Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol. 10

This volume picks up with Macht, one of the Seven Sages of Destruction, still trying to understand humans.  He’s still turning them into gold via the Diagoldze curse, but then he meets Solitar, another demon who struggles to understand humans.  Then Schlacht, a demon who says that he’s been ordered to defeat the hero of the South.  It isn’t until he meets Gluck, a human mage who has his own ideas about justice that he starts to believe that humans are worth studying.  Which leads him to mentor the mage Denken and eventually survive an encounter with the elven mage Serie.  All so that Denken, Fern, Stark, and Frieren will eventually be able to survive an encounter with the sage himself.

If all that sounds very straightforward and workmanlike… well, it really is.  “Frieren” has always been at its best when it’s telling an extended story rather than a done-in-one tale and that remains true here.  It’s just that this time it feels like the story that’s being told is more conventional than the ones we’ve been told before.  I don’t feel that we get any genuinely surprising insight into Macht’s character here, and Frieren’s bit at the end feels like a very low-key version of Wolverine’s classic, “You’ve taken yer best shot.  Now it’s my turn!” bit.  Not bad by any means, but still far from the best we’ve seen from this title when it’s in its groove.