Twin Bosses

# Twin Bosses

My sister and I were the twin Bosses of a horror game.

As everyone who plays these dungeons knows, twin Bosses answer to one rule above all others: we have to be killed at the same time, or not at all. Kill only one of us, and the other simply revives us both. So when my sister fell in love with a player who wandered into our dungeon and chose to give up being a Boss entirely to leave with him and live in the real world, I didn't think much of it. If I died, I told myself, I would just come back.

It wasn't until the third year after she left that I understood what she'd actually done to me. I was growing weaker by the month. Novice players — the kind who used to die screaming before they got within ten feet of the throne — could stroll into the dungeon and clear it by doing little more than shoving me over. I finally couldn't stand it anymore. I left the dungeon myself, to find out exactly what my sister was doing with her precious human life.

I found her in a hospital, buried under tubes, hanging on by a single thread of breath. And the boyfriend she'd thrown away godhood for was in the room with her — spending the points he was draining out of her body to buy gifts for a flashy, red-haired woman who wasn't her.

Looking at that scene, something in my chest went very still, and a smile I didn't recognize crept onto my face.

*So you're that reluctant to give up my sister's points. Fine. Then I'll take them myself.*

---

When the iron chain first punched through my chest in that dungeon three years earlier, I hadn't even had the strength left to resist it. The man in the cheap tracksuit holding the other end of the chain collapsed to his knees, too stunned to keep his grip.

"I— I solo-killed a Boss?"

He stared at his own hands like he didn't believe they belonged to him, then let out a whoop of pure joy and screamed the news to his friends in the distance.

"Holy shit! Is this really a dungeon Boss? She's way too weak — just standing there letting us hit her! Look at her, though. Pretty face like that, you'd almost think this place was some kind of honey trap. Guess the forums were exaggerating."

A handful of green, half-trained players crowded around my body, poking at me, eyes shining with the cheap thrill of an easy win. I could only lie there and watch their celebration as my vision blurred and dimmed. The humiliation of it followed me all the way down into the dark.

When I opened my eyes again I was back in the dungeon's twin core, the weightlessness of revival still clinging to my limbs. I forced myself upright. The lightning-shaped violet markings at the corners of my eyes burned faintly with rage. Above me, the void panel hung in the air, flashing crimson — the same panel that had once made the strongest players in the game break out in a cold sweat, now dull, withered, and tagged with a single degrading word: **Closed.**

I clenched my fists. Dark blood dripped slowly between my fingers.

Too weak. My current strength wasn't even one percent of what it used to be.

As one of the twin Bosses guarding this ultra-high-difficulty dungeon, my sister Mo Yao and I shared a single pool of life force. When one of us flourished, so did the other. When one of us was hurt, we both bled. Three years ago, my naive, almost foolish sister had voluntarily thrown away power as precious as her own life — for a man named Lu Minglang. She'd stepped out of the game and run off into the real world to live as an ordinary human being.

I remember trying to stop her.

"Humans only know greed and hypocrisy," I told her. "Walk into their world with your guard down, and they'll pick you clean and leave nothing behind."

She only smiled and patted my head. On that once-unshakable face of hers was a hunger for warmth so raw it frightened me.

"Xiao Zhu. Minglang is different. He gave me something real. I want to try, for him."

*Warmth, my ass.*

A fit of coughing seized me and I spat out a mouthful of black blood, my life force draining away at a speed that terrified me. I could smell my own soul starting to rot. Wherever Mo Yao was, whatever she'd walked into out there, it had to be bad — the kind of trouble that could unmake her completely. If she'd simply died, that would have been a mercy; we'd have both revived and gone back to guarding the dungeon together, same as always. But if she couldn't die, then I would be dragged down with her, chained to this weakness forever.

I stared at the line of text glowing on the void panel — the highest law governing the dungeon's existence — and a cold smile pulled at my mouth.

I gathered every last scrap of strength still left in my body and slammed it straight into the twin core.

*WARNING. Illegal destruction detected.*
*WARNING. Severe system vulnerability. Spatial stability compromised.*

The mechanical alarm shrieked through the chamber in flat, urgent English. The recoil alone was enough to shatter my jaw; blood and broken teeth ran down the blade in my hand. I didn't stop. I pressed harder.

*Crack.*

The panel, already teetering on collapse, finally gave way. A rift tore open in front of me — a passage straight into the real world, spatial turbulence churning inside it violently enough to shred an ordinary person to pieces. I didn't hesitate. I stepped through.

The feeling of my soul being ripped apart nearly finished me off right there. When my feet found solid ground again, the world around me had completely changed. The sharp bite of disinfectant hit me first. A private hospital. The suppression of real-world physics crashed down on me instantly, crushing what little was left of my power down to the level of an ordinary, breakable human being.

I braced myself against a cold wall and forced air into my lungs. Using the last thin threads of the bond between us, I lifted my head. At the end of the corridor sat a sealed intensive care room. The twin-sense inside me knew, without any doubt, that she was in there.

Through the little observation window I finally saw her.

The woman on the bed looked more dead than alive, her skin a corpse-gray, her once ocean-black hair tangled like dead grass. A filthy hospital gown hung off her wasted frame, soaked through with fluid I didn't want to identify. If it weren't for the faint, barely-there rise and fall of her chest, I would never have believed this ruin of a body had once been my sister — Mo Yao, who used to cut a bloody path through this game world as a twin Boss. Thick medical tubes were sunk into her veins like a spider's web, drawing something steadily out of her body while the machines kept up a slow, monotonous beep.

They were draining points out of her.

I watched, and felt nothing like pity. Only contempt — for how stupid she'd been. No wonder two rookie players could put me on the ground. My sister's stupidity had been bleeding me dry for years.

I flipped the blood-crusted bone butterfly knife over in my hand and didn't hesitate.

*Kill her.*

The instant she took her last breath, the twin death-reset would trigger, and we'd both slip free of these fragile human shells and be reborn at full strength back in the dungeon core. I reached for the door handle, ready to go in and end it — and then I heard voices through the crack in the door.

"Lang-ge, how many points does this thing have left? I saw a set of S-rank glowing wings in the shop yesterday. I'm still three segments short."

A woman in a tight red dress was leaning against the bed, twirling a lock of her big, wavy crimson hair between scarlet-lacquered nails, her eyes full of disdain. Beside her stood a man in an expensive suit and gold-rimmed glasses — impeccably put together, gently smiling. Lu Minglang. The man who had lied my sister out of the dungeon.

"What's the rush?" he said, pushing up his glasses. "This piece of bone is a living well of points. As long as we keep the equipment running and don't let her actually die, the points never stop."

The woman — Ji Xueya — glanced at Mo Yao on the bed with open disgust. "Gross. If it weren't for the points, who'd want to sit in this dump of a ward? Look at her, half a corpse already. Ugh."

Lu Minglang reached over and tipped Ji Xueya's chin up, his voice thick with mockery. "If I hadn't played the devoted boyfriend, fed her a little fake warmth, how else was I supposed to talk her into ripping out her own core brand and turning herself into a non-human freak who actually *dreamed* of being ordinary? Stupid enough to make you sick."

"Lang-ge, you're something else," Ji Xueya said, and hooked her arms around his neck, yanking his tie loose. What followed — right there, in front of the woman clinging to life by a tube — turned my stomach. I'd assumed my sister was merely blind. I hadn't realized her taste ran this low: giving up something close to godhood for a beast wearing a man's skin, reducing herself to something worse than dead.

I gripped the knife until the violet marks at my eyes ached, and I couldn't stand to listen for one more second.

Eventually the sounds inside quieted, replaced by the soft rustle of people straightening their clothes. I stepped back and squared my stance, ready to kick the door in and send both of them to hell — and then the handle turned from the inside without warning.

*Click.*

The door swung open, and Lu Minglang and I were suddenly face to face. He was looking down, still fixing his tie; Ji Xueya trailed behind him, tugging her dress back into place. When his eyes lifted and found my face, his hand froze on the knot of his tie. Both he and Ji Xueya went rigid.

"How is this possible?!" Ji Xueya's scarlet nail jabbed at me, trembling. "That monster's still lying right there full of tubes!"

Lu Minglang recovered faster than she did, greed sliding into his expression behind the gold rims of his glasses. "It's not Mo Yao. It's the other one — the little sister. Xiao Zhu." He looked at me the way a man looks at gold that's walked itself to his front door.

I didn't waste breath on him. I reversed my grip on the knife and went for his throat — and in that half-second I understood, with sick clarity, exactly how heavy my body had become. My sister's near-death state was pulling me down hard, and the crushing weight of real-world physics on top of it had reduced my combat power to something even weaker than an average adult's. What should have been a killing stroke looked, in front of him, like a joke.

He sidestepped it easily and pulled a card shimmering with gold light from his pocket.

"High-grade item. Absolute Binding."

Light flared. Invisible chains snapped into being out of thin air and wrapped every limb I had. I hit the floor hard, and the knife skidded out of my hand into a corner of the corridor.

"Lang-ge, you're amazing!" Ji Xueya rushed over and drove her heel into the back of my hand, grinding down. "Buy one, get one free," she sneered. "Now we can drain both of them. My S-rank wings are basically guaranteed."

Lu Minglang grabbed a fistful of my hair and forced my head up, smiling coldly. "No need to rush. The twin-core mechanism is complicated. We need to figure out how to drain you both at the same time first."

---

They hauled me down into the basement — one of Lu Minglang's private black-market holes beneath the hospital, a room he'd apparently built for exactly this. I was thrown into the dark and locked against the wall in high-grade alloy restraints.

"Talk," Lu Minglang said. "Where's the shared interface for your twin mechanism? How do we pull points from both of you?"

He held an electric prod that crackled blue and used it on me without mercy. The pain tore through every nerve I had. I bit down on my own lip and gave him nothing but a faint, cold laugh — the kind you give a man you've already decided is dead.

"Tough, huh?" Ji Xueya stepped up with a bottle of black-market corrosive liquid, pinched my jaw, and looked at me with pure malice. "This face of yours is just as disgusting as the trash upstairs." She poured it straight onto my shoulder. Flesh curled and hissed; the smell of burning filled the room; the wound went down to bone. Cold sweat soaked through what was left of my clothes, but I didn't make a sound. I kept my eyes ice-cold and let them work.

Lu Minglang went through every vicious tool he owned. By the end there wasn't an untouched patch of skin left on me, blood dripping steadily off my toes into a dark pool on the floor — but my mind stayed perfectly clear. With every blow, I quietly rehearsed exactly how I was going to kill them both. Pain meant nothing. As long as I didn't die, this debt would carve itself into their bones.

"Lang-ge, this one's about done and still won't talk," Ji Xueya said, wiping blood off her hands, irritated. Lu Minglang was reaching for something even worse when the communicator on his wrist screamed a sharp mechanical alarm.

*Beep. Beep. Beep.*

His face went pale as he loosened his tie. "Damn it. Forced dungeon cycle."

Ji Xueya glared at me, hanging limp in the restraints. "Lang-ge, what about her? Just leave her?"

"What else? Resist a forced summon and the System erases us outright." His eyes flashed with malice as he hit the switch on the wall, tightening the chains around me one more notch. "Keep her breathing. We'll deal with her properly once we clear the dungeon — this run's just a farmed-out low-level instance, we'll be back in a few hours. She's getting off easy."

Ji Xueya spat on the floor. A flash of white light swallowed them both, and their voices vanished. Silence dropped over the room like a lid.

I stared down at the alloy digging into my wrists. The item's power was real, but my body by that point was so numb, so broken, that pain barely registered anymore. I let out a cold laugh that would raise the hair on anyone's neck, and then I twisted my left hand as hard as I could, using the edge of the restraint as a fulcrum, dislocating my thumb and wrist with a series of sharp cracks. I didn't even flinch. With that ruined, blood-smeared hand, I wrenched myself free of the ring.

Losing that side of support dropped me straight onto the cold concrete. It felt like something had shifted loose inside my chest, and I coughed up a mouthful of black blood. Using my one good hand, I pushed myself upright and dragged my ruined legs inch by inch toward the corridor. My knife was still lying in the corner where it had skidded. I closed my hand around it, and the familiar feel of bone against my palm made my blood start to move again.

One step. Two steps. Using the wall for support, I crawled out of the basement and up toward the ward on the floor above, a long trail of dark red marking the path behind me.

I pushed the door open. Mo Yao was still lying there, a corpse with a pulse. The heart monitor gave its weak, uneven beep. I forced myself upright at the edge of her bed and looked down at that once-radiant face, now gray and lifeless, and felt nothing soft in me at all.

"Sister," I said. "This disgusting life, being drained like a blood bag — it ends today."

I reversed my grip on the knife, aimed it at her heart, and drove it down without a moment's hesitation. The blade went in. Warm blood splashed across my face. The heart monitor let out one final, piercing tone, and the green line on its screen stretched flat.

---

At that exact moment, inside the game.

In an empty, desolate forest, Lu Minglang stepped out of the teleportation array with his arm around Ji Xueya's waist.

"Lang-ge, it's so quiet here. I'm scared," she said, pressing close to him.

"What's there to be scared of?" He pushed up his glasses and stroked her hair. "It's just a low-level instance. With the gear I just bought, we could clear it with our eyes shut. Think of it as a vacation."

He'd barely finished the sentence when the sky above them tore open, a blood-red crack splitting the heavens, the ground shuddering violently beneath their feet. Then a voice — the cold, mechanical female voice that struck fear into every high-level player in the game — thundered across the entire world at full volume.

*"Highest-level warning. Real-world twin core reorganization detected. Death-reset mechanism triggered successfully. Current dungeon undergoing forced transformation. Transformation complete. This low-level instance has been forcibly upgraded to Super S-rank. Judgment begins now."*

By the time the announcement finished, I was standing in the great hall. The violet markings at the corners of my eyes — dormant for three years — flared back to life. I waved a hand through the air and a fresh, S-rank monitoring screen bloomed in front of me. On it, Lu Minglang and Ji Xueya had just been teleported to the outer edge of the dungeon, blood-red rain already falling from the split sky, the System's icy warnings echoing over their heads again and again.

Ji Xueya's legs gave out. She dropped into the mud and clung to Lu Minglang's leg, screaming. "Lang-ge! S-rank?! How is it Super S-rank?! You said this was a farmed-out low instance! We're going to die!"

His face had gone just as pale, a flash of raw terror crossing it before he shoved it down and shook her off. "Shut up! Stop scaring yourself! Look at what I'm wearing!" He slapped a hand against the top-tier, light-wreathed armor covering his body. "The System's glitched. I've played for years and never once seen a dungeon jump two ranks after players are already inside." He pushed his glasses up with real arrogance and laughed. "So what if it got force-upgraded? The bones of a low-level dungeon are still under it. There's no time for high-level monsters to spawn in. With this gear, I can still clear it easy."

To smother his own unease, he pulled out a glowing gold recovery potion and hauled Ji Xueya to her feet. "Stay close to me. Force our way to the core, and the settlement points will set us up for half a lifetime. Once we're out, I'll break that little bitch's bones one inch at a time."

I watched that selfish, hypocritical face on the screen and slowly turned the knife — glowing violet again — in my hand. A cruel smile spread across my mouth. Arrogant little insects. Did they really believe a handful of trash items bought with stolen points made them untouchable?

They had no idea what they'd just walked into.

Behind me, the core blood pool erupted in a wash of crimson light, endless dark-red radiance carrying a pressure that felt like the end of the world. Flesh knit back together. Bone realigned. A flawless body rose slowly out of the center of that light.

My sister.

The filthy tubes were gone. The gray, dying skin was gone. She wore a dress the color of a burning sunset, her ocean-black hair moving on its own in perfectly still air. She opened her eyes — eyes that had once been full of longing for warmth, now holding nothing but stillness and the purest killing intent. Three years of deception, three years spent as a living blood bag, had burned away the last shred of mercy she'd ever felt for humanity.

"Xiao Zhu," she said. Her voice was ice on a blade. The temperature in the whole hall dropped. She crossed to my side and fixed her gaze on the screen, where Lu Minglang was still charging forward, item in hand.

She lifted one pale finger and tapped the void panel floating in the air. Every alarm in the dungeon cut out at once, replaced by a low, oppressive sound that seemed to rise from nine layers beneath the world. On the screen, the peaceful forest around Lu Minglang twisted — the ground splitting open like torn flesh, revealing bottomless, blood-filled pits. Thousands of scarlet eyes lit up in the dark.

Mo Yao tilted her head and let a cruel, machine-precise smile curve her lips.

"They want to clear this dungeon so badly," she said. "Let's seal the exit for good."

Her voice rolled through the hall. The twin thrones — silent for three years, carved from dark crystal and threaded with crimson veins — rose out of the boiling blood pool amid a sound like roaring dragons, radiating a pressure that made the soul want to flee. I leapt up onto the right-hand throne, and the lightning marks at my eyes blazed. Power surged through every vein I had, my bones cracking like a string of firecrackers going off. That feeling — full strength, right up against the edge of madness — I'd almost forgotten what it felt like.

"Aren't you taking the left throne, Sister?"

She looked down at her own pale, perfect hands, and a slow, sharp smile crossed her face. "Three years," she said. "Human warmth is the most vicious, cheapest lie this world has to offer."

I finished spinning the blood-dark knife between my fingers. "So don't go soft on me again, Sister. Today we collect every debt they owe us. With interest."

She didn't answer. She only lifted her fingers, and a massive control panel bloomed out of the void, glowing violet. Her hands moved across it, and without any mercy at all she began rewriting the outer rules of the dungeon. On-screen, the low-level monster data was wiped clean and replaced, one line at a time, with blood-red alerts filling the whole interface:

*All-map monster berserk mode: activated. Spatial folding: initiated. Map coordinates: permanently locked. This is now an S-rank dungeon. The rules belong to us.*

She confirmed it. **First rule: every high-grade item carried by a player has its damage-immunity effect zeroed out.** I smiled and entered the second rule myself: **Pain sensation amplified three hundred percent. Instant-death mechanism disabled.**

The moment the rewrite finished, every screen in the hall turned into a window onto hell.

Lu Minglang, still charging forward with total confidence, raised his epic-grade sword to cut down a low-level zombie that had lunged at him.

*Crack.*

The sword — which had cost him a fortune and glowed with the promise of a longer life — shattered the instant it touched the creature.

"How is this possible?!" His face went bone-white behind the gold rims of his glasses. Before he could even process it, the zombie's claws slammed into his chest, tearing his light-woven armor apart like paper and leaving three deep gashes from shoulder to stomach, down to the bone.

"AAAAGH!" He screamed, his whole body convulsing under the pain amplification like he'd been electrocuted, and he collapsed into the mud, curling up like a dying dog.

"Lang-ge!" All the color drained from Ji Xueya's face. She screamed and tried to run — and made it exactly one step before the ground beneath her started to twist. Mud rolled and churned into living, pulsing flesh, walls of it rising on every side, sealing off every path of escape.

"Lang-ge, help me!" Tentacles shot up out of the ground and coiled around her. Under the pain amplification, even a shallow scratch made her scream like something being slaughtered. Lu Minglang gritted his teeth and threw a high-value purification talisman at the thing holding her; it produced a thin curl of white smoke and did absolutely nothing — and worse, it enraged every monster in the labyrinth around them. The blood-flesh walls trembled, and dozens of black-furred, red-eyed spirit-devouring creatures, twice the size of ordinary monsters, tore themselves free and went fully berserk.

"Lang-ge, they're coming! Use your items! Hurry!" Ji Xueya kicked and screamed and clawed at his leg.

Cold sweat poured off him as he ripped items out of his spatial bag one after another — frost scrolls, explosive flame beads, the kind of high-grade gear that had once made him untouchable — and every one of them sank into the low-level monsters like a stone into the ocean, without so much as a splash. With the blood-beasts closing in, he had no choice but to burn his last life-saving item, an Absolute Defense barrier. A pale-gold shield roared into place around them.

*Thud. Thud. Thud.*

The blood-beasts slammed into it, again and again, the sound scraping at the ear.

I leaned back on my throne, tapping the armrest lazily. "Sister, care to guess how long that barrier holds? Ten seconds?" Mo Yao's eyes stayed fixed on the screen, unreadable, like she was watching two ants struggle.

It made it to eight.

*Crack.*

Despair broke across Lu Minglang's face as spider-web cracks spread across the shield in real time. "No — this is impossible! This is only a low-level instance!" He screamed and clawed the system panel open, searching for any way out, but all it gave him was a sheet of pure white static, red warnings flashing across it:

*Coordinates lost. Map module destroyed. Retreat path permanently sealed.*

The labyrinth walls kept closing, writhing like something alive, the reek of blood and death choking them both. Then the barrier gave out entirely, dissolving into scattered light — and the instant it did, a blood-beast clamped its jaws onto Ji Xueya's shoulder and tore a chunk of flesh away.

"AAAH! My shoulder — it hurts, it hurts so much!" She rolled on the ground, clawing bloody streaks into the fleshy floor. Lu Minglang had no attention left to give her. He was staring into the dark, listening to the howls closing in, and whatever reason he had left finally snapped. "Get away! All of you, get away from me!" He grabbed a broken sword off the ground and crawled, half-mad, toward a passage that looked slightly less crowded than the rest.

Ji Xueya saw him about to run and lunged, wrapping both arms around his leg. "Don't leave me! Lang-ge, you said you'd get me through this! You said it!"

His eyes went bloodshot. He kicked her, hard, in her already dirt- and blood-caked face — then kept dragging her forward anyway, since she wouldn't let go.

Endless dark. A labyrinth that never stopped shifting. Monsters immune to every weapon they had. Pain turned up threefold. This flesh-maze was crushing their last shred of hope, one inch at a time.

I turned the knife idly in my hand, watching their reflections — two figures now soaked in blood and dirt — slide across the blade. Just as Lu Minglang finally dragged the half-dead Ji Xueya to the end of the passage, the living walls in front of them split open, and a massive bronze door, heavy with the aura of certain death, rose into view. He seized it like a drowning man grabbing driftwood, slammed his weight into it, and the two of them tumbled through together, leaving a long smear of blood behind them on the floor.

*BOOM.*

The bronze door crashed shut behind them and locked. The faint light that had been leaking through vanished. Their last road out was sealed for good.

Lu Minglang collapsed, gasping. His tailored suit was in tatters, one lens of his glasses shattered, his face a mask of sweat and blood. Ji Xueya looked even worse — a drowned dog, twitching on the floor.

"Safe... this is a safe zone..." he muttered, fumbling to stand. "We're in the boss room. If we can just clear it—"

He stopped mid-sentence, because he'd finally lifted his head and taken in the full shape of the hall around them.

Vast. Dead silent. No small monsters to farm for points. Only, at the far end, a twin throne built from countless pure-white sea bones and dark-red spirit crystals.

I sat on the right side of it, chin propped lazily on one hand, turning the blood-slick knife over between my fingers. Mo Yao sat on the left, in a flowing white gown, her ocean-black hair spilling to her waist, the face that had been gray and dying in that hospital ward now radiant and perfect as something not quite human, radiating a cold that could freeze a soul at ten paces. A single drop of blood fell from the tip of my knife and struck the bone throne beneath us — a small sound that seemed enormous in that silence.

Lu Minglang stared at us, his pupils shrinking to pinpricks, his eyes threatening to bulge out of his skull. The mask he'd worn his whole life finally cracked open, and underneath it was nothing but raw, absolute terror.

"You... you..." His voice came apart completely. "Mo Yao... and you — you little bitch — impossible! How can you be here?! You were both half-dead in the real world!"

"Lang-ge... who are they...?" Ji Xueya lifted her blood-smeared face and followed his gaze. The next second, she let out a scream far worse than anything the monsters had pulled out of her.

"AAAAAAAH! Ghosts! You're ghosts!" She clutched her head with both hands and scrambled backward, no longer even registering the torn wound still spurting blood from her shoulder. Whatever was left of her composure had simply collapsed. "Stay away! Don't come near me!"

I laughed softly and rose from the throne. At full power, the S-rank pressure that belonged to my sister and me together rolled outward in every direction like a tidal wave. Something cracked — Lu Minglang's kneecaps, shattering under the sheer weight of it — and his whole body slammed onto the cold stone floor like a broken doll.

"S-rank... it really is S-rank..." He trembled like something in a seizure, cold sweat washing the blood from his face until it was corpse-white.

"Why aren't you smiling anymore, Lang-ge?" I asked, spinning the knife, walking down the steps one at a time, the violet marks at my eyes flickering with dense, focused killing intent. Mo Yao stayed seated above us, watching with total indifference, not one trace of warmth left in eyes that had once burned so brightly with it.

"Three years ago," she said, "you told me you'd show me the scenery of the real world." She raised her hand slowly, and the torches around the hall flared up with violet-blue ghost fire, lighting the ruined faces of the two people in front of us. "So look. Here's the scenery I've prepared for you. Are you satisfied?"

Lu Minglang's eyes went wide with pure terror. He crawled toward her throne. "Yao — A-Yao, save me! It's me, Minglang! Your Minglang!" Tears and snot ran down his face and dripped onto the floor. "The things I did to you — that wasn't really me! I was forced into it! A-Yao, please, believe me, I'm still your Minglang!"

I spun the knife and looked up at the pure-white figure seated above us, my voice dripping with mockery. "Sister. This is the good man you traded your life for. Listen to him cry. Look at that face. You're not going soft again, are you?"

Mo Yao's crimson lips parted, and a soft, almost inaudible laugh slipped out of her — cold enough to scrape at the ears, echoing through the empty hall.

Lu Minglang's pleading cut off instantly. Some ancient, animal instinct told him exactly what that sound meant, and his scalp went numb with dread.

"A-Yao—"

Before he could finish, my sister lifted her right hand without the slightest hesitation and swept it lightly through the air. There was a soft sound, and the stone floor shattered outward like broken glass. Countless shadow spikes — thick as a man's arm, black, razor-edged — tore up out of the ground in a storm, carrying the thick smell of death with them.

"No—! No! No! No!"

Four wet, sickening sounds rang out in quick succession as the spikes drove through both his shoulders and both his thighs, hooking deep into bone. A surge of force lifted his whole body into the air and slammed it against the highest wall of the hall, pinned there like a broken doll on a row of nails. Blood poured down the stone in a straight, bright line. He couldn't even scream anymore — only broken, wet, gurgling sounds came out of his throat as he hung there like a dead fish nailed to a board.

Mo Yao rose from the throne and crossed the floor, the white hem of her dress dragging a crimson path through the blood.

That was when Ji Xueya finally broke completely. Seeing Lu Minglang pinned up like a specimen, she scrambled on all fours for the bronze door at the edge of the hall, screaming, "Open the door! Let me out! I'm from the Blade Guild! You can't touch me!"

I watched her ridiculous, scrambling retreat with cold eyes, gave the knife a lazy spin, and vanished — reappearing directly behind her a heartbeat later. She spun around, her lipstick-smeared face twisting into pure horror, and opened her mouth to scream for the Guild's protection.

I didn't give her the chance.

My wrist turned. The blood-red bone blade drew a clean, cold arc through the air, and a soft, slick sound followed — the sound of a throat opening. Her voice died instantly. She clutched her neck with both hands as blood sprayed between her fingers like a burst pipe, her eyes wide with disbelief and shot through with burst vessels, and slowly, silently, she sank to her knees and folded into the pool of her own blood. Still.

I flicked the blood off my blade and turned back toward the wall. Mo Yao was already crossing to Lu Minglang, walking with slow, elegant steps toward the man pinned high above, nearly drained white. Watching Ji Xueya die from a single cut, he'd lost control of his bladder entirely, his whole body shaking.

"A-Yao... kill me quick," he begged. "For old times' sake — a clean death..."

Mo Yao tilted her head up and looked at the face she'd once given up everything for. The corner of her mouth curved into a smile cold enough to freeze a soul.

"You drained my blood for three years," she said, "and now you want a clean death, so the slate's wiped clean?"

She raised her pale hand and pointed her palm at his chest. A mass of deep violet soul-fire bloomed in her palm.

"AAAAGH—!" It was the most vicious core-brand technique this world had — his body seized rigid, a scream tearing out of him, his eyes bulging in their sockets, as a thin, semi-transparent shape — his soul — was pulled forcibly out of his flesh.

"Go to hell," she said, her face utterly without expression, and closed her fist. With a sound that crawled straight up the spine, the soul crushed into nothing between her fingers, then was punched straight down through the floor of the hall into the endless purgatory beneath the dungeon — a place with no light, only ancient fire and venomous, ten-thousand-year insects that gnawed endlessly on souls. He would burn to ash there, reset, and be eaten again, over and over, forever. Unable to live. Unable to die.

The hall went quiet. Only the heavy smell of blood moved through the air.

Mo Yao turned slowly, the white hem of her dress swaying, and in her twin scarlet eyes settled the absolute, quiet weight that belongs only to an S-rank Boss.

"Xiao Zhu," she said, and looked at me.

I reached out my hand, put the knife away, and crossed the floor to her without hesitating. The instant our hands closed together, the shared power of our bloodline surged wildly between us. Without a word, we walked back across the blood-soaked stone and climbed the steps to sit once more on the sea-bone throne that had always meant absolute rule.

At that moment, the System's cold voice rolled out through the whole game world — and, for good measure, through the world above it too.

*Announcement, all channels. S-rank dungeon core reorganization complete. The Twin Lords have returned. Rules rewritten. Judgment hour begins now.*

I leaned back against the throne and watched the green monitoring screens flicker beyond the hall, a cold, satisfied smile pulling at the corner of my mouth. Three years of playing at being human — my sister's absurd little dream — was finally, completely over.

From this day forward, this world would follow no rules but ours.