Episode 16

The episode opens on a campfire recollection: Sein's lively boyhood friend once hauled him off to sit for a traveling mage's photograph, the same image he keeps in his locket. The party then enters the Klar Region to call on Old Man Voll, a dwarf of nearly four hundred years whom Frieren means to see before his death. Voll plays at senility, flips Stark to the dirt to teach him about dropped guards, then welcomes the visitors and takes the boy on for training. Across a week of drills and chores, he and Frieren trade memories. Locals treat the dwarf as a guardian spirit without grasping why he defends them. A flashback supplies the reason: he keeps watch over the village his late human wife adored, honoring a vow to her even though her face, voice, and gaze have all slipped from his memory.

Long ago, through Himmel, Voll asked Frieren to carry his memory onward, and she agreed; now he is grateful to have met her again near life's end, and she chooses not to tell him the Demon King is already dead. Out on the Rohr Road, Sein quizzes travelers about his friend, who took the deliberately memorable name Warrior Gorilla. In a village by the bridge, a cantankerous old woman holds back her information until the party runs a string of errands. The last is scrubbing a statue of long-forgotten heroes whose figures look like Sein and Gorilla, one of whom Frieren names as Kraft. The sight unlocks Sein's memory of standing there as a boy with Heiter and Gorilla, who swore to become heroes nobody would forget. The woman finally points Sein toward Tür, a town opposite the party's route to Äußerst, leaving him a decision to make.

Frieren visits the ancient dwarf Voll, who drills Stark and confides that he guards the village to honor a promise to his dead human wife, though every memory of her has faded. Frieren quietly leaves him believing the Demon King still stands undefeated.

On the Rohr Road, Sein searches for his friend Warrior Gorilla and works through a cranky old woman's errands. Cleaning a statue of forgotten heroes that mirrors him and Gorilla, Sein recalls their boyhood vow to be remembered, and he learns Gorilla headed for Tür, away from where the party is bound.

The opening reflection on Sein and Gorilla is largely grown out of a single later manga panel, with their full exchange saved for the second half. The adaptation gives Voll's village a central willow-like tree, shown again as he speaks of forgetting his wife.

When he remembers her approaching him beneath that tree as he sits, the manga instead shows only her back as she stands at his side. A manga image of the dwarf doing battle with a monster, used while a villager calls him a guardian deity, never made it into the anime.