Template:Chapter Bubbles (水泡 Suibō?) is the 287th chapter of the Berserk manga series, written and illustrated by Kentaro Miura.
Summary
Guts is watching Casca, but his vision soon begins to blur - a symptom of overusing the Berserker Armor. Guts is suddenly agitated, worried that he is going blind. He closes his eye for a moment, and when he reopens it, his vision is back to normal, but he is still uneasy. Farnese and Schierke, in their luminous bodies, have witnessed Guts' short moment of panic.
Roderick finds Guts and advises him to return belowdeck as the sea breeze will only irritate Guts' many healing burn wounds caused by Ganishka's lightning. Roderick moves forward to see what Guts is looking at: Casca. Curious, Roderick asks what Guts' relationship to her is. Farnese and Schierke suddenly become extremely interested in the men's conversation, eager to hear Guts' answer. The instant before Guts reveals the nature of their relationship, Farnese's luminous body disappears, and she reawakens in her physical body in her room. She is confused as to why she was forced back into her body. Schierke also awakens and Serpico steps into the room, both knowing that something is wrong with Farnese. While Farnese questions why she returned to her body, Schierke turns away and grips her staff tightly.
Guts cannot save Casca with his prosthetic arm.
Casca has begun to climb out onto the ship's bowsprit. Worried, Guts leaps from the deck onto the bowsprit, but this only serves to aggravate the situation - Casca does not like Guts and is compelled to avoid him. She continues to climb further onto the bowsprit, Guts following close behind, until the ship its a large wave, and the resulting jostle knocks Casca off the bowsprit. Guts reaches out to her, but he takes her hand with his prosthetic one, which is incapable of gripping anything that isn't magnetic. Casca falls into the sea.
Guts dives into the water and manages to reunite with Casca underwater. They swim back to the surface together, where Guts must suffer Casca using him as a floating device until Roderick can approach with a rowboat. Roderick hoists Casca into the boat, but a wave drags Guts back under the water. Unable to swim back up due to the weight of his prosthetic arm, Guts lets himself sink, musing that whenever Casca is near water, something bad seems fated to happen. This conjures memories from the days when Casca was sane, and she and Guts lived together in the Band of the Hawk. Guts blacks out.
When Guts wakes, he finds himself belowdeck on Roderick's ship, surrounded by Schierke, Ivalera, Puck, Isidro, Roderick and Serpico. Schierke explains that Roderick dove into the sea to rescue Guts. Guts suddenly forces himself to a sitting position, asking about Casca. Schierke informs him that she is being given a hot bath by Farnese, and that she is safe. Guts lies back down in his bed, relieved.
Schierke asks that everybody leave the room so that she can redraw Guts' erased talisman. Roderick, Serpico, Isidro and the elves acquiesce, and they find Manifico in the adjacent room, lying in bed and comically suffering from acute seasickness.
While Schierke redraws the talisman, Guts stares at his prosthetic arm, which has been removed and placed on a nearby seat. He recalls that when he reached out to Casca with it, he was unable to save her. He muses that even if his original arm was restored, he would still have been unable to save her.