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Passing through the Northern Plateau had been anything but easy. The certain explosion of monsters roaming the land combined with the heavier presence of demons had swollen their patience until bursting. Of course, it wasn’t like they could simply go back or around or anything, so they’d just have to re-inflate it with some time spent relaxing away from the cities and any one-sided requests made to Frieren.
“I thought we’d be heading out to a lake or something! Not a dungeon!” Stark groaned. He’d been tired of carrying the girls’ things already, and was dreading how much more garbage that old elf would snatch up here.
Fern seemed to echo his complaints, if just less blunt, “Lady Frieren, with how much supplies we bought from the last town, I don’t think we’d be able to carry anything else without leaving some behind.”
Frieren, even those long knife ears, didn’t hear a thing. She loved strange little crevices in the earth, ones absolutely inflamed and oozing with old treasures and the possibility of an obscure tome or two.
It would’ve been easy to mistake that little elf for a child if not for being an elf, and being an elf, that long life spent in ostensible retirement had made her no less immature. White pigtails she didn’t even do up herself while dressed in clothes taken care of by Fern, it was a surprise Frieren got anything done in entire life.
Happily waltzing down the dark, orangey stone hallways, she suddenly stopped her companions by putting out her hand and saying, “There’s something ahead of us.”
Fern hadn’t detected any living mana, so it seemed like Frieren’s instincts took over rather than a real threat. Still, she and Stark took it to heart lest something else come take it away.
The elf cast a spell and sent a little orb of light to trawl the dark ahead. It quickly came to a dead end that was marked with a little pile of dirt in the corner with something leaned therein. It was long, carved of wood, and something like a flute if just scaled up by three times.
Frieren’s caution disappeared as she bounded forward and snatched the object up. They could all get a nice and close look at that queer instrument, the original dark wood segmenting indents of light paint and bright patterns. It ended with a snake’s head for the music to come out while the mouthpiece seemed normal. Overall, it wasn’t too interesting of a find.
Yet, Frieren was just enraptured, “I’ve never seen such an interesting device before! I can feel an odd mana emanating from it as if it came from another world.”
“Oh,” Stark replied, “Do you think it’s from where we’re going? I feel like that place would have some pretty weird stuff.”
Fern wasn’t so sure, “No. They’d have no reason to create an instrument like this. It would have to be from somewhere else, but…”
Crossing dimensions and the sort should’ve absolutely been impossible, something not even the greatest demons could do, so there had to be another explanation.
“Well we have it now,” the elf reassured, “And I think I should try playing it.”
Before Fern could rightly condemn the idea, Frieren was already putting it to her lips and blowing a strange song. It was surely a sort of flute, but it seemed to play over them, no echo from the dungeon’s walls bouncing back into their brains. Instead, it was like it was playing directly in their heads as it expertly played.
That was strange too, the skill at which Frieren played. Perfect music came out of it with only a puff of air, and her hands didn’t move at all to produce that delicate symphony. Images formed in the music, memories and little reflections of themselves running amok on the floor as they stood giants in their own recollection.
Then it transitioned into things that hadn’t happened yet or perhaps ever. Scenes from another world played out in a confusing pastiche of reality where nothing looked quite right. It was a simplified desert apocalypse following one strange, furry man as he searched for something that they couldn’t quite make out.
The song finished, and the visions disappeared. Frieren appeared satisfied and led the other two, very concerned, party members out of the dungeon back into fresh air where they could actually relax.
Finally, she spoke up, “What a wonderful song, no? It really wafts away the pomp and circum-stench of cleaning up the Norm Company’s big and stinky, doesn’t it? That silent but delimeat thing called debt had really sliced a frown in the brown, and my penniless bottom could only take a penny less, but ham…”
“WHAT!?!?” Stark and Fern both yelled out after letting Frieren finish her nonsense.
The elf just tilted her head and looked back without thinking a single thing she said was strange, “hm? What’s wrong? All I said was that it’s good to be free from the Norm Company, isn’t it?”
Frieren was weird, but certainly not weird enough to come up with anything like that. Both party members immediately became suspicious of the otherworldly instrument. However, there was nothing they could do as Frieren cradled it in her arms. All they could do was hope that she was just messing with them.
“Shall we continue? I believe there’s a lake or river up ahead you two can use to relax more entangled with spirits au naturel and a la carte for the hungry man’s threesome with Dinner and Movie…”
Again, she said something that made no sense, but she was still acting normal enough for Stark and Fern to follow along as if nothing happened.
Really, besides her strange words, some of which didn’t even exist in their world, Frieren was the same as usual. Yes, her carefree, almost childish demeanor carrying her along the ground as if she hadn’t seen over a thousand years pass by. Well, she was starting to slow down in her elven age, but that didn’t apply to just how slow she suddenly was compared to her companions. After all, it’s quite hard to suddenly walk with her knees bent backward.
Fern almost choked on her tongue when she looked back to the elf trailing so far behind with legs malformed, “L-Lady F-F-Frieren…”
Stark looked back too and made a, “unh?” noise with nothing to follow. Frieren’s legs were absolutely bent wrong at the knee, and she didn’t seem to even notice as her speed picked up and she walked over like normal.
Her innocent face looked back and responded with, “Is there something wrong? I don’t mind stopping again on a nice day like this, but I’m sure you two would like some time in the slimy underbelly of passion and indig-”
“Why do you keep saying things like that, Lady Frieren!?” Fern was worried, “It doesn’t make sense, and now you’re body’s starting to-”
“Well, ‘tis hard to maintain a tall drink of li~fe’s secret sauce on peasant wages, but that’s no reason to get queasin’. Suckling at the glory hole of one’s potential can only bust a cranial nut so far… I’ll have to take out a lo~an at the spank bank and refill on mother nature’s protein shake!”
With whatever she meant, Frieren suddenly bounded off ahead with renewed purpose. The other two were too taken aback to catch up, and stood still for a while thinking about what she’d said.
The elf was alone, and that was perfectly alright. She’d been alone most of her life, faint memories of her father’s death hanging over her as she continued an epic quest to nowhere in particular.
Eventually, she came across two hunters coming back from an unsuccessful hunt, the anger apparent in their eyes. They say the elf and one huffed, “Well, well, if isn’t a freak moseying her way through a blissful expanse of nature’s beauty. I don’t think you should be here!”
Frieren quivered a moment as the wind hit her bare legs. She’d decided to go with only a loincloth to cover her elven particularities and only kept some shoes on to continue. She didn’t want to move, “A night on the hunt and no meat to blow for it? I don’t have time to get on my knees nor the ample bosom to articulate a breastful meal for you gentlemen!”
“Oh lookie here, the big fancy freak don’t got the cupsize to size up the cup-petition! I’ll have you know,” the hunter stepped forward and readied his hands on her tunic, “that I don’t need some freak’s hairy tits to feed my family!”
“That’s right! You tell her!” The other chimed in while the former tore his top off and revealed the chunkiest set of breasts Frieren had ever seen, “We don’t need your tits!”
Still, the elf kept her composure, “Those are the largest mammaries I’ve ever seen, but never largest memory I’ve ever theen-ked. augh My brain cage is rattling a cup on the electric superhighway of recollection! My memories…”
Frieren as a young elf stood in front of a little forest cabin, staring down at a line of ants she singed one by one. Behind her, she could feel the watchful eyes of her elf father before they suddenly vanished in a warm blanket of hellfire. Frieren dropped the magnifying glass she’d fashioned from a grimoire’s spell and spun around to see the forest oozing with flames. The only thing could’ve started this horrible fire would’ve had to been-
“My father’s killer!” Frieren broke from a trance as the hunters kept taunting her.
“She’s thinking ‘bout her daddy’s jugs while starin’ at yours!” yelled the breastless, “That’s some messed up, psychoanalytic complex of desire for the opposite-sex parent that I can’t abide by!”
“No~o! I’m only- augh” Frieren cried out again as she felt a strange cramp between her bent legs, “I wrote a Freud-ulent cheque my supple bottom can’t cash! My syrupy white life juice is empty, and I can’t cast my sp~ells without it!”
“We’ll show you a resolution and suppression to create the superego that internalizes parental morals!”
“Yeah! Get suppressed!”
Both men set upon Frieren, punching her to the ground and kicking her to a chorus of, “Taste the pain! Taste the pain! Ta-Ta-Ta-Taste the pain!”
The hunters left the elf behind, bruised and battered, and went home to supposedly make a milky dinner.
Frieren slowly stood back up, letting her newly straightened and blonded hair flow in the empty wind. Those two hunters hadn’t been any help, but even a shred of memory of solving her father’s murder was good enough on her journey to refill her mana stores. She’d been stockpiling it for hundreds of years, now having an almost infinite supply of the stuff, but it felt like it all just shriveled up the moment after she played that strange instrument.
Speaking of the instrument, it was thankfully unharmed during the scuffle and still nebulously existed somewhere around her body. She was so exposed though, her bare, thickly haired legs matching the rest of her body. She was hardly the same elf anymore, and Fern and Stark were too lost in the forest to find their way to Frieren’s new look.
The elf thought aloud as she hobbled down the path, “You try to take a bite of li~fe, but it takes a big bite of your voluptuous behind instead… The salt of earth rubs it into my wounds, but I must continue on into the bubbling hotpot li~fe now finely seasoned piece of ass.”
She eventually came upon a village, thankfully not the one the hunters seemed to come from, but nonetheless intimidating as they saw a stranger come in and stare upon the layout. There, right near the entrance, she saw what she’d supposedly been looking for and walked into the tavern looking to make a withdrawal.
Sidling up to the bartender, “Hm, I think I’ll have a little bit of everything you have, my dear tender. My juices aren’t loose no matter how much of I did it I didn’t do. What can even be done than to separate the mind from the matter and drink this tasty swamp the way God (God)… intended!”
The bartender did as told and the beast slurped the mixture up in one flick of the tongue. A little bit of everything, the first suicide shot in history and one that included all sorts of a strange elixir, had brought Frieren back to spirits in a triumphant exit outside.
“Ah, Frutata! What a fantastic-” Suddenly, as she tried to wax and wane once more, she was accosted by the Chivalric Order of Norm coming to dispel the freak in their midst.
“Your disruption of the peace of the Northern Plateau has been noted, and you have been considered a demon because we just don’t like you!”
Frieren considered this declaration of war for a moment before feeling the mana surge through her body again and deciding to act appropriately, “Why have been so scor~ned!? All I’ve done is drink from the barmaid’s flavorful teat and imbibe the mighty elixir of my forefathers… (fathers)… (fathers)… That’s right! My father-s!”
“She’s getting frisky business in her head ‘bout her daddy! This messed up Freudian recursion’s gotta stop before she does something drastic! Kill the freak!”
The knights set upon the elf’s less than elven body with spears and halberds, forcing her to let loose with a magical blast trained on center mass. It sortied as the usual magic sigil appearing before a row of light cut through the air and flash fried the merry band of knights a delicious golden brown.
None were left standing except Frieren.
“Dangit, I hadn’t meant to flank their sizzlemeat until after asking about my father… (father)… (father)… My father! I have to discover the ne’er done well that cooked him well done… A journey’s end is my path less travelled by… beyond.”
…
Stark and Fern followed the path Frieren probably took, but couldn’t find anyone or anything. Just a spiraling path through the brush ahead of them, they just couldn't figure out where she could’ve vanished while hiding all traces of her mana.
“Do you think Frieren’ll be fine without us? She was acting pretty weird before disappearing out here,” Stark pondered.
Fern was more annoyed than anything that the elf had once again derailed their journey, “Lady Frieren lived a long time by herself. I’m sure she’s fine…”