Chapter 122: The Hunter and the Hunted (9)

The bolts Hild has driven into Thorfinn leave him unable to rise, his legs too badly torn to hold his weight. Sprawled and defenseless beneath her aimed weapon, he asks only for a stretch of time in which to answer for the harm he once dealt others. Hild has no patience for the appeal and readies herself to finish him, having already resolved that he must die. When she releases the shot, Einar hurls himself forward in a desperate bid to cover his friend, yet the bolt veers wide and passes uselessly overhead.

In that moment Hild sees the figures of her murdered father and her old teacher, their presence seeming to turn her aim away from Thorfinn. Shaken, she silently demands why the two of them would hold back her revenge and press her toward mercy for the man who destroyed her family, and the vision slowly quiets her fury. She then challenges Thorfinn to explain how he means to repay so vast a debt. He answers that he will raise a peaceful home in Vinland, a settlement that will bring more children into the world than the lives he once took. Hild calls the notion absurd and reminds him it can never return the people she lost, yet she agrees to watch and see whether he is sincere.

Hild warns that Thorfinn's continued existence now rests entirely with her, and that she will end him the instant his vows reveal themselves as empty talk. Drained by his blood loss, Thorfinn manages a word of thanks for the reprieve before losing consciousness. The installment is the ninth chapter of the storyline titled The Hunter and the Hunted and belongs to Volume 17. It ran twenty-eight pages, appeared in the 2016-01 issue, and was released on November 25, 2015.