Chapter 63

Twenty-nine winters past Himmel's death, Frieren rests in the northern settlement of Fabel alongside Fern and Stark. An aged local hires the group to restore a statue's shine, and the offer of a charm for soothing an itchy back wins Frieren over at once. Both of her young companions expect the carving to depict Himmel, so they are caught off guard when it shows a middle-aged man sporting a mustache and a pair of blades.

Frieren names the figure the Hero of the South and ranks him above every other champion who ever marched on the Demon King. She lays out his record for the pair. The Seven Sages of Destruction once held the most vital ground across the northern realms, and while her own band only struck down two of them with two more slipping away, this lone swordsman finished off the remaining three. In the span of a single year he tore through the enemy's forward ranks and reached the far rim of the Northern Plateau, a chokepoint on the army's supply line.

At that distant frontier, Schlacht the Omniscient, a confidant of the Demon King said to perceive a thousand years ahead, met the swordsman with the Sages flanking him. Against impossible numbers the hero still cut down three more of them before crossing steel with Schlacht. The clash liberated much of the surrounding territory from the Sages' grip, and since no corpse ever surfaced, villagers tell their children through puppet plays that he duels the seer even now. Frieren privately suspects that flesh-eating demons devoured what remained of him.

A memory rises while she works. Long ago in the Central Lands the champion had failed to recruit her, then shared a secret he trusted her never to repeat. His might sprang from an ability to glimpse what lay ahead. He had already foreseen his own end within the year and knew the Demon King would outlive him, yet he predicted that Frieren would someday stand beside a young hero fated to save the world. He begged her to relay a vow to that youth, that mankind's strongest would carve open the road forward even if the chronicles forgot his name.

Once the statue gleams, the elder pays the promised spell, and the townsfolk gather to admire the renewed monument. Watching their reverence, Frieren reflects that the swordsman's bleak prophecy about fading into obscurity proved false, since the people plainly still treasure him. He fought with two swords, and the keepsake he inspired here is nothing grander than a minor charm for an itchy back. His first appearance in the series unfolds entirely inside Frieren's recollection, with Schlacht and the Sages glimpsed only in her telling.