Judging Frieren's Power

[BitVyper]

Just as a note on shielded vs not shielded: While we're never specifically shown it, Frieren makes it pretty clear that clothing enchanted for defense is just a basic thing for adventurers to have. Part of the reason no one even thinks of Zoltraak (fuckin phantasy star-ass spell name there) as a killing spell anymore is because equipment has improved enough to soften it. Not really a big deal, just saying we lack a lot of clear feats of meat durability for her because how those base level defenses are working is kept fairly ambiguous. Though when something actually pierces her clothes, she doesn't seem terribly bothered, like Lernen's surprise attack that put a big gouge in her shoulder. Actually Lernen's surprise attack gives us a good benchmark for the quality of defensive gear: We've seen a normal Zoltraak will punch through multiple huge stone slabs. Frieren gets a bloody shoulder after it rips through her shield.

After a few Edit: months, I think of him whacking at the cliff

IIRC he was in the village for three years. Though even if he were only cleaving like a foot into it per day, it's still a pretty wild feat, especially with it being so tall. I think the way he just meteors that huge dragon right into the ground is probably the better feat though.

Despite Fern's insanely fast defense and magic sensing, when Frieren focuses completely on her she instantly penetrates Fern's defense and incapacitates her, Fern being completely incapable of reacting to or even sensing her magical attack.

This one is weird and speaks to how Frieren was trained to be deceptive. I don't think we're even wholly sure just what she did there. That said, I don't know that it's much of a feat against Fern's defensive speed so much as a feat against her senses as you note. The way Fern reacts feels like someone pulled out a bazooka in the middle of a fight with an 11th century swordsman who doesn't know what a gun is, so I think she didn't even see anything to defend against. (hilariously, I was reminded of a scene in Snarfquest where Snarf shoots a dragon with a gun)

Anyway yeah Frieren rules. I think it's safe to call her a very fast mountain buster with multiple layers of active and passive defenses that can stop or soften instant-death type stuff, and trained almost exclusively to mislead opponents. She's also exceptionally good at analyzing and undoing magic. So good that she was able to undo the Midas curse, with curses in Frieren notably being things that usually require active divine intervention to beat. It's funny that she's considered not really a combat mage, when I'd say she seems more built to win fights than someone like Wirbel (though Wirbel is great).

I always thought it would be funny to put the main three in Overlord, a setting where people have not really investigated the whys and hows of magic, so some MMO player beats them at everything partly by having maybe a decade's worth of MMO meta (and then massively by virtue of being OP), where Frieren's world has had attack/defense meta going back and forth and being refined for a thousand years to the point of now having something like magic graphene shields. So they make a fun counterpoint to every isekai setting by being aware of and adapted to the rules of their world.

[Sharpandpointies]

Just as a note on shielded vs not shielded: While we're never specifically shown it, Frieren makes it pretty clear that clothing enchanted for defense is just a basic thing for adventurers to have. Part of the reason no one even thinks of Zoltraak (fuckin phantasy star-ass spell name there) as a killing spell anymore is because equipment has improved enough to soften it. Not really a big deal, just saying we lack a lot of clear feats of meat durability for her because how those base level defenses are working is kept fairly ambiguous. Though when something actually pierces her clothes, she doesn't seem terribly bothered, like Lernen's surprise attack that put a big gouge in her shoulder. Actually Lernen's surprise attack gives us a good benchmark for the quality of defensive gear: We've seen a normal Zoltraak will punch through multiple huge stone slabs. Frieren gets a bloody shoulder after it rips through her shield.

Absolutely. Frieren's world is an RPG world, basically. They have warriors who get more and more ridiculous as they train, to the point where steel speartips are shattering on Eisen's skin.

Mages aren't immune to this. You give a good example, above. Then there's Frieren fighting Solitär. When Solitär hits Frieren with a blast of hyper-condensed mana, it shatters Frieren's anti-Zoltraak shields like they're nothing and flings Frieren through the forest like she's garbage. It strikes her more than once, culminating in the elf hitting a tree hard enough to snap it in half (with broken shields). If it's treating her shields like trash, it's doing the same to any protections on her clothing.

What does Frieren think about this?

"I can't take those kinds of hits non-stop. If they hit the right place, they might even kill me instantly."

This, after already taking three of them.

I mean, Fern gets stabbed clean through a shoulder and pinned to a wall, then shows no sign of impairment afterwards. And Fern isn't that great compared to Frieren. Edit: Frieren's special attack on Fern slams Fern into a granite, cave wall hard enough to make a small crater in the stone. Fern is badly hurt, bleeding from the mouth, but still perfectly conscious.

Mages can get pretty tough. They're not on the level of fighters, but fighters are...insane.

IIRC he was in the village for three years. Though even if he were only cleaving like a foot into it per day, it's still a pretty wild feat, especially with it being so tall. I think the way he just meteors that huge dragon right into the ground is probably the better feat though.

In the manga he cuts off all of its claws, bats its limb aside, then one-shots it.

Three years, sounds right. I knew it was a while. Thanks.

Anyway yeah Frieren rules. I think it's safe to call her a very fast mountain buster with multiple layers of active and passive defenses that can stop or soften instant-death type stuff, and trained almost exclusively to mislead opponents. She's also exceptionally good at analyzing and undoing magic. So good that she was able to undo the Midas curse, with curses in Frieren notably being things that usually require active divine intervention to beat. It's funny that she's considered not really a combat mage, when I'd say she seems more built to win fights than someone like Wirbel (though Wirbel is great).

She's just so monstrously powerful, is all.

I wouldn't quite put her at mountain buster, but wouldn't argue with people who did. The slice of a cliff she casually destroys isn't nearly on the size of a mountain, though it is - conservatively - high hundreds of tons. And she does it with ease. So...

And yes, her ability to analyze and neutralize magic is insane. Better than anyone so far (including Serie, since we haven't seen Serie bother to do so).

Zoltraak is a completely physical attack, from what I see - it's just 'armor piercing', so to speak. It kills by carving big bloody holes through whatever it hits. That she can casually resist it from powerful mages is impressive, given the stuff that Fern and others pull off with it. And that her shields resist their advanced attack magic as well.

Manga Frieren is lesser in displayed feats to Anima Frieren. They certainly upped the ante, in what she's shown to do with her basic spells and what advanced attack magic she uses (the manga doesn't, for example, have her creating 100 ton golems, evaporating scores of tons of stone with hellfire, or creating a miniature black hole complete with accretion disk).

I always thought it would be funny to put the main three in Overlord, a setting where people have not really investigated the whys and hows of magic, so some MMO player beats them at everything partly by having maybe a decade's worth of MMO meta (and then massively by virtue of being OP), where Frieren's world has had attack/defense meta going back and forth and being refined for a thousand years to the point of now having something like magic graphene shields. So they make a fun counterpoint to every isekai setting by being aware of and adapted to the rules of their world.

Kind of lost interest in Overlord - rapidly - so it's not something on which I can comment.

[BitVyper]

Stone and earth can be hard to judge, but that thing was solid enough to stay as one mass, and a three metre tall boulder can clear 200 tons pretty easily, so I can't conceive of what she destroyed in... I think the time travel arc? being anything below tens of thousands

Zoltraak is a completely physical attack, from what I see - it's just 'armor piercing', so to speak. It kills by carving big bloody holes through whatever it hits.

If not defended against with modern magic, we're told getting hit with it completely destroys the body, which is what we.see with Qual. Of course humans have been improving it for 80 years since Qual used it

[Sharpandpointies]

Stone and earth can be hard to judge, but that thing was solid enough to stay as one mass, and a three metre tall boulder can clear 200 tons pretty easily, so I can't conceive of what she destroyed in... I think the time travel arc? being anything below tens of thousands.

Unfortunately, that's a little off. A 3 meter, perfectly cubic boulder (which is as big as a 3m boulder can get) will be 27 cubic meters (3 x 3 x 3). Granite masses about 2.7 tonnes per cubic meter. That works out to ~73 metric tonnes, using a cubic boulder, which is a lot more than a roughly spherical one. Maybe you're thinking about a 4-5m one?

Edit: For fun, a sphere would clock in around 38.2 tonnes; take an average and we run about 55.5 tonnes for an irregular thing somewhere between a sphere and a cube. ^_^

And the mass is being held up by magic, so it's not surprising it's not falling apart. Or maybe it IS a solid chunk, but to me it looks like a slice out of a ridge or an escarpment. Not a slice out of a giant boulder.

Now I admit, I like to lowball a little so as not to exaggerate. It's likely to be somewhere BETWEEN our estimates, in the thousands of tonnes. Maybe even up to ten thousand, I don't know. But it's not a perfect cube (it's conical), and would need at least 3 700 cubic meters of pure granite to weigh over 1 x 10 000 tonnes.

I'm open to someone figuring it out and proving me dead wrong, of course! ^_^

If not defended against with modern magic, we're told getting hit with it completely destroys the body, which is what we.see with Qual. Of course humans have been improving it for 80 years since Qual used it

I did a lot of study of this when it was brought up elsewhere - went through the whole manga at the time (it was just past issue 100).

Zoltraak is shown to simply bore holes though things and people. By 'destroys the body', that's pretty much it (it also doesn’t say ‘completely’, just that it goes right through magic defences ‘to destroy the body’). It's not a death spell (in the manga the canon writer has the art depicting it in the Qual description of the effects as simply blasting a cookie-cutter hole in the body of a human).

Similarly when it hits demons. Despite being 'calibrated' to being anti-demon, it doesn't disintegrate them in total once they're hit by it, or burn their bodies away after hitting a non-vital part. Lügner survives a direct hit from Fern that eats most of his left side away and his arm, and grows it back. It's not until his 'vitals' are hit by the Zoltraak that he dies, and he doesn't just 'die' from it - he effectively sits there broken and bleeding to death, unable to stop himself from slowly dying, until Fern decides that enough is enough and obliterates him.

People can't take that kind of damage, though, so if Qual was shooting bolts that blast a 15 cm hole through anyone it hit, that would kill them pretty much no matter where it struck.

I realize the description sounds like a death spell, but every actual demonstrated use of it is basically 'boom, carves holes through things. Stone. People. Hillsides. Whatever.' It's just made to blow through the old magical defenses, as well - basically it's armor piercing.

Edit: now Frieren, she often shoots Zoltaak beams that are bigger than a person, so…nothing left from THAT, obviously.

The demons turning to particles after dying, that's explicitly a demon/monster thing (noted by Frieren herself in the manga) and happens regardless if they are killed by Zoltraak, other spells, or Stark hitting them really hard with his axe.

[BitVyper]

That's long tons, I believe. I'm largely remembering the white rock in white rock being 183 tons and a bit less than 3m tall

As to Zoltraak, I don't particularly disagree at any rate, whether it's punching holes or otherwise, it seems to be pure physical damage but compare what happened to Qual, who had no.modern defenses to what happened to blood tentacle man. Qual basically evaporated immediately (which you could argue is just the norm for demons, but then the same would be true of the other guy) and the guy who had 80 years on Qual was able to sit there with a hole in him and monologue.

Though I kind of feel like Frieren may have hit Qual with Zoltraak classic, since she actually called the spell and it would be fitting.

[Sharpandpointies]

That's long tons, I believe. I'm largely remembering the white rock in white rock being 183 tons and a bit less than 3m tall

I'm talking metric tonnes. We were talking meters, I went with metric tonnes (which are about the same as a long ton anyway, being about 2200 lbs). Also, the difference between a long ton and a short ton is 2240 lbs to 2000 lbs. It's not a lot. ^_^

I mean, maybe the white rock about which you're talking is 3m tall and 10m wide or something? That would make a big difference. Have a pic or a link?

[Sharpandpointies]

As for Qual, I feel the difference there has to do with scope. Fern blew a hole in Lügner's chest, taking out his heart. Maybe he hung on for a bit out of tenacity (he does state that he's too badly injured to heal).

Frieren blasted Qual with something big enough that it destroyed everything below his head and one shoulder (I just checked), and maybe his feet or something like that. He died pretty much instantly (massively more damage than Lügner suffered), and dissolved as demons always do (the demon dissolving after they die thing is noted in text by Frieren, and is even a plot-point in one of the episodes...in the same story arc where Stark kills a demon with his axe and her body dissolves).

Edit: Also Lünger may have been able to hang on due to his blood control magic, which allowed him to regenerate from getting his arm blown off (as well as part of his side) and such. Other demons haven't shown the same capabilities.

[Sharpandpointies]

Hm. Interestingly enough, we have further examples of demons taking fatal injuries but hanging on. And all of them are of the Lügner sort - smaller damage, as opposed to Qual getting his entire body vaporized by Frieren.

spoilers:

Chapter 102, Macht gets hit by Deken's Zoltraak spell.

end of spoilers

Does the same thing in this case - the demon gets their heart (and pretty much nothing but) destroyed by Zoltraak and is fatally injured. They sit down and can chat, but that's all, and are already showing signs of dissolution (but are still functioning). They then get burned away by an explicitly larger blast later.

Then, no more than a few pages after this...

spoilers:

Sölitar takes a shot from Fern that punches through...her heart, same as Macht. That's it - it's a hole in the middle of her chest that is approximately heart-sized, maybe a bit bigger.

end of spoilers

Same thing happens. Demon falls down. Demon has enough left to chat, but is clearly fatally injured - they have begun to dissolve, there's a cloud of black specks around them as they talk. Frieren finishes them off with a larger blast. They turn to dust.

Lünger's injury is larger than the other ones, but part of his torso is left, as is one arm, his head, nearly all of his abdomen, his legs, etc. And his magic involves control over his blood; he specifically states that he can't stop the bleeding with this injury (presumably because his vital point has been hit) and that's what's going to finish him. The earlier shot that DIDN'T kill him most certainly would have been immediately fatal to a human - it took his arm and a big slice of his side away. But he was fine after that - he healed perfectly well and was fully prepared to fight Fern only a short time later.

Qual, on the other hand, gets taken down by a godawfully enormous blast that obliterates his entire body, leaving nothing but his head, one shoulder, and one arm by the art. There's not a whole lot of the dude left at all.

Interesting food for thought. I feel it upholds the basic idea of 'Zoltraak carves holes in people' (like the art of the human getting hit with it). But that's me.