Fräse

Fräse keeps her light hair in a center-parted ponytail, with side bangs falling to about her shoulders. Age shows in the lines of her face, and she wears small, round-rimmed glasses. Her Magic Special Forces uniform buttons up the front and is crossed by several belts at the torso, finished with a sweeping cape and dark gloves. In her younger days she looked much the same, minus the glasses, and topped the outfit with a service cap bearing the unit's insignia.

Behind a composed exterior Fräse hides considerable danger and even greater cunning. In her youth, Macht reckoned her powerful enough to level an entire fortress city on her own. At the negotiating table she is a slippery, exasperating opponent whose real aims stay hidden, and both Denken and Glück peg her as a schemer. Demanding as she may be to serve under, she commands fierce loyalty from her vice-captain Kanone, who keeps a pack of Fräse's preferred cigarettes on hand at all times. Her taste in those cigarettes, like much about her, has not shifted in over fifty years.

Half a century before the story, the Empire dispatched Fräse to inspect the fortress city of Weise. Sensing her strength, Macht urged Glück to let him kill the envoy outright, judging her too powerful to be harmless; Glück instead chose to talk with her and feel out her purpose. The exchange proved tiresome and she remained hard to handle, yet she got what she came for and left the city untouched. Over the decades that followed she climbed to command the Magic Special Forces, and somewhere in that span she had a tense run-in with a young Land and his grandmother.

Her gifts include extraordinarily fine mana detection. She once blanketed the whole Imperial Capital in a layer of sensing so faint that even Frieren, though uneasy at being watched, failed to pin it down. In a prophetic dream of Serie's, the two fought a long duel that ended in Fräse's death, a battle Serie described as thoroughly enjoyable and slow to finish.