Berserk 15

This will be the last volume for awhile. Something tells me I’ll probably get the rest of what’s available in English the next sale I see and marathon it again, but for right now, I need to stop.

This is more of the “Lost Children” chapter from last volume, and things carry over into the next volume from here. The arc is so named since the faeries we saw at the very end of the volume are revealed right away to be children transformed by magic into insect-elves. The fight that the large elf-insect starts at the end of the last volume is abruptly cut short in the first chapter, and as the townspeople come back out of their houses, they see only Guts and a gigantic pile of burning children’s corpses since they transform back when they die. It’s pretty horrifying, and it gives Guts pause when Puck tells him about it, and makes him sick later on. I kind of like that these situations come up after the flashback.

The head insect-elf is created, not surprisingly, by making a deal with the Cenobites, and Guts has no problem with killing anything which offered up people as a sacrifice to give themselves power. Guts parts ways with the little girl who had been helping him in the village, and she is invited by the head elf-insect to live with them, away from adults and punishing them. The little girl has no problem with this until she realizes that the little ones cannibalize each other, which is also horrifying. Guts is waylaid on his way into the valley with a bloody battle with some forest guardians under the command of the insect-elves, and I have to say I am definitely enjoying the return of his metal arm with fire cannon. At one point, he blows a gigantic insect-man up, his head flies off with his eyeballs on fire, then the body parts turn from insect back into man. While I still don’t believe anything could compare with the sacrifice, random insane acts of violence definitely continue to surprise me.

The one thing I didn’t like was the implication that Guts is some sort of Christ figure. The army of the Holy See appears again, and the woman who heads it mentions that they follow basically wild tales of monster sightings, not really expecting to find anything, but all the tales have a “black swordsman” in common. She suggests several explanations for this swordsman, but the last one (complete with a large illustration of her posing in front of a stained glass window) was that Guts was “important to their religion.”