Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End – 26 – The Ant that Slew the Dragon

So, about that attack Fern launched when Frieren gave her an opening … the replica blocked it. And so the battle continues, with Frieren and her replica flipping to the back of the playbook and executing some awesomely powerful offensive spells at each other while Fern flits around trying to find more openings. It’s stressful, but also gorgeous to behold, and at no point does Frieren seem remotely worried. On the contrary, she’s having a blast.

While she and Fern fight her replica, the others head out to face off agains the other replicas gathering at the bottom of the dungeon. They choose their targets based on how good or bad matchup they are against the replicas. Denken is quite right that their ability to work together and communicate means not only can they win, they should win. Even when Sense’s replica ambushes Richter and Lawine, and both have to break their golem bottles.

Ultimately, the only one who believes she can defeat the replica of Sense is Übel, who just shot up in the official Coolest Frieren Mages Ever ranking in my books for this reason. As Land, Denken, and Sense lament, Übel’s mind simply works differently than most humans. Growing up watching her sister cut cloth with scissors, she developed Reelseiden, a spell that cuts anything she thinks it can.

She could cut the indomitable magic cloak of a first class mage in a past test, killing him, because she saw the cloak as cloth to be cut. In the same vein, she’s able to easily defeat Sense’s replica (and Sense herself if she chose to) because hair can be cut. Reelseiden is the manifestation of her own personal intuition, which is separate from the typical rules of magic and logic. Put simply, she’s one deadly gal!

Methode makes contact with Wirbel, Ehre, and Scharf, asking them to take on Denken’s replica, while she’ll deal with Fern’s. She needs to be alone in order to maximize the sensitivity of her mana detection, plus in an adorable cutaway, we se her successfully testing her binding magic on Fern, complete with a friendly “Take that!”, Fern declaring she can’t move, and Frieren poking her face.

When replicas they’ve already defeated start to appear, it becomes clear the Spiegel can continue re-spawning them indefinitely until it is defeated. Frieren’s replica has to be destroyed soon to allow them access to the Spiegel, or everyone’s going to eventually be carted away by golems.

Rewinding back to before they confront the replica, Frieren tells Fern that she’ll give Fern the opening she needs by showing an opening to her replica, thus making it show an even bigger opening. Everything hinges on Fern being able to exploit that opening, and Frieren tells her if she thinks they can win, they can win.

Not only that, Frieren admits she “underestimates” Fern. This is the Age of Humanity, after all. Even in her relatively short lifespan, Fern can surpass Frieren one day, but again, only if she thinks she can.

Some truly heinous magic is unleashed by Frieren and her replica in the final stage of their battle, with Frieren cutting things so close her jacket is shredded and her shoulder singed. But the big opening works, and Fern is able to pummel the replica with offensive magic, blasting her arms off.

But then Fern is once again surprised by the depths and heights of Frieren’s magical knowledge as demonstrated by her replica. Fern is tossed across the chamber and slammed hard against the wall, her staff shattered … and Fern doesn’t even recognize it as a spell, nor can she detect any mana.

True to Frieren, the most powerful magic whips out is so elegant it isn’t even recognizable as magic. But as the replica prepares to finish Fern off, Frieren slips behind her and finishes her off. Fern had to take a bit of a lickin’ so that everyone could keep on tickin’.

Victory! I loathed the potential for an unaccounted-for replica to be hiding in the treasure chamber where the Spiegel resided, but Frieren’s replica truly was its final line of defense. Frieren shatters it, and all of the replicas vanish as if snapped away by Thanos. And just in the nick of time too, judging by the precarious state of the various battles.

Everyone arrives at the treasure chamber at the very bottom of the dungeon to a smiling, congratulatory Sense, who tells them all of them deserve to be first-class mages. As for the “ladies of the hour”, as Denken calls them, Fern once again watches as Frieren gets nommed by another mimic, shouting that it’s dark and scary.

But you know what? After being as badass as she was, she deserves to act a little goofy before the third and final test, for which only two announced episodes of the series remain to tell. More than anything, I’m already loathing an end to Frieren, even if it’s likely to get another season down the road. Few anime in history have succeeded so thoroughly in making magic look and feel so … magical.

RABUJOI WORLD HERITAGE LIST

DanMachi IV – 20 – Her Justice

A week of absolutely sterling anime continues with this, the long-awaited (and feared) definitive depiction of the demise of Astrea Familia and Ryuu’s subsequent fall from grace. Jura and Rudra Familia, working under Evilus, did indeed set a trap for Astrea, but it didn’t work. However, detonating all of those bombs awakened the Juggernaut, which turned even a dream team like Astrea into mincemeat with sickening speed and efficiency.

It’s a tough, horrific watch, as it should be. And even if we haven’t spent nearly as much time with the various members of Astrea, all I needed to do was imagine if it were members of Hestia instead dropping one by one to understand the weight being placed on Ryuu by Alise to “live enough for everyone”. Alise trusts Ryuu to always “do the right thing”. Alise, Kaguya, and Lyra die, but they go out fighting in a literal blaze of glory.

The weight proves too much for Ryuu, and she is soon consumed with anger and hatred. She leaves the goddess Astrea (though is able to keep her blessing) and transforms into an angel of death, tearing through every Rudra Familia and Evilus stronghold, hideout and hovel and leaving no one alive in her path, like a merciless calamitous gale wind.

Once her twisted form of justice is finally complete when she finds, corners, and stabs the shit out of Jura (whom she only learns much later survived), Ryuu feels like an empty husk, hollowed out by all the hatred and murder. But when she collapses, it happens to be near the tavern where one Syr Flover works, and that’s all that’s needed to know that the gods aren’t done with Ryuu quite yet.

She’d go on to not only work with Syr and the other ladies at the tavern, but to swoop in and save the lives of Bell, Hestia, Welf, Lili, and everyone else, more times than Bell can count. She may have thought she was simply continuing her quest of vengeance, but to Bell, it meant she was his hero, plain and simple. He came back for her at the Coliseum because it’s what she’d do for him, and he won’t leave her behind because his justice is making it home alive with her.

Bell admits he didn’t know the “old Ryuu”, and that she may have made many a mistake in her past. All that matters to him is how many times he and his Familia would be dust without her. Without Ryuu even realizing it, the justice of her Familia lived on, and continues to live on.

When a Barbarian busts through the wall and Bell looks like he’s knocked out and about to be eaten, Ryuu desperately cries out his name, only for him to kill the monster and reveal he was playing possum, causing her to blush profusely.

The two eventually make it to a spring beneath the Coliseum, and they might just be the first two adventurers to make it there. When Bell collapses from exhaustion into the water, Ryuu gets in with him, cradles him, and heals him. Let those waters cleanse Ryuu of the hate, grief, regret and anguish she allowed to define her for so long, as well as the notion that she doesn’t deserve to live, or to love.

What happened to Astrea Familia was a abject tragedy. But it wasn’t her fault, and it was a blessing that she survived, because it meant she was alive to rescue Bell & Co. all those times. Now that they finally have a place to rest and heal, and the Xenos contingent aren’t far above them, it’s looking like both Bell and Ryuu are going to make it out of this. They won’t be the same  people they were when they first fell down there…but that’s not a bad thing.

DanMachi IV – 19 – No Time to Die

This week starts with a flashback chat between Ryuu and her diminutive colleague Lyra (a prum like Lili). Lyra warns Ryuu not to try to create the answer to “what is right” by gathering everyone else’s opinions, but to determine what that means for herself. Knowledge is a weapon, info is a friend, and wisdom is what is needed to use both to save others, and oneself.

At this point on the 37th floor, Ryuu’s only remaining purpose in life is to make sure Bell is armed with as much knowledge and information as possible so he can turn them into his own wisdom, just as she did. She is now the teacher Lyra was to her, and she’s able to come up with a plan Bell would never have thought of.

They can’t go around the coliseum—they have to go straight through it to reach the normal route and the stair to the higher floor. But with the monsters in the coliseum infinitely battling each other and re-spawning the instant they’re killed they won’t be able to fight their way through. So they wear a skull sheep pelt, cover themselves in barbarian heart blood, and try to sneak their way through the closest thing to hell we’ve yet seen in the Dungeon.

I was a ball of anxiety throughout the sneaking session, just waiting for one of the monsters to notice them (or for Bell to step on the pelt and expose them). Turns out the former happens when a skeleton grabs him, and from there it becomes a race to the other end of the coliseum before they’re completely overrun by the beasts zeroing in on them en masse.

When they reach a certain point, Ryuu asks Bell to go to the other end of the bridge and clear the way while she holds off the monsters on her side. Bell says “I’ll be right back” but after he kills the monsters on his end, Ryuu uses her wind magic to fly him to the other side of the bridge…and then collapses the bridge. She’s ensuring none of the coliseum monsters can get to Bell…and also sealing her fate.

When Ryuu contemplates her imminent demise and reunion with her long-lose Astrea companions, saying it was worth it if Bell survives, Hayami Saori does some of her absolute finest work. But unlike Ryuu, I had a distinct feeling Bell wasn’t sprinting as hard as he could towards safety. Instead, he ran all the hell the way around the coliseum to meet back up with Ryuu, and is ready with his signature Bell-Tollin’ Firebolt to deal with the monsters surrounding her.

When Bell unleashes that Firebolt and sets the entire coliseum and everything in it ablaze, he is making his ideals a reality, exactly what Arise told Ryuu is what true heroes are capable of doing. Ryuu misunderstood something crucial about Bell. No matter how scared he was or helpless he seemed, there was never any chance he’d let her sacrifice herself to save him.

I know Ryuu has a low opinion of herself for being the sole survivor of the extinction of Astrea, and many of the awful things she’s done since then. But for all her amassed knowledge, she didn’t have the wisdom to realize she wasn’t going to get one over on a hero, or that sometimes it doesn’t matter what you think of yourself, but what others think of you.

Bell considers her a dear friend and mentor, not an irredeemable wretch, and used the power he had to stop her from sacrificing herself. She can call him an idiot, but until she can start turning ideals into reality, she’d sure as hell better accept his idiocy, ’cause he ain’t changing!