Chapter 21

Pierced through the chest, Lügner accepts that he is finished but warns Fern that Frieren cannot beat Aura head-on. Fern counters that Frieren never fights a demon without some trick. The dying executioner studies Fern's faint mana and realizes the truth: rather than overpowering him, she buried him under swift, relentless strikes because both she and Frieren suppress their mana. He spits that they are cowards, and Fern calmly agrees before ending him.

The story turns to the distant past. Flamme walks through an elven village reduced to corpses and rubble, the work of the Demon King's general Basalt the Throne, whom Frieren has somehow slain. She finds the young elf barely alive at the edge of the blast and judges her a fool for facing the demon directly when cleverer paths existed. Frieren insists Flamme is by far the greater mage despite her smaller mana, and the impressed sage takes her as an apprentice.

Three demons even mightier than Basalt give chase, dismissing Flamme by her mana and demanding she abandon the elf. Flamme remarks that strong mages are proud and careless, then annihilates the trio with a single unrestrained blast. She had deliberately masked her power to bait their miscalculation, a tactic she calls a mockery of noble magic. She trains Frieren to throttle her mana for life so as to deceive demons forever. The flashback closes on Frieren confronting Aura, whose mana visibly towers over her own as the demon wonders whether the elf spent too much.

Fern kills Lügner after he deduces the mana-suppression tactic. In flashback, Flamme finds the dying Frieren amid her ruined village and takes her on as a student. Flamme destroys the three pursuing demons by hiding her true strength. She teaches Frieren to limit her mana permanently to fool demons. The scene shifts to Frieren squaring off against Aura.

Flamme, Frieren, Fern, and Lügner all regard mana suppression as a disgrace to honorable magic. Flamme's dwelling sits in the Voll Basin of the Bredt Region and still stands centuries afterward, shielded by a great tree and barrier, the very place Eisen, Fern, and Frieren later visit to find her notes on speaking with the dead. Basalt the Throne ranked among the Demon King's generals. The present-day action takes place in Graf Granat's domain.