Chapter 108: Reunion

Cast back fifty-three years before Himmel's death, seven years into the heroes' campaign, Frieren falls in step with the Hero Party as Himmel announces they are turning back, having marked the trees to find the way. Before leaving the restored monument she checks once more that no illusion is fooling her. She really has landed in the same stretch of Kino Pass she once walked with the heroes lifetimes ago.

She spends the march lost in thought. Time travel would violate cause and effect, yet almost nothing is understood about the Goddess's magic, so the plainest reading is that the stone returned her to an earlier instant when she had touched it. That leaves only the question of how to get home, since touching it again did nothing. She nearly asks the others for help, then stops herself, wary that meddling could rewrite the future she came from.

The party simply assumes she is sulking over failed research. Heiter chides the rest for coddling her and moves to scold her himself for all her detours, only for Frieren to apologize, stunning everyone. He instantly forgives her and offers candy, earning a rebuke from Himmel and Eisen for spoiling her in turn. When they near the main road, Himmel asks her for a locator spell, and Frieren offers to simply fly up and look, drawing baffled stares. She realizes humanity has not yet discovered flight magic, which sharply limits what she can cast in this era.

At sunset they reach the road and find it strewn with dead imperial soldiers and wagons that look to have dropped from the sky. A demon ambushes them from behind, and Himmel's blade is out at once. The attacker has sensed her meddling with time and deduces she handled the Goddess's monument, then declares he intends to cut down the whole party regardless. Naming himself Zart the Remnant, servant of the Sage of Destruction Grausam the Miraculous, he slips away from Himmel's blinding charge and reappears behind Frieren. A single touch hurls her thousands of meters up, past the clouds, and leaves her plummeting between the sun and the horizon.

By Flamme's records, the gulf between demon and human magic was once so wide that even gifted casters dismissed demonic feats as fairy tales. Teleportation like Zart's cannot even be proven to exist in this age, and a fall without flight magic would kill any mage of the time outright. Frieren has no memory of ever facing Zart during the war on the Demon King, and she doubts he will be a simple foe for the heroes. Were her full power available she would shrug off the drop, but it is not, and so she tumbles through the sky wondering what she can possibly do.

Frieren's choice to hide her situation defines the chapter. Fearing that any change could unravel her own timeline, she keeps the truth from the heroes and even apologizes out of character to avoid drawing scrutiny, a small act that rattles the whole party.

The arrival of Zart the Remnant raises the stakes sharply. A servant of Grausam the Miraculous, he wields a teleportation power humans of the era cannot account for, and he leaves Frieren falling helplessly without the flight magic that would otherwise save her. His ability to read her time-meddling marks him as a threat tied directly to the monument's secret.

The constraints of the past era become a central obstacle here, since flight magic has not yet entered human practice and Frieren's available spells are narrowed accordingly. Flamme's written observations frame how unknowable demon magic seemed to mages of that time. The sixteen-page chapter introduces Zart and was published in early 2023 within the twelfth volume.