Chapter 53

The mages put their plan into motion, each pairing off against the duplicate they are best suited to counter while Frieren and Fern keep her own copy for themselves. Frieren reasons that a smaller team makes the clone easier to read, and that a massed assault would simply get most of them killed before any escape golem could be summoned. Denken offers a quiet prayer as the hall seals shut, and master and student open with matched lightning and hellfire, the brief blind spot it creates letting Fern slip out of sight to wait for an opening.

The examinees split apart to intercept the duplicates spreading toward the lowest chamber, while the rest work to keep fresh copies from boxing them in. Frieren trades Judradjim and Vollzanbel with her clone, confirming it mimics her exactly, and Fern conceals herself to set up a strike with Zoltraak, the one spell Frieren's elven reflexes cannot reliably parry. The chapter ends as that very spell lands on the duplicate.

A long memory recounts Frieren carrying Flamme's final message to Serie fifty years after the two last spoke. The document reads more like a report, noting that the continent's largest empire has sanctioned the open study of magic and that Flamme schooled its first Imperial Mages, a shift certain to spread across neighboring nations within decades. Serie refuses the request to inherit Flamme's work, insisting magic should remain the province of the gifted, yet she admits Flamme's dream of a world where anyone can cast has begun to come true.

Walking together, Serie traces that dream back to the humble flower-field spell Flamme loved as a child, and she explains that short human lives force a haste elves never feel. At a cliff's edge she predicts that within a thousand years humans will surpass elves, warning Frieren that if death ever finds her, it will come at the hands of a human mage or the Demon King himself. In the present, Fern's Zoltraak finally connects, and Frieren smiles.