Chapter 61

Twenty-nine years after Himmel's death, the party crosses the Saum Marshes, where Frieren turns up a magic-nullifying crystal and gleefully explains how it smothers any spell and hoards mana until it glows. Fern, who cannot even light a cooking fire near it, twice begs her to throw the dangerous thing away. Soon after, the ground gives out beneath them and drops the three into an enormous cavern walled in the same crystal, leaving both mages as powerless as ordinary girls.

As they search for a way out and camp by an underground lake, Fern confesses to Stark how frightening it is to sense no mana at all, while Frieren sleeps untroubled. A Venomous Apex Dragon then erupts from the water, a lethal opponent for Stark alone. Frieren calmly explains that she has trusted her life to him since the day he joined, and rather than ask him to be brave she offers to flee at his side. Charging a crystal shard with her mana, she blinds the beast and the party escapes together.

While trekking toward the next village, the ground collapses and drops the party into a cavern formed entirely of magic-nullifying crystal, foiling their flying magic. Cornered there by a Venomous Apex Dragon, Frieren blinds it with a mana-charged shard, and the group flees the cave carried on Stark's back before continuing north.

Frieren describes the crystal as the world's hardest mineral, impossible to cut or refine with magic and so rare that a pebble fetches several gold coins while a large block could buy a mansion; Stark's hope of hauling the cavern's riches out is therefore hopeless. Her calm trust in Stark echoes a remembered moment from the Hero Party, in which Himmel assured Eisen that whenever the urge to run seized him, the whole group would run alongside him, just as Heiter once carried Eisen and Himmel carried Frieren away from a dragon. The ordeal ends with Stark's legs giving out the moment they reach safety.