Kratos vs Wolverine

The Arena

A portal spat Logan out into knee-deep snow under a pale Norse sky. He sniffed the air: pine, frost, old blood. Then he heard a voice like gravel telling someone named Atreus to stay behind the tree.

Kratos had seen many strange creatures in Midgard, but never a short, angry man with metal claws sliding out of his knuckles. When the stranger stepped between him and his son’s position, the god of war did not ask questions. He drew the Leviathan Axe.

Round One

Logan went straight for him, claws first, snarling. Kratos met the charge with the axe haft, turned the claws aside and drove a fist into Logan’s chest that broke ribs and threw him twenty metres into a pine tree.

Logan got up. His ribs knitted with a crackle and he came again, lower and faster, raking claws across Kratos’s thigh and opening three deep lines. Kratos grunted, took the wound and slammed the axe down. It bit into Logan’s shoulder and stopped on adamantium with a ringing note. Both men stared at it for a moment. Then Logan grinned.

The Turn

For two minutes the fight was a blur of steel. Logan healed everything Kratos did to him. Kratos simply absorbed everything Logan did to him, and kept coming. The forest around them was shredded, trees falling like matchsticks.

Then Kratos threw the Leviathan Axe into the trees and pulled the Blades of Chaos from his back. Chains wrapped in fire lashed out, coiled around Logan’s arms and pinned them. Heat poured through the metal. Adamantium does not melt easily, but the flesh around it does, and for the first time in decades Wolverine could not heal faster than he was being hurt.

The Finish

Logan went berserk. He tore one arm free with a scream that shook snow from the treetops and slashed through Kratos’s armor to the bone. It was the closest the god of war had come to falling in years. But Kratos has killed Zeus. He took the wound, reeled in the chains and caught Logan by the throat.

He did not try to cut him; he had learned in the first minute that blades do not finish this man. Instead he carried Logan to the edge of the cliff, the fire from the Blades still burning, and threw him into the fjord far below, through the ice, into water so cold even a healing factor would need hours to recover from it.

Atreus came out from behind the tree. “Was he a god?” Kratos called the Leviathan Axe back to his hand and looked down at the hole in the ice. “No,” he said. “Something more stubborn.” Far below, a pair of claws were already scraping at the underside of the ice.