Frieren

Small and slight, Frieren is an elf with green eyes, heavy brows, and the long pointed ears of her kind. Her silver hair parts down the middle and gathers into two high pigtails. She typically dresses in a black-and-white striped shirt beneath a white jacket whose oversized gold cuffs match the gold trim running along it and the skirt it tucks into, all held by a black belt. A short white cape repeats the gold-and-white scheme, fixed at the throat by a red gem and bearing more red jewels at each shoulder. Black tights, brown boots, and gold earrings dangling red teardrops finish the look, and in combat she raises a red staff crowned by a gold crescent that cradles a jeweled orb.

Frieren drifts through life with a relaxed, easygoing air that leaves those around her struggling to read her, the gulf between elven and human outlooks always between them. A thousand years and more have stretched her sense of time past recognition: she sleeps deep into the morning, struggles to feel how fast human lives pass, and once breezily offered to bring her companions to a meteor shower fifty years off, forgetting they would not live to see it. Only after Himmel's funeral, realizing how little she had bothered to learn about him, did she resolve to understand humans better.

Cool and tactless as she usually seems, she is tender about certain things. Being called old wounds her pride and has earned Stark a lasting grudge, and she quietly envies Fern's figure while insisting she is, magic aside, just an ordinary girl. Pushed too far, she can sulk and weep for days, though her rare flares of temper, roughly one a decade, burn out within minutes. A playful gambler at heart, she will chase a one-percent chance of a grimoire even knowing a chest is almost certainly a mimic, and she will stake her own life when the gamble buys an edge over an enemy. Her lazier, more childish moods leave Fern mothering her through the simplest daily tasks.

The finest pupil of the Great Mage Flamme and the Hero Party's spellcaster, Frieren ranks among the legendary mages of history. She refined Zoltraak from a demon's killing spell into the weapon humanity now turns against demons, and she has slain more of them than anyone alive, which earned her the title Frieren the Slayer. Her unrestrained mana dwarfs even that of the five-hundred-year-old demon Aura and rivals Serie's own suppressed output. Above all she is a master of mana concealment, having dampened her power for so long that the strain no longer shows; only the Demon King and the mage Lernen ever pierced the disguise at a glance. She reads and unravels enemy spells with rare precision, a gift that let her take apart the spellwork of two Sages of Destruction, Aura and Macht, and breach the barrier of a third, Böse the Immortal.

Her offensive arsenal runs from rapid blasts of Zoltraak to the lightning of Judradjim and the engulfing fire of Vollzanbel, up to the so-called Height of Magic, an attack that cannot be sensed as a spell at all. She rounds this out with hexagonal barriers, a sturdy mental defense few can breach, dispelling magic that cancels an opponent's spell outright, and a wealth of practical and folk casting: flight, telekinesis, sealing magic that held the demon Qual in stone for eighty years, golem puppetry, and the meadow-of-flowers spell handed down from Flamme. For all this, Frieren insists raw mana is not everything, pointing to technique, experience, and willpower; across her long life she has been beaten eleven times by mages weaker in mana than herself. Her one consistent flaw is shared by novices everywhere: the instant she casts, her mana detection blinks out, leaving a narrow opening for foes skilled at hiding themselves.