Chapter 44

Kanne and Lawine settle into a grinding duel with Richter, but the veteran turns their own playbook against them. Lawine's freezing magic barely registers against his deeper mana reserves, and her ice arrows, the spell Nephtear, shatter on a shell of conjured earth. Richter answers with stalagmites that erupt from the ground, then mocks the pair as a girl whose ice cannot kill and a mage who is helpless without water nearby. He exposes Lawine's bluff about controlling the water inside his body, reasoning that neither girl could possibly picture such a spell.

Richter lectures them on history while he fights: the shielding magic forged to stop Zoltraak guards superbly against spells but was never reinforced against sheer physical mass, since speed of casting mattered more than blocking a warrior's blow. Exploiting exactly that gap, his earth manipulation and superior power steadily crush their defenses, and he tells them to sit still until Denken finishes Frieren.

Denken, meanwhile, unleashes a cascade of spells dazzling enough to impress both watching proctors, and Sense even questions whether the barrier can hold. Genau assures her that anything raised by Serie cannot be breached. Yet Frieren threads through Denken's defenses and fells him with nothing but elementary offense. She then holds his life over him to lure out the hidden Laufen, binds the two to a tree, and takes back the Stille. With Denken beaten, Richter readies himself in earnest, but an untroubled Frieren signals that she has finished unraveling Serie's barrier.

Frieren defeats Denken with basic offensive magic and captures both him and Laufen, letting the Second Party reclaim its bird. Richter pins down the limits of Kanne and Lawine's magic and prepares to fight them seriously. Frieren reveals she has decoded the barrier sealing the examination grounds.

Recapture the Stille, given in Japanese as Shutire dakkan, released on March 31, 2021 across eighteen pages of volume five. It belongs to the first stage of the First-Class Mage Exam Arc and corresponds to the anime's twenty-first episode. The installment leans heavily on the principle that shielding spells resist magic far better than they resist physical force.