LinieBaru: Chapter 25: The Abyss Within You (Patreon)

The afternoon sun hung low in the sky, casting long shadows across the clearing where Genau was waiting. The candidates had gathered, their faces a mixture of exhaustion and hope. Some clutched cages with birds inside, their expressions triumphant. Others stood empty-handed, their shoulders slumped, their eyes fixed on the ground. The first phase of the exam was over, and the results were clear.

Subaru stood near the back of the crowd, her arms crossed, her eyes scanning the assembled mages. She saw Denken's team standing near the edge of the clearing, a bird cage in Richter's hands. The bird inside was small, its feathers bright, and it chirped softly. Denken caught her eye and nodded, a gesture of respect that surprised her. She nodded back, a small, uncertain movement.

She saw Übel standing with her team, a bird cage resting on the ground beside her. Übel caught her eye and winked, a sly grin spreading across her face. Subaru felt a chill run down her spine. She did not trust that grin.

Genau stood at the front of the clearing, his staff in his hand, his expression calm. He waited for the candidates to settle, his eyes scanning the crowd, counting, assessing. When the murmurs died down, he spoke.

"Those of you who have successfully captured a bird have passed the first phase," he said. "The rest of you are dismissed. You may leave the exam grounds. Your journey ends here."

A wave of groans and sighs passed through the crowd. Some candidates turned and walked away, their steps heavy, their heads bowed. Others lingered, hoping for a second chance that would not come.

Genau waited for them to leave, his expression unchanged. Then he continued.

"The second phase of the exam will be hosted by Sense," he said. "You will receive further instructions in the morning. For now, you are dismissed. Rest, recover, and prepare yourselves."

The candidates began to disperse. Some walked toward the castle, their voices low, their conversations focused on the next phase. Others sat down on the grass, too tired to move.

Subaru was also leaving. She turned, her steps slow, her mind already wandering to the next challenge. She had made it through the first phase. She had survived. That was something.

Then Genau raised his finger at Subaru. Threads shot out from his hand, thin and shimmering, wrapping around her arms and legs. They tightened, holding her in place, and she stumbled, nearly falling.

"Hey!" she shouted, her voice sharp, indignant. "What is this?"

Genau walked toward her, his steps measured, his expression unchanged. "You need to go to Serie-sama," he said. "She has requested your presence."

Subaru's eyes widened. "Why? And why am I tied up like this?"

Genau shrugged, a small, almost imperceptible movement. "There is no particular reason, other than the fact that you are a demon. We cannot simply let you walk freely through the castle. It would give the wrong impression about the Association."

Subaru stared at him. Her mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. She wanted to argue. She wanted to point out that she had just helped capture a bird, that she had not caused any trouble, that she had been a model participant. But the words would not come.

She sighed, a long, heavy sigh that seemed to carry all the weight of her exhaustion. "Fine," she said. "Let us go."

Genau nodded and turned, the threads still wrapped around Subaru. She followed him, her steps slow, her shoulders slumped. The other candidates watched her go, their eyes filled with curiosity and suspicion. Übel caught her eye and gave a small wave, her grin still in place.

Subaru ignored her. She focused on walking, on keeping her balance, on not tripping over the threads that bound her. She followed Genau through the castle, past the guards and servants and mages who stared at her with cold, unreadable eyes.

She did not know what Serie wanted. She did not know if she would survive the meeting. But she knew that she had no choice but to follow.

───✧───

Subaru stood before Serie, her hands clasped behind her back, her posture stiff and uncomfortable. The room was vast, the ceilings high, the walls lined with bookshelves that seemed to stretch into infinity. The ancient mage sat on her throne, her eyes fixed on Subaru with a gaze that was both curious and calculating.

Serie spoke, her voice calm, measured. "Tell me about the forest. What happened there?"

Subaru blinked. The question was simple enough, but there was something in Serie's tone that made her uneasy. She had expected questions about the exam, about the bird, about her performance. But this was different. This was personal.

"The forest?" Subaru said, her voice hesitant. "It was fine. We found the bird. Frieren caught it. Then Laufen stole it. Then we got it back." She paused, her eyes narrowing. "Why are you asking about that? You have already heard the reports, have you not?"

Serie's expression did not change. "I have heard the reports. But I am more interested in what happened between you and Frieren. How did she behave? Was she troubled? Anxious? Frustrated?"

Subaru stared at her. She was asking about Frieren. She wanted to know if the elf was suffering, if she was unsettled, if she was losing control.

“It looked like she wanted to kill me, skin me alive and all,” Subaru replied. “But, uh, she couldn’t, and didn’t, felt like she had stomach cramps the whole time,”

Serie nodded with a smile, eyes closed.

What a petty elf, Subaru thought. She is using me to spy on Frieren. To see if she is troubled. To see if she is vulnerable. This is all just a game to her.

Subaru's expression shifted. Her eyes narrowed, and her lips pressed into a thin line. She was not sure if she was angry or disgusted or something else entirely.

Serie saw the judgmental expression on Subaru's face. She did not react outwardly, but something shifted in her eyes. She raised her hand, her fingers curling slightly, and she reached out with her mind.

For a brief moment, Serie was inside Subaru's mind.

Everything she saw was pitch black darkness. There was no light, no shapes, no sense of direction. It was a void, endless and suffocating. The air was thick, heavy, and the silence was broken only by a constant, echoing chant.

"I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you... I love you..."

The voice was soft, feminine, and it filled every corner of the void. It was not a pleasant sound. It was obsessive, consuming, the voice of something that had been waiting for a very long time.

Serie retreated immediately. Her hand dropped to her side, and she maintained her composure completely. Her face did not change nor her breathing quickened. She was the picture of calm control.

Subaru sensed the change in the air. She felt something shift, something she could not quite name. Her eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head.

"Is something wrong?" she asked.

Serie shook her head, a small, almost imperceptible movement. "Nothing is wrong." She paused, her eyes studying Subaru's face. "How did you become a demon?"

Subaru's shoulders slumped. She had been expecting this question, dreading it. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"I do not belong to this world," she said. "I was walking home, and then I was in the middle of a forest, in the body of a demon girl. I do not know how it happened. I do not know why. I just want to go home."

She paused, her eyes distant. She wanted to tell Serie about her ability, the curse that forced her to die over and over again until she won. She wanted to explain about the loops, the resets, the endless cycle of death and rebirth. She opened her mouth to speak.

“And this ability of retuning—”

The moment she went to speak, something grabbed her heart. A cold, crushing grip that stopped the words in her throat. She gasped, her hands flying to her chest, her eyes wide. The pain was brief, intense, and then it was gone.

She could not speak. The words would not come.

Serie's eyes narrowed. She studied Subaru's face, her expression unreadable. "Interesting," she said. "Your body emits the aura of the Megami."

Subaru blinked. "Megami?"

Serie nodded. "You carry a curse, or a blessing, from the Megami herself. I cannot tell which."

"But why me? Why would the Megami curse me?"

Serie shook her head. "Probably because of what is inside you."

Subaru stared at her, her eyes wide. "What is inside me?"

Serie raised her hand, cutting off the question. "Enough questions. After the exam is over, you may go your separate way. I have no further interest in you."

Subaru's mouth opened, then closed. "But what about Frieren? She is dead set on killing me. Should I tell her about the Isekai thing? About the body possession?"

Serie's expression shifted. A grin spread across her face, slow and wide. She waved her hand, a casual, dismissive gesture.

Subaru was suddenly outside the hall, standing in the hallway. The door had closed behind her, and she was alone in the corridor.

She blinked. "Huh?"

She saw Übel standing a few metres away, munching on an apple. The green-haired mage looked at her, her eyebrows rising in surprise. Then she smiled.

"Subaru!" she said. "I was wondering where you went."

Subaru walked toward her, her steps quick, her expression focused. She snatched the apple from Übel's hand and took a bite, the crunch loud in the quiet hallway.

"I am stress eating," she said, her voice muffled by the apple. "Please ignore me."

Übel blinked. Her eyes moved from Subaru's face to the apple in her hand and back again. A slow grin spread across her face.

"Indirect kiss?" she said.

Subaru froze. The apple was halfway to her mouth, and she stared at Übel with an expression of pure horror. She had just taken a bite of an apple that Übel had been eating. She had not thought about it. She had just acted.

"Ew," she said, her voice flat. "That is disgusting."

Übel laughed. "You are the one who took the apple."

Subaru took another bite, defiantly. "I do not care. I need this."

Übel watched her, her grin still in place. "Whatever you say."

Subaru chewed, her eyes fixed on the wall, her mind still racing. She had more questions than answers, and she was not sure if she would ever find the truth. But for now, she had an apple, and that was enough.

───✧───

The inn was quieter than usual, the kind of quiet that came from most of its patrons already being drunk enough to stop making noise about it. A single oil lamp burned low on the table between them, throwing soft orange light across Frieren's face while she stared at her mug without drinking from it. Sein sat across from her, arms crossed, watching her with the patient expression of a man who had asked a question and fully intended to wait until he got an answer, even if that meant waiting until the lamp burned out.

"So," he said again, "you're really being forced to team up with Linie?"

Frieren finally looked up. She had the tired look of someone who had been asked this question three times already and was beginning to suspect it would follow her into her dreams.

"It was Serie's idea of a joke," she said. "She thought it would be funny."

"Funny how?"

"Funny in the way that only someone who has lived for over a thousand years finds funny. Which is to say, not funny at all to anyone who has to live through it."

Sein let out a short laugh, more out of disbelief than amusement. He picked up his own mug and took a sip, mostly to give himself something to do while he processed the idea of Serie, of all people, making jokes. Serie did many things. Cackling with mischief was not usually one of the things people associated with her.

"That doesn't sound like her," he said.

"It is exactly like her," Frieren replied. "You just haven't known her long enough to see it."

"Fair enough." He set the mug down and leaned forward slightly, resting his elbows on the table. "So what's your plan now? You can't exactly refuse a direct order from the Great Sage."

"I'm going to win the competition."

Sein blinked. He had expected something more complicated, something involving loopholes or clever tricks or maybe even outright defiance dressed up as strategy. Instead she had just said it plainly, the way someone might announce they were going to have soup for dinner.

"Win it," he repeated.

"Yes."

"Just like that."

"Just like that." She finally took a sip from her mug, unbothered by his obvious skepticism. "Serie made a promise. If I win, she keeps her word. She has to, even when the promise was made half as a joke and half as an attempt to see how much trouble she could stir up."

"And the prize is Linie."

"The prize is Linie," Frieren confirmed. "Or rather, custody of it. Serie doesn't want the responsibility of keeping an eye on a demon who's decided to play house with humans. She'd rather hand that job to someone else and watch what happens from a comfortable distance."

Sein rubbed the back of his neck, the way he always did when a plan sounded simple on the surface but he suspected it was hiding something underneath, like a rock that looked flat until you tried to sit on it.

"Do you really think she'll hand Linie over that easily? Even if you win?"

"Yes," Frieren said, without hesitation. "Serie doesn't lie about things like this. She might twist the meaning of a promise until it barely resembles what you thought you agreed to, but she doesn't break them outright. Besides, winning isn't impossible. I just have to survive."

"Just survive," Sein muttered, shaking his head slightly. "You say that like it's the easy part."

"For most people it would be the hard part. For me, surviving is basically a hobby at this point." She said it with such a flat, unbothered tone that Sein couldn't tell if she was joking or simply stating a fact she had grown too used to for it to sound remarkable anymore. Knowing her, it was probably both.

He decided to steer the conversation somewhere more useful before she could keep making him question his own sense of humor.

"Have you found anything out about Linie? Anything worth knowing before you're stuck fighting alongside her?"

At this, Frieren's expression shifted, just slightly. Not dramatically, nothing that would catch the attention of anyone who hadn't spent decades learning to read the smallest changes on her face. But Sein noticed. He always noticed, mostly because there was so little to notice that any small change stood out like a lit torch in a dark room.

"It has completely copied human mannerisms," Frieren said. "The way it talks, the way it moves, even the small habits people don't usually think about, like scratching an itch or tilting its head when it is confused. It's strange. Some of it feels performed, almost too precise, like it studied it rather than picked it up naturally. But other parts of it feel disturbingly close to real. Close enough that if I hadn't already known what it was, I might have mistaken it for an actual person."

"That's unsettling."

"It is."

Sein frowned, turning his mug slowly on the table, watching the way the lamp light rippled across the surface of his drink.

"What if there's a reason behind it? Demons don't usually put in that much effort unless they're getting something out of it."

Frieren nodded slowly, as if she had been waiting for him to ask exactly that.

"There are two kinds of demons," she said. "The first kind spends their whole existence perfecting the art of deception. Their entire goal is to look and sound and feel as human as possible so they can walk among us without ever raising suspicion. It's not a hobby for them. It's practically a religion. Every mannerism, every phrase, every little imperfection they add to their behavior is deliberate, meant to make them blend in so well that a person could spend years next to one of them and never suspect a thing."

"And the second kind?"

"The second kind doesn't care about any of that. They fixate on something else entirely, something so specific and consuming that deception becomes irrelevant to them. There was a demon named Qual, for example. He was obsessed with magic research, to the point where nothing else in his existence mattered. Human interaction, human appearance, human behavior, none of it interested him in the slightest. He looked the part too. Grotesque, almost monstrous, because he never bothered pretending otherwise. Demons like him don't hide what they are because hiding requires effort they'd rather spend on their obsession instead."

Sein leaned back, absorbing this. It made a strange kind of sense, in the way most things about demons eventually did once you stopped expecting them to think like people and started accepting that they simply didn't.

"So most demons fall into the first category, then. The ones obsessed with blending in."

"Most of them, yes. It's simply more useful for their survival. A demon that looks human and acts human can walk into a town, buy bread, ask for directions, and nobody bats an eye. A demon that looks like Qual gets chased out with pitchforks before it even finishes introducing itself."

"So Linie is one of the first kind. The ones who focus on deception."

"That would be the obvious conclusion," Frieren said. "But something about it doesn't sit right with me."

Sein raised an eyebrow, waiting for her to continue, though he had a feeling she was going to make him work for it, the way she usually did when she wanted him to think through something rather than just being handed the answer outright.

"If it were simply mimicking humans for the sake of blending in, its behavior would be consistent," Frieren went on. "Deceptive demons study their targets and repeat what works. They don't waste effort on habits that serve no purpose. But Linie does things that don't help it blend in at all. It will say something oddly specific, phrase something in a way no ordinary person would think to phrase it, then catch itself and correct it as if it remembered halfway through that it wasn't supposed to sound like that."

"So she's not perfect at it."

"It is not perfect at it, and that's what worries me. A deceptive demon who has had decades to perfect their disguise doesn't make mistakes like that. Their performance is seamless because it has to be. But Linie slips. Not often, and not obviously, but it slips."

Sein considered this for a moment, tapping his finger against the side of his mug.

"Maybe she's just young. Inexperienced. Not every demon has had centuries to practice."

"That's possible," Frieren admitted. "But it still doesn't explain why it bothers pretending at all if the act isn't good enough to fool anyone paying close attention. A demon smart enough to imitate that much of human behavior should also be smart enough to know when the imitation isn't holding up. And yet it keeps doing it anyway. Keeps living among humans, keeps talking the way they talk, keeps smiling the way they smile, even when it clearly isn't perfect."

"Your point?"

Frieren didn't answer right away. She turned her head toward the window instead, where the last thin strip of daylight was fading behind the rooftops across the street, painting the sky in a color that looked like it couldn't decide whether it wanted to be orange or grey. For a moment she said nothing at all, and Sein almost thought she had drifted off into one of her long silences, the kind that could stretch for minutes if nobody interrupted them.

Then she spoke, quiet but certain.

"We cannot let Linie escape."

I didn’t even realise that it was time for another chapter until like 15 mins ago.

This chapter raises some questions and gives a hint. Can you guess what it is?

Hope you liked this chapter.