Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
- During the travel montage post Time Skip we see our heroes encounter a monster wolf the size of a house. Himmel and Heiter understandably can't help, but the past fifty years have done nothing to slow down Eisen, who's able to leap above it and whack it on the head with a stick to distract it, giving Frieren the opening to blast it to pieces.
- How good is Fern's potential as a mage? Well, even when she's only a child she has such control over her magic that she can almost strike a boulder on the far side of a canyon, and is able to mask her mana so well that even Frieren has trouble detecting it.
- Heiter has a couple moments:
- Appearing at just the right time and place to keep a young Fern from jumping off a cliff following her family's death. Not by catching or restraining her either, but by simply talking to her. Saving a life is always awesome, regardless of circumstance. Doubles as Heartwarming.
- Knowing that Frieren won't take on Fern as an apprentice because of how dangerous it is, Heiter plays the long game instead by having Frieren translate an old grimoire for him, a process she states would take five to six years to finish, during which time she can help Fern in her training. By the time she finishes translating the grimoire, Fern is now a proper mage and free to travel with Frieren. Not bad for a "corrupt priest".
- Fern and Frieren's brief sparring match shows the sheer power the two have, with Frieren's casual attacks destroying the forest around them and Fern able to produce shields strong enough to block/redirect said attacks.
- Frieren and Fern vs Qual. Qual's claim to fame was a magical attack named Zoltraak, which tears through defensive spells and enchanted armors to kill his opponents. It was so dangerous Frieren could only seal him away. Key word there being was. Turns out that during the eighty years Qual was sealed, Zoltraak had been thoroughly studied and adapted to, to the point where it's just considered "common offensive magic." So instead of an actual duel, Fern blocks all his attacks while Frieren charges up her own Zoltraak to obliterate him.
- Even so, Qual showcases the genius that allowed him to develop Zoltraak in the first place by analyzing the defensive magic developed to counter it, and instantly figures out its weakness: the high mana cost. He then conjures a storm of Zoltraaks that begins to overwhelm Fern's defences, until Frieren is able to charge up her finisher. Even eighty years out of time, Qual proves that those years were absolutely necessary in order for humanity to be able to defeat him, and had he managed to escape he would have swiftly caught up and re-established himself as a threat.
- It's an awesome moment for narrative, too. The exposition given on Zoltraak does a better job of establishing Qual as a threat than any one-sided battle or field of corpses ever could. Just how much of a monster do you have to be for an entire society of wizards to spend eighty years revamping their entire ciriculum just to defend against one of your creations?
- Stark is introduced as having saved a town three years ago from a dragon, not by actually attacking it, but just by standing his ground. Even after Stark admits he was just flat-out to terrified to move, he still charged in to protect a woman and her child.
- After being presented as a sniveling coward and looked down upon by Fern, we're given three different examples of just how powerful Stark really is before seeing him in action:
- The massive wedge-shaped fissure he's sitting in front of is a result of his training, with each strike packing so much force it superheats to rocks to be glowing red.
- Eisen, his own master and a legendary hero in his own right, is afraid of him, to the point he reflexively punched Stark clean through the wall of his house, a punch that Stark tanked with only a scar, mind you.
- As Frieren explains, the reason the dragon left the village alone for the past three years is because Stark was there, and it knew not to mess with such a powerful opponent.
- Stark vs the dragon. Frieren said he had to distract it for thirty seconds. Turns out thirty seconds is all he needed to kill it. The dragon doesn't land a single hit on Stark, who runs circles around it, shatters the claws of one hand, holds onto the side of its head for a good while as it tries to dislodge him, then finally buries his axe in its head midair with so much force they crash into the ground like a meteor. Stark doesn't even realize he killed it at first!
- The events of the Aura arc provide Fern and Stark the much-needed affirmation that they aren't just sidekicks raised by the prior heroes on a whim, but their apprentices with their own strengths that will take them forward. While the demons brush off the pair and assume that Frieren will be tied up dealing with Aura, they find themselves almost laughably outmatched by Fern and Stark once they get over their confidence issues.
- Fern recalls Frieren praising her ability to quickly cast magic, and uses that talent to its fullest potential, with her vast mana reserve and endless barrage stopping Lügner cold. His internal thoughts during the fight shift from arrogance to confusion to panic as he realizes he has no counter to Fern until she fatally blasts him.
- Stark, while put on the defensive by Linie, and intimidated by the realization she's imitating Eisen, remembers his master's actual lessons — not to give up. So he doesn't, and despite his fear of Linie, realizes she's nothing like his master, particularly in how she lacks the dwarf's strength. So he takes her so-called killing strike, which barely cuts into him, and then cleaves her in two in an instant.
- Frieren's defeat of Aura is the culmination of a thousand-years-long Batman Gambit. Aura cast a spell using a magical item that weighs the relative mana of two targets by placing their souls upon the scales, granting complete control to whoever has more - it's risky, but is incredibly powerful if the caster is confident they'll win. In 500 years, Aura has never lost... but Frieren has spent her entire millennia-long life concealing her mana specifically to trick demons into overconfidence. The scales just don't weigh in her favor, they audibly CLANK as they bottom out.
- The reveal of Frieren's mana field is its own moment of awesome. Aura, who's trained in magic for 500 years, has a mana field about the size of a large truck around her. In a flashback, Flamme, one of the most powerful human wizards ever, had a mana field that filled a small forest clearing. Frieren's mana floods an area several times the size Aura's covered. note
- During the First Class Mage Exam arc:
- Denken is a very capable mage by most standards, but despite doing his utmost his match with Frieren is decidedly one-sided. She doesn't have to resort to anything but basic defensive and offensive spells to win, and Denken is left feeling like to her the battle was basically the equivalent of a sparring session with a trainee mage.
- After the thirteenth party lose to the second party in the first exam, Richter is ready to call it quits as the three of them have already run out of mana. Denken insists that they push on until the bitter end, find another team that has already caught a Stille and duel them for it using fistcuffs.
- Übel easily defeating Sense's clone. Nothing is shown of the actual fight, only a flashback of the previous time Übel was there for a mage exam, where she killed the mage proctor by cutting right through his impenetrable magic robe. In Sense's office, Übel freaks her out by explaining the core concept of her magic and how it led to her penetrating such powerful defenses, and implying that she would swiftly destroy Sense if they ever fought.
- Frieren is locked in a mage battle with a perfect replica of herself. Until this point, even against other skilled mages, she has always contented herself with basic attack and defense magic, because at her power scale, she doesn't need anything else. For this fight, however, she is pitted against a creature that is exactly as powerful as she is, and requires her to tap into her vast knowledge of magic. It starts off simple, with just lightning and fire spells that can melt stone, but quickly evolves into summoning miniature black holes. In the end, when the Replica Frieren is beaten, battered, and has had both of its arms blown off, it still manages to throw Fern across the room with enough force to leave a crater in the wall, and reduce her staff to pieces, all from just a glare. The spectacle of the fight shows just powerful a mage can become, and just how deadly Frieren can be when she stops holding back.
- The reveal that Land went through the entirety of the arc without even being physically present in Äußerst. Serie even passed him instantly for this reason.
