Conviction Arc

Guts encounters fanatical religious persecution and must protect Casca while confronting the horrors of a world descending into darkness.

The Conviction arc is the point at which Berserk fully transforms from a revenge narrative into a sweeping theological horror epic, stretching across dozens of chapters to build one of manga's most meticulously constructed acts of orchestrated evil. Following the devastation of the Eclipse, Guts has abandoned the Band of the Hawk's survivors to pursue his personal vendetta against Griffith and the Apostles — a choice that haunts the arc through its absence as much as its presence. The arc splits into multiple interconnected storylines: Guts battling possessed children and Snake Lord apostles at the Tower of Rebirth as he pursues an escaped demonic child, the lost and traumatized Casca being held captive by a fanatical religious order that sees her Brand of Sacrifice as proof of diabolism, and the machinations of the Holy See and its inquisitor Mozgus whose zealotry has made him into something indistinguishable from the monsters Guts hunts. Farnese and Serpico are introduced as members of the Holy Iron Chain Knights pursuing Guts, and the arc begins the slow process of transforming Farnese from a tortured true believer into someone capable of questioning her faith. The Conviction arc's central horror is its demonstration that human cruelty and institutional evil operate on a scale and with a systematization that individual demonic Apostles cannot match. Mozgus's burning of heretics, the mass suffering at St. Albans, and the political manipulation underlying the Holy See's authority all reflect a Griffith-shaped world in which the boundary between human and monstrous has been made deliberately indistinct. The birth of Griffith reborn as Femto at the Tower of Conviction is among the most operatic sequences Miura ever drew.