I Broke The Game Rules To Kill The Sister Who Broke Our Bond Chapter 01
Melanie Thorne and I were twin bosses in a horror dungeon. That was the rule with twin bosses: kill us both at the exact same time, or neither of us stayed dead.
So when Melanie fell for a player who’d stumbled into our dungeon, threw away everything to follow him out into the real world, and decided to play house, I didn’t care.
She’d come back when she died. She always did.
Three years went by. I started getting weaker, so weak that rookies fresh out of the tutorial were cutting me down like I was nothing.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I reached out through our fading bond to find out what the hell Melanie had gotten herself into.
And there she was, a vision lying in a hospital bed, tubes snaking out of every vein, barely alive.
Meanwhile, the boyfriend she’d sacrificed everything for was draining her dungeon credits, every last one, and using them to buy gifts for some woman in red lipstick.
I stood there in my throne room, watching the whole pathetic scene play out in my mind, and something between a laugh and a snarl pulled at my mouth.
If he wouldn’t let her die and set us both free, fine. I’d do it myself.
***
The iron sword drove through my chest, and I didn’t even have the strength to flinch.
The kid who’d stabbed me, some rookie in starter gear, dropped to the ground, too terrified to keep hold of the hilt.
“I… Did I just solo the boss?”
He stared at his own hands. Then the disbelief cracked into panic, and he spun around to yell at his party across the chamber.
“Holy crap! That was the boss? She just stood there and let me swing at her!”
“No way, man! Wasn’t this place supposed to be a rookie killer? The forums were full of it!”
They crowded around my body, grinning like they’d just hit the ultimate jackpot.
I watched them celebrate over my corpse, disgust pooling in my gut until everything faded to black.
Pathetic.
I opened my eyes in the dungeon’s core hub.
The hollow, weightless feeling of respawning still clung to me. I dragged myself upright.
The lightning-shaped crest near my eye, translucent blue, the mark of what I was, flickered hot with rage.
I looked up at the control panel floating above me.
Red warning lights strobed across its surface.
Our dungeon, an S-class nightmare that used to make top-ranked players quit at the loading screen, now had a fat, ugly B-class rating stamped across it.
My nails dug into my palms until dark blood welled up between my fingers.
Too weak. I wasn’t even running at one percent of what I used to be.
That was how twin bosses worked: shared life force, shared power. When she thrived, I thrived. When she fell apart, she dragged me down with her.
Three years ago, Melanie—stupid, trusting, impossibly naive Melanie—threw away her god-tier power for a player named Gideon Vance. She ripped herself out of the game to go live a “normal life” in his world.
I told her exactly what would happen.
“Humans are greedy. That’s all they are. You walk out there with nothing to protect you, and they’ll bleed you dry. They’ll pick your bones clean and sleep just fine.”
She just smiled and rested her hand on my head. She had always been the beautiful one. Her face was lit with a desperate, hungry hope that made me sick.
“Valerie, he’s different. What I feel with him is real. I have to try.”
So much for that.
A cough tore through me, violent and shredding, and black blood spattered the floor.
My life force was hemorrhaging out of me so fast I could smell it, something rotten at the core of my own soul.
Something had gone horribly wrong with Melanie in the real world. Whatever it was, it was killing her.
If she’d just died, that would almost be a mercy. She’d snap back to the dungeon, and we’d go on like before.
But if she was stuck, alive and suffering, unable to die, she’d keep dragging me down with her. Weak like this. Forever.
My eyes landed on the system’s supreme law, pinned to the top of the panel: [Dungeon creatures are strictly forbidden from leaving the game.]
I smiled. It wasn’t a kind smile.
I pulled the bone butterfly knife from its sheath, poured every last scrap of power I had into the blade, and drove it straight into the panel’s core.
“WARNING: Unauthorized destructive action detected.”
“WARNING: Critical system breach. Spatial barrier integrity compromised…”
Alarms shrieked through the hub, a metallic, skull-splitting wail, and the backlash ripped through my hand, splitting the skin between my thumb and forefinger wide open.
Blood ran down the blade. I leaned into it harder.
Crack. The panel, supposedly indestructible, shattered. The air in front of me split open, a dark rift tearing through the fabric of space itself.
The passage to the real world. The turbulence churning inside could shred a normal person down to atoms.
I walked in without blinking.
The pain hit like my soul was being peeled apart layer by layer.
When my feet hit solid ground again, everything was different.
The sharp bite of disinfectant flooded my lungs.
Pinecrest Private Hospital. The real world.
The laws of the real world clamped down the instant I arrived, crushing what was left of my power to human level. Ordinary. Helpless.
I braced myself against the cold wall, gulping air. Somewhere deep in my blood, a thread-thin bond was still pulling at me, barely there, almost snapped.
At the end of the corridor was an ICU door. Sealed shut.
I didn’t need to read the chart. The bond told me everything. Melanie was on the other side of that door.
