Episode 45: Courage

Surveying the heaped dead, Wulf judges that the survivors have lost their appetite for war and sends fresh terms of surrender. Canute forbids his tired Jomsvikings from bedding down in the village houses, insisting the goal was to claim the farm intact rather than plunder it, a restraint the aging Sweyn reads as fitting for a king even as he privately vows to keep killing until his paradise is won. Back at the stronghold, a shaken Olmar wanders among the maimed and dying, hallucinating the man he slew before vomiting in horror.

Snake relays the ultimatum to the family. Ketil's wife refuses to abandon their land and blames the whole disaster on Snake, while Thorgil eagerly offers to make a glorious last stand with twenty men. Sverkel silences the argument by ruling that the choice belongs to the heir Ketil himself named. Summoned before them, Olmar chooses to surrender, admitting he is frightened for everyone's lives and simply wants it to end. Thorgil mocks the boy who started the war for backing down, but Olmar owns the decision, and Sverkel quietly tells the unconscious Ketil that his son has finally become a man.

Learning that Thorfinn has gone to negotiate, Einar demands to know why Leif let him leave after such a long search; Leif answers that a larger purpose now moves the young man, and that he has promised to return. Einar races toward the enemy camp to find him.

Thorfinn presents himself at the royal lines claiming to speak for Ketil, but the guard Drott dismisses him as a filthy slave and refuses to fetch the king. Rather than fight back, Thorfinn seizes on the soldiers' wager over how many blows he can absorb and stakes himself on the bet: if he endures a hundred punches he earns an audience, and if he fails he dies. He explains to a horrified Einar that the farm's people treated him with a kindness he means to repay, and squares up against the furious Drott.

Airing May 30, 2023 as the forty-fifth overall episode and twenty-first of the season, this MAPPA installment adapts chapters 94 and 95 along with anime-original material. Tarou Kubo and Tomoko Hiramuki directed, with Seimei Kidokoro on storyboard. Sweyn appears only as a vision, and Arnheid features in flashback.