Chapter 33: Old Man Voll

Frieren leads her companions into the Klar Region to call on Old Man Voll, a dwarf who has shielded a single village for nearly four centuries. She wants to see her longtime friend before the end of his life, joking she might linger a decade until Fern caps the stay at one week. Voll greets them by feigning senility, then flattens an unguarded Stark with his sheathed blade to drive home a lesson about never lowering one's defenses.

Over the following days the dwarf puts Stark through brutal conditioning, from hauling boulders to felling bearlike beasts, while Frieren spends her hours reminiscing. A villager confides that Voll is usually a vacant, friendless old man who can barely hold a conversation, and that no one understands why he keeps guarding the place at all.

On their last night, Frieren thanks Voll for the long-ago chance to grow close to Himmel and his companions. A memory surfaces of the Hero Party's final visit, when Himmel pressed the dwarf on his reasons and Voll explained he was simply honoring a promise to his late human wife, whose face and voice he could no longer recall. Himmel had vowed to carry Voll's memory onward, only to note that the long-lived Frieren could shoulder that duty instead, a task she accepted without hesitation.

In the present, Voll asks whether she still holds Himmel's face and voice; she answers that she remembers all of it, because he was the reason she came to understand humans. The dwarf confesses he can summon nothing of his wife yet guards the village regardless, since it matters to him. When he hears the party is bound for the Demon King's castle, he has forgotten his own history with the heroes and merely hopes a peaceful age draws near.

Rather than correct his confusion, Frieren laughs and vows to carry the old warrior's recollections onward alongside the rest she keeps. Touched, the dwarf calls it a gift to cross paths with her once more near the end, prompting Frieren to remind him he voiced that exact sentiment eighty years before.

As the group departs the next morning, Voll calls out that he dreamed of his wife, likely stirred by the visit. The Voll Basin in the Central Lands, seen during the party's earlier travels, may take its name from the old warrior.