LinieBaru: Chapter 27: LinieBaru VS Clone: The Comeback (Patreon)

Subaru gasped, air rushing back into lungs that hadn't existed a moment before, and her body snapped back into solid form with the disorienting suddenness of falling out of a dream. She stood exactly where she'd been standing before, hand hovering inches from the brass lamp, its low flame flickering as if nothing had happened at all.

Because nothing had happened. Not yet. Not this time.

She yanked her hand back like the lamp had bitten her, even though it hadn't touched her yet, even though the only thing that had actually hurt her was the memory still burning fresh in her mind. Her heart hammered against her ribs, and she pressed a palm flat against her own chest, checking, absurdly, that it was still there, still whole, still hers.

That wasn't the most painful death she'd had. Not by a wide margin. She'd been split open, burned, crushed, and once memorably turned inside out by something Übel had done during an earlier loop that Subaru still refused to think about in detail. Pain wasn't the problem here.

The problem was how it happened.

She stood still for a long moment, replaying it, trying to pick apart exactly what had gone wrong, and the truth settled over her like a layer of frost. That clone had been fast. Not fast in the way the red haired boy was fast, all raw muscle and momentum that telegraphed itself half a second before impact. Not fast in the unpredictable, gleeful way Übel moved, where at least there was some twisted logic buried underneath the chaos if you looked hard enough. This had been something else entirely. Precise. Silent. Utterly without hesitation.

It hadn't spoken. It hadn't smiled. It hadn't paused to gloat or taunt or even acknowledge her as anything more than an obstacle to be removed. Every other opponent she'd faced in this ridiculous, repeating nightmare had given her something to work with, some crack in their focus, some flicker of ego she could exploit. The clone gave her nothing. It simply existed to end her, and it had done so with the efficiency of a machine that had performed the same task a thousand times before and would perform it a thousand times again without ever once feeling tired of it.

That boy had been hard because Subaru hadn't understood Erfassen yet, hadn't known how to read an opponent through it, how to borrow shape and weapon from the deepest need buried in her own mind. She'd learned through him, painfully, one death at a time. Übel was terrifying in her own right, a live wire of violence wrapped in a smile, but at least Übel was, for now, fighting on her side. Rivale had been no joke either, brutal and relentless in a way that still made Subaru's shoulders tense at the memory.

But this. This clone felt like something built specifically to kill her, stripped of every distraction that made a fight survivable. And somewhere deep in her gut, in that place where instinct lived long before logic caught up, Subaru understood something with total clarity.

If she tried to fight that thing directly, she would die again. And again. And again, for as long as it took her to either get lucky or get smart, and luck had never been something she trusted to show up on schedule.

So she turned around.

She walked the opposite direction, back down the passageway she'd originally avoided, the one that would presumably lead her toward wherever Übel had disappeared to. Whatever waited down that path, it couldn't possibly be worse than facing that hovering, clay colored thing with its empty eyes and its perfect, merciless aim.

As she walked, her mind raced through possibilities, sorting through every weapon she'd ever conjured through Erfassen, weighing each one against what she'd just witnessed. She needed something fast to summon, something that wouldn't drain her reserves dry before she even got a chance to use it properly. Something that could stand up to magic itself, because ordinary steel wasn't going to cut it against an opponent who could turn the air into a weapon with a flick of her wrist.

A shield wouldn't be enough. A shield just delayed the inevitable. She needed something that could actually answer magic on its own terms, something built by someone who understood exactly how fragile magic could be if you hit it the right way.

Up ahead, a soft glow spilled into the passageway, warm and inviting in a way that made every instinct in Subaru's body scream in protest. Light at the end of a dark tunnel usually meant something good was coming. In her limited but rapidly growing experience, it usually meant the opposite.

She stepped out anyway.

Big mistake.

It was the grand hall again, the exact same chamber she'd already died in once, marble pillars gleaming under that same distant, directionless light, statues standing silent watch along the walls. The passageway had looped her right back to where she started, some cruel enchantment folding space in on itself just to make sure nobody ever really escaped this place by accident.

And there it was. The clone. Hovering in the exact same spot, calm and clay colored, its emotionless eyes already locking onto her the moment she crossed the threshold, as if it had simply been waiting the entire time for her to make this exact mistake again.

Subaru's pulse spiked, but underneath the fear, something steadier was already taking hold. She knew what was coming this time. She had a plan, thin and desperate as it was, but a plan nonetheless.

"Come on, you flat board," she muttered, mostly to give herself something to say, and reached deep into that familiar well of borrowed power.

The weapon that answered her call was massive, a broadsword nearly as tall as she was, its blade split down the middle in two distinct edges. One side gleamed sharp and clean, humming faintly with a strange pressure that seemed to devour the ambient mana around it. The other side was flat and heavy, thick enough to double as a wall if she needed it to be one. Asta's first sword, forged for a boy born without a drop of magic in his blood, built specifically to cut through the very thing he lacked.

The edge could nullify magic outright. The flat side could reflect it back where it came from. And the whole thing was heavy enough to serve as a shield against nearly anything that hit it.

"No way your tricks work on this," Subaru said, gripping the hilt with both hands, feeling the weight settle into her arms like a promise.

The clone didn't respond. It never did. Its staff simply rose, and a beam of pure mana tore across the chamber straight at her chest.

Subaru swung the blade up and caught it dead center.

For a single glorious heartbeat, it worked. The beam struck the flat of the sword and scattered outward in a burst of harmless light, deflected clean, the impact barely even jarring her stance. A grin started pulling at the corner of her mouth.

Then the pain hit.

It started in her fingers first, a searing, boiling sensation that felt like her own hands had been dipped straight into molten metal. Subaru's eyes went wide with horror as she looked down and saw her hands were not simply burning. They were dissolving, black mana curling off her skin in thin ribbons, her fingers losing shape and definition with every passing second, the sword slipping from a grip that no longer fully existed.

"What," she gasped, staring at her own disintegrating hands like they belonged to someone else. "What is this, what's happening—"

The feeling spread up her wrists, into her forearms, an agony that felt like being boiled alive from the inside out, and Subaru's knees buckled beneath her. She dropped hard onto the marble floor, the massive sword clattering uselessly beside her, already forgotten as her focus narrowed entirely down to the horror of watching herself come apart.

The clone was already moving.

It didn't wait for her to recover, didn't offer even a heartbeat of mercy. Subaru forced her half dissolved body upward through sheer stubbornness, legs still solid enough to push off the ground, and she leaped, scrambling up toward the nearest fixture she could reach, a massive iron chandelier hanging from thick chains near the chamber's ceiling.

She landed on it hard, metal groaning under the sudden weight, and clung there with what remained of her rapidly dissolving hands, black mana peeling off her skin faster now, drifting away like smoke caught in a draft that shouldn't have existed this deep underground.

Shit, shit, shit, she thought, her mind spinning uselessly, searching for any option that wasn't simply waiting to die again. Her fingers were nearly gone now, thin wisps trailing where solid flesh used to be, and she could feel the same dissolution creeping steadily up toward her elbows, toward her shoulders, toward everything that made her a shape instead of smoke.

Below her, the clone raised its staff one final time, mana gathering at the tip in a dense, glowing orb that pulsed once before it launched.

Subaru had no time left to move, no strength left in a body that barely qualified as a body anymore, and the fireball closed the distance in an instant.

She exploded into a fine black mist the moment it struck, the chandelier swinging wildly from the force of the blast, chains groaning under sudden absence of weight, and the scattered remains of her form drifted lazily through the air of the grand hall before fading entirely into nothing.

Subaru gasped back into existence exactly where she'd started, standing in the narrow passageway, hand hovering inches from the brass lamp, its small flame burning steady and patient, utterly indifferent to the fact that she had just died again.

───✧───

Subaru stood frozen in the passageway, staring at the lamp she hadn't touched yet, her mind spinning through the wreckage of everything that had just happened to her. Two deaths now, back to back, each one uglier than the last. She could still feel the ghost of that boiling sensation in her fingers, the memory of watching her own hands unravel into smoke, and it made her stomach turn just thinking about it.

This was not a normal dungeon. This was not a normal loop.

She pressed her palm against the stone wall, taking a slow breath, trying to force her thoughts into something resembling order. Panic wasn't going to help her here. Panic was, in fact, actively getting her killed, over and over, in increasingly horrifying ways. She needed to think clearly, needed to actually use the brain that had somehow survived every prior loop even when her body hadn't.

The magic sword hadn't worked. Not because it was weak, but because whatever the clone's spells did on contact went far beyond simple damage. It hadn't just cut through her defense. It had unraveled her, turned her own body against itself, dissolved her from the inside like she was made of wet paper left out in the rain. That wasn't ordinary combat magic. That was something closer to a curse, something designed specifically to make sure nothing survived contact with it for long.

She needed speed. She needed range. She needed something that could hit hard and hit fast, something that didn't require her to stand still long enough to become a target for whatever nightmare spell that clone had waiting next.

A gun.

The thought arrived almost on its own, and once it landed, it refused to leave. A gun made sense. No wind up, no long cast time, just point and fire, and with the way Erfassen worked, pulling something quick and devastating out of memory felt like exactly the right instinct.

Her mind raced through possibilities, flipping through half remembered shows and stories the way someone might flip through a deck of cards looking for the one that mattered. Something reliable. Something powerful enough to matter against a target that had already proven itself capable of shrugging off a magic nullifying blade like it was nothing.

Then it came to her.

The Caster Gun.

She remembered it now, clear as anything, an old battered pistol from a story about a scruffy bounty hunter drifting through space on a ship held together by luck and stubbornness. The gun itself wasn't magical in the traditional sense. It didn't cast spells on its own. Instead it fired special cartridges, Caster Shells, each one packed with a pre-made spell just waiting to be triggered on impact. Fire, ice, barriers, devastating elemental blasts, all of it condensed into compact little cylinders that let someone with zero magical talent punch well above their weight.

Unpredictable. Powerful when it worked. Occasionally a complete dud when it didn't.

"Guess we're gambling," Subaru muttered, and reached for it.

The weapon materialized in her grip with a familiar crackling pull of borrowed power, an old, worn revolver with a wide barrel and a cylinder loaded with strange, glowing shells. It felt lighter than she expected, almost too light for something meant to fire spells capable of leveling buildings, but there was no time left to second guess her own choices.

She stepped out of the passageway.

The grand hall greeted her exactly as before, marble pillars and silent statues bathed in that same directionless light, and hovering in the center of it all, the clone. Its calm, clay colored eyes tracked her the instant she crossed the threshold, and its staff was already rising, mana gathering at the tip in a beam that would be loosed within a heartbeat.

Subaru didn't wait for it to fire first this time.

She leaped sideways, boots skidding across polished marble, and raised the Caster Gun in both hands, squeezing the trigger the moment her aim crossed the clone's silhouette. The gun bucked hard in her grip, far harder than a normal firearm should, and a shell screamed across the chamber trailing a thin ribbon of crackling energy behind it.

At the exact same instant, the clone's beam fired.

The two attacks crossed paths in midair, and for one brief, hopeful second, Subaru thought her shot might actually punch straight through. Then a shimmering wall of pale mana bloomed into existence directly in front of the clone, thin as glass but apparently just as effective, and her Caster Shell detonated harmlessly against it in a burst of light that did absolutely nothing except confirm the shield existed.

The clone's beam, meanwhile, had no shield to stop it.

Subaru threw herself flat, hitting the ground hard as the beam scorched over her head close enough that she felt her hair singe at the tips. She rolled behind the nearest pillar, chest heaving, and pressed her back against cool marble.

"Tch," she hissed. "Of course it has a shield. Of course it does."

She peeked out from behind the pillar just in time to see the clone drifting forward, unhurried, staff already recharging, that same terrible calm etched across its featureless clay face. It didn't rush. It didn't need to. It simply advanced with the patient certainty of something that had already won this fight a thousand times before and saw no reason to expect a different outcome this time.

Subaru broke from cover and ran.

She kept low, weaving between pillars, using the wreckage of the previous statues she'd smashed in the earlier hall as makeshift cover, firing off shots whenever she caught a clean angle. Each shell screamed across the chamber trailing bursts of ice, or flame, or crackling lightning, wildly different every time thanks to whatever random shell had loaded into the chamber, and every single one slammed uselessly into that same shimmering wall of mana that bloomed into place a fraction of a second before impact.

The shield never wavered nor it ever cracked. It simply absorbed everything she threw at it and reset instantly, like the clone had an infinite supply of patience layered directly into its defense.

"Come on," Subaru snarled, ducking behind a fallen chunk of statue as another beam tore past, gouging a smoking scar into the marble floor beside her. "Just once. Just crack once."

She fired again, sprinting sideways as she pulled the trigger, and this time the shell detonated in a burst of frost that spread briefly across the shield's surface, a thin layer of ice crawling outward before shattering and falling away, the barrier beneath it completely unharmed.

Close. Not close enough.

The clone adjusted its aim, tracking her movement with mechanical precision, and Subaru felt the air behind her grow suddenly, unnaturally cold, the same telltale prelude she remembered from the last loop, right before her hands had started dissolving. She didn't wait to find out if this spell worked the same way.

She dove sideways, rolling behind another pillar, and the spell struck the marble instead, the surface where it hit turning instantly black and porous, crumbling into fine ash that drifted away like the stone itself had simply forgotten how to exist. Subaru stared at the ruined pillar for half a second, feeling something cold settle deep in her chest.

That would have been her hand. Her arm. Her whole body, given enough time.

She kept moving, kept firing, desperation creeping into every motion now as the shield kept absorbing shot after shot without so much as a flicker of weakness. 

The chamber felt smaller now, the pillars fewer, the open ground between cover stretches growing wider with every step she took, like the room itself was slowly closing the trap around her. She spent more mana and fired her last few shells in rapid succession, a desperate spread meant to overwhelm the shield through sheer volume rather than any real strategy, and for one flickering moment, the barrier actually seemed to strain, its surface rippling like disturbed water.

Then it simply reformed, smooth and untouched, as if it had never been threatened at all.

The gun clicked empty in her hand.

Subaru stared down at it in horror, the weight suddenly feeling like nothing more than dead metal, useless and spent, and when she looked back up, the clone was already there, hovering just a few feet away, staff leveled directly at her chest, its expression as blank and unreadable as it had been from the very first second she'd seen it.

"Wait," Subaru said, though she had no idea what she thought that word would accomplish. "Wait, hold on—"

The clone did not wait.

A beam of concentrated mana punched straight through her, and Subaru felt the impact less like pain and more like the sudden, total absence of everything she'd been a moment before. Her vision fractured into streaks of white and black, her body already unraveling at the edges, and she had just enough time to register the horrifying sensation of her own thoughts scattering like smoke before there was nothing left to feel anything with at all.

She dissolved into the air of the grand hall, one more fine black mist drifting silently among the marble pillars, and somewhere far above, the clone lowered its staff and turned away, drifting back toward the center of the chamber, patient and untouched, waiting for whatever came next.

Subaru gasped back into existence in the narrow passageway, her hand once again hovering inches from the small brass lamp, its flame steady, its patience infinite, utterly unbothered by the fact that she had just died for the third time in a row without ever once managing to land a single meaningful hit.

───✧───

Eighteen loops.

Subaru sat on the cold stone floor of the passageway, knees pulled up to her chest, staring at nothing in particular, because at this point her eyes had stopped bothering to focus on anything at all. Eighteen deaths in a row, each one uglier and more inventive than the last, and her mind had reached that strange flat place beyond exhaustion, where fear stopped feeling sharp and just settled into a dull, permanent hum somewhere behind her ribs.

She'd tried grenades at loop eleven, ripping straight from her otaku arsenal, a string of them thrown in quick succession that detonated against the clone's shield with a satisfying series of cracks and absolutely no lasting effect. She'd summoned Pumpkin at loop fourteen, dragging Mine's massive rifle out of memory and unloading everything it had, watching each devastating shot splash uselessly against that same shimmering wall of mana, over and over, like throwing stones at the ocean and expecting it to eventually get tired.

None of it worked. Not one single attempt had so much as scratched the surface of that shield, and every loop ended the same miserable way, with her body dissolving into black mist while that clone hovered there, utterly unbothered, staff already lowering back to its resting position like it hadn't just erased her from existence again.

Worse than the shield were the beams themselves. She'd started timing them somewhere around loop nine, trying to find a pattern, a rhythm, anything predictable she could exploit. There wasn't one. They moved faster than anything Übel had ever thrown at her, faster than she could track with her eyes alone, and they curved when they needed to, adjusting mid flight to follow her no matter how sharply she changed direction. Dodging wasn't really dodging anymore. It was just delaying the inevitable by a few extra seconds each time.

She dragged a hand down her face, feeling the phantom itch of fingers that had dissolved so many times now that the memory of it had practically become routine.

What else was there. She ran through the list in her head, flipping through every scrap of fiction she could remember, searching for something, anything, that might actually break through that shield or outrun those beams. Bleach gave her plenty of blades, but blades hadn't worked once already, and there was no reason to believe a different blade would suddenly behave differently against the same problem. Fullmetal Alchemist offered transmutation, interesting in theory, useless against something that could apparently unravel matter faster than she could reshape it. Tools that came from Hunter x Hunter had Nen constructs, flexible and strange, but she barely understood the rules well enough to trust summoning something from it under this kind of pressure.

One Piece gave her some weapons, but those were clearly not enough Naruto offered some jutsu with tools, but jutsu required handseals and focus, both of which felt like luxuries she couldn't afford while dodging beams that bent around corners to find her. Even Jujutsu Kaisen crossed her mind again, cursed tools sharp enough to cut through anything physical, but physical wasn't the problem here. The problem was a shield built from pure magic, something that swallowed physical force and elemental force alike without so much as flinching.

Nothing fit. Nothing felt right. Every option that crossed her mind got discarded within seconds, either too slow, too weak, or simply another variation of something she'd already tried and already failed with.

She let her head fall back against the cold stone wall, staring up at the ceiling of the passageway, feeling something close to despair creeping in at the edges of her thoughts.

Then she blinked.

"Ah," she said quietly, sitting up straighter.

There was one option left. One she hadn't touched yet, mostly because some instinctive part of her had been avoiding it, some quiet warning buried deep in the back of her mind that recognized the sheer weight of what she was about to summon.

She pushed herself to her feet, legs shaking slightly from exhaustion, and began walking toward the hall, slow and deliberate, each step echoing softly against stone. The passageway stretched ahead of her, and she stared straight down its length, letting her focus narrow to a single, sharp point.

A blade began forming in her outstretched hand as she walked, gathering itself out of borrowed memory and raw will, taking shape piece by piece with each passing step. Short. Straight. Deceptively odd in design with shark-like appearance, nothing like the ornate, oversized weapons she'd tried before. This one didn't need decoration. It needed one thing only, and it had exactly one thing to offer.

If every blade she'd summoned so far had failed to make a difference, then there was one left worth trying, one weapon powerful enough that even thinking about wielding it made her chest tighten with something close to fear.

She reached the edge of the hall, the light from beyond the archway spilling across her face, and raised the spear high, its polished length catching that pale glow along its entire form.

"The Inverted Spear of Heaven!”

───✧───

In case this isn't obvious, Subaru appears to have developed something we'd see in canon. Not valuing life enough.

Anyways, will the Inverted Spear of Heaven Make the cut? Or will some another tool needed to be used?