Chapter 70: The Dream

Battered but unbroken, Einar keeps swinging at the equally beaten farmhands until the four of them give up and back away, warning that both slaves will pay dearly once word spreads that they raised their hands. Einar only smiles, glad to have won. Beside him Thorfinn lies senseless, drifting through a dream in which he wakes clean-shaven in a sunlit meadow near his home village, a lamb bleating over him. Sitting up to see his old village, he sinks back in relief, convinced that all of it, his father's murder, endless battles, the giant he fought, and his life as a slave, was only a terrible dream, and he closes his eyes at peace.

Thors approaches and pets the lamb, but when Thorfinn rises to describe his strange dream, his father cuts him off, saying he smells blood. He asks who Thorfinn killed with the swords now in his hands, and Thorfinn looks down to find himself gripping his bloody short swords, restored to the teenage killer he was under Askeladd. Thors reminds him the blades were only ever meant for self-defense. As Thorfinn reaches out, a corpse's hand erupts from the soil and seizes his foot, and more dead burst free to drag him screaming into the ground. Grasping at Thors too, the cadavers pull as Thors apologizes for all he failed to teach his son and repeats that Thorfinn now understands the truth he was told at six: he has no enemies, no one does, and there was never anyone he needed to hurt. The earth collapses and Thorfinn plummets, catching himself on the crumbling wall of the pit, where he stares down at grotesque dead soldiers locked in endless battle and wonders whether this place is Valhalla.

The farmhands concede the fight and withdraw, threatening retribution against the slaves. Thorfinn's dream begins with a false peace in which his violent past seems erased, before Thors appears and confronts him over the blood on his short swords. Thors reaffirms the creed that Thorfinn has no enemies as the corpses of the dead drag both of them down. The dream ends with Thorfinn clinging to the wall of a pit above warring cadavers, questioning whether he has reached Valhalla.

The chapter interweaves the aftermath of the brawl with a symbolic dream sequence that revisits Thors' guiding words from Chapter 7. The imagery of the dead reaching up from the earth externalizes Thorfinn's guilt and sets up his confrontation with Askeladd in the following chapter. The events were adapted in Episode 33 of the anime.