LinieBaru: Chapter 26: Liniebaru VS Clone: The First One To Attack (Patreon)

The morning arrived cold and grey, the kind of grey that made everyone squint even though there was no sun bright enough to justify it. The candidates stood in a loose crowd at the base of the cliff, staring up at the entrance to the Dungeon Ruins like a group of people who had been told there was free food inside but suspected it was actually a trap. Which, in a way, it was.

The ruins climbed up the rock face in broken tiers, half swallowed by moss and centuries of neglect, with a black doorway carved into the stone that looked less like an entrance and more like a mouth that had learned patience. Subaru stood near the back of the group, arms crossed, trying to look like someone who had done this a hundred times before and was mildly bored by the whole affair. It was not working. Her eyes kept drifting up toward the doorway, and every time they did, her stomach did a small unpleasant flip, like it was trying to warn her about something her brain hadn't caught up to yet.

That was when she spotted Frieren.

The elf stood apart from the crowd, near a boulder that had probably been sitting in that exact spot since the Age of Myths, and she was staring at it. Not glancing at it. Not passing it by. Staring, with the kind of focused, unwavering attention most people reserved for things that were either extremely interesting or extremely threatening. As far as Subaru could tell, the rock was doing absolutely nothing. It just sat there being a rock.

"What is she doing," Subaru muttered, mostly to herself.

"Probably deciding if it's edible," said a voice right next to her ear, close enough that Subaru nearly jumped out of her own skin.

Übel had appeared beside her with the kind of silence that should have been illegal, her grin already stretched wide across her face, the kind of grin that made most sane people take one step back on instinct. Subaru had learned by now that stepping back never actually helped. Übel just followed.

"Don't do that," Subaru said, pressing a hand to her chest like it might stop her heart from trying to escape.

"Do what?"

"The sneaking thing."

"I wasn't sneaking. I was walking normally. You're just bad at noticing things." Übel tilted her head toward Frieren, still watching the rock with the devotion of a woman attending a religious ceremony. "So. If you got the chance in there, would you kill her?"

Subaru blinked. "What?"

"Frieren. If the dungeon gave you an opening, a nice clean shot, no witnesses, would you take it?"

"Why would I do that?"

Übel shrugged, the picture of innocence, which on her looked deeply unconvincing. "Just curious. You're a demon. She's killed a lot of demons. Seems like the kind of thing that might come up."

Subaru considered the question for exactly as long as it took to glance over at Frieren again, still frozen mid stare at her rock, looking about as dangerous as a sleepy cat. It was hard to reconcile that image with the stories, but Subaru had heard enough of them by now to know better than to trust appearances, especially not with elves who had survived multiple centuries of demon slaying without so much as a scar to show for it.

"Only if she attacks first," Subaru said finally. "I'm not going looking for trouble. I've got enough of that already, thanks."

"Boring answer." Übel didn't sound disappointed exactly, more like she'd expected it and was simply confirming her prediction. "Can you kill her though? If she did attack first?"

"I don't know. Can you?"

Übel's grin widened, if that was even possible, and she raised both hands in front of her, making a slow, deliberate scissoring motion with her fingers, the kind of gesture a child might make while pretending to cut paper, except on Übel it looked like she was rehearsing something with far more permanent consequences in mind.

"Easy," she said.

Subaru stared at her for a long moment, trying to decide if that was a joke. It did not appear to be a joke. Nothing about Übel's expression suggested humor of any kind, just a calm, cheerful certainty that made the whole thing worse.

"Right," Subaru said slowly. "Noted. Never make you angry."

"Too late for that," Übel said sweetly, and walked off toward the front of the crowd before Subaru could figure out what exactly she meant by it.

Before Subaru could chase down that particular thought, a hush rolled through the gathered candidates, the kind of hush that meant someone important had decided to start talking. Sense stood near the entrance of the ruins, her long hair pooling around her feet like she'd been standing in the same spot so long that gravity had simply given up trying to argue with it. She looked, as always, entirely unbothered by the crowd of nervous mages in front of her, her expression calm in a way that somehow felt more unsettling than if she'd been scowling.

"This is the Ruins of the King's Tomb," she said, her voice quiet but carrying easily across the clearing, the way a voice does when its owner has never once needed to raise it to be heard. "They say it was built during the Unified Dynasty, back when there were still kings who thought carving their names into cliffsides was a good use of resources. Some of you may have heard rumors about its age. The truth is even the historians can't agree. Some records trace it back to the Age of Myths, though nobody alive can confirm that, given that nobody alive was around for the Age of Myths."

A ripple of nervous laughter passed through the crowd. Sense did not laugh. She rarely seemed to find anything worth laughing about, though whether that was because she lacked a sense of humor or simply kept it locked away somewhere safe, nobody had figured out yet.

"Inside, you'll find carvings on the walls," she continued. "A crowned figure holding a mage's staff, standing beside a queen with wings. Nobody knows exactly who they were or why they're depicted together, and honestly, it doesn't matter for your purposes today. What matters is that the tomb has spent the last several centuries falling apart, and falling apart tombs tend to develop problems. Traps. Puzzles. Mimics that look exactly like treasure until they bite your hand off."

Somewhere near the front, a candidate made a small choking sound.

"The real danger," Sense said, unbothered, "is something called the Spiegel. It's a magical phenomenon buried deep in the tomb, and what it does is create a perfect copy of anyone who enters. Not just an image. A full copy. Same combat style, same face, same spells, right down to the way you'd react if someone startled you. These copies are your main obstacle. You will very likely end up fighting yourself before this is over, and I'd suggest thinking about how well you actually know your own weaknesses, because your copy certainly will."

Subaru felt her stomach twist at that. Fighting herself sounded less like an exam and more like a very specific kind of nightmare, the sort she'd have refused to admit to if anyone had asked her about it directly.

"Each of you has been given a bottle," Sense went on, holding up a small glass vial with something faintly glowing inside it, a tiny golem curled up like it was taking a nap. "Inside is a golem. You are only to open it if you wish to forfeit. Once opened, it will carry you out of the ruins and mark you as withdrawn from the exam. There is no shame in using it. There is a great deal of shame in not using it and dying instead, so please, use good judgment."

She said the last part with the same flat, even tone she'd used for everything else, which somehow made it land harder than if she'd shouted it.

The mages began filing toward the entrance in small groups, some pairs, some trios, a few brave or foolish souls going in alone. Subaru fell into step beside Übel almost without deciding to, mostly because Übel had simply attached herself to her side the moment the crowd started moving, the way a particularly enthusiastic and terrifying shadow might.

"We're going in together?" Subaru asked.

"Hmmm… let's pick three," Übel said, as if this had already been decided in some meeting Subaru hadn't been invited to. "It cuts through the eastern collapse. Fewer mimics that way, or so the last surviving people to try it said before they stopped being available for comment."

"That's not comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be."

They stepped through the black doorway together, the air inside immediately colder and thicker than it had any right to be, pressing against Subaru's skin like something with actual weight to it. Ahead, she caught a glimpse of Sense falling into step behind a group, her hair trailing behind her like a forest tree that never seemed to touch the ground properly.

The tunnel sloped downward, and the deeper they went, the more Subaru became aware of something strange humming under her skin, a pressure in the air that felt like standing too close to a very large fire without actually seeing any flames. She stopped walking for a second, just to be sure she wasn't imagining it.

"Do you feel that?" she asked.

Übel glanced back at her, unbothered. "Feel what?"

"The mana. It's incredible down here. Way more than it should be." Subaru pressed a hand against the nearest wall, and the stone practically thrummed under her palm, like it was breathing. "Something down here is pulling mana straight out of the environment. Actively drawing it in."

Übel frowned, the first genuinely confused expression Subaru had seen on her since they'd met. "I don't feel anything like that. Just regular old dungeon creepiness."

"Huh." Subaru pulled her hand back, turning the thought over. "Maybe it's a demon thing. Something in how we sense mana that's different."

"Must be." Übel didn't sound especially concerned about it, which Subaru found both reassuring and slightly infuriating, given that she herself was now walking through a tunnel that felt like it was slowly trying to drink the magic straight out of her bones.

They kept moving, deeper into the tomb, the walls narrowing and widening in ways that didn't quite make sense, like the ruins themselves were breathing slowly around them. Along the way they hit a scattering of traps, a pressure plate that sent a spray of blunted darts skittering harmlessly off Übel's raised arm, a section of floor that dropped away to reveal a shallow pit lined with rusted spikes that Subaru cleared with an easy jump, a swinging section of wall that Übel dismantled with a single lazy wave of her hand, muttering something about it being cuttable long before it actually posed any threat.

Nothing dangerous yet. Nothing that made either of them break a sweat. But the air kept getting heavier, the humming under Subaru's skin kept getting louder, and somewhere ahead in the dark, she could have sworn she heard something that sounded almost like footsteps that weren't quite matching their own.

───✧───

The moment they stepped through the archway, the doors behind them slammed shut with a boom that echoed through the hall like a judgment. Subaru spun around fast enough to feel her own hair whip against her cheek, staring at the solid stone where an opening had been just a second earlier. There was no seam, no crack, nothing to suggest a door had ever existed there at all.

"That's not ominous," she said.

"Very ominous," Übel agreed, already stepping forward with the calm of someone checking the weather rather than someone trapped in a sealed stone chamber. She raised her hand and her staff appeared in it, a long dark length of wood topped with a cluster of jagged crystal shards that caught what little light filtered down from somewhere above. She twirled it once, testing the weight, though Subaru suspected she'd done that more for effect than actual necessity.

The hall stretched out ahead of them, wide and tall, lit by shafts of pale light coming down through cracks in the ceiling far above. And standing along both sides of that hall, evenly spaced like an honor guard nobody wanted, were statues.

They weren't small.

Each one stood at least three times Subaru's height, carved from some dark grey stone that looked like it had been quarried specifically to be unpleasant to look at. Their faces were smooth and featureless except for deep hollow sockets where eyes should have been, and their arms ended in fists the size of boulders, held loosely at their sides in a pose that somehow managed to look both patient and violent at once. There were six of them in total, three on each side, and as Subaru's eyes swept across them, she felt a cold drop settle in her stomach.

"Those are statues, right?" she asked. "Just decoration. Very large, very unsettling decoration."

As if personally offended by the suggestion, the nearest statue's head turned with a grinding scrape of stone against stone, its hollow eye sockets locking directly onto her.

"Never mind," Subaru muttered.

The statues moved all at once, stepping off their pedestals with a series of impacts that shook dust loose from the ceiling. Up close, the sound of their footsteps was less like walking and more like small earthquakes taking turns happening in sequence. Subaru backpedaled instinctively, but Übel was already moving forward, staff raised, an expression on her face that could only be described as delighted.

"I've got this," Übel said, and swung her staff in a wide arc.

Nothing visible happened at first. No blast of light, no wave of force. But the nearest statue simply stopped, mid stride, its raised leg frozen at an odd angle, and then it toppled sideways with a crash that sent stone fragments skittering across the floor. A clean line had been cut straight through its ankle, invisible until the moment it mattered.

"Neat trick," Subaru called out, already backing further away to give her room.

"They're stone," Übel said, sounding faintly annoyed as she turned to face the next one. "Stone can be cut. Everything can be cut if you just believe hard enough."

The second statue lunged at her, fist swinging down in an arc that would have turned anyone standing underneath it into a very flat, very dead memory. Übel sidestepped with barely a flicker of urgency, her staff trailing behind her, and the follow through slice took the statue's arm clean off at the shoulder. It didn't fall immediately. It stood there for a moment, lopsided and confused in the way only a headless expression carved from rock could manage, before its balance finally gave out and it crashed down.

Two down. Four to go, and they were closing in fast, their footsteps overlapping now into one continuous rolling thunder.

Übel handled the third with the same easy confidence, a diagonal slash that opened a gap straight through its torso, and the fourth took two hits before it finally buckled, but by then the remaining two had reached her at the same time, and even Übel's reflexes had limits when facing two boulder sized fists coming from opposite directions at once.

She dodged one. The other caught her staff instead of her body, but the impact still sent her skidding backward several feet, boots carving furrows into the stone floor.

"Little help," she called out, not sounding particularly worried, more like she was requesting someone pass the salt.

Subaru had been watching from the side, mostly staying out of the way, but the moment Übel's staff cracked under the weight of that hit, she decided that watching time was officially over. She reached inward, toward that familiar surge of borrowed power, and Mjolnir materialized in her grip with a satisfying crackle of static energy that made the hairs on her arms stand up.

"Someone once told me," she said, rolling her shoulders and gripping the hammer's handle with both hands, "that if brute force doesn't work, you just haven't used enough of it."

She charged the nearest statue, the one still recovering its balance from the blocked strike, and swung Mjolnir in a wide, low arc that connected with its knee. The impact sent a shockwave rattling through the entire hall, dust raining down from the ceiling, and the statue's leg simply ceased being a leg, crumbling into rubble and forcing the whole massive body down onto one knee.

"That's more like it," Subaru said, already swinging again, this time upward, catching the statue under what would have been its jaw if it had a jaw, sending its head snapping backward in a spray of stone chips.

The last standing statue turned toward her, apparently deciding she was now the bigger problem, and swung both fists down at once in a move clearly meant to end things quickly. Subaru rolled to the side, felt the impact of the strike shake the floor beneath her hard enough to throw off her footing, and used the momentum of her roll to come up swinging, catching the statue across what remained of its midsection.

It didn't fall.

"Oh, come on," Subaru muttered, adjusting her grip.

Übel appeared beside her a second later, staff repaired or perhaps simply not as broken as it had looked, her earlier calm now edged with something closer to genuine focus. "Together?"

They struck from opposite sides at the same moment, Übel's invisible cut opening a clean gash through the statue's chest while Mjolnir crashed into its opposite shoulder with enough force to crack the stone clean through. The combined impact finally did what neither strike alone had managed, and the statue toppled backward, crashing down in a heap that sent a final wave of dust rolling across the hall.

Silence settled over the room, broken only by the soft ticking of settling rubble.

Subaru let Mjolnir dissolve back into her mana from where it came from, breathing a little harder than she wanted to admit, and glanced over at Übel, who was inspecting her staff with mild interest, running a thumb along a hairline crack near the crystal cluster.

"That was fun," Übel said.

"That's one word for it," Subaru replied.

As if triggered by the last statue's fall, the far wall of the hall groaned and shifted, stone grinding against stone as two separate doorways slowly revealed themselves, each leading into darkness beyond. Subaru approached them cautiously, half expecting more statues to come stomping out the moment she got close, but nothing happened. The hall stayed quiet, the two paths simply waiting.

"Two ways forward," Übel said, tapping her staff thoughtfully against her shoulder. "We should split up. Cover more ground."

"That's how people die in places like this," Subaru said flatly. "That's like, rule one of surviving a dungeon. Don't split the party."

"I'll be fine," Übel said, already drifting toward the left passage with the unbothered confidence of someone who had never once considered the possibility of not being fine. "Probably."

"Probably is not the reassurance you think it is."

But Übel was already gone, swallowed by the shadows of the left passage without so much as a backward glance, leaving Subaru standing alone in front of the right one, staring into darkness that didn't seem particularly interested in explaining itself.

"Great," Subaru muttered. "Wonderful. Love this for me."

She stepped into the right passageway anyway, because standing around complaining to an empty hallway wasn't going to get her anywhere useful. The corridor was long, straight, and narrow, the walls pressing close enough on either side that she could have touched both if she stretched her arms out. Unlike the grand hall behind her, this passage was dark, lit by only a single lamp mounted on the wall roughly halfway down its length, its flame burning low and steady despite what had to be centuries without anyone refilling its oil.

Subaru approached it slowly, curiosity getting the better of caution, and leaned in to inspect the lamp's housing. The metalwork was intricate, curling patterns etched into the brass, geometric shapes layered over each other in a style that looked deeply, distractingly familiar.

"Huh," she said, tilting her head. "This looks a lot like Ottoman architecture."

She stared at it a moment longer, brow furrowed.

"Are you telling me some random Ottoman guy also got isekai'd into this world? Or is this just, what, a coincidence? A really specific, really weird coincidence?"

The lamp did not answer, on account of being a lamp.

"Whatever," she muttered, and reached out to touch it, mostly out of habit, the same reflex that made people poke things they probably shouldn't poke.

She regretted it immediately.

The moment her fingers made contact with the brass, the entire hallway shuddered, and behind her, the walls began collapsing inward with a deep grinding roar, stone crumbling away section by section in a wave that was chasing straight toward her.

"Nope, nope, nope," Subaru said, already sprinting.

She ran with everything she had, the corridor narrowing further as it collapsed behind her, chunks of ceiling raining down close enough to graze her shoulders, the roar of destruction snapping at her heels like something alive and hungry. Her lungs burned, her legs screamed, but she didn't dare slow down, not with the entire hallway trying to eat itself directly behind her.

She burst out the far end just as the last section of corridor caved in with a final thunderous crash, stumbling forward into open space, chest heaving, heart pounding hard enough that she could feel it in her ears.

When she finally straightened up and looked around, her breath caught for an entirely different reason.

The chamber before her was massive, its ceiling lost somewhere in shadow far overhead, its walls covered in intricate carvings that spiraled and twisted in patterns too detailed to have been made quickly. Marble pillars lined the space in perfect symmetry, polished so smooth they seemed to glow faintly in the dim light, and statues far more elegant than the guardians she'd just fought stood positioned around the room like silent witnesses to something important.

"Ah," Subaru said softly, straightening up. "This is it. The innermost place of the ruins."

A slow grin spread across her face.

"Nice. I actually made it."

She took a few steps deeper into the chamber, looking around at the carvings, the pillars, the sheer scale of the place, feeling something close to pride swelling in her chest.

"Oh my luck," she started to say, "finally something goes my—"

The words died in her throat.

Somewhere in the shadows beyond the pillars, she felt it. The unmistakable, skin crawling sensation of being watched.

The figure floating in the center of the chamber looked exactly like Frieren, down to the tilt of her head and the faint boredom carved into her expression, except everything about her was the wrong color. Her skin, her hair, her robes, even the staff clutched loosely in one hand, all of it the same dull, uniform clay grey, like someone had sculpted the elf out of wet riverbank mud and forgotten to paint her afterward.

Subaru's stomach dropped.

"Oh no," she whispered. "You're one of those copy things."

The clay Frieren didn't answer. She didn't need to. Her staff came up in one smooth motion, and a beam of raw mana tore across the chamber straight at Subaru's chest.

Subaru threw herself sideways, hitting the floor and rolling behind the nearest marble pillar just as the beam scorched past close enough to singe the ends of her hair. The pillar cracked from the impact, chunks of stone spraying outward, and Subaru didn't wait around to admire the damage. She scrambled up and bolted for the nearest wall, planting both palms against the smooth marble the second she reached it.

Her body stuck.

She'd never fully understood the mechanics of it, some quirk of demon physiology that let her cling to surfaces the same way certain bugs did, but right now she didn't care about the science. She just cared about moving, and she ran straight up the wall, sideways along the ceiling, legs pumping like she was sprinting across solid ground instead of defying gravity entirely.

The clone tracked her without hesitation, another beam already forming at the tip of its staff.

Subaru dropped flat against the ceiling as the beam sheared through the space she'd just occupied, gouging a long black scar into the stone. She kept moving, weaving in tight, unpredictable arcs, refusing to give the thing a straight line to aim down. Below her, marble pillars kept getting cut apart one after another, the clone's aim following her path a half second too slow each time, and that half second was the only thing keeping her alive.

She reached into the space where her power lived and yanked out whatever she could grab first. A chunk of jagged obsidian materialized in her hand, and she hurled it down at the clone without breaking stride. It missed by a wide margin, sailing past the clone's shoulder, but it forced a flicker of motion, a small dip in its flight path that Subaru desperately needed.

She used the opening to drop off the ceiling, twisting midair, and hit the ground running.

There was no time to think, only to move. Every stray object within reach became a projectile. A fist sized shard of broken statue. A piece of splintered pillar. A rock she scooped up without even checking what it was. She threw everything she could grab as she sprinted, not because she thought any of it would actually hurt the clone, but because chaos bought distance, and distance bought time, and time was the only currency that mattered right now.

The clone weathered every hit without slowing, mana beams cutting through her thrown debris like it was smoke, but each impact still forced a fraction of a flinch, a tiny stutter in its aim, and Subaru used every single one of those stutters to change direction before the next beam could find her.

She sprinted directly at the clone.

It felt insane even as she did it, closing distance with something that could apparently vaporize marble with a flick of its wrist, but standing still and letting it pick her apart from range felt even worse. She juked left, then cut hard right, a beam splitting the air exactly where her head had been a heartbeat earlier, and kept closing the gap, weaving through the wreckage of fallen pillars, using every piece of cover the chamber offered.

For a moment, she actually thought it might work.

Then the clone's calm, clay colored face tilted slightly, and its staff rose higher, and Subaru's stomach turned to ice as she understood what was about to happen. It wasn't going to fire one beam this time. It was going to fire everything at once.

She skidded to a halt, boots screeching against marble, throwing herself into a low stance in preparation to dodge whichever direction the mass volley forced her to move.

The clone was already above her.

Eighteen beams tore loose in a single burst, spreading out in a fan that covered nearly the entire width of the chamber, leaving almost no gap wide enough for a body to slip through. Subaru's eyes went wide and she threw herself backward, kicking off the ground hard enough that her body left the floor entirely, and then she simply kept rising, using that strange, unearned gift demons carried, the ability to fly without wings or staff or any of the tools mages needed.

She shot upward, beams tearing through the space below her, some of them so close she felt the heat rake across her back like an open oven door. She twisted midair, dodging two more, then three, her lungs burning from the effort of moving her body in ways it was never designed to move.

But the clone matched her.

It didn't matter how fast Subaru flew, how sharply she turned, how desperately she tried to break line of sight behind the remaining pillars. The clone tracked her with the same cold, mechanical precision it had shown from the very first beam, closing the distance between them with terrifying, unnatural speed, staff already recharging for another volley before Subaru had even finished evading the last one.

She reached for her power again, desperate now, trying to summon something, anything, a weapon, a shield, some trick that might buy her half a second of breathing room.

There was no time.

The beam caught her mid motion, clipping her shoulder and spinning her violently out of the air. She hit the marble floor hard, the impact driving every ounce of breath from her lungs in one brutal exhale, her body skidding several feet before finally coming to a stop in a crumpled heap.

For a moment, everything went silent except for the ringing in her own ears.

Shit, she thought, staring up at the distant ceiling she could no longer really see. Death. Again. After all those days spent clawing her way through this, it was going to start here, on cold marble, in a room she'd been so proud to reach just minutes earlier.

Her body had already begun to come apart. Black mana curled off her skin in thin wisps, drifting upward like smoke from a dying fire, the telltale sign of a demon's form losing its cohesion. She could feel herself thinning, edges blurring, the world growing distant and soft around her.

A shadow fell across her.

The clone descended slowly, staff held loose at its side, its clay colored face utterly blank. No triumph. No malice. No flicker of anything resembling satisfaction at having won. It simply looked down at her the way a person might look at a puddle they were about to step over, an obstacle noted and dismissed in the same breath.

Subaru tried to move. Her limbs wouldn't listen. Whatever remained of her physical form felt distant now, disconnected, like trying to control someone else's body through a thick pane of glass.

The clone raised its staff, pointing the tip directly at her forehead.

Subaru wanted to say something. A last words kind of something, defiant or funny or at least memorable, the sort of line that might have made this whole absurd death feel like it meant something. But her voice wouldn't come, and there was no time left to search for one anyway.

The mana gathered at the staff's tip, dark and dense, condensing into the shape of a single deadly point.

Zoltraak.

The spell released in a flash of black light, tearing straight through the space between them, and struck Subaru directly in the center of her forehead.

Everything went white, then nothing at all.

Her body, already halfway dissolved into drifting black mana, finished coming apart in an instant, the last traces of her shape scattering into the cold air of the chamber like ash caught in a wind that didn't exist. The marble floor beneath her, cracked from the earlier fall, held nothing now except a faint smear of dark residue and the fading echo of a fight nobody else had witnessed.

The clone lowered its staff, watching the last wisps of black mana dissipate into nothing, its expression unchanged. It hovered there a moment longer, silent and still, clay colored eyes fixed on the empty space where a person had been standing only seconds before.

Then, without any sign of hesitation or thought, it turned away, drifting back toward the center of the chamber to resume its silent, patient watch over the innermost heart of the ruins, exactly as it had been doing for the last two hours.

There we go. Another loop begins. How many would it take this time?

Perhaps Subaru will use a weapon of mass destruction, or something unremarkable. Or something new?

Let me know what you think.