A Guide to Guts's Armors, Part 2.4: The Berserker Armor

 

A Guide to Guts's Armors, Part 2.4:
The Berserker Armor

Back to Finish the Job

Hello to both new and returning readers! I am Azurepark from r/berserk, and this is the conclusion of a five-part blog series on the form and function of Guts's armors in Berserk. The goal is to document the evolution of Guts's armor and equipment across the timeline of the story; to help fan artists and cosplayers to represent the details of these costumes as accurately as possible; and to make more people familiar with the fascinating historical armors and gadgets which Kentaro Miura often used for inspiration. 

I wrote the first four installments in rapid succession during July and August of 2020, when the New York metropolitan area was locked down against COVID-19 and I suddenly had a lot of free time to devote to such a project. I immediately started writing this last part, naively thinking I would wrap it up in a reasonable time and get on to writing the next Berserk article I had in mind. But I'm one of those writers who doesn't know when to stop. I kept making it bigger and going into more details, so that I was moving my original goalposts further and further away. Meanwhile I rejoined the workforce and lost the surplus of time and energy which had kickstarted my writing. I got writer's block. I procrastinated. I started and stopped more times than I can remember. But 2024 was the year I finally got it done, and I hope you'll find it was worth the wait.

To start this off properly I need to offer a tribute to the great Miura-sensei, who was still alive when I began writing this article such a long time ago. I felt truly crushed when we first got the news that he had died of an acute aortic dissection; Berserk was the story I most wanted to see the end of, and I thought Miura was still at the height of his powers. I can only guess that this sudden cause of death caught him unprepared. Did he regret leaving his masterpiece unfinished? Did he perhaps regret sacrificing so much of his personal life for the sake of his art, especially when he was younger? The only thing that softened the blow for me was seeing the outpouring of love for him that came from fans on the internet, fellow artists like George Morikawa, and especially his close friend Kouji Mori who produced a moving one-shot manga about their lifelong friendship. I was relieved and happy when publication resumed over a year later under Studio Gaga and Mori. Even if we'll never see the full glory of the finale that Miura would have crafted if he was still alive, I think we can at least hope for something that's faithful to his ideas and provides closure for the readers.

Kentaro Miura (left) with a translator named Emilio Gallago (right) on January 31, 2003.
Originally posted on Gallago's since-deleted blog, japonicante.blogspot.com

There's one more thing I want to add: If I frequently sound like I'm criticizing or nitpicking the design choices of Miura in this article, I want to make it clear that he understands the function of armor better than 99% of visual artists today. Many armors in medieval fantasy art look so ugly or impractical to me that I wouldn't even know where to begin. Miura was always different: from the beginning he was trying to show fighting gear that could plausibly work, even if his earliest efforts showed some gaps in understanding. Over the years he did a lot of research and added an increasing number of realistic historical armor designs to the world of Berserk, which are really delightful to see properly represented. But with the Berserker armor he was taking on a challenge: to design an armor that visually communicates the power and danger of Guts's inner Beast of Darkness, while still including enough practical details to make it feel like a real piece of equipment that gets worn and used. I think he did a fantastic job at striking that balance. Far from putting down his artistic creativity, I just want to help my readers understand the similarities and differences between Miura's creations and the historical examples he was inspired by.

About this Article

The Berserker Armor required me to change my format for this episode, because it does more than just protect Guts with inanimate metal. It's almost like a biological organism, capable of moving on its own and changing shape in response to the state of Guts's mind and body. We're going to see how the different modes and abilities of the armor tie are tied to Guts's relationship with the Beast of Darkness inside him, and how his struggle to not be consumed by the armor involves other characters such as Schierke, Casca, and the Black-haired Boy.

Instead of the way I did the previous essays, where I'd explain each armor's construction all in one go before ending with a summary of its battle record, I'm going to follow the Berserker Armor through a series of key scenes in the story with a heavy focus on the armor's powers and interactions with the characters. I will cover story and spoilers from volumes 26 to 37. While doing that I will frequently stop to explain whichever construction features are important to a given scene. The rate of switching between the narrative and technical passages gets awkward at times, but I hope you'll still be entertained.

I strongly encourage those who haven't followed from the beginning to click on these links and read Part 1, Part 2.1, Part 2.2, and Part 2.3 before proceeding. This essay will use a lot of technical terms and concepts that I explained in the previous entries, and I'm going to just charge ahead with the assumption that you've read those and will know what I'm talking about.

All original images were created by Kentaro Miura, unless stated otherwise. I have frequently altered these images by adding arrows and coloring to point out features I'm describing, or by changing the sequence and arrangement of images from their original page layout to help present the information.

The Berserker Armor: First shown in Volume 26, Episode 222, "Claw Marks"

Scene 1: Mansion of the Spirit Tree

When we left off in the last installment, Guts got wounded and lost the upper half of his Albion Armor in a confrontation with Slan in Qliphoth. While he and his party make their way back to the Mansion of the Spirit Tree, Flora finishes engraving a protective symbol inside the backplate of a sinister-looking black armor. She talks to the Skull Knight about this artifact from their pasts: she knows as well as he does how dangerous it is, but she's convinced that Guts will need to use it nonetheless.

Just then, a force of Apostles led by Zodd and Grunbeld attack Flora's home; by the time Guts and company arrive, the mansion is already on fire. Grunbeld steps forward to challenge Guts, while Zodd keeps the Skull Knight busy. In this state, Guts doesn't stand a chance. He can't stand up to Grunbeld's swings, he has no armor on his upper body, and the wounds he received from Slan are beginning to reopen. Flora uses thought transference from inside the blaze to say goodbye to Schierke and show her what she needs to do: get the Berserker Armor to the Black Swordsman. 

 

Swallowing her grief, Schierke goes to the Treasure Chamber with Serpico and Isidro and uses thought transference to summon Guts. Guts gets her message and makes a run for the Treasure Chamber while Grunbeld is momentarily held off by Flora's golems. Once inside he is already too weak to stand, so it's up to his companions to strip off the remains of his Albion Armor and put on the pieces of the Berserker Armor. Guts is an unusually tall and muscular man, meaning he could have been in major trouble if this armor had been made to fit a smaller person. After all, this is the first time that Guts suddenly had to wear an armor without being able to confirm that it fit beforehand. The fact that it fits him so well right away implies that the Skull Knight who wore it had similar proportions. Or maybe there's some magical explanation; I don't quite know.

The armor's power kicks in just in time, enabling Guts to spring up and slay an Apostle who is trying to force his way in. The armor is black all over and covers Guts in protective plate from head to foot. The style is extremely angular, with almost none of the spherical or cylindrical shapes that most historical European armor is based on, and which appeared frequently in Guts's previous armors. Pronounced ridge lines divide the pieces into faceted geometric shapes; on each piece of armor these ridge lines begin at a central pointed apex (such as the one over Guts's sternum on the breastplate) and radiate outwards to the edges. Both the ridge lines and the surfaces between them are concave in form, which makes them structurally stronger than flat shapes and creates a very memorable appearance.

While the form of the Berserker armor is highly fantastical, it has certain component parts and aesthetic forms in common with historical examples, particularly the German or "Gothic" style of the late 15th century. The German style often featured pointy or elongated shapes, plates with scalloped edges, and fluted decoration consisting of alternating ridges and grooves. The statue below resembles the Berserker Armor even more than most examples I've seen, with the breastplate, faulds, and tassets divided into deep, concave facets.

Sculpture of Saint Victor, Upper Rhine, ca. 1500, with later restorations; lime or poplar wood with gold and pigments; Wiesbaden City Museum, Collection of Nassau Antiquities, Inventory No. 10939
https://www.bildindex.de/document/obj22004012?medium=fmd488295&part=3

The next thing to notice is that under the plates, every inch of Guts's body has been covered by a dark membrane that behaves like a living, liquid shadow. I will call this dark covering "the shroud." In this scene Miura hasn't given us any views of where the shroud emerges from or how it covers Guts's body, but we'll get to see that in the next battle. The armor's shroud even covers Guts's face, so that we see only blackness when we look into the eye sockets and nasal cavity of the skull-shaped helmet. 

The Skull Helmet on Guts

For comparison, episode 362's flashback shows us that when the Skull Knight wore this helmet in some of his last moments as a mortal man, the shroud was covering his mouth and nose but allowed his eyes to show through.

A vision from the Skull Knight's past, when he was a
man of flesh and blood

The Berserker Armor's helmet is shaped after a human skull, although one without a jawbone. In fact, when we look at the shrouded area from the side it looks as if Guts's chin has disappeared somewhere in the amorphous material of the shroud. 

This chin is MIA

The helmet is made of multiple smaller plates riveted together, with the largest single plate being the one in front that forms both the facial bone structure and the front of the cranium. There's a protruding pointed apex in the center of the forehead: eight ridge lines radiate outward from this point to divide the forehead into eight facets.

The rest of the skull consists of multiple narrow segments that overlap backwards, similarly to the "Bazuso Armor" helmet that Guts wore in his mid-teens. Seven of the eight ridge lines from the pointed forehead continue backward along these lames, presumably until they reach the bottom of the neck guard. On each side, a strip of metal extending from the lower edge of the cheekbone reaches back like a bridge and connects by a rivet to one of the rear skull lames. This strip (highlighted red) represents a structure on each side of the human skull called the zygomatic arch.

The zygomatic arch replicated in metal

I've chosen to classify this skull helmet on the Berserker Armor as a sallet, which is a type of late medieval helmet with a rounded skull that transitions into a neck guard. Sallets came in many shapes and sizes. One type was permanently open-faced, which allowed the wearer to easily look around, breathe, and communicate. This example from the Met has a pivoting lame forming the lower part of the neck guard: this avoids the problem of a rigid neck guard this long getting stuck against the back of the neck when the wearer tilts their head upward. In front there's a brow reinforce which gives an extra layer of protection to the forehead.

Sallet in the Franco-Burgundian Style, possibly Italian, late 15th century.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 29.150.13.

Other sallets had a movable visor, which could either be raised for improved vision and breathing or lowered for protection. Many of these sallets were designed to be used together with a lower face defense called a bevor (more about that soon), in which case they had a short visor that only covered the upper half of the face. I’ve already shown you an example of the sallet/bevor combo on that painted sculpture of Saint Victor. 

The sallet example below has a neck guard of two lames, and a visor whose upper part overlaps the bowl of the helmet to give extra reinforcement to the forehead. This forehead-covering visor visually dominates the front of the sallet, much like the prominent face and forehead protection on the Berserker Armor's skull helmet. 

Sallet, South South German, 1480–1490. Royal Armouries IV.428

The visor on this Royal Armouries sallet has a vision slit cut into it called an occularium (plural, occularia). The horizontal slit is fairly wide from left to right in order to preserve some peripheral vision, while being quite narrow in vertical terms so as to reduce the chance of a weapon point slipping in. Because humans have their eyes positioned side-by-side rather than one on top of the other, and because of other anatomical features of the eyelids and facial bones, we naturally view the world in a "widescreen" aspect ratio where more information is visible horizontally than vertically. Therefore, not as much visual information is sacrificed by using a narrow horizontal slit compared to using a narrow vertical slit. A man looking through this kind of occularium would get in the habit of scanning the environment by moving his head around more, since he could no longer do so by just moving his eyeballs. Still, this was enough of a vision impairment that a lot of medieval people chose to keep their visors raised most of the time even during combat, only closing them against special dangers such as volleys of arrows or an incoming lance charge.

The rearmost lames of the skull helmet form a neck guard that's kind of sallet-like, but it's always unfortunately hidden in shadow or blocked by another object when Miura shows this version of the helmet. That makes it difficult to figure out the exact shape of the neck guard, or exactly how many lames it consists of. A prop-maker would need to extrapolate partly from the few views we do have, and partly from the features of the "beast helmet" that replaces the skull helmet soon after Guts puts it on.

The main difference between the skull helmet and the typical medieval sallet is the form of the face protection. Firstly, the visored sallet I referred to has a single narrow slit for the occularium, rather than two large circular eye holes. One place we can find that feature is close helmets of a certain style from the early 1600s, which are nicknamed "Savoyard burgonets" because the Swiss defenders of Geneva captured numerous helmets of this type from the Duke of Savoy's attacking troops in 1602. The helmet fully encloses the head, and the visor features a large pair of rounded eye openings as well as a small breath slit over the mouth. These helmets were also called Totenkopf—German for "Death's head"—because of their resemblance to human skulls. The comparison is especially fun because Shiro Sagisu, the soundtrack composer for the Berserk: The Golden Age Arc anime movies, gave the Skull Knight a musical theme called "Totenkopf".

Siege Helmet, 17th Century, Italian.
Metropolitan Museum of Art 14.25.498

Secondly, the face protection on the Berserker armor's skull helmet is not a pivoting visor that can be moved out of the way, such as those on the visored sallet and the Savoyard helmet. Instead, the skull-shaped mask is built into the rest of the helmet in a fixed position covering the wearer's eyes and nose. That makes it more similar to the permanently-installed nasal bars and face masks used on many helmets from the Early and High Middle Ages. One helmet with such mask-like face protection is the Gjermundbu Helmet, which came from a burial mound in southern Norway and is one of only two "Viking" helmets known to have survived (albeit as incomplete fragments, which are displayed in a reconstructed arrangement). The wearer's eyes were framed with metal bars arranged like "goggles" that protected the nose, eyes, and part of the cheeks.

"The Gjermundbu Helmet", late 10th century.
Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, Norway

When there's nobody wearing it, you might see a resemblance to the empty eye sockets of a human skull. These eye openings are a lot wider than you'll find on late medieval visors, which means it's easier to thrust a weapon into them, but I guess it's probably more important to ensure a large field of vision when the face protection can't be moved out of the way. Unlike the Gjermundbu helmet, whose nasal bar protects the wearer's nose very well—and unlike Guts's Bazuso and Raid Captain helmets whose visors also included a big bar in front of the nose—the skull helmet on the Berserker Armor has a potential weak spot because of the large nose opening. 

Pwned through the nose?

Leaving this spot wide open would be a very bad idea in real life, because you're giving the enemy three holes large enough to stab you through the face instead of just the two for the eyes. At least having openings in front of the eyes is a necessary weakness because light rays require a straight path to reach the eyes, and bigger eyeholes do improve vision in exchange for more vulnerability. Meanwhile, the nose and mouth can still get air even if it enters the helmet through indirect paths—our nostrils point downward after all—so if you're going to put on a mask that covers your whole face you might as well protect them frontally. When a mask or visor needs to be pierced for breathing, smaller but more numerous holes let in enough air while keeping weapon points out. I guess maybe you could get away with having the skull-like nasal opening if you put a pierced grille behind it. That reminds me: Guts's mouth is in there somewhere amidst the non-existent jaw. Is the shroud breathable? Does he even need to breathe in there? Maybe I'm thinking about it more than Miura did.

I previously noted that the skull helmet lacks plate protection for the jaw. To make up for that there is a large Y-shaped piece of metal which sticks up from the breastplate, which I will refer to as a bevor. A bevor is a piece of plate armor for the throat and lower half of the face. It was most popular in the 15th century, and was used together with helmets such as the war hat or sallet which did not cover the lower half of the face when used alone. The bottom of the bevor was often fastened to the breastplate to help hold it in place, and to make it harder to thrust a weapon point between the breastplate and bevor. Sometimes the upper part of the chin defense was a separate lame that could be pivoted downward to expose the mouth, sacrificing some protection to make breathing and speaking easier.

Bevor, Milanese, 1460. Royal Armouries, II.168 B

Ideally the lower edge of the sallet visor would overlap the upper edge of the bevor when closed, reducing the chance of a weapon point slipping in between. Below I deliberately chose a painting where the visor is cracked open a bit to show the guy's nose, which gives you an idea of where all these pieces sit in relation to the face. But this creates a weak spot that someone could thrust a weapon into. That's why it's better to make sure that the visor and bevor overlap a bit so that a gap doesn't open up even when the wearer moves his head around.

Detail from "St George and the Dragon" by Herlin Friedrich,
1462, in the Nördlingen City Museum, Germany.

Guts's bevor is very different from the historical type, and in fact I wondered whether "bevor" is really the term that applies. It consists of a metal post with a triangular cross-section that stands up vertically from a base that's riveted to the breastplate, then separates into two "wings" or "antlers" that wrap around the whole front half of Guts's head. To me it looks like a giant version of the hood ornament on an old-fashioned car. 

Side view of the bevor; note this is after the transformation
from the "skull knight" shape to the "beast" shape.

Unlike the historical bevor—which leaves no gap from the breastplate up to the nose and wraps around the whole front half of the throat and lower face—the Berserker Armor's bevor has a lot of open space between the breastplate and the wings on either side which an enemy could thrust his point through. The bevor might block cuts or thrusts from certain angles, but to me it seems kind of silly to stick this giant thing on if it's going to have big holes in its defense.

To be fair, I will also note that the base section of Guts's bevor that sits on the breastplate (highlighted red) would function similarly to a stop rib, such as the V-shaped piece of metal on this late 14th century breastplate from Churburg Castle. It doesn't stop direct thrusts to the throat, but if a weapon point hits the breastplate and starts sliding upwards towards the throat, the stop rib will catch it and divert it away to the left or right as predicted by these arrows.

"Churburg #14" Breastplate, ca. 1390. In armory at Churburg Castle
(a.k.a. Coira Castle) in Schluderns (Sluderno), South Tyrol, Italy.

Anyway, this armor is about to show us some tricks. Guts feels an immediate change when the plates are girded onto him. He is no longer bothered by his wounds, and while he realizes that the pain hasn't gone away, the armor makes him able to completely ignore it. He also feels an impulse building inside of him, an evil voice saying, "Yield to me."

Just by wearing it for this short a time, Guts has already aligned with the violent Od (meaning life force or magical energy) that flows through the armor. This Od amplifies the aggression and negative emotions of the wearer, which makes Guts particularly vulnerable. As a result of his traumatic and often self-destructive history—as well as close encounters with spirits of the malevolent dead—Guts has been haunted by some kind of mental or spiritual tormentor called the Beast of Darkness. This canine creature with glowing eyes represents all the hatred and bloodlust inside of Guts. It was already bad enough to have such a toxic influence inside his head, but now the armor gives it the chance to completely take over his mind and body.

At this moment the skull helmet and its bevor morph into a new shape.

The transformed helmet has all the features of the Beast of Darkness: the skull-like nasal cavity closes up, while the maxilla or upper jaw elongates into a pointed snout; the formerly rounded eye sockets become Z-shaped, and begin to glow with red light; the zygomatic arch pieces detach from the rear of the helmet and grow into pointed ears; and sharp teeth grow from the lower edge of the entire face plate. The bevor transforms together with the helmet, morphing from its previous smooth, curving shape into a more angular shape that also sprouts teeth from its edge to form the lower jaw of a fanged mouth.

When the jaws open to roar, we see only the black shroud instead of Guts's face, showing that he really is trapped inside. I call this new form of the helmet "the beast helmet", and while it is still fundamentally a sallet the details have changed significantly.

The helmet and the bevor combine to create a sharply pointed muzzle and fanged mouth, which together with the "ears" in back creates the appearance of a vicious dog. When viewed from above, the outline of the jaws and the projecting ears create a roughly triangular shape resembling a barbed arrowhead. It's also clear that the lower corner of each Z-shaped eye slit extends almost to the tip of the helmet's nose.

The pointed face of the beast helmet slightly resembles the "hounskull" visors of late 14th/early 15th century bascinet helmets, which were noted for their resemblance to a dog's muzzle (hence the name) or sometimes a pig's snout. The pointed nose created a glancing shape that made arrows or lance heads more likely to be deflected to the side. The example below also has a large aventail or neck-curtain made of mail links, which was often used to protect the throat in the era before bevors of rigid plate were common.

Visored Bascinet. Milan, Italy, ca 1390–1410.
Wallace Collection A69

The largest single piece of the beast helmet is still the plate in front, which covers the upper face and front of the skull. From under the brow plate come eight lames that overlap downwards, forming both the rear half of the skull and the neck guard. The neck guard has become longer and more like a lobster tail, flaring backwards from the top of the skull in one smooth slope.

Whereas a solid metal tail of this shape would stop Guts's range of motion if he tried to look upwards by tilting his head back, these neck lames can collapse as much as needed.

With the armor in Berserker mode, Guts behaves like a crazed animal and gains inhuman strength, agility, and reflexes. He dashes and somersaults around the battlefield, chopping Apostles to pieces and throwing Grunbeld off balance with the power of his blows. 

Furthermore, his prosthetic left hand—which is normally limited in function—seems to regain voluntary wrist and finger movement through the armor's power. Wearing a gauntlet on top of the iron hand does cause a potential problem for the cannon mechanism, though, since the metacarpal section on the back of the hand (red) would get pulled down in front of the gun muzzle if it stayed attached to the iron hand when it folded under. 

The solution is for the shroud—which here acts as a kind of glove—to temporarily evaporate so the iron hand can separate from the gauntlet: the gauntlet plates stay up and out of the way while the iron hand folds down and under the forearm, leaving the gun bore unobstructed for firing. Guts shoots directly into the muzzle of Grunbeld's cannon, destroying it and the rest of Grunbeld's shield.

The flow of od around the armor is too strong for Schierke to reach him with thought transference, and she is getting worried; she knows the armor gives its power for a heavy price.

"He surpasses the limits of the human body," she concludes, "at the risk of his own life." After Guts manages to dent the shaft of his warhammer and wound him in the shoulder, Grunbeld decides to get serious and unleashes his colossal dragon form. 

All this time, blood is flowing out from between the joints of the Berserker Armor. 

The armor does not heal Guts's injuries, but instead enables him to keep fighting through them at the cost of injuring himself even more. The now-feral Guts catches the tail swipe of Grunbeld's dragon form with his hands and stops it completely by digging his feet into the ground, the force fracturing the tibia and fibula bones of his left shin. The bones are broken clean in half, leaving his lower leg unnaturally bent in the middle. 

The fact that we don't even need this X-ray view to see that Guts's leg is broken shows an important difference between these greaves and historical ones. Greaves are armor for the lower leg. In the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, European greaves were typically constructed from a front plate which covers the shin from the top of the foot to just below the knee, and a rear plate which wraps around to enclose the calf and everything behind. The rear plate is attached to the front plate by vertical hinges located on the outward-facing side of the greave, which is what allows the greave to be opened for donning or removal. The plates can be fastened shut by buckles or pins on the inward-facing side. 

Greave, 1430–1440. Philadelphia Museum of Art 1977-167-192a

In other times and places around the world, craftsmen would instead make greaves out of long strips of metal called splints. Since making fully enclosed greaves from two large plates required highly skilled hammerwork, as well as larger pieces of metal to start from, it was technologically easier to craft fully enclosed greaves by wrapping the leg in narrow metal splints. In this funeral portrait from a knight's tomb, the splints are riveted to a piece of leather which serves as the structural foundation of the greave.

Detail of Monumental Brass of Sir Thomas Cheyne, 1375, at St. Mary the Virgin,
Drayton Beauchamp, Buckinghamshire England, as represented in an Etching by
John Green Waller, After L.A.B. Waller, 1840. National Portrait Gallery, NPG D33179

Suneate, shin guards worn by Japanese fighting men from the 12th to 19th centuries, were similar in this regard. The suneate below have vertical splints connected by mail links and sewn to a fabric foundation. Because the long bones of the arms and legs don't bend in the middle, there is no need for the plates covering them to be flexible along the long axis. At the same time, it's a little easier for a craftsman to hammer out long, narrow splints and arrange them in a barrel shape than it is to beat multiple horizontal lames into tube shapes and rivet them together from top to bottom. But that second, harder method seems to be exactly how the greaves and gauntlet cuffs on the Berserker Armor were made.

Suneate, Edo Period. Photo record created January 2008
by Samuraiantiqueworld, Wikimedia Commons

On Guts's armor, the greaves consist of multiple floating segments which appear to be secured to the underlying shroud rather than riveted to each other, which allows them to flex and even gap as you see below. I think this shows a downside of having articulation in unnecessary places, which is that a piece of armor that's more flexible than the body part it covers provides no structural protection against breakage or hyperextension of the limb. While the use of large plates or vertical splints might not necessarily have prevented Guts's bones from fracturing, it could have at least prevented the appearance of gaps between the plates and reduced the damage by holding the broken bones in place.

The armor has a gruesome way of dealing with fractures: the segments of the Berserker Armor's greave snap back into their former arrangement, forcing Guts's bones back into alignment in the process. Thin splinters of metal erupt from the inside of the armor and pierce through Guts's flesh, biting into his bones to fix them in place. 

The same process happens to his fractured ribs.

We might compare what the armor is doing to Guts's bones to a real-life medical technique called external fixation. This is a method for treating bone fractures in which thin metal rods are inserted through the patient's skin and muscle and screwed into the pieces of fractured bone. The parts of the rods left sticking outside the body are then fastened to an external fixture (such as the adjustable bar depicted below) to hold everything in place after the bones have been re-aligned. In Guts's case, the actual pieces of armor he's wearing such as the greaves and breastplate are serving as the external fixators, and the spikes stand in for the screw rods. Obviously, no sane practitioner would approve of the way the Berserker armor turns its "patient" into a bleeding mess; the real-life procedure is designed to disrupt the flesh and bone as little as possible, control bleeding, and prevent infection.

Illustration of External Fixation featured in the article "Internal Fixation for Fractures"
on OrthoInfo website of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons

Being stabbed by all these steel teeth causes Guts to bleed at an alarming rate, and yet he keeps attacking the dragon Grunbeld and multiple Apostles without slowing down. Schierke makes it very clear what will happen to Guts if this continues:

Schierke cannot even check on Guts's current mental and physical condition, since her magic isn't strong enough for thought transference to get through the Od surrounding the armor. While she blames herself for putting the armor on Guts and agonizes over what to do, Flora again speaks to Schierke via though transference, telling her to use her skill as a mage to guide Guts out of the turbulence of rage. Schierke sets up her magic circle and separates her ethereal body from her physical one, leaving her physical body in Isidro and Serpico's care while she goes to help Guts. In the astral world, Guts is trapped inside an astral projection of the Beast of Darkness amidst flames of hatred and rage.

Schierke enters the eye of the Beast in search of Guts. Inside, she first sees representations of Guts's memories with the Band of the Hawk floating around her like lamplights. Then those lights disappear, and suddenly she is surrounded by Guts’s horrible memories of the Eclipse, which swirl around in such a violent cyclone that Schierke is about to be swept away. Just then she sees an eye in the storm, a circle protected by the talisman which Flora carved into the armor.

Schierke finds Guts's ego, which the talisman protected from collapsing. He is nonetheless in the grip of the Beast's malice, burning with rage and speaking disjointed words of hatred.

Schierke entreats him to come to his senses, but he resists. The crucial moment comes when Schierke shows him that Casca and Farnese are about to be attacked by an Apostle. "Stop..." he says, "leave her alone..." As Schierke's words break through to him, the appearance of Guts's ego changes to represent his sense of self coming back.

When Guts comes to his senses, the jaws of the helmet and bevor crack open, the shroud retreats from Guts's face, and the eye slits clear up to show Guts looking out of them. 

At this moment Grunbeld tries to incinerate Guts with his dragon fire. Guts dives through the jet of flame, carves up the Apostles attacking Schierke, Isidro, and Serpico, and then kills the Apostle that's approaching Casca and Farnese.

Even while Guts's body continues to smolder from Grunbeld's fire, the helmet folds backwards and dissolves into his cape, representing the deactivation of berserker mode and Guts being himself again. This implies to me that Guts's cape has been assimilated by the armor and is now an extension of the shroud; for all I know, his shirt and trousers may have been similarly recruited.

Guts's face projects reassurance toward his companions, but he has obviously taken a lot of damage from both the attacks of his enemies and from defying his physical limits. Just one sign of this is that a lock of his hair has turned white from the stress the armor placed on his body.

The party is saved from Grunbeld's renewed assault by the appearance of Flora in spirit form: she creates a wall of magical flame to block the enemy, giving them the chance to escape. This is goodbye to everything that Schierke grew up with, and the start of much adversity which Guts and Schierke will have to face together.

Scene 2: Moonlit Beach

After the manga switches focus onto Emperor Ganishka and Griffith for a while, we return to Guts and his companions who have now reached the seashore. Guts is wearing the armor right now, but the helmet remains dissolved inside his cape, and the arm protection has similarly withdrawn into hiding. From now on, this will be the default appearance of the armor when not in Berserk mode.

Besides its Gothic stylings, the Berserker armor also resembles a certain type of Renaissance armor featuring a breastplate and backplate made of multiple horizontal lames. This style of construction, called anima, was invented in Italy during the early 1500s. It soon spread to other countries such as France, where it was called anime. Those words and the English word "animation" derive from Latin, in which animus meant "soul", and animātiō meant "a bestowing of life". I guess they might have been describing the more natural and human-like way that this special armor was supposed to move. Much later in history the word "animation" was used to describe the art of turning drawings into moving pictures: the Japanese picked it up from English and shortened it to "anime", which is now the word associated with animated TV and movies from Japan.

Anima Armor of Carlo Gonzaga (d. 1555), Lord of Gazzuolo; made by Caramelo
Modrone of Mantua around 1540; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna A 632
https://www.khm.at/de/object/373051/

To talk about anime armor, let me first explain what it developed out of. A normal breastplate of the early 16th century had one large, solid plate of steel forming its main structure, which started around the collarbone and usually extended down to the bottom of the ribcage. Often there would be a separate pivoting waist lame attached to the bottom of the main plate, which would also serve as an attachment point for any faulds or tassets. From about 1530 armorers started producing longer breastplates, and some breastplates that retained a separate waist lame used it to form the lower part of the domed belly shape. This extra joint allowed the breastplate to collapse into itself at the bottom, making it easier to bend forward at the waist. The backplate could be hinged at the waist just like the breastplate. 

Breastplate, made ca. 1550–55 by Kunz Lochner of Nuremberg
Metropolitan Museum 14.25.866

An anime cuirass took this flexibility several steps further: it divided into segments even the middle and upper parts of the breastplate that would have usually been one solid piece. This was more complicated to make, and large solid breastplates usually allowed enough movement even without an extra waist lame, so why was anime armor even necessary? One part of its appeal was fashion: the anime cuirass resembled lorica segmentata, which for Renaissance people evoked both the military and moral virtues of the ancient Romans. Another is that anime armor allowed the armorer to show off his skill as a craftsman, while the buyer showed off his wealth by being able to afford such sophisticated work. Finally, some of these armors were made of carbon steel and heat-treated to resist weapons. The intense temperature changes they were put through sometimes caused plates to warp out of shape, and it may have been easier to control this tendency when using smaller plates.

Italian Anima Cuirass, ca 1550–1600; Warsaw National Museum, Poland
https://twitter.com/TheArmour/status/1675506490864443394

Even if the lamination extends all the way up the chest, it might be not so much for function as it is for show. Firstly, the ribcage does not bend in on itself as easily as the abdomen.  Secondly, these breastplates have a domed shape that leaves some breathing room between the breastplate and the wearer's chest, which also increases the distance a lame can travel downward before its lower edge bumps into the torso. For these reasons, most of the flexibility required is already achieved through the abdomen lames. Since the lames up in the pectoral area don't unlock much flexibility even when they are movable, and larger rigid plates are more protective against blunt impact, some makers decided to rivet these lames together into one rigid chest piece that only gave the outward appearance of articulation. Others would skip the faux chest lames altogether by extending the abdominal lames no higher than the arm holes, and by making the remaining upper portion out of one solid plate. I think of this as a 'half-anime' subtype, and it's the one most similar to the Berserker Armor cuirass.

Anime breastplate owned and photographed by Peter Mustonen,
admin of "XVI Century European Armour" group on Facebook

Here is a historical breastplate which illustrates a simple form of anime articulation. As with all the other Renaissance breastplates we've looked at, each lame overlaps the one above it. The left and right edge of each lame is connected to the lames above and below it by sliding rivets, which I've circled in light blue.

Internal view, overall

To create a normal non-sliding rivet joint, the method is to clamp the two plates in their overlapped position and drill a hole clean through both layers. Each plate gets a circular hole in it just big enough for the shank of the rivet to fit through. The rivet can only be inserted through both plates when the holes are lined up with each other, and once it's in there the rivet shank prevents the two holes from sliding apart. Even if the two plates are allowed to pivot around the rivet like a pair of scissor blades, the location of the pivot point on each piece is fixed. 

Cross section of rivet passing through two metal plates:
the manufactured head is below, while the protruding
part of the shank is deformed with a rivet setting
tool to form the shop head on top.
Source: ScienceDirect.com

But on this breastplate the holes visible from the inside are elongated into vertical slits, which enables the inside-facing part of each rivet (fitted with washers) to travel up or down inside its slot. This allows the overlapping lames to slide closer together or farther apart in the vertical plane, while still restricting them from moving apart horizontally and creating a more self-supporting structure than internal leathers would. 

detail, sliding rivets

A flexible leather strip, highlighted in the yellow box, also runs down the center of the breastplate. The center of the abdomen is the part that needs the most freedom to expand and contract, making leather the appropriate hardware. Its ability to scrunch up allows the joint to compress, while its length when taut sets the limit of expansion to prevent gaps from opening.

detail, central leather strip

When Guts is having the cuirass of the Berserker Armor put on him, we can see two internal leather bands that hold the front of the cuirass together.

Internal leathers highlighted in red

The berserker cuirass (highlighted yellow) has each lame overlapping the one below it: this is actually a feature of ancient Roman lorica segmentata, rather than the Renaissance anime armors which tended to do the opposite. The front of the cuirass consists of a short breastplate that doesn't quite reach the bottom of the ribs, and three abdomen lames that stop at the crease of the hips. 

Front of cuirass (yellow)

The protruding pointed center of the breastplate is formed by the apex of five ridge lines, which radiate outward and blend together with ridges on the bevor, pauldrons, and cuisses. 

Side view of cuirass (yellow)

The back of the cuirass (yellow) matches the front, with the same size and number of segments. Each piece overlaps the one below it. The largest section is a short backplate of the same length as the breastplate, which is decorated with two pyramid-shaped protrusions along the spine. Below the short backplate are three lower back lames. The lowest lame serves as the attachment point for a pair of pointed rear tassets (green) that partially protect the buttocks, each of which is supported by two buckled leather straps. The pauldrons (purple) overlap much of the backplate as well, reducing the chance of a weapon slipping between the pauldrons and the backplate.

Here's Flora's golem assistant holding the backplate by itself, with the rear tassets removed.

It looks like the top edges of the backplate and breastplate directly butt together, and a practically seamless circular neck hole is formed between them. The pauldrons buckle onto straps which are attached to the top of the cuirass; I propose the top of the backplate as the pauldron strap location that makes the most sense.

The Berserker Armor's cuirass is articulated in such a way that its lames can twist in relation to each other. Even if Guts turns his chest to point in a different direction than his hips, the lowest lames of the cuirass can stay in the same position on the hips while the breastplate is allowed to turn separately. I've highlighted the frontal plates of the cuirass in purple and the back ones in green. I think it's a safe guess that the Berserker Armor's cuirass has no direct plate-to-plate rivet connections, even though Renaissance anime armors tend to have such joints at least along the edges of the back and breastplates. The Berserker Armor cuirass is instead articulated more like original Roman lorica segmentata, with the lames only being riveted to vertical leather strips that suspend the lames both down the center and along the edges. This construction grants more freedom to twist the torso.

This degree of twisting implies articulation by internal leathers only

Strangely, Miura neglected to draw in any hardware for buckling the two halves of the cuirass closed at the sides. Prince Armory has made a fantastic interpretation of the berserker armor that adds the required buckles to the outside. If you insist on keeping it exactly like the manga, you will need to invent some clever concealed mechanism.

Berserker Armor costume by Prince Armory.
Completed in November 2024, posted on reddit 

One thing from previous costumes that's missing from the new one is the broad waist belt and leather codpiece that Guts used to wear. Instead of the tops of the cuisses being strapped to such a belt, they now buckle directly to the bottom of the cuirass at the left and right hips. A metal codpiece made of four lames also hangs from the front of the cuirass by two buckled straps. There is no strap going between Guts's legs to keep the bottom of the codpiece in place, so I have to assume it's stuck to the shroud or trousers by mysterious means. I think the fact that the codpiece is both fixed to the groin and directly buckled to the cuirass is one reason the abdomen of the cuirass needs to be able to twist.

While Guts no longer needs a belt as the anchor point for his leg armor, he does still need one to hold up his sword and equipment bags. He's now wearing a narrower belt around his waist, made from what used to be his left shoulder baldric. He uses one of the hook attachments as a buckle in front and loops the excess strap length under and over the belt towards his right side to keep it out of the way.

The suspension method of the Dragon Slayer needs to be different now that Guts has gone back to wearing only one baldric. Instead of coming down from over the left shoulder, the secondary chain which holds the Dragon Slayer at an angle now originates at the back of the waist belt, loops around the dragon slayer from behind, and hooks onto the same front post that the baldric does. Because Guts's cape and equipment bags are usually blocking the view, I'm not quite sure whether the secondary chain originates from the rear attachment point of the baldric or a separate fitting next to it. This sketch assumes the first possibility.

Here is a close-up of the front fastened position.

Moving downward from the cuirass, we encounter the leg protection of the Berserker Armor. It's pretty complicated to describe, so I've gone crazy with the highlighter again. The cuisse and poleyn for each leg need to be fastened to the cuirass, both to prevent them from slipping down and to relieve some of the weight carried by the legs. The armor for Guts's left leg is held up by buckling onto this single strap (pink) that hangs from the cuirass at Guts's left hip. The armor for the right leg is held up by an identical strap on the right side.

The buckle end is on the cuisse, while the corresponding leather strap from the cuirass has one or more punch holes in it to receive the prong of the buckle.

I know at least one historical case where leg defenses hung directly from the cuirass: I'm thinking of some armors with extra-long tassets that basically blended into or replaced the cuisses. These are also the examples where you're most likely to see the thigh defenses divided into numerous lames like those on the Berserker Armor's legs.

Breastplate with Tassets. German, Augsburg ca. 1530.
Metropolitan Museum 2013.28

That said, there were some armors with cuisses that were fully divided into lames despite being distinct and separate pieces from the tassets. I've noticed a number of Greenwich armors from Elizabethan England with such segmented cuisses, which are analogous to the main section of Guts's thigh defenses. But unlike Guts's cuisses, the Greenwich cuisses below look like they would have been laced to some other part of the arming garments instead of the cuirass.

Field and Tilt Armour. Greenwich, England 1590. Royal Armouries II.40
https://royalarmouries.org/collection/object/object-24

At the top of each cuisse in Guts's armor are three upper thigh lames (highlighted green) that extend the cuisse upward to the place where it straps to the cuirass. These upper thigh lames only cover the front of the thigh and are compressible to let Guts raise his knee. Next down is the main section of each cuisse (red), which provides most of the protection for the thigh and is made up of four lames.

The segments that make up the cuisses and other pieces of armor on Guts's limbs are not fully enclosed tube shapes. They are upside-down trapezoids that are wrapped almost around the leg so that the pointed parts of the edge are the first to meet. 

Trapezoid before and after shaping

Behind the thigh, the pointed ends of the uppermost lame come closest together; each cuisse lame going down has a progressively larger gap between the pointed parts. For the cuisses and other parts made of these trapezoid lames, the size of the gaps between the pointy ends appears inconsistent between drawings. For example, the panel below depicts the pointy ends just about touching together, unlike the previous picture we looked at where the points are significantly farther apart.

The lowest lame of the red main cuisse section connects to a strange piece which I will call the "sweep plate" (light blue). The bottom part of each sweep plate functions as a lame connecting the poleyns (dark blue) with the main part of the cuisses. From here the piece transitions into a sort of wing, which rises towards the outside of the top of the thigh in a diagonal path that covers parts of the red main cuisse lames. This overlapping sweep plate is unlike anything historical that I've seen, and I don't see any practical use for it. 

The outward-spiraling shape of the ridge lines on the cuisses, and especially the sweep plate, have a clear anatomical inspiration. This comparison shows how the cuisse mimics the diagonal orientation of the quadriceps and sartorius muscles of the thigh.

Cuisse of Berserker Armor compared to diagram of thigh from Cleveland Clinic website https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/22816-quad-muscles

Note in the image below that from the kneecap upwards, each lame of the leg defenses overlaps the lame above it. This is true of most historical cuisses and extended tassets.

Below each sweep plate (light blue) we find a poleyn protecting the knee joint. Each poleyn is permanently riveted to the sweep plate above it, making it inseparable from the cuisse. In descending order (all labeled dark blue) we see upper lame 1, upper lame 2, and then the kneecap piece.

Poleyn, inside view of the right knee

The kneecap has a pointed shape with six facets like a hexagon, and a fan plate shaped like a fish tail to protect the outside of the knee joint. 

Poleyn, outside of left leg

The fan plate is embellished with a V-shaped indentation that divides it down the middle. You can see this decorative indentation on many historical fan plates.

Poleyn, German, 16th Century.
Metropolitan Museum of Art 27.183.68

Below the kneecap are three lower poleyn lames that rest against the top of the shin. In many panels and poses the lowest poleyn lame (numbered "3" in dark blue) is partially hidden by the top of the greave (yellow), but in other pictures (such as the one below) we see the whole bottom lame and even a narrow gap between the poleyn and the greave.

Observe in this next picture how the top of the greave (yellow) usually overlaps and partially hides the bottom of the poleyn (dark blue).

Normally medieval plate armor did this the other way around: the lowest part of the poleyn, sometimes in the form of a special plate called a "demi-greave", would fit over and partially cover the top of the greave. In the example below, the demi-greaves are identified by yellow arrows. Note how they cover any vulnerable gap between the poleyns and the greaves: each greave has a little pin sticking out of the top, which slips through a hole in the bottom of the demi-greave and helps prevent them from separating. Because Guts's greaves have a wide opening on top and do not overlap the poleyn by very much, he is hypothetically vulnerable to someone stabbing a weapon into the gap.

Detail of Field Armor of Frederick I, Elector of the Palatinate. Made by workshop of
Tomaso Missaglia of Milan circa 1450. Inventory No. A2 in Imperial Armory at
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Now we finally come back to the greaves, which I briefly introduced in the Flora's Mansion scene. Guts's greaves are made up of four lames, numbered below in yellow. Anything you see below greave lame number 4 is not part of the greaves, but rather the sabatons or foot armor.

inside view of right leg

As stated before, these lames are upside-down trapezoids that wrap most of the way around the lower leg, leaving a narrow opening down the back.

The medieval greaves that I described before were either made from a front and a rear plate that opened on hinges, or from several vertical splints connected by flexible material. Guts's greaves are built quite differently because there is no vertical division between plates. Despite being made of four lames, the way they fit on Guts's legs makes them comparable to the bronze greaves worn by ancient Greek hoplites. These would usually be hammered from a single sheet of bronze into an anatomical shape that snugly fit the owner's leg but left a fairly large vertical gap down the back. The warrior would point his foot in a straight line with his shin bone, insert it toes-first through the top of the greave, and then slide it out the bottom. The opening down the back and the springiness of the metal allowed the greave to temporarily stretch open a little wider. Once the leg was all the way through the metal would spring closed again and hold itself in place by hugging the calf muscle.

Front and rear pictures of an Etruscan Greave, Bronze, late 5th–4th
century B.C. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017.228d

The size of the rear opening on the Berserker Armor greaves is not consistent between drawings: in the previous yellow-highlighted picture it is so narrow that the tips of the lames are touching, but in another picture below it's wide enough to clearly see the leather boot (highlighted brown) Guts is wearing underneath. Actually his boots are so tall they rise almost to the top of his greaves, which poses a challenge to my idea that Guts could slip his foot through his greave like a hoplite would. A hoplite would have been able to leave his feet bare in order to slide them through without getting stuck, and then put his sandals on after the greaves were in place. If Guts put his greaves on before his boots, I doubt he'd manage to pull a boot shaft so far up his leg while keeping it on the inside of the greave. It seems equally doubtful that he could slip his foot through the greave while wearing the boot, since that would make his foot bigger and reduce flexibility at the ankle. 

Of course, all of this will only be a problem for Guts if his greaves behave similarly to real metal. As we've seen already, the metal of the Berserker Armor can stretch and deform at will whenever the Beast of Darkness is in control. That makes me wonder whether the pieces can also think for themselves or change their shape while the armor's in its dormant state. The artwork never explicitly shows this happening, but what if these greaves instinctively open up whenever they sense someone trying to put them on? After all, Guts's companions somehow managed to fit the greaves onto him at Flora's mansion before the armor had attuned itself to him. On the other hand, it could be that whatever exotic metal it's made of is springier than normal steel, allowing anybody to just physically stretch it open enough without needing the magic to be active. Your guess is as good as mine. 

To work around the greave-donning conundrum without supernatural help, I figure a cosplayer could use any or a combination of these suggestions: 

• Use a hard plastic that can flex open a lot and still spring back to shape (not sure if this exists), or else something soft like latex that can wrap around the calf and fasten to the back of the boot;
• Make the greaves bigger and roomier than in the artwork, so even a boot-wearing foot can go in through the top and out the bottom;
• Change the design so the pointy ends of the lames to do not hug the back of the calf, but instead stick directly backwards so the opening's large enough to slide the front of the shin into it;
• Make a tight-fitting greave that must be slid on before adding footwear, then cheat by using a boot that's barely taller than the ankle except for a vertical strip up the back that can be tucked inside the rear opening of the greave.

Another issue with the design of Guts's greaves is where weight and pressure would be carried. Well-shaped greaves can hold themselves up purely by their tight fit around the shank of the leg, so unlike the cuisses they don't need to be fastened to any other garment or section of armor to stay in place. Knyght Errant illustrates below how the greaves should be held up by the narrowed top section resting on the bulge of the calf muscle, while the bottom of the greave is designed to not press against or put weight upon the top of the foot.

Sketch by Knyght Errant, 2016, from "Common Modern Reproduction Errors:
Greaves, Anatomical Shaping" https://youtu.be/ZuupVQJYD0s

In contrast, Guts's greaves widen at the top so much that the poleyns can fit inside with room to spare. Even though a side view shows that the top rear portion of the greave conforms to the shape of the calf muscle, realistically the looseness of the front and sides would negate that benefit. I worry that copying the Berserker Armor in real life might give you a problem like that of many mediocre replica greaves, which is that they slide down and press their weight against the top of the foot. The other thing to consider is that Guts's boots are in there, including the folded-over bucket tops which double the thickness of leather towards the top. I guess they could help to support the weight of the greaves if the leather is stiff enough, and the bucket tops might even fill up enough space to make the tops of the greave sit more snugly on the legs than I had assumed, but I don't think the amount of volume they take up is modeled consistently. Overall, I think Miura's greave design works better on paper than in practice.

Finally arriving at the feet, we see the sabatons. Like previous sabatons Guts has worn, they have a wicked-looking pointed foot shape. This is based on the European fashion for pointy-toed shoes during the 14th and 15th centuries, which was reflected in equally pointy sabatons.

Including the toe piece there are five lames covering the front of the foot. If I say that the toe piece is lame number 1, and the plate touching the ankles is lame number 5, then each lame overlaps the next one in the sequence. A central ridge starts from the tip of the toe, runs along the top, and blends together with the frontal ridge of the greave. Partway up the toe cap, additional ridge lines split off to the left and right, reaching the pointed edges near the ankles and roughly matching up with the next set of ridges on the sides of the greaves. These pointed corners of the last lame are high enough to give protection to the ankles.

The rear section of the sabaton protects the heel of the foot. The lowest heel lame is the largest and has a horizontal ridge near the top which creates a sort of beveled edge; above it are two narrow horizontal lames that stop at the bottom of the greave. Each heel lame overlaps the one above it.

To me it looks like these sabatons lack any hinges or straps to hold the front and rear sections together. Unlike Guts's previous sabatons, there isn't even a strap running under the sole to keep the sabatons from lifting away from the boot.  Maybe this is more of the armor's sticky magic at work.

Those were a lot of paragraphs entirely focused on construction, so now it's time to weave the story back in.

Guts is still feeling the effects of his ordeals in Qliphoth and at Flora's mansion. Schierke thinks Guts should take off the armor and rest at least four or five more days, but Guts responds that he's already been "laid up" almost a month and doesn't want to lose any more time. According to him, the armor doesn't completely shut off his response to pain as it does in combat mode, but it enables him to keep going. Schierke recalls to herself, "The armor ate into his body for days, unable to be removed, and the bleeding continued."

"...each time, the wounds would again open." The fact that Guts came so close to death—and took so long to recover merely this much despite the aid of Schierke's medicine and the two pixies' healing dust—shows what a brutal tradeoff the Berserker Armor is. 

After a bit of frolicking on the beach, Guts's group finds an abandoned house to take shelter in. Serpico prepares a meal for everyone and then makes some changes to Guts's equipment harness with ease of use in mind.

To summarize Serpico's changes to Guts's outfit:

Guts gets a new throwing knife holster for his right thigh; this allows him to reach them more quickly and comfortably because they're at the height where his hand would normally hang at his side. A metal ring rests on the front of Guts's thigh; one strap goes around the girth of the leg, and the three knife pouches are held up by a strap that goes diagonally from the top of the ring up to the rear of Guts's waist belt.

Outside view of the right leg

Two more throwing knives are sheathed towards the bottom of Guts's sword baldric with the handles pointing right at a roughly ten o'clock angle, while his dagger is sheathed horizontally over his belt buckle with the pommel facing to his right. The big leather bag hangs at Guts's right hip, and the small one at his left.

On the Albion Armor, Guts wore his crossbow box horizontally with the opening facing right, and the bolt box beneath it vertical with the lid facing up. Here Serpico has set the bolt box parallel to the crossbow box above it: the openings of both face to the right at a roughly two o'clock diagonal angle.

During the meal, everyone is surprised when Farnese asks Schierke to teach her magic, the start of an apprenticeship that will soon be important for everyone. Meanwhile, Guts feels a faint tingling in his brand caused by the Skull Knight appearing nearby.

Afterwards, amidst the sea breeze and under the stars, Schierke sits on the beach thinking about Flora. Guts comes to keep her company, and soon they are both approached by the Skull Knight, who warns Guts about the danger of the armor. The Skull Knight says to him, "Color fades from the eyes. The tongue loses taste. Shivering plagues the fingertips..."

Putting together the hints, Schierke guesses that the Skull Knight himself was the original user of the armor. "Indeed," says the Skull Knight, "that armor is something I once wore. In the distant past, when we lived within the reason of time. [...] The od that dwells within that armor is as a flame which never dies out. Even once contained, the coals yet smolder. Given the chance, it will explode into hellfire. Even with the applied talisman, never make light of it. If you wish to continue existing as a human, that is." 

When the Skull Knight changes the subject to Griffith, triggering Guts's feelings of hatred, the Beast helmet begins to creep up behind Guts's head from the folds of the cape. It's only when Schierke shouts at him that Guts snaps back to his senses and swats his shoulder, only to find nothing there. This ominously establishes that the Beast of Darkness is working with the Berserker Armor to try and control Guts, waiting for the moment when he lets his guard down.

Finally, the Skull Knight tells Guts that the Flower Storm Monarch on Elf Island may be able to cure Casca of her mental illness, albeit with a cryptic warning that Guts's wish for Casca might not be what she wishes. As the Skull Knight departs, Casca encounters a strange little boy with long black hair and no clothing, standing alone at the water's edge under the moonlight. She immediately becomes attached to him and starts acting like a mother. Schierke senses a mysterious Od from the black-haired boy. Since there is no parent or guardian around, the companions let Casca take the boy back to the house with them. The news about the hope for a cure is received happily by all.

Late in the night, while Guts keeps watch, he notices mist creeping in and feels the brand begin to sting. The house is attacked by crocodiles that walk on two legs and wield spears; these crocodiles are examples of Pishacha, ordinary animals turned into monsters through magical possession by nearby Kushan sorcerers. The Kushans are stealthily wiping out settlements all along the coastline so that there will be no warning of their invasion, and Guts's company just happens to be caught up in their plan. Guts uses his crossbow to kill the first beast that breaks down the door, then attaches his right hand to the Dragon Slayer with bandages so his weakened state won't make him lose his grip. Schierke tells him to be extra careful because people's minds are most unhinged when the moon is full.

In the thick of fighting, Guts tries to draw out the minimum of the armor's power and resist its control. Still, the beast helmet lurks in the fabric of Guts's cape, waiting for its chance to pounce. Eventually Schierke detects the hiding spot of the sorcerers controlling the crocodiles, allowing Serpico to kill them and turn the animals back to normal. Yet no sooner have they gained the upper hand, than a gigantic beast called a Makara bursts out of the water, a possessed whale whose features are combined with those of an elephant. 

The caster controlling the makara is on a boat beyond the party's attack range, meaning the monster can only be defeated directly. Despite Guts's best efforts he gets beaten down by the creature's power, and in his desperation to save his companions he either loses his will to resist or deliberately allows the armor to take him over. The dark shroud oozes forth from Guts's cape and covers the skin of his arms, while the segmented lames of the arm harness appear from the same source and close around him. 

At the same time, the Beast helmet comes bursting out of the cape...

...and the dark shroud engulfs his face as the jaw snaps shut.

For some extra detail, this is a color painting that represents the same process of engulfment.

Since the arm protection just popped out again, let's refer to history in order to pick them apart. In European-style plate armor, the arm harness was an assembly of pieces for protecting the arms. What I will describe first is the "classic" combination of pieces that men in full plate armor usually wore. The upper arm was protected by a tube-shaped component called a rerebrace. There were two main types of shoulder defenses that could be used: pauldrons were large and usually fastened on separately, while spaulders were smaller and often permanently integrated into the rerebraces (as depicted below). The forearm was protected by another tube called a vambrace. The elbow protection, called the couter, included expanding lames and connected the rerebrace and vambrace together. A fan plate attached to the couter was used to help protect the inside of the elbow joint, since the vambrace and rerebrace had to include significant cutouts on the inside to allow the elbow to fully bend. The gauntlets were separate pieces and were always the last things to be put on. They incorporated flared cuffs which overlapped the lower edges of the vambraces.

Replica arm harness in English style of ca. 1415.
Made by Piotr Feret of Poland, 21st Century. platener.eu

Guts's arm harness is very different from that classic knightly arm harness because it totally leaves out both vambraces and rerebraces, and instead enlarges other components to cover for their absence. His pauldrons (purple)—which I'll write about in more detail later—include four large lames which extend all the way down the upper arm and protect it in place of a rerebrace. Meanwhile his forearms are protected by segmented gauntlet cuffs (red) that extend all the way up the forearm and thus replace a vambrace. The small crescent-shaped couters (green) aren't connected in any way to the gauntlets or pauldrons but are stuck directly to the shroud that stands in for an arming garment. These floating couters, as we might call them, are a legitimate alternative to the integrated couters of our English arm harness example.

The English style arm harness we just looked at is an example of what the Armoursmithing Wiki calls "hard" articulation. The whole assembly of rerebrace, couter, and vambrace is permanently joined together with rivets that act as hinges for the lames to pivot around, with the expansion lames of the elbow joint being designed to allow adequate range of motion while at the same time preventing gaps from appearing between the plates. I've taken some stills from a Knyght Errant video and added highlights: the expansion lames are colored pink, with dotted lines to show you what parts are temporarily hidden inside the couter. From this view of the arm in extension we can see two (green) rivets in each expansion lame: one hinging the lame to the couter, and another hinging the lame to a vambrace or rerebrace. 

Still from "The Arm Harness" published on YouTube by Knyght Errant, Sep 13, 2015
https://youtu.be/uiDZ35_Ym3A?si=W-b3pncr3YI-Lnzj

When the elbow is flexed, all of these parts pivot around the rivets to permit the bending of the arm. The inside of the elbow is able to contract because of the cutouts in the rerebrace and vambrace in that area. Note how points A and B, which were so far apart in the extended position, are practically touching together in the flexed position. Meanwhile the outside of the joint is able to grow in surface area when the pink expansion lames slide out from under the couter, and even some small areas of the vambrace and rerebrace that were hidden inside the expansion lames are exposed as well. Despite all of these plates sliding over and under each other, the joint is structured in such a way that there are always overlapping edges between the lames and vulnerable gaps are prevented from appearing.

While hard articulation has its merits, there is also an alternative called floating articulation. In this method the pieces of the arm harness do not have rivets directly connecting plates to each other or acting as pivots: instead, the pieces are either individually laced onto the underlying arming garment, or else connected together by flexible leathers. Armored fighting expert Reece Nelson has an example of the latter, in which two parallel leather strips pass from the rerebrace to the couter to the vambrace: these three components are riveted to the leather without being riveted to each other. This looser construction gives the wearer more freedom of movement compared to hard articulation and can be simpler to manufacture.

Detail of Reece M. Nelson's floating arm harness in "Pursing
the Knightly Arts: Getting into Harness" Jan 12, 2018
https://youtu.be/cNVLhRY8YSo?t=306 flcK67GlWvSu

The couter on Guts's elbow is a crescent-shaped plate of metal whose widest part sits on the bony part of the elbow, while the narrow pointed tips of the plate face the inside of the joint. Unlike the poleyns, there is no fan plate here. A central ridge line running from tip to tip divides the surface into two facets, which meet each other at an angle like the roof of a house. In other words, the 3D shape of this couter is similar to a fortune cookie. The couter sticks directly to the mysterious shroud, with nothing connecting it to the pauldrons or gauntlets. Since the pauldrons and the gauntlets both flare to their greatest width near the elbow, the couter seems designed to fit under them with its small and unobtrusive shape. This contrasts with couters from history, which were usually designed to fit over a vambrace and rerebrace.

Guts's small floating couters are presumably good for flexibility. The downside is they don't cover the gaps between the pieces like hard articulation couters would, or even like his own poleyns do. Even though the gauntlets and pauldrons partially overlap the couters, certain postures can cause very large gaps to open: look below at how much unprotected space there is between the couter (green) and the gauntlet (red), and between the couter and the pauldron (purple). The lack of fan plates on his couters also leaves the inside of the elbows very exposed. These openings are worse for Guts because unlike many historical men-at-arms, he does not have mail sleeves underneath to act as a second line of defense.

Floating arms in history had some of these same inherent downsides as the price for their mobility. Unlike hard-articulated arms—where the outside of the elbow joint is almost airtight against weapons probing for gaps—your floating arms will always be more gap-prone, especially when the arm is bent. Even so, I think historical versions would have minimized the problems more effectively. Keeping vambraces and rerebraces as separate pieces from the gauntlets and pauldrons would have reduced the chance of them sliding farther apart from the couter, especially if they were all connected by the same set of internal leathers. It is also better to have relatively tight-fitting vambraces and rerebraces combined with bigger floating couters that can overlap them, since it is easier to design a couter that overlaps the braces by a generous amount while still leaving enough room inside for easy movement of the joint.

Floating arms created by White Rose Armoury
http://www.whiterosearmoury.com/gal_arms.html

I have two replicas to show you that are based on a type of arm harness used in the 15th century, characterized by very large floating couters. The picture above from White Rose Armoury shows the couter detached from the other pieces: note the four holes in the plate which are meant to have laces inserted through them.  A similar piece created by Georges Jolliot is depicted below in its assembled state: the leather strip connecting the vambrace and rerebrace has holes in it for laces to pass through, which allows the couter to be securely fastened to the leather. These large couters overhang the other pieces by a generous margin, so that most angles will always be protected regardless of arm position. This design is marginally more vulnerable to gap-seeking than hard articulation of the same date, but I think it offers a better balance of mobility and protection than what Guts is wearing.

Replica arms by Georges Jolliot of France, inspired by tomb effigy of Sir William Ryther III (d. 1475) in All Saint's Church, Ryther cum Ossendyke, England. XC45 tempered steel brushed with hematite.
Posted to Facebook November 26, 2024 at 2:54 AM

Now let's talk about Guts's gauntlets, which have cuffs that extend all the way up the forearm and partly overlap the elbow. Whenever Guts rotates his wrist, the cuff lame closest to the couter keeps its orientation while the cuff lame next to the hand performs the complete rotation. The two cuff lames in between go through intermediate stages of rotation, meaning that the whole cuff assembly twists progressively. If he was wearing a normal non-segmented vambrace and a separate gauntlet, then the vambrace would be designed with enough room for his wrist to rotate inside it without the vambrace itself needing to rotate: only the gauntlet would rotate together with his hand.  It's clear to me from the way this assembly twists that Guts's segmented gauntlets cuffs use floating articulation. There must be two strips of leather on the inside that run the length of the forearm: one along the radius bone side, and one along the ulnar side. Each cuff lame is riveted to these leathers, thus enabling the flexibility we see.

Looking at the inside of the arm, you can see how the pauldron lames around the upper arm and the gauntlet lames around the forearm completely replace rerebraces and vambraces. The problem, of course, is similar to that of the greaves: because they're not hinged in two pieces, these tubes would be too form-fitting for Guts to slide into if the metal didn't magically bend open. The real-life cosplayer will need to invent a hidden opening mechanism, or else visibly modify the design. 

These pictures also show us how the small couters that lack fan plates leaves the inside of the elbow joint vulnerable from many angles.

The hand portion of each gauntlet consists of five metacarpal lames on the back of the hand (red), a knuckle lame (green), and then individual fingers (yellow). The central ridge that runs down the gauntlet cuffs continues along the metacarpal plates until it reaches the knuckle plate, while the shapes of the four metacarpal bones are embossed in progressively sharper relief closer to the knuckle plate.

The individual fingers (not including the thumb) are each segmented into five pieces, the last of which is a fingertip pointed like a claw. I have kept the green highlight on the knuckle lame so that you won't confuse it with the fingers. The thumb joint is a whole extra assembly attached to the rest of the hand by one small hinge. This loose hinge joint is used to allow the thumb its full range of motion from opposition (used when pinching together the tips of the thumb and index finger) to apposition (used when pressing the palm of the hand against a flat surface). The thumb is segmented into only four pieces, not including the metacarpal piece (red).

This hinged thumb design is characteristic of German gothic armor in the 15th century; the German-speaking armorers also preferred to articulate the wrist using several lames, which also allowed the cuff to be a little more close-fitting. Italian armorers were more prone to making the first metacarpal bone part of one solid piece with the other metacarpals and using a wide bell-shaped cuff to allow wrist movement instead of adding articulation to the wrist. As a general stereotype, the German-style gauntlet is more flexible while the Italian style is more protective.

Detail of Gauntlets from a Composite Gothic Field Armour.
German, 1471–1499.
II.1 A, Royal Armouries

We should note a small difference here, which is that the historical gauntlet has the hinge located closer to the knuckles than to the wrist, giving it more of a middle-pivoting function.  On Guts the hinge starts at the very base of the thumb assembly and attaches to the back-of-the-hand lame which is closest to the wrist.

Just to round out my overview of Guts's arm harness, I will note that a full-length arm harness with no vambrace or rerebrace did exist. If it's one thing I've discovered while researching this project, it's that I can find an exception to almost any generalization about how historical armor was constructed. From the mid-16th century a new type of arm harness pops up as an alternative to the classic version: this alternative style replaced rerebraces with shoulder defenses of extended length, and replaced vambraces with long gauntlets. Maybe some people liked it because it was cheaper, quicker to make, and weighed a bit less. The tradeoff is that they got rid of the couters in the process of simplifying it, and even though the gauntlets often included a cup for the elbow the joint was not as protected from various angles. Thus it did not replace the classic style of arm harness but existed alongside it. 

Half Armor of Gabriel Serbelloni (1509 - 1580), made in Milan around 1570. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Court Hunting and Armory A 987 www.khm.at/de/object/373436/

I don't think there was any technical reason stopping them from adding the couters back in after deleting the vambraces and rerebraces; a slightly earlier armor from 1488/89 has gauntlet cuffs just long enough to replace vambraces, but protects the elbows with floating couters. This one still has rerebraces and normal-length pauldrons, though. If you wanted the Guts setup you'd have to swap in the extended pauldrons from the 16th century armor.

Boy's Armor of the future King Philip I "The Handsome" of Castile. Date 1488/89, made by Hans Prunner of Innsbruck. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Imperial Armory, A 9
www.khm.at/de/object/373346/

Now, if you'll forgive me for having brought the narrative to yet another screeching halt, I'll get back to our story. We were at the point where Guts goes berserk in the armor for the second time.

When Guts went berserk back at the Mansion of the Spirit Tree, he wasn't wearing any gear except the armor itself. What we can see now is that the transformation from dormant mode to berserker mode produces a wave of air pressure which blasts all of the belts and items (highlighted orange) off of his body. On one hand this unburdening could make the armor's crazy acrobatics a little easier, but on the other hand it means that someone needs to go gather them up again after every time he transforms. Kind of inconvenient, huh?

Guts goes into a frenzy, hacking the Makara to pieces and then massacring the remaining crocodiles. 

As Guts rages on, Serpico fears that he won't stop when his enemies are gone: "According to legend, those called berserkers inspired fear not only in their enemies, but also among their allies. Not for their relentless fighting style alone, but because whether friend or foe, they were said to slay everything around them." Indeed, the armor has so distorted Guts's thoughts and perception that he sees only a sea of fanged mouths trying to rip him apart, and can think of nothing except fear, hatred, and killing.

Schierke, noticing that Guts's wounds from Slan have reopened from the strain, enters a trance in an attempt to bring him back. When Guts is done with the Kushan beasts, he can't recognize his companions and sees only indistinct, threatening figures that he assumes to be more enemies. Schierke hasn't broken through yet—leading Serpico to step in front of the others ready to fight—when a glowing figure that resembles the black-haired boy interposes itself between Guts and the companions.

The figure touches the snout of the helmet, unclouding Guts's eyes.

Guts sees Schierke reaching out her hand, the light behind her taking the form of the talisman Flora engraved on the armor. 

He grabs on...

...and like a drowning man pulled back to the surface, he gasps for air as the helmet's jaws release him. Before we know it, the helmet and the arm defenses have disappeared back into his cape.

Thus, a tragedy is averted. Guts curses the fact that he came so close to attacking his companions. Schierke, Isidro, and Farnese tell him not to be so hard on himself, and express hopefulness that they will figure out ways to control the danger of the armor as they go along. However, the expression on Serpico's face shows that he isn't about to forgive or forget.

Guts tells Isidro and Puck to help gather up his equipment that went flying, while Schierke insists they should treat his reopened wounds first. However, anxious sounds from Casca make everyone realize that the black-haired boy is gone; they don't find him anywhere, so they just have to hope that he went home. Guts notices the resemblance between the boy and the figure of light that appeared before him but isn't sure what to make of it. Anyway, Guts manages to re-equip all his stuff, and the party decides to keep walking before more monsters show up. As dawn breaks, the city of Vritannis is visible in the distance.

Scene 3: Vritannis

The port city of Vritannis is home to Farnese's family, the noble house of Vandimion who are bankers to the Holy See and other great powers. Approaching Vritannis, Guts and company see that armies from all the states in the Holy See's territory are gathering outside the walls; a great alliance has been formed to oppose the Kushan Empire. Amidst this swarm of activity, the companions need to first find a place to stay, and secondly to find a ship captain willing to sail them to Elf Island.

For carrying some extra items which I can't identify, Guts has some simple drawstring sacks that he wears hanging behind his right shoulder. At least two have some kind of stick poking out of them. It looks like at least one of them has a strap looped over the dragon slayer hilt, but I find it hard to tell whether they're all attached to the sword individually or daisy-chained to each other.

Skipping ahead, we get to the part where Farnese and Serpico have temporarily left the group, leading the remaining companions to seek them out at a grand ball. The urgency of the mission increases when the companions discover that Kushan monsters have infiltrated Vritannis. As they make their way into the palace, Schierke gets a thought transmission from Serpico, beckoning them to the rear entrance. They find Serpico without Farnese, standing in a vast room full of pillars with a rapier drawn. He apologizes for tricking them, but says he won't allow them to see Farnese, and challenges Guts to fight here and now. To Schierke's dismay, Guts accepts without hesitation.

This is an interesting fight because one on hand, all the confined spaces and obstacles in the room rob Guts's swings of their full speed and power, giving Serpico the advantage he needs in order to dodge Guts's blows and find opportunities to attack. On the other hand, Serpico has no means of piercing Guts's armor. Even though Guts isn't fully covered when berserk mode is inactive, Guts knows that Serpico can only target his head and arms, and the limited number of ways Serpico can attack makes it simpler for Guts to anticipate and defend. Some pieces of armor that Guts didn't have in previous sets show their usefulness: Serpico's point is diverted by Guts's bevor, and the large overlap of the pauldrons over the cuirass eliminates a gap that his previous armors used at have.

The iron prosthetic is especially useful for defense, allowing Guts to block Serpico's strikes using the forearm portion whenever he can't bring the Dragon Slayer to bear fast enough. At one moment he anticipates a cut to his right hand and switches hands on his sword grip, so that Serpico's blade harmlessly bounces off the iron hand.

This fight is all about Serpico wanting to protect Farnese from Guts and the Berserker Armor. He doesn't know if he can trust Guts not to lose his mind to the armor again like he did on the beach, which could result in him killing Farnese. 

Serpico pushes Guts enough to make the armor want to activate, but Guts successfully holds it back and defeats Serpico by himself. Furthermore, Schierke has read Serpico's thoughts and promises him she won't ever let something like that happen. Persuaded by this experience, Serpico decides to trust in Guts's willpower from now on. For some reason it didn't occur to anyone to tell Serpico before the fight that Farnese and everyone at the ball was in danger from a monster—in which case the fight could have been postponed until after they'd rescued Farnese—but as soon as they do tell Serpico he guesses that the Kushans are behind this, and that they need to hurry.

Meanwhile, in the ballroom where Farnese and all the nobles are, a giant tiger familiar crashes through a window and starts devouring people. Farnese's quick thinking with a silver candelabrum keeps the beast at bay until Serpico and the others arrive just in time. Soon, more tigers arrive and the whole party fights them together. When the tigers are dispatched the party has a happy reunion, and Farnese tells Guts she's ready to rejoin them.

You might not have noticed it, but the way the pauldrons on the Berserker Armor move when Guts raises his arm like this shows just how weird and wonderful they are. These are the last major components of the armor that I haven't put under the microscope yet, so buckle up one more time while I explain what makes them stand out from the pauldrons of history.

To review our knowledge, there are two main categories of shoulder defense. Spaulders are the smaller type that only cover the deltoid muscles and the outside of the upper arms, so that the pieces don't overlap with the cuirass. Spaulders are lighter and allow the largest range of motion, but the gap between the spaulder and the breastplate is vulnerable to thrusts.

Elements of a Light Cavalry Armor in the German Fashion, Milanese, ca. 1510. 
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 14.25.716b–f

While the shoulder defenses of several of Guts's previous armors were so big and loose-fitting that I hesitated to call them spaulders, they shared this particular weakness, as we saw in the Chapter of the Binding Chain. The owner of the light cavalry armor above probably wore a mail shirt under it or had patches of mail sewn to his arming jacket, which would have stopped a one-handed sword thrust (like Farnese used against Guts) from drawing blood. But mail was less dependable than plate against more powerful piercing weapons such as the heavy lance, which is why the existence of these gaps represented a calculated risk.

Guts gets stabbed in a gap while wearing his Lost Children armor

Pauldrons cover more of the upper body than spaulders do to minimize gaps in the plate protection: they include large plates that overlap the cuirass both in front and in back. The pauldrons on the armor of a lance-using heavy cavalryman were normally asymmetrical: the left pauldron would be larger and often fitted with a reinforcing piece to better protect his left side against the opponent's lance, while the front side of the right pauldron would incorporate a cutout in the armpit area so he could couch his lance under his arm. The armor-wearer's own lance would help to block thrusts to this spot when it was tucked in there, especially if the lance was fitted with a cone-shaped handguard called a vamplate. The hook-shaped object sticking out of this breastplate is a lance rest (or as I like to think of it, a lance arrest), which prevents the lance from sliding backward on impact and thus increases the power of the strike.

Portions of a Field Armor. German, probably Augsburg, dated 1524. 
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 29.150.3b–p

An armor for a foot soldier or light cavalryman who did not intend to use a couched lance could be made with symmetrical pauldrons that covered the left and right sides equally. While such pauldrons don't protect every gap all the time, they greatly increase the likelihood of deflecting thrusts that would have found a gap if spaulders were being used. 

Portions of an Armor for Vincenzo Luigi di Capua (d. 1627) by Pompeo della 
Cesa (Italian), ca. 1595. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001.72; 2013.618

As you can see, the pauldrons on the Berserker Armor totally surround and cover up the arm holes in the cuirass. I have highlighted the pauldrons purple, the cuirass yellow, and the bevor teal. It's just as well for Guts that the armor has symmetrical pauldrons and no lance rest, because he's never been a lance user and has rarely fought on horseback since he got marked with the Brand of Sacrifice.

The pauldrons I've shown so far represent a form of construction that was very common in the 16th century. This type includes some small upper arm lames resembling those on a spaulder, the lowest of which can be fastened to the arm with a strap that goes around the rerebrace. The highest of these upper arm lames hangs from a much bigger main pauldron plate that overlaps the front and back of the cuirass, thereby covering many of the gaps that would be present when using a simple spaulder. On the example below, the main plate extends quite low down the chest in order to cover the entire arm hole of the cuirass. Only the highest of the upper arm lames is actually articulated to the main plate, but a flange projecting from the main plate (yellow arrow) overlaps and partially conforms to the upper arm lames so that the armpit is well-hidden from a horizontal thrust.

The pauldrons on Guts resemble the historical pieces in their broad outlines, but the details are actually quite different. Instead of some upper arm lames hanging down from a large main plate that overlaps the breast and back, the upper arm lames hang from a smaller cap plate sitting on the deltoids. Spreading out from this pointy-shouldered cap plate are two big lames (purple) that extend the pauldron over the back and breast plates. But if the purple lames over the chest were not present, the cap plate and the upper arm lames by themselves could work perfectly well as a spaulder. 

Rivets (green) along the front- and rear-facing edges of the 'spaulder' section connect the upper arm lames and the cap plate. The row of rivets on the front should probably attach to an internal leather to make it more collapsible when the arm raises forward, while the row of rivets on the back of the spaulder section could be either on leathers or sliding rivets. Please be aware that the green rivet at the bottom of the cap plate does NOT connect the cap plate to the purple chest lame next to it; this rivet only connects the cap plate to the highest upper arm lame. While no rivets are visible along the centerline of the spaulder, realistically the middle of each lame should also be riveted to an internal leather strip to prevent gaps from opening between them when they sag under gravity.

Note that although they go pretty far down the chest, the purple chest lames do not bridge the gap between the cuirass and the upper arm lames. In other words, the protective flange pointed out on the historical pauldron is missing from Guts's pauldrons. Since Guts doesn't use a lance, these gaps that exist on both sides are not really doing anything for him except making it easier to stab him in the armpits. It seems strange to leave in this vulnerability when the big purple lames imply a desire for maximum protection. I'm using this animated GIF to suggest how the pauldron might look if the purple lames were extended over the gap.

When Guts raises his arm over his head, you're also going to see that the larger of the two purple lames does something construction-wise that the smaller lame doesn't. For comparison, let's first see what a normal historical pauldron would look like in such a posture. In the picture below, modern jouster Arne Koets is raising his arm while putting a piece of armor on his horse's neck. You can see that the front and back parts of the pauldron are not connected underneath, so that there is a significant gap in the plate protection where only mail is visible (arrow). The armpit is an extremely awkward place to surround with plates in a way that allows natural movement, making it usually more trouble than it's worth. It was far easier to leave the pauldrons open underneath while letting the highly flexible mail act as insurance.

Arne Koets, "Riding in armour on a fully barded steed", posted Nov 4, 2020.
https://youtu.be/0fXYVj5fxus

Almost all of the lames making up Guts's pauldrons are open on the insides of his arms and armpits so that his bare skin is exposed. Guts would be more protected in this position if—like most well-equipped knights in full armor—he was also wearing closed rerebraces under the pauldrons and a layer of mail armor inside the armpits. But putting that aside, the open underside of the pauldrons themselves is historically normal. 

The big exception to the normal—and one of the weirdest things about these pauldrons—is that the biggest lame actually connects its front and back parts together under the armpit! When Guts raises his arms really high like this, the lower edges of the pauldrons' underarm plates actually rise above the lower edges of the cuirass arm holes, creating a gap between the purple and yellow plates where you can see the black cloth of his shirt peeking through.

I don't think an exact match for this underarm plate on the pauldron can be found in history. The closest things I've seen are from some extremely fancy early 16th century sets by two armorers who served nobility and royalty: Conrad Seusenhofer (Austrian, Innsbruck, died 1517) and Kolman Helmschmid (German, Augsburg 1471–1532). The ones I'm talking about were costume armors that were sculpted and decorated to imitate extravagant clothing of the period. What's interesting for our purposes is how the arms—made in the shape of oversized sleeves—connected to the cuirass. 

The pauldron (or at any rate the pauldron-like section of the arm assembly) was basically a flexible horizontal tube made up of numerous hoop-shaped lames. The inward-facing end of the tube overlapped the cuirass to form a tight seal all around the armhole, and this overlapping edge was fastened in multiple places so the lames protecting the armpit could not separate from the cuirass. I'm not sure what restrictions this design placed on the wearer's range of motion; I suspect the shoulder joints on Seusenhofer's armor for Giuliano de' Medici (not pictured) would have been more practical for fighting than the one he made for the future Emperor Charles V (below). What's clear is that having this degree of armpit protection was rare even for kings, and unheard-of for any normal man in armor.

Ceremonial Boy's Armor for the future Emperor Charles V. Made by Konrad
Seusenhofer in Innsbruck, Austria ca. 1512–14. Kunsthistorisches Museum,
Vienna, Imperial Armoury (A 109)

Guts's pauldrons have very little in common with those royal masterpieces besides the fact that they both have a plate under the armpit which sits against the cuirass. Even then, there is a massive difference because the Seusenhofer pieces have the mating lame locked to the cuirass in a stationary position, while Guts's underarm lames can move around in relation to the cuirass.

To better understand how Guts's pauldrons' behave in motion, let us examine their articulation. In this picture we can see six rivets (green) on the top of the pauldron, whose arrangement implies that there are two parallel strips of leather on the inside running from the neck to the deltoid cap. Each strip has three rivets in a row, and each lame is connected to both strips. The surprising thing is that as far as I can tell, the two internal leathers on top are the only things connecting the three biggest plates of the pauldron together! There are no leathers or rivets holding the pieces together at the front, rear, or underside of the pauldron assembly, meaning the lames will move more freely in relation to each other than normal pauldrons would allow.

The picture showing all six rivets is a rare view in which none are hidden by the cape. It's also a rare side-on view of the dimensions of the pauldron. On the other hand, I don't like how this particular drawing makes the top of the pauldron look completely flat; such an unnatural shape would not sit comfortably or securely on the shoulders. The picture below is both a better ergonomic design and more representative of how Miura usually draws it: the ridge line between the green rivets is raised up, and the facets on either side of it slope downward towards the chest and back like a gabled roof.

The pauldrons buckle onto the cuirass using a single strap (yellow arrow) on each side of the neck opening. 

Historically speaking, if pauldrons were strapped to a piece of plate armor on the torso it would have been a neck defense called a gorget. A gorget enclosed the neck and rested upon the structures of the upper chest and upper back, making it a secure place to hang the pauldrons from. On the armor with gold stripes there is a wide gap between the breastplate and backplate which the gorget fills in; each side of the gorget has a vertical pin (circled green) which the shoulder defense slides onto. The gorget did not enter common use until the start of the 16th century; the earlier method for attaching pauldrons was to lace them directly to the arming garment. But since Guts has neither a gorget nor a purpose-made arming garment, there's really nothing to do but fasten his pauldrons to the top of his cuirass. It's unclear whether the straps for Guts's pauldrons are mounted on his backplate or his breastplate. I'm going to suggest the backplate, if only because historical armors that used a gorget would usually put these pauldron straps on the rear half of the gorget.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 14.25.716b–f

I will now expand on the theme of Guts's pauldrons having unusually loose articulation. If you look at the inside of historical pauldron, you will probably see something like the GIF below. It depicts Edward Hunter, Armorer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, showing a pauldron from a 1527 armor that was probably made for King Henry VIII of England. This pauldron has multiple parallel internal leathers holding it together, which are evenly distributed from the center out to the edges. When the king has his arms hanging at his sides, the lames spread apart through a combination of gravity and the strap around the rerebrace pulling the bottom lame downward. But the leathers are just short enough to ensure that the lames will still overlap a little bit even at their maximum distance, thus preventing any gaps from appearing. When an arm (and particularly the elbow) is raised, the pauldron will try to accommodate that movement through the lames sliding closer together—that is, compressing—in one or more locations. The formerly taut leathers scrunch up as the lames compress.

Edward Hunter holding a pauldron in "Insider Insights--Dressing in Armor",
recorded August 18, 2021 at Met Museum. Pauldron belongs to Armor, Probably of
King Henry VIII of England, dated 1527. Made in the Royal Workshops
at Greenwich. Metropolitan Museum of Art Accession No. 19.131.1 
https://youtu.be/CI_niyEAnjM?si=ZLJALUq_ae_rHGkL

At first glance, it may seem like there is no downside to articulating the pauldron in a way that prevents the lames from gapping anywhere. Unfortunately, this is partly responsible for the tendency of pauldrons to ride up higher whenever the elbows are raised above a certain height. If even one pauldron lame is displaced upward by the movement of the arm, that lame will tend to drag its neighboring lames upward with it. And since the pauldron is connected to the torso by just one strap or set of laces next to the neck, the whole lower part of the pauldron tends to pivot away from the torso when the arm is raised. This exposes the vulnerable armpit to an increasing degree as the arm is raised higher, as you can see in the picture below.

Dr Daniel Jaquet in "Moving in harness", a short film by Daniel Jaquet,
realised by Vincent Deluz. Film originally played in the exhibition
"Armatus Corpus" at the Military Museum, Castle of Morges, Switzerland 
https://youtu.be/q-bnM5SuQkI?si=yctXMIwLHVBStAN5

Knights in history may have tried to minimize this problem by being careful about how they moved their arms; it's surprisingly easy to use many knightly weapons while keeping the elbows relatively low, especially because one can shift some of the burden of defending themselves onto the armor. In the picture below, Reece Nelson is out of frame on the left and Ben Bruce is in frame on the right. Each man stands with his left side forward and grips the middle of his own blade with his left hand, a technique that improves accuracy and leverage when thrusting at the gaps in an opponent's armor. Ben keeps his elbow low so that his pauldron stays in the most protective position over his armpit, and his arm harness blocks most attacks that could come at the armpit from below. Therefore, Reece's thrusts to Ben's armpit keep bouncing off his pauldron. This would not work so well for Guts if he had to do it, since his pauldron is missing that protective flange between the chest and the upper arm lames.

Reece Nelson's sword blocked by Ben Bruce's pauldron in "Pursuing the Knightly
Arts: Covering our Harnesses" posted to YouTube on Aug 11, 2017.
https://youtu.be/Odf8dI3wCQI?si=V9qTQpMT242MdoSl

The way that Guts's pauldrons behave when he raises his arms is rather different. Since he's missing all those extra internal leathers near the edges of the pauldrons, the big chest lames and the shoulder cap plate tend to spread apart from each other more and more towards the edges, to the point where the tips of the lames are no longer overlapping with each other. Despite this spreading around the edges the lames stay overlapped on top of the pauldrons, because that's where the internal leathers are. On one hand this loose construction would make the pauldron lames rattle around a lot when Guts moves, and it would certainly make it easier for an attacker to pry the lames apart if their point got between them, but on the other hand it kind of reduces the "riding up problem" associated with conventional pauldrons.

When Guts raises an elbow over his head, the cap plate on the pseudo-spaulder is the part that rises up the most. But since there are no leathers connecting the bottom of the cap plate with the bottoms of the chest lames, the cap plate does not drag its neighbors upward as it rises. The chest lames do rise up because of the shifting of the underlying muscles and bones, but to a far lesser extent than they would if all the lames were fully leathered together. Their relative disconnection from the spaulder-like pieces allows them to stay in a relatively low and level position even in this arms-overhead posture, unlike conventional pauldrons which would probably flip behind his back and completely expose his armpits from the front. To sum up the pros and cons, I'd say that Guts's pauldrons are more likely to let in a thrust that comes at an oblique angle where it slides along the surface until it finds a gap, but perpendicular hits against the plates will be stopped dead and the armpits are far more protected in a hands-overhead position.

I did a fair amount of cherry-picking to find drawings where the pauldrons' moved dramatically. But in many pictures the underarm plates rise very little, and they maintain their overlap with the armholes of the cuirass.

I suppose that these underarm plates have a similar function to the armhole gussets I described way back in blog number one: they're the brightest gold plates on the cuirass of that light cavalry armor covered with stripes. Such gussets can move inside the arm holes on sliding rivets to allow for an effectively smaller arm opening without reducing the range of motion. I definitely think gussets on the cuirass are more practical than underarm plates on the pauldron, since the underarm plate is bound to have problematic interactions with the cuirass and might not have the freedom to rotate that it really requires. But even if the pauldrons on the Berserker armor might not work as well in real life as they do in the manga, there's something refreshing about their sheer inventiveness.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 14.25.716b–f

Having finally finished my last digression on physical armor construction, let's marathon our way through the remaining story scenes where we'll focus on the character-based and supernatural aspects of the armor.

Getting Farnese back is a good start, but the Kushan attack on Vritannis has only just begun. Emperor Ganishka appears as a giant head made of fog and declares his war against the "infidels" before disappearing again. Reports start coming in from all over the city that monsters are attacking and setting fire to all the ships in the harbor. When Roderick hears that Farnese's friends need to get to Elf Island (it seems Magnifico kept him out of the loop) he offers to take them on his ship the Seahorse. In order for that to happen, they need to hurry up and save the ship before it's too late.

The Kushan forces attack by landing platoons of Daka—monstrous humanoid soldiers with horns and fangs—accompanied by the tiger and crocodile Pishacha we've seen already. The fighting on the way to the harbor is fierce. Guts encounters a makara, the same kind of whale beast from the beach. The beast helmet threatens to come out, but Guts wills it to stay down. With improved physical condition and the experience of fighting one before, Guts kills the leviathan without having to go berserk. 

When they arrive at the harbor, they find it swarming with Daka, and soon their exit is cut off. Guts gets ready to fight thinking that going berserk is the only way, but Schierke begs him to stop, saying there's another way. Schierke begins a ritual to summon a powerful and dangerous spirit, the Wheel of Flame, while Guts and the others fight to protect her. Just as Guts is about to lose control—gritting his teeth as the Beast of Darkness creeps up from his cape—Schierke completes the spell and destroys all the Daka in sight. 

Unfortunately, casting this spell exhausts Schierke to the point where she needs Guts to carry her on his back, and she certainly cannot perform another summoning. At the worst possible time, no fewer than five makara burst out of the water. Guts tells Schierke to let go; he allows the Beast take control because they're out of options. Schierke is alarmed about not being able to bring him back in her current state and tries in vain to stop him. 

Because she keeps hanging onto him as the Beast head comes up from the cape and turns into the helmet, Schierke's ethereal body separates from her physical body and gets drawn inside the armor with Guts, leaving her physical body to collapse unconscious. 

As ever, the armor transformation sends Guts's equipment belts flying off him.

The jaws of the helmet open in a roar as Guts turns into a furious tornado of carnage, somersaulting through the air as he carves the monsters to pieces. 

From inside the armor, Schierke sees the combat through Guts's eyes.

One Makara tries to bite Guts in half: a tooth punches into the breastplate, causing Guts to cough up blood from the jaws of the helmet. 

Amazingly, the armor's structure holds under the pressure. Guts kills the Makara that bit him without slowing down, and crouches atop a heap of their corpses.

When the tooth is removed, the apparently self-repairing armor begins to close up the hole again.

At this moment, a huge Kushan ship comes careening at Guts, who avoids being crushed by leaping onto the bowsprit. Commanding the ship from a levitating position is a turbaned old man, the wizard general and Pishacha Gana leader, Daiba. The berserker attacks recklessly in response to Daiba's challenge, only for the wizard to effortlessly conjure a water spout which launches Guts high into the air. 

As Guts falls from a height at which even water is deadly, Schierke's spirit urgently reaches out to him: "Hear me, Guts's perception, distorted through the turbulence of enmity. Look, open your eyes."

Restored to rational thought just in the nick of time, Guts turns in midair and uses wind resistance to steer himself toward the mast of one of the burning ships, and by chopping through everything on the way down he is able to slow his fall. Serpico wonders if it was Berserker instinct, or something else. Guts starts evading, as Daiba sends more water spouts at him. The mainmast of the burning ship starts falling, and is about to crush Guts's companions, when Guts blocks it with his sword.

The strain of this labor is great, causing him to bleed from the wound in his chest. Notice that the outer part of the hole in the breastplate is mostly bent back into shape by the armor's self-repair.

Guts manages to throw the mast safely aside. Everybody holds their breath wondering if he's going to attack them or not, when he starts speaking normally and turns to show them his face. Guts has entered a state where he can use the armor's pain-ignoring and performance-enhancing powers yet stay in control of his will. The bevor is lowered and the dark shroud has withdrawn enough to reveal his mouth and chin. The helmet stays on, but the eye slots clear up so we can see Guts's left eye looking out.

In this configuration, the helmet resembles Batman's cowl. The armor was briefly used in this state at the Mansion of the Spirit Tree the first time that Schierke snapped him out of his berserker frenzy: I am going to call this mode of the armor "control mode".

The shape of the helmet actually changes somewhat in control mode, reverting from the very long and pointed berserk form to a more human-shaped form with a shorter snout and taller skull.

After grabbing Casca and Farnese in his arms to keep them from being washed away by a large wave, Guts recognizes from the sizzling feeling on the back of his neck that Daiba is either an Apostle or directly connected with them. His thoughts of hatred cause the beast helmet to close on him again, so that he starts squeezing Casca and Farnese dangerously hard before Schierke snaps him out of it and he lets go. 

"Stay centered!" says Schierke's spirit. "If you mind is seized with hatred, the armor will possess you, its wearer!" 

Guts's ethereal body has the armor fused with him, almost like an organic shell. The geometry of the breastplate and pauldrons is easy to recognize. 

The helmet and bevor are absent from Guts's ethereal body, but his head gives off a kind of dark haze which covers everything except his face below the eyebrows (and encroaches over the right eye, perhaps to represent its blindness) and gives him pointed canine ears like the Beast.

This painting depicts the colors of Guts and Schierke's ethereal bodies.

"Anger, fury, they draw out the armor's power," says Schierke. "But, you must never yield everything to them. Make your volition your pivot of power." 

Guts and Serpico now attack Daiba together. Isidro picks up Guts's now somewhat soggy equipment harness—which Guts had shed when the armor transformed—and hurts Daiba with a mini bomb.

Fallen to the deck and with Guts bearing down on him, Daiba summons the Kundalini, a serpent familiar whose name means "Coil God". Its true body is merely that of a large snake, but it can control the water elementals in order to surround itself with a gigantic snake body made out of water. It shoots a narrow jet of water from its mouth so powerful that it cuts the Kushan ship in half.

Guts and Serpico battle the Kundalini while avoiding its attacks. Finding that no one's sword can penetrate the great mass of water to attack the serpent's true body, Guts and Schierke come up with a dangerous plan to channel the Wheel of Flame through the Dragon Slayer. With his blade heated to a scorching temperature by the Wheel of Flame, Guts evaporates the Kundalini's water jet and then its body, enabling Serpico to slice the Coil God's true body in half. Daiba retreats on the back of a winged beast. 

Guts has been burned by the spirit's heat, so landing in the water again is a relief for him. Schierke says she never wants to let Guts do something that dangerous again. A quick note on Guts's ability to push off the harbor bottom and tread water: Swimming in armor was practiced in history, although it was extremely dangerous and difficult to master. Some Japanese swimming styles still practice swimming in samurai armor. Michael K. Bergstrom performed an experiment in a swimming pool using a European replica harness, with scuba divers present for assistance and rescue. Bergstrom's test shows how difficult it would have been to swim in plate armor without drowning, but the results were promising enough that he thinks a person with more strength and training than himself would be able do it effectively.

Guts and Serpico meet up on a floating piece of ship. Sensing Daiba's failure, Emperor Ganishka appears in fog cloud form to chastise his wizard and to deal with the problem himself. He attacks Guts and Serpico with lightning, forcing them to split up again. Guts leaps onto another ship that's floating on its side, but Ganishka's lightning finds him.

When Ganishka zaps Guts, inflicting life-threatening harm and excruciating pain, Schierke's spirit is ejected from the armor...

...and returns to her body. 

At the same time, the Berserker armor reverts to inactive mode with the helmet and the arm defenses retracting into the shroud, while Guts collapses limp and smoldering from the shock.

Guts rejects an offer from Ganishka to spare his life if he joins forces with him against Griffith. Just before the Emperor can finish off Guts, Griffith's servant Nosferatu Zodd swoops in with a swarm of flying Apostles to attack Ganishka. They attempt to scatter Ganishka's mist body by flying through him at high speed but are zapped out of the sky. Zodd happens to fall right into the capsized ship that Guts floating on, knocking Guts into the water with him. When Zodd surfaces, Guts clings to him; after a tense exchange, they agree to temporarily cooperate against Ganishka. Fortunately, Schierke is able to re-establish contact with Guts through thought transference, telling him and Zodd to aim at Ganishka's ethereal body located between the mist-form's eyes. They fly right into Ganishka and strike the blow, dispelling the emperor's mist body.

Zodd and Guts get electrocuted again in the process, causing Zodd to crash-land with Guts into a stone quay. The defeat of Ganishka's proxy causes the supernatural mist that had spread through the streets of Vritannis to recede, and Daiba commands the Kushan forces into full retreat. When Guts's party gets to the scene of the crash, Zodd quickly recovers, while Guts is in far worse condition. He's laid out on the ground with smoke coming off him and serious burns from the lightning.

Zodd demands that Guts get up and fight, but it takes all his will just to stand while propping himself up with the Dragon Slayer. Zodd changes his mind and says they will fight again when Guts is fresh. It's Guts's turn to get aggressive when Zodd mentions that Griffith is nearby; it takes some words from Serpico and the sight of an anxious Casca to persuade Guts to disengage from Zodd. 

Here we can note that Isidro is still helpfully carrying Guts's discarded baggage.

As soon as Zodd flies away, Guts collapses from his wounds and exhaustion. The companions drag Guts and his heavy equipment into a rowboat so they can rendezvous with the Seahorse and start tending to him en route. 

As dawn breaks, Guts glimpses Griffith on the cliffs in the distance before his eyes fall shut. Another fight using the armor has been survived. The ship awaits.

Scene 4: Sea God Island

When we return to our heroes on the open seas, Roderick's navigator describes Guts as having been on the verge of death when he was brought to the ship. Now he is back on his feet, albeit with the help of a crutch. His body is almost completely wrapped in bandages from the neck down, and his exposed skin is covered in scars left by the burns he received from using the Wheel of Flame against the Kundalini, as well as Emperor Ganishka's lightning. 

Guts watches over Casca as she explores the bow area of the ship, keeping his distance so as not to frighten her.

While looking at Casca, Guts has an unsettling moment of darkened vision or hazy consciousness. Maybe this is one of the things the Skull Knight warned about.

An accident occurs when Casca climbs out on the bowsprit to chase a bird: Guts climbs out to coax her back, but she keeps backing away from him until a wave jolts the ship and she falls off, her hand slipping from his grasp when he tries to catch her with his iron hand. Guts dives in after her and gets them to the surface, but as soon as the rescue boat takes Casca aboard, his bad condition catches up to him and he starts to drown. 

When Guts wakes up afterward, he's back in bed on the ship with his relieved companions standing around him; they explain that Roderick saved him, and Casca is okay. Schierke asks to have Guts alone so she can re-draw the talisman on his neck that got washed off. 

While she gets ready, Guts dwells on the absence of his left hand and the limitations of his prosthetic, perhaps applying the statement to other things about himself: "I'd forgotten it was just a lump of iron I attached so I could beat up my enemies. She slipped right through."

While Schierke re-applies the talisman, she notices she can feel the pain coming from his body, perhaps because their ethereal bodies overlapped while she was with him in spirit. After this, she leaves him to rest in bed.

The voyage to Elfhelm is interrupted when the pirate captain Bonebeard attacks with a force of three ships. As the cannons exchange fire, Farnese, Serpico, and Schierke take Guts to the ship's hold for safety. His fever's returned—made worse by his burned skin preventing him from sweating—and while unconscious he's gripped by a nightmare. Schierke thinks it too risky to use magic to dispel the nightmare while Guts is in this condition, meaning it must run its course.

Guts's fever intensifies as the Beast of Darkness, wrapped in rattling chains, emerges from the darkness of his mind and gives this warning:

Don't think you can bind me with this yoke. The moment you acquired that shell, I had already been released. The clever witch thinks she's tamed me, but that's just temporary. Your new companions—those you protect, warm lights—fine, for now. You cling to those trifling chains. 

But the closer they get to you, the more they entwine about you, the more exposed they are to death. Then someday, they'll be smashed and torn, just like that time in the eclipse.

 

No one will be able to prevent that moment. You'll find yourself consumed by me. May we run rampant with hatred and wild joy, just to crush with these fangs the true light that burns us. 

But for now, I'll obey. I'll hold my breath, deep in the darkness, within us. Bound, restrained, I'll conserve my energy. And then, someday...

As the beast withdraws back into the darkness, Guts wakes with a start. He can't remember his nightmare, only the ominous feeling it gave him.

Fortunately, Isidro brings the news that the pirates are driven off, and the crew celebrates. That night, Guts sits brooding on the ship's railing. Here he is re-bandaged, and not wearing his prosthetic.

A few more days into the voyage, on the morning after the night of the new moon, an earth-shaking event back in Midland is felt on the Seahorse. The forbidden second reincarnation of Emperor Ganishka into a gigantic and monstrous Shiva is sensed by Schierke, who feels as if some calamity is tearing the world apart. At the same time the behelit that Guts took from the Count starts to tremble as its scrambled features rearrange into a proper face, and pain alerts Guts and Casca through the Brand. 

Far away, Griffith's forces engage the abomination in battle. It ends when the Skull Knight appears and tries to cut Femto with his Sword of Priming, but Femto steals the sword stroke out of the air and uses it to cut open Ganishka. Ganishka's destruction unleashes a wave of light and wind that blows across the world, bringing creatures of myth and magic into the world of humans. Captain Bonebeard later describes feeling as if something blew through his very body, and this seems to be what everyone in the world experiences at the same time. Guts and the others watch in amazement from the deck as the wall of light approaches, and when the strange wind passes through Guts, it heals large areas of his burned skin. The healing isn't total, since a few burn scars remain on him. It also has no effect on his old injuries, since his missing left hand does not grow back, and the scar on the bridge of his nose stays the same. 

After this, the pirates attack again. It seems that in the meantime they were turned into slaves of a supernatural aquatic monster, which attacks using giant tentacles that burst out of the water. Although Guts and the crew fight them off, the Seahorse is left damaged and with multiple leaks. To perform proper repairs, Roderick decides to stop at a nearby island that has a fishing village and a small, run-down seaport. 

When the party disembarks, Schierke senses an ominous od shrouding the whole island, and asks Guts if he senses it too. He is also wary, saying that ever since the wind of change his brand has been like a wound that won't close.

At night, while Schierke and Isidro are occupied elsewhere talking to a fishing girl named Isma, the main group of people from the Seahorse come under attack from the Sea God's tentacles. As usual, Guts and Serpico take the lead in combat.

Their trouble escalates when the multiple lamprey-mouth tentacles which the smaller clawed tentacles were attached to burst into the open. These are so large that Serpico's sword cannot cut through them, and it takes all of Guts's effort to kill the giant tentacles as they lunge at him. 

The number of attacking tentacles continues to increase. The Beast of Darkness asks Guts,

Attacked by lamprey tentacles from two sides at once, Guts once again uses his special move. He scrapes his sword against the iron hand to spark the cannon and shoot one tentacle monster, then uses the recoil to turn and chop through the monster on the opposite side. 

Here his reloading method is shown in more detail than we've seen before: first he shakes the muzzle downward to make the remaining ashes fall out. It's a bit hard to see what he's grabbing from his pouch, but I think it might be some kind of self-contained cartridge, in which a combustible wrapping holds together both a ball and a powder charge.

He's got a brush for cleaning out the bore, the butt of which serves as his ramrod.

The party is surrounded and cut off from the Seahorse, and the tentacles keep coming. Magnifico asks Guts outright to use his beast transformation; Farnese barely has time to reproach her brother for this suggestion before the pirate ship from before comes crashing into their midst.

The ship, it turns out, now serves as the shell of a giant sea slug, which in turn is the source of multiple lamprey-mouth tentacles. More than a dozen additional slugs approach, bringing with them a seemingly endless mass of tentacles. From up on the forecastle, tentacle-Bonebeard tells the party that all people devoured by the Sea God are reborn as tentacles to serve as its literal hands and feet, and that soon they'll be joining the rest. 

Guts clenches his teeth in desperation. Now that he realizes he can't hold back such a flood of monsters, the metaphorical chains restraining the Beast of Darkness loosen. Schierke senses from a distance what is coming over him, dismayed that she isn't there to at least help Guts control himself like she did in Vritannis.

As the tentacles close in, Guts looks back at Casca's face, and seemingly makes up his mind that going berserk is the only way to protect her. Farnese cannot dissuade him or stop the Beast Helmet from rising up and swallowing his face.

With untamed power coursing through his muscles, and the usual high-pressure shedding of his equipment harness, Guts leaps into the fight.

Guts's begins a rampage that inflicts impressive damage, managing to draw blood from the pirate ship slug by ramming his sword point through the armored hull, and chopping apart numerous tentacle creatures. At this point, Schierke reaches a cliff edge from which she can see Guts fighting below. After asking Isidro and Isma to guard her body, she sends out her ethereal body to make direct contact with Guts and reach his consciousness.

Unfortunately, the armor is even more powerful than before, and its od completely repels Schierke's ethereal body. 

Jolted back to her physical body, she says she can't get through to Guts.

Guts continues to rage on against the monsters, at one point tearing off the eyestalk of a giant slug using the jaws of the helmet and bevor. It's startling to see how elastic the metal of the bevor actually is when the magic is active, and how beast-like Guts becomes in his frenzy.

While Guts is raging on against the monsters, Casca suddenly sees a child wandering alone and goes running to it through the danger zone. The others in turn run after Casca. A slug attacks Casca and the child, who are only saved because Guts cuts the monster down at the last moment. 

Though Farnese wonders if he protected Casca because he's in his right mind, Schierke finally arrives on the scene and warns that Guts is still dangerous. Serpico stands ready to defend his companions against Guts. 

Guts's clouded mind is torn between contradicting commands to either kill or protect the indistinct figures standing before him. 

The Beast of Darkness is trying with all its might to make Guts obey...

...when a voice breaks through to Guts and directs his sight towards Casca. A light shines in front of her which dispels the shadows clouding Guts's perception of her, which turns out to be the child of light who helped Guts once before. 

It touches the point of Guts's breastplate... 

...sending glowing energy through him that opens his eyes to recognize the faces of his precious companions.

The armor fights to contain Guts as he starts struggling to get out, with the gauntlets momentarily peeling off and the jaws partially cracking open before the armor clamps down on him again. 

Seeing her chance, Schierke leaps onto Guts's back. 

She whispers something unintelligible in his ear, which finally breaks the armor's hold and allows his face to burst out of the helmet.

In this picture we finally get a clear view of the gauntlets and couters peeling off, with the material of the black shroud clinging to Guts as it dissolves away.

Only then does everybody notice the reason that Casca ran into danger: it's the same little black-haired boy who appeared at the seashore near Vritannis. Schierke notes that there was also a full moon the last time the boy appeared, suggesting he is connected with magic. Guts recognizes that it was the boy who saved him while in Berserk mode. However, the group can only guess because the boy doesn't speak at all.

Everyone now wants to leave the island as soon as possible, but Guts points out that the Sea God will only attack them at sea if they try to escape, and they also won't survive if they do nothing but try to defend until sunrise. Fortunately, Schierke comes up with a plan.

First, everybody gets back on board the Seahorse. There, with some help from Schierke, Farnese casts the Formation of the Four as a magical barrier around the ship. As long as Farnese stays within its bounds and keeps its protective light within her subconscious, no evil beings from the astral world can touch the ship. However, the barrier will only be half as effective against any beings which are partly physical, so the crew and passengers might be required to fight.

While everyone else is protected on the ship, Guts's role will be to enter the Sea God's cave and slay it. Schierke explains to him that although she would prefer to fight the creature with magic, she can sense that the interior of the island is under the Sea God's complete control, meaning that the spirits' powers would be ineffective there. Guts will need to fully activate the armor for combat. Schierke will go with him in her ethereal body, ensuring that even if the armor strains his body, at least his mind will remain clear. Guts squats down so that Schierke can climb on his back, then summons the beast from within his mind. 

His cape billows as the Beast awakens.

While the beast helmet rises up to cover Guts's head, and the vein-like edges of the dark shroud consume his face, Schierke's ethereal body separates from her physical body to merge with Guts and the armor. 

From this point, her physical body must remain on the ship under the protection of her companions.

With the armor's jaws snapped shut, Schierke's work begins. Her ethereal body clings to the head of the Beast, which surrounds the true form of Guts.

Reaching out her hand, she tears through the Beast's eye to uncloud the eye of Guts.

Guts regains control of himself, and the helmet takes the now-familiar "cowl" appearance. This is the first time that Guts and Schierke have managed to activate control mode immediately upon starting the armor up, instead of needing to bring Guts back after he'd already been on an uncontrolled rampage.

Now that Schierke's spirit is with him, Guts shows off his incredible mobility by using some stones poking above the water to leap from the ship back to the island, and onward to the Sea God's cave. In addition to increasing his athleticism, he notes that the armor also sharpens his night vision. 

At the entrance, the brand of sacrifice on Guts starts to bleed in response to the now-awoken Sea God's spiritual pressure. They arrive in a huge subterranean chamber, where they stand before the Sea God's cavernous fanged mouth and the hundreds of sea slug tentacles which grow from it like a beard, including the transformed pirates.

When the Sea God Roars, both physical and spiritual pressure rattle Guts and Schierke.

Realizing that he can't waste his strength fighting the Sea God's minions, Guts decides to rush through them and leap right into the Sea God's mouth to kill it from the inside. 

Schierke struggles to hold on to Guts as he furiously maneuvers, which is a problem I didn't expect her to have. Since Schierke started out inside the armor while the previous fight in the harbor of Vritannis was happening—and since the subsequent depictions of her ethereal body clinging to Guts were not shown as directly related to physical reality—I figured she was basically a passenger inside the armor and unable to be dislodged by anything except a magical attack that disrupted their mental connection. What this present scene suggests is that Schierke's ethereal body is in some meaningful sense outside the physical enclosure of the armor, and that there is enough of a causal relationship between the characters' physical and ethereal bodies for her to be jerked around by Guts making sudden changes of speed or direction. 

Guts leaps into the Sea God's open mouth, and the jaws snap shut. Thinking him dead for sure, the pirate captain leads the host of tentacles out of the cave to attack the Seahorse. 

Guts gets through the esophagus intact and lands in the creature's stomach, where numerous swallowed ships provide platforms to stand on. The fact that Schierke's ethereal body is shown in this position, even in a panel where the armor is shown in physical form, really clarifies to me that Schierke is clinging to the outside of the armor rather than being encapsulated in there with Guts. 

I will also suggest that this X-ray view of the helmet makes it look way too close-fitting on the cranium; in real life a battle helmet should have some excess room and padding inside to help reduce blunt impact. Maybe the shroud provides some padding, but that helmet really ought to be more roomy.

The beast is so gigantic that stabbing the inside of its stomach won't cause much harm. However, Guts hears its pounding pulse and gets the idea of finding its heart. Schierke senses the flow of od through its body to figure out where to go, and Guts escapes from the stomach by cutting through part of the wall and letting the stomach gasses blow him out. Walking through spaces filled with blood vessels, Guts follows the increasingly loud pulse until he reaches the heart. The sound waves become so overwhelming that Guts's body is numbed and the air feels heavy to breathe, as if he were underwater.

Suddenly, the pulse intensifies. While this was happening, the Seahorse fought off an attack by the Sea God's tentacles, including the pirates. Now that its minions have failed, the Sea God bursts out from the inside of the Island in order to attack the Seahorse directly. However, a host consisting of all the merrow who had been in hiding swims past the Seahorse to do battle with the Sea God, their ancient enemy.

Inside the Sea God, a number of monstrous sea creatures come out to defend their host's heart from Guts. Guts tries to strike the heart but is thrown back by the wall of sound and caught in the jaws of multiple giant fish. Thankfully, the armor prevents him from being crushed by the force, and only the very tips of their fangs draw blood before getting stuck in the plates.

After Guts cuts his way out, the broken-off tips of the monsters' fangs get pushed out of the plates as the living metal rapidly closes up the holes.

By the time he's killed all the monster fish, the percussive battering of the Sea God's heartbeat has all but crippled Guts, whose armor gives no physical protection from the sonic pulses. He's been repeatedly knocked to the ground with blood spurting from his eyes, ears, and mouth; both his sight and hearing are disabled, so that he must ask Schierke to direct him towards the heart. Just when he's almost within striking distance, he takes another blast that knocks him down paralyzed. It seems like the end.

Suddenly, Guts and Schierke hear the supernatural singing of Merrows coming from outside the Sea God. The merrow song strikes fear into the Sea God's heart and cancels out the damaging sound waves of its pulse. Schierke exhorts Guts to get up one more time and slay the monster. Guts calls on the Beast to help him make one more desperate attack. 

The armor pierces every part of Guts's body with its spikes, somehow helping him rise to his feet. 

I suppose there are a couple possibilities for what the spikes are for in this case, if not for setting broken bones. Firstly, it could be that the excruciating pain of the spikes stabbing into his flesh physically shocks his nerves out of their numbness, restoring feeling and control to his limbs. Secondly, the armor may be inflicting this pain on Guts just to encourage the psychological state of rage, which is what's enabling him to override his body's limitations. Thirdly—although I am not as committed to this idea—the spikes might increase the armor's ability to stimulate the muscles through direct penetration of the muscle tissue. And fourthly, it might just be that Guts's own muscles and nervous system are too disabled to get him up unassisted, and the armor needs to physically manipulate his body as if it were a robotic exoskeleton. Which reason or combination of reasons is in effect, I'll let you judge.

At this moment Guts's eyes are depicted as glowing and demon-like, recalling some of the darker images of him from the Black Swordsman and Conviction Arcs. Since those pictures of Guts with glowing eyes date back to before Guts had the Berserker Armor, I think this particular way of drawing his eyes is an artistic exaggeration instead of Miura trying to show what they literally look like. The important thing is that the eye slits of the helmet are still open and not filled in by the glowing Z-shapes of the Beast, showing that Guts hasn't fallen into full uncontrolled berserk mode. His continued mental communication with Schierke proves that he hasn't lost his sense of self, but rather called on his inner darkness to give his conscious self one final push.

Holding himself up with ferocious willpower, he steps forward in the direction Schierke tells him, even as his blood sprays from every joint in the armor. At last, he raises his giant sword... 

...and cuts open the wall of the heart, giving a death blow to the Sea God.

Unfortunately, the resulting torrent of blood knocks Schierke's ethereal body off of Guts and puts him down for the count again. Schierke wakes up again in her physical body on the Seahorse and tells everyone that Guts is still trapped inside the Sea God. The monster's body is collapsing in on itself and beginning to sink, leaving a limited time to rescue Guts.

Inside the Sea God's corpse, Guts finds himself alone and in pitch darkness. Schierke is gone, and her thought transference cannot reach him through the creature's bulk. Sensing which way is up, Guts stabs through the ceiling, but only succeeds in unleashing another torrent of blood that completely submerges him. But just when he thinks he's going to meet a miserable end, the glowing figure of the boy appears.

It guides him to the right place to stab. Seawater rushes in, allowing the merrow to find him and pull him to the surface. After Guts is brought aboard the ship, the merrow thank the humans for helping to kill the Sea God by guiding them towards Elf Island.

Guts lies awake in bed after receiving treatment from Farnese and Schierke, noticing the trembling of his hand and his hazy perception of the lantern's light. He remembers the Skull Knight's warning of what the Berserker Armor will take from him and hopes he can hold together now that the journey's end is so close.  

He starts thinking about how much he's missed the Casca he knew before, and perhaps how that version of her could come back, but then he gets a flash of the torment he saw inflicted on her during the Eclipse. He senses the Beast of Darkness lurking behind him, always watching in his moments of vulnerability.

Will Casca be able to deal with her memories if she gets them back? If the journey ends, will he confront Griffith again? For a moment, he thinks he sees translucent tree branches stretching across the moon. He does not notice the black-haired boy standing on one of these branches, giving a parting look at the Seahorse before slipping inside the branch and travelling through like a shooting star. 

Parting Thoughts

If anybody has gotten to the end of this overly-long article, thank you for bearing with me.  A Guide to Guts's Armors is now a completed series! I'm a little sad to leave out some very interesting stuff relating to the Berserker Armor that happens on Elf Island, but I've already written too much and I just don't have the energy. This has been a cautionary tale for me about "mission creep". I would like to write more articles about Berserk in my areas of knowledge, but I cannot make any guarantees about topics or release schedules: the first you'll know about it is when I randomly share something to reddit. If you have any comments or corrections to make to this article, I look forward to reading them. Never stop struggling!