Dünste

Tall and lean, Dünste has a receding hairline above hair that spills past his shoulders, plus a carefully kept mustache. He wears black robes marked by two contrasting jacket panels and a pale hood, with a white turtleneck underneath.

Dünste's character is only lightly sketched. He keeps quiet, seldom speaking up and usually yielding to others, as when he obeyed Edel's command to burn away the frozen lake. That deference has a limit, though: when a wounded Blei holds back Sense's duplicate and orders him to run, Dünste briefly protests and wavers before finally fleeing to fetch help.

In the exam's first trial at Äußerst, Dünste joins Edel and Blei in waiting beside a lake for a Stille to alight. After Lawine freezes the water, Edel has him and Blei try to thaw it with fire. The team eventually succeeds when a Stille settles on the fallen Dünste and his partners snatch it, securing their advance.

The second trial sends them into the Ruins of the King's Tomb, where they push forward only to be trapped by a Spiegel's copy of Sense. Because their modern magic is useless underground, their defenses crumble; Edel is hurt, and after Dünste shields her with offensive magic, she sends them off to find fighters and escapes with her golem. The clone runs them down and mortally wounds Blei, who orders Dünste to flee so at least one of them survives. Dünste reaches the main party at the dungeon's base, bleeding from a shoulder wound, and Methode heals him. He shares what he knows, offers an alliance, and confirms for the group that the mindless clones are immune to hypnosis. Paired with Kanne against the Richter duplicate, since neither can fight well below ground, he trades blows with it in a war of attrition until the copy abruptly vanishes, a sign that Frieren and Fern have won. He files into the treasury with the others and is told he has cleared the stage.

The final trial is an interview with Serie, who fails Dünste almost the moment he speaks, judging that he either fears the scale of her mana or cannot picture himself as a first-class mage. What becomes of him afterward is unrecorded.