Isidro ends up pinned beneath it.

Kentarou Miura first imagined an Asian swordsman with a katana and a trick left hand set in a medieval-European world, then landed on the giant blade and prosthetic cannon arm, admitting the massive sword began as a hook to draw readers. He felt earlier oversized swords in other series were merely drawn large without conveying real heft, so he calculated how much muscle his hero would need to swing one. Notably, the Dragon Slayer is the sole weapon shown to harm a God Hand member, though it has never actually cut down a living dragon despite the persistent fan belief that it once did.