Chapter 120: False Image of a Hero

Three decades and one year after Himmel's death, Frieren, Fern, and Stark arrive in Bohne Village within Imperial Territory, reaching it just as the Liberation Festival is about to begin. The yearly event marks the date of the Demon King's downfall, and the local mayor greets the travelers warmly, urging them to join the evening's revelry. As the three wander the streets and watch residents string up decorations and raise stalls, Frieren explains the festival's meaning and hints that a feast may await, which delights her perpetually hungry companions.

Once night falls, Frieren steers the group toward the square to touch the village's statue of Himmel, since local belief holds that doing so brings fortune. Stark doubts the superstition, but Frieren reasons it costs nothing to try. What they find stops them short: this Himmel has been carved as a brawny, stern-faced figure draped in aristocratic finery, so unlike every other likeness that Stark fails to recognize him at first. Frieren is unsurprised, recalling a regional statue that had recast Flamme as some nondescript old man, and she notes that the Empire has long enshrined its dead heroes as objects of worship. The mayor adds that villagers funded this fresh statue once the old one wore down.

When Stark wants to flag the glaring inaccuracy, Frieren stops him and steers him away, seeing no point in spoiling the town's joy. The deeper north one goes, she observes, the more fervently Himmel is venerated, with communities clinging to an image of him that strays far from the man she knew. Nothing about it is ill-intended, she assures Stark; the villagers simply adore Himmel and built what they consider a grand tribute, even if the stiff, noble styling is the last thing Himmel himself would have wanted.

After enjoying the stalls and a hearty meal, Frieren slips back alone to touch the statue, and the moment summons a memory from just after the Demon King fell. Riding home toward the Royal Capital, the Hero Party passed through this same village and overheard an old man dazzling children with a claim that Himmel had cleaved a hundred-meter serpent in two. Heiter and Eisen scoffed, recalling the real creature measured only ten meters, while Himmel cheekily inflated it to two hundred and was promptly called out. Frieren had urged the others to treat such tall tales seriously, warning that exaggerations would harden into accepted fact. Himmel agreed, yet made peace with it: their journey had been foolish and thrilling and had saved the world, and that truth could never be rewritten. Standing before the statue in the present, Frieren concedes he was right, watching a town that has forgotten the details still celebrate the peace he won. Come morning the party leaves northward, and Stark repeats a festival rumor that the serpent was a thousand meters long, leaving Frieren amused at how far the story has ballooned.

The chapter's cover art shows Himmel cutting down the ten-meter serpent in Bohne Village, the modest deed that local storytelling has since magnified beyond recognition into the legend honored at the festival.