“The reason is the same as when I didn't go with him ten years ago. How could I leave my brother alone in this village?”
Sein Quotes
2 quotes from Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
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“It has only been ten years, after all.”
Six pages earlier the arithmetic was Frieren's: Sein said his friend must be dead by now, and she answered that it had only been ten years. The chapter builds his decision by having him adopt her measurement rather than find one of his own. In between, his brother slaps him for using the brother's old choice as a reason to stay, and Sein apologizes. Only then does he tell Frieren, lighting a cigarette, that he will become an adventurer and track the warrior down. The borrowed phrase does real work. Ten years of silence read to Sein as proof of death; to an elf they read as a short delay, and taking her scale lets him treat the gap as recoverable. It is also a little comic, a middle-aged priest quoting the time sense of an elf who outlived Himmel. Her reply is two words, "I see." She pushed, and she does not claim the result.
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Sein offers this as loyalty, and the next three pages take it apart. As a boy he overheard Heiter offer his older brother a post in the Holy City. Heiter said the little brother could come too; the older brother declined anyway, because Sein had lost his parents young and he would not take away his home as well. Sein has spent a decade repaying a debt nobody asked him to carry. When he says aloud that his brother stayed in the village for him, the brother slaps him and shouts that he has never once regretted the decision he made then. The natural reading of the line is devotion. The chapter's reading is harsher: gratitude kept Sein in one place and let him describe his own hesitation as a sacrifice for someone else. He concedes as much on the next page, telling Frieren he has apologized to his brother and that the man had never raised a hand to him before.