"How strong are you to go after the Demon King?" Damian asked a question as if there were no hidden meaning behind it.
"I won't fight the Demon King; I don't feel ready for it yet," said Frieren, who was lying on the sofa inside the cabin.
Damian, who was washing the used dishes, smiled slightly. He knew that Frieren's confidence was underestimated in many aspects, to the extent of her capabilities.
"Don't you seek revenge? If you wait five hundred to a thousand years, you'll forget how to fight. That flame in your chest will extinguish, and it'll be very difficult to reignite it as it is now." Damian, after three years, could say as a human that he was friends with Frieren, but she, as an elf, couldn't say the same.
In Frieren's eyes, she saw Damian as a strange boy who had stuck to her so much that he became dependent on her. Life, after all, is difficult for a human, who would live many more years than a common elf.
"Since you've been fighting demons all this time, do you usually use different types of magic?" Frieren had been observing the magic Damian had learned, and she truly didn't understand why he needed so many different spells.
Damian thought about it while returning everything to normal with the dishes. He replied, "The attack magic I use tends to exceed the established parameters, damaging me in the process. I can't be very specific because it would take me a long time to explain."
"We have all day; how much time will a simple conversation take?" Frieren didn't understand Damian's way of thinking. Their lives would be very long, so there was no reason to worry about wasting time.
"Hey, Frieren, do you think we're friends?" Damian sat in front of Frieren, looking at her with a more serious expression than usual.
Frieren fell silent, thought about it for a moment, and said, "I barely know you. How long do humans usually take to become friends with each other?"
"In a few minutes, you can make a friend, but only time will tell if there's loyalty in the friendship or if it's just one that gets discarded after a while. Humans are different from elves; we value time a lot and end up forgetting the bad things in less than a year." Damian smiled slightly. This was the advantage humans had over themselves.
"By the way, do elves forget their memories over the years? I haven't lived more than two hundred years, but I feel like I'm forgetting things that used to be important. Is that a problem?"
Damian had been thinking a lot about this. He didn't know how long he would live, but it was certain that he would forget things, so after a while, he started writing down interesting things in books that he would store every hundred years.
"We forget things that aren't important; we keep the most important resources and naturally discard those that don't serve us. We can't remember everything, or after a thousand years, we'd have a very disoriented mind; we'd go crazy," Frieren replied casually, as if what Damian had asked wasn't of great importance.
"As for my question..."
Frieren put her book aside and said, "We can be friends, but I can't say the same a hundred years from now."
"That's enough." Damian felt inexplicably good. This elf was more or less his age, so he didn't feel trapped in the identity of a hundred-year-old with a young person who wasn't even twenty yet.
"What does it take to be more human?" Frieren asked with a slight nervousness.
Damian fell silent, thought about it for a moment, and said, "Well, I've been thinking about it, and from now on, we must be aware of death. Not ours, of course, but the death of humans and how their lives are very short compared to elves."
"You can find the details in conversations; you must be aware that humans don't have the same time as us, so if you really care about someone and want to retain some memories, learn to feel emotions." Damian was excited to see this elf speaking to him more than a dozen words.
There was no television in this place yet, but Damian had been working in a workshop on the second floor, where he kept his newest inventions. However, he was still bored with inventing things, so talking occasionally was incredible to make the years pass.
"So, how do I do that?" Frieren was glad to know that Damian hadn't mocked her, but her joy was still hidden behind an emotionless gaze.
Damian stood up and said, "Don't worry, my dear friend, I'll list a manual with the twenty emotions that every human feels at some point in their life."
After saying that, before Frieren could say anything, Damian pointed out, "However, you should know that each person expresses each of these emotions in a special way, so the most important thing is to perceive these emotions in others. Of course, knowing what we feel is important, but that doesn't work to understand someone else."
"Well, the first step would be..."