At one point during a reread of Berserk, I got to the battle against the trolls in Enoch village before realizing that all of Guts’ scars had disappeared. I thought that was a little odd, so I searched back through to see when exactly it had happened and came across something very interesting.
Everyone’s wounds disappear when they stay overnight in Flora’s mansion (Ch 203).
The night before (Ch 202), you can see that Guts in particular is still, as always, covered in tiny little marks, no matter what distance he’s drawn at.
All of them are gone by the time they’re leaving, except for two. The Brand of Sacrifice, and the little one across the bridge of his nose.
Schierke’s wording in the first picture becomes important when you think about it: what has disappeared are ‘minor’ wounds and ‘recent’ wounds. That she bothers to point out the difference means that it SHOULD heal scars. But it hasn’t, here. And if it hasn’t, then the reason it hasn’t is that the ethereal body that the physical body should be matching up with is ALSO wounded.
That the Brand of Sacrifice didn’t disappear is unsurprising, of course: Flora herself can’t erase it, and it was left on Guts by a being that can directly wound ethereal bodies. Slan pulls this same trick later on when she leaves the wound across Guts’ chest.
But why wouldn’t a scar as tiny as the one across his nose not be suddenly gone?
Simple. Though it’s a small thing, it’s still significant to his soul. The two biggest traumas in Guts’ life are the Eclipse and everything surrounding Gambino: dealing with the reality that his adoptive father sold him to Donovan, tried to kill him, and was killed BY him. Before the Eclipse occurred, deep-seated hurts relating to Gambino popped up a lot. Just off the top of my head I can list things like Guts’ outright stating to Casca how laughable it is that he can’t get over killing Gambino, his touch-aversion, the recurrent nightmares that feature Gambino with his head hanging half off and telling Guts he should have died, the unsubtle parallel between Guts and Gambino’s relationship and Adonis and Julius’ relationship and how badly killing both of them messed with him because of it.
The wound Gambino left on Guts runs much deeper than the little scar he put across his nose, it’s something that Guts has been carrying forever, and STILL carries: it’s just not had as much attention paid to it since the focus of the story shifted to the effect the Eclipse had on Guts. Even so, something like that upbringing doesn’t just magically go away.
Obviously, the actual reason that the scar didn’t disappear is that it’s iconic to Guts’ character design, but that there is a possible in-universe justification for it is just SO great.
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