God of the Abyss (1)

Guts rushes the apostles scaling the arm. The first to reach him carries sharp spikes, and after dodging its strike he pries one loose with his dagger to use as a weapon. He cuts down many of the creatures around him without taking too much harm. Slan watches him struggle to stay alive and finds it fitting that his fierce will to survive will only feed Griffith's transformation further. Guts fights on until an apostle clamps both hands around his throat. He bites into its hand, and in its anger it flings him against one of the giant fingers, dazing him, though he recovers in moments and returns to the attack.

Griffith, meanwhile, feels himself descending into a bottomless ocean. The deeper he goes, the more visions reach him of the band being slaughtered, their deaths nourishing him. He feels their pain as they die yet remains emotionally hollow to it. In the dark of the abyss he makes out a whirlpool from which bubbles shaped like Beherits rise past him toward the surface. There he is met by a presence he takes to be God.

Guts strips a spike from an apostle to use as a weapon and slays many of them on the arm. Slan observes that his will to live only fuels Griffith's transformation. Griffith sinks through a dark abyss, experiencing visions of the band's massacre while feeling nothing, and encounters an entity he believes to be God.

Part of the Golden Age Arc, this chapter was published in Young Animal issue 13 on June 28, 1996, across twenty-three pages. It sets up Griffith's confrontation with the entity later revealed as the Idea of Evil.