Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End – 10 – Just a Feeling

“They don’t play fair, so we must be even more unfair.” Such are Flamme’s words about demons to a younger Frieren, asking her what Demon General Basalt’s last words were. Frieren didn’t bother hearing them, because demons only use words to deceive.

Lugner can’t figure out how Fern, someone with so much less mana than he has, managed to overwhelm him with an unceasing steam of rapid-fire spells. Then it dawns on him: she wasn’t fighting fair. His last words are “You’re a disgrace to all mages.” Fern already knows that, as does her master. It’s why she beat him, and it’s why Frieren will beat Aura.

Many hundreds of years ago, Flamme came upon a ruined, burning elf village with only one survivor: a young Frieren, who managed to defeat Demon General Basalt, but couldn’t save anyone. Compared to Flamme’s narrow band of mana surrounding her, Frieren’s is much wider, and yet Frieren is certain this woman is far more powerful than she is…it’s just a feeling.

Flamme decides to take Frieren in and make her her apprentice. Her first lesson to her is to never directly engage the enemy, especially when it comes to demons. Run, hide, take them by surprise; use anything and everything at your disposal to maintain an advantage.

When three demon mages, each of them more powerful than Basalt, confront Flamme with Frieren on her back, Flamme notes how supremely confident they are in their magical skill to engage her so directly. But in the blink of an eye Flamme lobs a spell at them so powerful it incinerates them instantly and carves a large hole in the earth.

Flamme then reveals her true mana, not the one she let the demons see. It’s so large it takes up the entire frame. What she will teach Frieren in the years and decades to come is how best to deceive and kill her enemies by ensuring they miscalculate her strength. Essentially, by being cowardly and unfair and mocking magic itself.

At first, it takes great effort for Frieren to suppress her mana, but Flamme tells her she’ll need to suppress it for her entire life, spending that whole life fooling demons as she does. Like Gandalf, she is the wielder of a secret fire, the magnitude of which is only exceeded by the scale of the concealment of it.

In the present day, Frieren stands on the battlefield face-to-face with Aura, and Aura is certain she has this thing in the bag. After all, her mana is several times wider than Frieren’s. And Frieren admits, as a 500-year-old demon who has trained her entire life, Aura is indeed a great demon, but can also tell she’s probably never been challenged.

She knows this because Flamme told her demons don’t conceal their mana, nor can they. Demon culture, importance is determined by mana the way wealth and status are to humans, and just as humans are bound to those things, demons are bound to mana. It is their pride and their dignity, their identity. To see a demon’s mana is to see their whole, unguarded selves—as well as their limits.

Fifty years pass (or as Frieren calls it, “only” fifty years), and as Flamme grows old and infirm, she laments only teaching Frieren how to fight and use magic for revenge. That said, she believes Frieren will one day become strong enough to defeat the Demon King, protending her actual future.

The last spell she teaches Frieren is one she learned as a small child: how to create a field of flowers. She asks Frieren to do so around her grave when she passes, and Frieren does so. She also tells Frieren to live in obscurity and not seek to leave her name in history…at least not until the Demon King is gone.

After a deeply engrossing montage of Frieren living that solitary, unassuming life for centuries, one day her gardening in her forest is interrupted by the arrival of Himmel, Eisen, and Heiter. She asks what they want with a “mediocre mage”, but Himmel has the same feeling she had about her master when she first met her: the feeling that he is standing before the most powerful mage he’s ever encountered.

And he would be right. Frieren may have lived a simple, hermitic life after Flamme’s death, she also spent all of those centuries training and continuing to suppress her mana. A human hero like Himmel could see past that ruse almost immediately, but back in the present, Aura has no frikkin’ idea what’s comin’ down the pike. Not until she already has her and Frieren’s souls on her scales.

Seeing that her soul outweighs Frieren’s, Aura takes a broadsword from one of her headless minions and draws closer in preparation to take her head as well. She believes she’s won, because she can see Frieren’s mana isn’t that impressive. But as she gets closer, the scales start to tip more in Freiren’s favor.

When Frieren finally lets on that she’s been suppressing, Aura is skeptical; there’s been no instability or variation in mana output—the telltale sign of suppression. But that’s simply because she’s been suppressing her mana for most of her over thousand years of life, more than double that of Aura’s.

When Frieren stops suppressing, the scale is yanked down on her side, and her mana envelops Aura in a vast fifty foot-plus column. Aura can no longer scoff and claim to be the stronger of them. Nor can she control herself any longer, as the scales she deployed have turned against her.

Frieren turns her back on Aura and orders her to kill herself, and Aura, unable to resist, puts the blade to her neck, lopping off her ornate braids one by one, and then beheads herself. Taketatsu Ayana effortlessly switches Aura’s voice from haughty confidence to pure fear and panic. Just as demons deceive with their words, Frieren, like her master, deceives with her mana. Lugner and Aura can call it unfair all they like…because life ain’t frikkin’ fair.

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