Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol. 5

The first round of testing for the First-Class Mage exam has begun.  All that the teams involved have to do is capture a Stille and make sure all of their members are still alive by sunset the following day.  This sounds simple, but the Stille is a bird that can fly at supersonic speed and sense the slightest amount of mana without giving off any itself.  If that wasn’t bad enough, Frieren has been teamed up with two troublesome girls, Lawine and Kanne.  They’re ice and water mages, respectively, and they tend to get on like cats and dogs more often than not.  So Frieren is going to have to manage them in addition to the requirements of the test itself if she is to have any shot at becoming a First-Class Mage.  Oh, and did I mention the other teams who are also looking for Stilles?  While some of them are perfectly willing to hunt the bird on their own terms, others aren’t above a bit of theft or outright murder to get what they want.

This isn’t quite as good as the demon arc that straddled volumes two and three, but it’s easily the second-best one in the series so far.  Writer Kanehito Yamada not only lays out the stakes quite well, but he also does a good job of throwing in little twists as the story goes on.  The writer also fleshes out a decent portion of the competing parties and comes up with a nice diversity of motivations for why they’ve all entered this competition, in addition to making them more than just ciphers we want to see Frieren (and Fern) succeed against.  It’s very solid work that wraps up before the end of this volume, leaving us with two chapters of fluff that give us even more insight into these new characters.  As well as set up the next round of testing, which is to be administered by a mage who has had no one pass her tests before!  Any takers on the over/under for how long it’ll take Frieren to pass it?