Chapter 54

Frieren's duplicate parries Fern's Zoltraak, and the two settle into a grinding contest of endurance just as Frieren foresaw. Elsewhere the team has fanned out to take on whichever copies suit them, yet Sense's clone stays invisible to their mana sense and proves the deadliest variable. After Richter and Lawine put down the Lawine and Kanne copies, that unseen clone ambushes them, forcing both to crack their bottles and ride their escape golems to safety.

Denken reaches the scene with Ubel and Land in tow and insists the clone must be beaten to clear the dungeon. Ubel steps up despite Land's open doubt, trusting the cutting magic she calls Reelseiden, which severs whatever she can convince herself it will. When her wide snare fails to frame the clone's hair, she falls back on the cut itself and ends the fight in a single stroke.

Methode pinpoints each duplicate's position, and Denken organizes the group into favorable one-on-one matchups, doubling up only on the toughest copies. Richter and Lawine are knocked out of the exam by Sense's clone and withdraw by golem. Ubel then destroys that same clone, the one threat no one else could track.

An extended flashback returns to a second-class exam overseen by Burg, a defense specialist who had never once been wounded as a first-class mage. The test merely asked candidates to shove him back a step, yet the then-unknown Ubel sliced clean through his Immovable Cloak and killed him, brushing it off as an accidental overcut.

Questioning her afterward, Sense learns that Ubel's gift rests entirely on belief: she fondly recalls the snip of her sister's scissors and cuts any fabric simply because she is certain she can. Sense compares the leap to an ant picturing itself crushing a dragon and concludes that Ubel reasons by pure feeling rather than ordinary thought. In the present, Sense admits she has been unable to imagine beating Ubel ever since, while Ubel shrugs that hair was always meant to be cut.