Chapter 72

Carrying straight on from before, the group debates their next move. Methode and Stark study the demon's cutting patterns, and Stark argues that a single-sword reading makes no sense, proposing a dual wielder instead. Frieren tells Fern that demons can hide their mana for short stretches, so their target likely sits beyond detection range for now, and points to the lairs Genau flagged around his hometown as their first search ground. She then unpacks the dreaded hard bread for dinner, drawing groans, and urges patience until the plateau's supply lines recover.

When Methode offers to carry Genau's meal to the church, Frieren keeps her back for her analysis and sends Stark instead. Methode corrects the earlier guess outright: the enemy wields not two blades but four.

Outside, Genau tells Stark he has layered a stronger barrier over the church to shield the corpses the demons had exposed. Asked why the bodies are left unburied, he explains that the plateau rarely keeps cemeteries except in fortified places, since shoddy graves draw monsters that dig up the dead. Corpses are instead escorted south by the Chivalric Order, and while the Norm Company sensibly favors cremation, the clergy will not allow it, a stance Genau half understands, finding it cruel to burn someone who died in agony yet necessary to let them rest in their homeland.

Inside, Methode marvels at sharing a meal with Frieren's party and asks why she and Genau are present. She reveals that Serie personally charged the two with clearing demons from the plateau, a duty that falls to her apprentices. A memory shows their cold first meeting, where Genau rebuffed Methode's handshake until Serie ordered it, then later confessed that his former partner had been a kind, earnest man who died protecting a child and let a four-bladed demon escape. Genau swore he would never be so foolish, having already abandoned countless people, and warned Methode against ever turning out like him.

Before splitting up, the group pools its knowledge. Mana traces point to four demons in the raiding force, one of them a quadruple-wielding demon general. Frieren explains that such generals are martial warriors who reinforce their bodies with mana over centuries of training, some far stronger than Eisen once was in the Demon King's army, and that the garrison fell because it had never faced a four-blade master. Far away, a young demon reports to Revolte, a four-armed creature with a human torso atop a serpent's body, that prey has entered their trap: a warrior and four mages. Revolte refuses to strike yet, trusting a bad feeling and his observation that humans always leave someone behind to guard their dead, and resolves to wait until they separate. Fittingly, Genau has volunteered to remain with the corpses. The chapter debuts Revolte, while his young servant goes unnamed in print and is called Jung only on the anime's website.