Jñānin

Facing the creature in his mind, Guts snarls, but it calmly insists it means neither him nor his friends any harm. It lays a hand on the helmet's snout and the metal splinters, nearly breaking apart. In the waking world Guts recoils from a foe no one else can see. He feels himself rising through black water toward a circle of moonlight, which becomes Schierke reaching down for him; she pulls him to the surface, and the Berserker Armor melts away the higher he climbs.

The helmet flies off and Guts comes back to himself. Isidro and Serpico hurry to his side while Farnese looks after the drained Schierke. Furious at having slipped under the Beast despite the Skull Knight's warning, Guts pounds the ground, until Schierke soothes him by echoing the words he had spoken to her on the beach. Isidro reasons that if she can always recall Guts, the armor could be used freely, but Schierke rejects the idea as far too dangerous. Farnese sides with the boy, noting the armor has kept them alive ever since Flora's mansion burned, and Guts, flustered by the praise, shuts the discussion down.

Watching the others, Guts privately mourns how nearly he killed them, and recalls the being that stopped him, a figure whose identity his rage had hidden. Serpico too fixes him with a wary look. The group then notices Casca moaning nearby and realizes she was the first to sense that the black-haired boy is gone. A search of the beach turns up nothing, and even Schierke cannot feel where he went; Farnese guesses he simply went home, while Guts quietly wonders whether the boy and the creature are one and the same. Unseen, the boy watches from the clifftop as they depart.

"Jñānin," a twenty-two page chapter of the Millennium Falcon arc, first appeared in Young Animal issue 13 on June 25, 2004. It resolves the makara battle and marks the debut of Daiba, the Kushan sorcerer aboard the offshore ship, who orders his land armies forward yet frets that someone nearby defeated his enchanted pishacha. As dawn breaks, Isidro glimpses the distant city of Vritannis, the party's next destination.