Chapter 89: Guilt

Schlacht's request to fight is met with a flat refusal, Macht wanting no part in dying for the Demon King. The seer brushes the answer aside, calling it a royal command and threatening death for defiance, and after a tense standoff the two settle into an uneasy truce. Macht notes that a being able to read the future would not come begging without cause, and he spots the presence of Grausam, a fellow Sage of Destruction who happens to be his worst possible opponent. Told only that he must fight without thinking, Macht warns that the best outcome looks like a stalemate and that Schlacht seems to be walking toward his own grave.

Schlacht then reveals he has ordered Grausam to wipe Macht's memory of the coming battle, scolding him for letting his recollections be read by someone in the future. Speaking through that very memory, he addresses Frieren directly, explaining that he is erasing the details of the war against the Hero of the South because that fight matters to demon survival even a thousand years on. He departs, deflecting Macht's parting words of concern.

The memory jumps ahead several years to the Northern Plateau, a region where the demon has slaughtered crowds not to feed or by instinct but purely to provoke guilt or malice in himself. Watching one childhood friend forced to kill another, he questions the weeping survivor and learns the boy's grief springs from having slain someone he loved who never resisted. Delighted by the answer, Macht kills the enraged boy as well, having seized on a vital clue, that people feel guilt when they kill those close to them. He resolves to find humans he might call close, and soon arrives just outside the Fortress City of Weise.

Schlacht conscripts Macht for the campaign against the Hero of the South and has Grausam erase his memory of it, while leaving a message buried in that memory for Frieren far in the future. Years of aimless killing later, Macht grasps that guilt arises only from harming someone close, a revelation that draws him toward the heavily populated city of Weise.

Published April 6, 2022, the chapter carries the title Guilt and continues volume ten of The Golden Land arc. It introduces the Sage Grausam and details Schlacht's precognition, a power said to reach as far as a thousand years into the future. Schlacht's hidden words frame the entire flashback as a warning planted for Frieren across the centuries.