LinieBaru Chapter 29: LinieBaru VS Clone: The Bone of Her Sword (Patreon)

By the three hundredth loop, Subaru had stopped counting entirely, and something about that felt less like giving up and more like her mind simply deciding numbers no longer mattered. She existed now in a loop within the loop, wake up, walk out, dodge, die, wake up, walk out, dodge, die, the details blurring together until entire stretches of memory felt like watching the same scene played through slightly different colored glass each time.

Her body had learned things her conscious mind barely registered anymore. She moved without deciding to move, dodged without calculating the angle first, her limbs responding to threats a half second before her thoughts caught up to explain why. Somewhere buried under the exhaustion, a small, distant part of her noticed this and found it almost funny. All those loops of dying horribly had apparently doubled as the most brutal combat training program imaginable, and her body had absorbed the lesson even while the rest of her had been busy falling apart from grief and terror.

Two minutes.

She realized it somewhere in the middle of a wide dodge, weaving between two beams that crossed paths just behind her shoulder, that she'd been moving through this fight longer than she ever had before. Not because the clone had slowed down. It hadn't. It moved exactly the same way it always had, precise, relentless, without a flicker of hesitation or fatigue. The difference was her. She knew this fight now. She knew the timing between shots, the subtle shift in posture right before the clone switched from single beams to that overwhelming spread attack, the way its head tilted a fraction before unleashing that invisible crushing force that had ended her more times than she wanted to remember.

Knowing wasn't the same as winning, though.

She summoned the spear again out of habit more than strategy, feeling the familiar weight settle into her palms as she closed the distance, and drove it through the clone's shield exactly the way she had that one time it actually worked. The barrier split apart cleanly, same as before, and the blade caught the clone across the shoulder this time instead of the throat, carving a deep gash that sprayed dark mana across the marble floor.

The clone didn't even flinch.

Instead, the same invisible force she'd come to dread slammed into her chest before she could pull back, sending her flying backward through the air with bone jarring speed. She hit a pillar this time instead of the wall, the stone cracking under the impact, pain exploding through her ribs in a way that felt disturbingly familiar by now.

She dragged herself up anyway, coughing blood onto marble, spear still gripped loose in one shaking hand.

Even when it worked, it didn't actually work. The spear could bypass the shield, could cut the clone open, but the clone simply healed and retaliated with that same crushing telekinetic force regardless of how deep the wound went, and no amount of clever bypassing mattered if the counterattack always landed first.

Subaru felt something inside her chest cave in that had nothing to do with her cracked ribs.

She was exhausted in a way sleep couldn't fix, a hollow, scraped out feeling that sat behind her eyes and made even breathing feel like a chore she was only doing out of habit rather than actual will. Her reserves of mana had thinned dangerously low too, worn down by hundreds of summons across hundreds of loops, and she knew without needing to check that she barely had enough left for one more significant attempt.

She thought about Ea again, that final devastating detonation she'd unleashed a while back, the one that had erased half the chamber along with herself in one blinding pulse of white. It had felt, for one brief moment, like an answer. It had also killed her just as thoroughly as everything else had, the backlash of that much destructive power tearing through her own body before she'd even had the chance to see if it worked on the clone at all.

She couldn't use it again. Not with what little mana she had left. Not without a real plan this time instead of pure desperate rage.

The clone advanced, staff rising, another beam already gathering at its tip, and Subaru found herself moving on pure autopilot again, legs carrying her sideways without any real input from the numb, exhausted mind currently occupying her skull.

I wish I could stop this, she thought, distant and tired, the words drifting through her head like they belonged to someone else. I wish I could just make it stop. I wish, God, I wish I could just pretend the beams don't exist. Pretend none of it can touch me. Just for a second. Just long enough to actually hit this thing and have it matter.

The beam fired.

She dodged late this time, her exhausted body a fraction slower than it needed to be, and she knew, with the kind of flat, hollow certainty that came from having died this exact way more times than she could count, that this one was going to land.

She threw herself backward anyway, more out of stubborn instinct than any real hope, and her shoulder blades slammed hard into unyielding stone. A dead end. She hadn't even registered retreating into this narrow alcove, hadn't planned it, her body simply carrying her here in blind panic while her mind stayed somewhere else entirely.

There was nowhere left to go.

The beam closed the distance in an instant, and Subaru's whole body went rigid, bracing for the familiar tearing pain that always came right before the world went dark and she woke up back in that passageway.

I wish I could copy techniques even without weapons, she thought, the idea surfacing from somewhere deep and desperate, half formed and useless given how little time remained. I wish I didn't need to summon a sword or a spear or a gun every single time. I wish I could just, just be the technique itself, just for once, just so something in this fight actually depends on me instead of whatever I happen to be holding.

The beam reached her.

And stopped.

It hung there in the air, inches from her chest, a churning column of raw destructive mana frozen in place like it had slammed into a wall that simply wasn't visible to the eye. Subaru stared at it, her whole body still braced for an impact that never came, her mind scrambling to catch up with what her senses were telling her.

The beam wasn't touching her. It had reached some invisible boundary and simply stopped there, hovering, contained, its edges rippling faintly against something Subaru couldn't see but could absolutely feel, a thin, cool pressure surrounding her entire body like a bubble drawn in the air.

Her eyes went wide.

Across the chamber, the clone's head tilted, that same flicker of confusion crossing its calm clay features that Subaru had seen only once before, right after the spear had split its shield for the first time. It raised its staff again, firing a second beam directly at her, and that one stopped too, hanging frozen in the same invisible barrier, close enough that Subaru could feel the heat radiating off it without any of the actual damage reaching her skin.

Her heart was pounding now, adrenaline cutting straight through the fog of exhaustion that had been dragging her down for what felt like forever. She lifted a trembling hand and reached out toward the frozen beam hovering in front of her, half expecting it to surge forward and finish what it started the moment she touched it.

It didn't move.

"This is," she whispered, staring at the impossible sight in front of her, the words barely audible even to herself. Her mind raced backward through everything she knew, every scrap of story and power and technique she'd ever absorbed across a lifetime of watching things she loved, searching for the name of whatever this was, whatever had just saved her life in a way nothing else had managed across three hundred brutal, bloody attempts.

Then it clicked, sudden and absolute, recognition slamming into her with the force of the beam that had failed to reach her only seconds earlier.

"Infinity!"

The clone's head tilted again, that flicker of confusion sharpening into something closer to recalculation, and then it simply unloaded everything it had.

A fireball roared across the chamber first, condensed and blazing, aimed directly at Subaru's chest. It slammed into the invisible barrier around her and simply stopped, flattening out against nothing like a bug hitting a windshield, flames curling uselessly around a boundary she couldn't even see.

"Oh," Subaru said, blinking. "Oh, that's cool."

A beam followed immediately after, the same relentless attack that had ended her life more times than she could bother counting anymore, and it too froze inches from her skin, hanging there like it had run headfirst into an invisible glass wall and forgotten how to keep moving. Zoltraak came next, that same black, condensed spell that had ended her very first attempt at this fight, and it stopped just as uselessly as everything before it, dissolving harmlessly into scattered motes of dark light against her unseen shield.

The clone, apparently deciding that spells alone weren't cutting it, reached out with its telekinesis and started flinging debris. Chunks of broken pillar. Shards of marble. An entire fallen statue's severed arm, ripped off the ground and hurled with bone crushing force straight at her skull.

None of it landed. Every single object simply halted in midair the moment it crossed some invisible line surrounding her body, hovering there uselessly before clattering to the floor like the room itself had lost interest in trying to hurt her.

Subaru stood in the middle of all this chaos, completely untouched, and something extraordinary began happening behind her own eyes.

The chamber sharpened around her, every detail suddenly crisp and vivid in a way that felt almost too much for her brain to hold. She could see the individual cracks running through each marble pillar, could count the tiny fractures spreading through stone that had been struck decades ago by forces long since forgotten. She could see the faint shimmer of mana still lingering in the air from every spell that had ever been cast in this room, layered over each other like old paint on a wall nobody had bothered scraping clean ever. She could see the clone itself with a clarity that bordered on absurd, every seam in its clay colored form, every faint pulse of mana running through its staff, every subtle twitch of muscle memory baked into a body that wasn't even really a body at all.

Information poured into her head from nowhere and everywhere at once, not words exactly, more like understanding arriving fully formed and complete, the way you just know how to breathe without ever being taught the mechanics of it. She understood, somehow, without anyone explaining it to her, that the space around her had a shape now, a boundary, something she could stretch and hold and control if she just reached for it the right way.

Her eyes had begun to glow.

She didn't know this yet, couldn't see her own face in this moment, but the deep purple of her irises had brightened into something closer to burning amethyst, twin points of light cutting through the dim chamber like something out of a story rather than something that belonged inside her own skull.

"Is this the power of the Six Eyes?" she asked out loud, mostly to herself, raising both hands and staring at them like they belonged to a stranger.

A laugh bubbled up out of her chest before she could stop it, giddy and bright and completely out of place given everything she'd just survived over the past three hundred deaths. It felt incredible. It felt like waking up after being buried alive, like breathing fresh air for the first time after drowning over and over in the same dark water.

"I can only use powers that come with a weapon," she said, spinning in place, watching another thrown chunk of debris freeze harmlessly a few inches from her ribs. "That's the whole deal, right, that's how Erfassen works, gotta borrow the gear along with the trick. But this. This doesn't need a weapon at all."

She threw her head back and laughed again, louder this time, the sound bouncing off marble and stone in a way that probably should have felt insane given the circumstances but instead just felt free.

"This is exhilarating!" she shouted, arms spread wide, spinning on the spot as another beam crashed uselessly against her shield. "This is sweet! This is so, so sweet, oh my god, I want to cry, I actually want to cry right now but in a good way, do you understand, this is the first good thing that's happened to me in like three hundred deaths!"

The clone kept firing, methodical and unbothered by her outburst, each attack simply piling up around the edge of her invisible domain, and Subaru kept laughing, kept spinning, feeling something bright and electric fizzing through her veins that had nothing to do with mana reserves and everything to do with pure unfiltered relief.

She felt untouchable. She felt, for one glorious stretch of seconds, like the universe had finally decided to stop kicking her while she was down and had instead handed her the biggest, sharpest stick in the room.

"Alright," she said, rolling her shoulders, raising one hand and pointing her middle finger directly at the clone with a flourish that felt, in the moment, incredibly dramatic and satisfying. "Meet your end, puppet."

She grinned, wide and manic, eyes still glowing that strange bright purple.

"Red!"

A small ball of crimson energy bloomed at the tip of her finger, condensed and crackling, exactly the way she remembered it from every scene she'd ever watched of this exact technique doing exactly this exact thing right before obliterating whatever stood in its path.

And then it vanished.

Just like that. No explosion. No devastating burst of destructive force tearing through the chamber. No dramatic wind picking up around her in that satisfying, cinematic way. Just a tiny fizzle of red light winking out of existence like a candle flame caught in an unexpected draft.

"Huh?" Subaru said, staring at her own finger with genuine, baffled confusion.

She had exactly enough time to register that something had gone deeply, catastrophically wrong before the clone's next beam tore across the chamber and struck her square in the chest, the invisible barrier she'd been relying on apparently having decided, at the worst possible moment, to simply stop existing.

The impact sent her flying backward, her body already unraveling into familiar streaks of black mana halfway through the air, and the last thing she managed to think, right before the world dissolved into darkness again, was a single, furious, deeply unimpressed thought.

Of course. Of course the one time something actually worked, the follow up attack just had to fizzle out like a wet firework.

She hit the floor already halfway gone, the remaining wisps of her form scattering into the cold air of the chamber, and somewhere in that fading darkness, she could have sworn she heard herself laughing one last time, high and hysterical and entirely unbothered by the fact that she had just died again.

Then there was nothing at all, and a moment later, the gasp of air rushing back into her lungs as she reappeared once more in the narrow passageway, hand hovering by the lamp exactly where it always waited, patient as ever, ready to watch her try this whole impossible thing all over again.

───✧───

Subaru sat in the passageway with her back against cold stone, catching her breath, her mind racing through everything that had just happened in that brief, glorious window where the world had finally, finally stopped hurting her.

What had caused that? She turned the question over and over, trying to find some solid ground to stand on. Back when she'd first started this whole nightmare, dying over and over against Stark's axe, something had clicked after roughly a hundred repeated deaths, and Erfassen had unlocked itself, that strange ability to borrow shape and weapon straight out of memory whenever her need became desperate enough. Now, apparently, something similar had happened again, except this time the trigger had been the clone instead of Stark, and what she'd unlocked wasn't just another weapon.

It was Gojo's power. Infinity, and then, for one brief flickering second, Red.

That felt important, but it also felt like a puzzle she didn't have time to solve right now. Understanding the mechanics could wait. Surviving could not.

She thought back through the fight, trying to pinpoint exactly why the barrier had failed at the worst possible moment. She'd been holding that fight, by the time it collapsed, dodging, weaving, maintaining that invisible shield around her entire body the whole time. Infinity wasn't free. Nothing in her arsenal had ever been free, and if Erfassen worked anything like she suspected it worked, sustaining that kind of constant, passive barrier had to be draining her mana reserves at a rate that made all her earlier summons look cheap by comparison.

Mana shortage. That had to be it. She'd simply run dry at the exact moment she needed the barrier most, and the beam had slipped straight through the gap left behind.

Which meant, if she wanted to survive this next attempt, she needed to be smarter about how she spent whatever she had. Hollow Purple crossed her mind immediately, that devastating fusion of Blue and Red capable of erasing anything caught in its path, powerful enough that it might actually end this fight in a single decisive strike. But theoretically, and she hated how uncertain that word felt even inside her own head, she doubted she had enough mana left to sustain a full Infinity barrier and layer something like Hollow Purple on top of it. Red alone had fizzled out like a damp match. Asking for more than that felt like begging for a death she couldn't afford to walk away from.

She could try Red again, though. Maybe alone, without trying to hold Infinity at the same time, she could actually make it work.

Worth a shot. It was always worth a shot at this point.

She pushed herself up onto unsteady legs, rolled her shoulders once, and stepped back out into the hall.

The clone was already waiting, hovering exactly where it always hovered, staff rising the instant she crossed the threshold. Subaru didn't wait for the first shot to land before moving, throwing herself upward in a sharp diagonal climb, letting the beam curve after her through the open air.

"Let's see if this actually works this time," she muttered, twisting midair, trying to bend the trajectory of the pursuing beam back toward its source through sheer force of will and whatever thin scraps of control she'd managed to piece together from that brief taste of Infinity.

It didn't work. The beam simply kept following her, ignoring her attempt at redirection entirely, and she had to dive sideways at the last second to avoid taking it straight through the ribs.

"Okay, fine, that one's a bust," she said, already conjuring a handful of kunai between her fingers, flinging them down toward the clone in a tight spread. The clone tilted its body with almost lazy ease, letting every single blade sail harmlessly past, not even bothering to raise its staff for something so trivial.

"Ugh," Subaru grumbled, still hovering, watching the clone's staff begin gathering mana for another shot.

She dove the moment it fired, dropping low and fast, skimming just above the marble floor, weaving between fallen pillars and broken statues, letting the ruined obstacles absorb the worst of the beam's path while she stayed low and quick beneath the wreckage. Debris exploded around her as the beam chewed through stone instead of flesh, and for a moment, she actually felt like she was gaining ground, actually felt like maybe, just maybe, she could keep this dance going long enough to find an opening.

Then the clone's expression shifted.

It wasn't much, barely a flicker, but Subaru had spent enough loops staring at that same blank clay face to recognize even the smallest change by now. The clone's head tilted, its eyes narrowing slightly, as if it had sensed something new in the way she moved, something different from the desperate, predictable patterns of the past three hundred deaths.

Its hands came together, and between them, a small point of blinding light began to form.

Subaru's stomach dropped as she watched it grow. What started as a pinprick expanded rapidly, swelling outward into a dense, swirling sphere of condensed darkness rimmed with searing white light, gravity itself seeming to bend and warp around it as it grew larger and larger, pulling loose debris and dust toward its center in slow, inevitable spirals.

A black hole. An actual, honest to god black hole, forming right there in the clone's outstretched hands, growing with every passing second toward something that looked less like an attack and more like the end of this entire chamber… that's not a black hole—

"Oh, that's not fair," Subaru breathed, watching it swell, feeling her own pulse hammering wildly against her ribs. "That is extremely not fair, how is that even, what kind of ending boss nonsense—"

There was no time left to finish the thought.

She moved on pure instinct, borrowing speed from somewhere deep and desperate, and in a blur that even she barely registered consciously, she was suddenly behind the clone, a sword already materialized in her grip, blade already swinging in a brutal arc across its exposed back.

The strike landed clean, tearing a deep gash from shoulder to hip, dark mana spraying outward in a wide arc, and for one satisfying second, Subaru actually believed she might have finally, truly hurt it.

Then the telekinetic backlash hit her like a freight train.

Invisible force slammed into her entire body at once, hurling her sideways with brutal, bone jarring speed, and she crashed into the far wall hard enough to crack the stone around her, pinned there by that same crushing, unstoppable pressure she'd come to dread more than any beam or fireball this thing had ever thrown at her.

Her vision swam. Blood filled her mouth. And still, that swelling black hole hung in the air behind the clone, growing larger, ready to be thrown, ready to end this loop the same brutal way every single one before it had ended.

She had one shot left. Maybe not even one full shot, given how thin her mana reserves felt at this point, stretched out and trembling like a rope about to snap. But one shot was still one more chance than she'd had a hundred loops ago, and she wasn't about to waste it lying pinned against a wall feeling sorry for herself.

She pressed both hands together in front of her chest, forcing herself to breathe despite the crushing pressure still bearing down against her ribs, forcing her scattered, panicked thoughts into something resembling focus.

"Please work," she whispered, voice trembling, eyes squeezed shut for half a second as she gathered every last drop of power she had left.

Then she opened her eyes, and the purple light behind them burned brighter than it ever had before.

"I am the bone of my sword," she said, her voice suddenly steady, suddenly certain, cutting clean through the chaos of the chamber like a blade through silk.

Author Note:

In case you were confused— she can now use techniques alongside tools and techniques that come with tools. Infinity was just an example.

Did that give you any insights on anything...? I hope you can catch it.

Regardless, obviously there are some serious limitations. But LinieBaru seem to have an idea here.

Is it a Reality Marble or something else? I shall leave that to your imagination... For a week.

Any idea if it would work or not?

This arc ends with chapter 32, which is CloneBaru from Land's Point of View.

I have changed the names of the Patreon tiers.

Amber League→ B Rank.

Sapphire League→A Rank

Diamond League→S Rank

Pink Star League→EX Rank

The emoji are still the same so you shouldn’t have any trouble identifying them.