Chapter 3: First Blood
[Midgard — Wildwoods Burial Grounds — Same Day, Late Afternoon]
The first draugr pulled itself free of the earth like a man climbing out of a bathtub—slow, deliberate, unconcerned. One arm emerged first, then the other, blackened fingers digging into frozen soil, hauling a torso wrapped in rotting burial leather up through the cairn's broken surface. The skull-face swiveled, eye sockets burning with sickly green fire, and the jaw opened on a moan that vibrated in Ethan's molars.
Then the rest of them came.
Three more burst from adjacent mounds. Two from behind a collapsed stone wall. One crawled out of a drainage ditch twenty feet to Ethan's right with an ancient axe still clutched in its grip. The burial grounds were waking up—whatever magic had kept these warriors sleeping through the centuries was failing, or Baldur's fight had shaken something loose, or this was simply what happened in a world where death was negotiable.
Kratos didn't hesitate. The Leviathan Axe left his hand in a flat arc that bisected the nearest draugr at the waist. The top half kept crawling for three seconds before the frost caught up and froze it solid. Kratos caught the returning axe, pivoted, and buried it in the chest of the second one before it had finished climbing free.
Atreus nocked an arrow, let it fly. It struck the third draugr in the shoulder—not a kill shot, but enough to stagger it back into the path of Kratos's boot, which caved its ribcage inward with a wet crunch.
Ethan should have been watching. He should have been learning. Instead, he was running—not toward the fight, not away from it, but sideways, trying to circle wide around the burial grounds while Kratos drew every dead thing's attention. The plan was simple: don't engage, don't get caught, don't give the Spartan god a reason to add living stranger to the list of things he was killing today.
The plan lasted eight seconds.
The draugr from the drainage ditch came at him from the right. It was faster than the others—fresher, maybe, or just angrier—and it swung the ancient axe in a horizontal arc aimed at the spot where Ethan's neck met his shoulders.
He knew the attack pattern. He'd fought hundreds of draugr in the game. Dodge right, the horizontal swing always overcommits, leaves the left flank open for a counter—
His legs didn't move.
Not fast enough. Not even close. The axe whistled past his face as he threw himself backward, and instead of a clean dodge, he got an ugly tumble into the frozen dirt with the blade opening a shallow gash across his left forearm. Pain bloomed—hot, immediate, and nothing like the vague red flash of a health bar ticking down. This was wet. This was muscle parting under corroded iron. This was blood running down his wrist and making his grip slippery on nothing because he didn't have a weapon to grip.
The draugr advanced. Burning eyes. Burial rags trailing from its frame like a funeral shroud caught in a wind that wasn't blowing. It raised the axe overhead for a killing stroke.
Ethan rolled. The axe hit dirt where his chest had been and stuck. The draugr wrenched at it—one second, maybe two—and Ethan used both to scramble backward on hands and knees, blood painting the snow behind him, arm screaming.
This isn't a game. This isn't a game. This isn't—
The axe came free. The draugr turned.
Something hit it from the side like a freight train made of pale skin and divine fury. Kratos's fist connected with the draugr's skull and the skull ceased to exist—fragments of bone and green fire scattering into the cold air. The body collapsed. Kratos straightened, Leviathan Axe in one hand, the draugr's own weapon in the other. He looked down at it, unimpressed, and tossed it aside.
Then he looked at Ethan.
Grey eyes. Cold. Not angry—worse than angry. Calculating. Assessing the threat level of a strange man who'd appeared in the middle of a draugr ambush covered in blood, wearing rough clothes, carrying no weapons, fifty meters behind them in a forest where no one had reason to be.
"You followed us from the cabin."
Not a question. A statement delivered in a voice so deep it resonated in the chest cavity. Kratos didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to. The words carried the weight of a man who had killed the entire Greek pantheon and would not be inconvenienced by adding one more body to the count.
Ethan's mouth opened. Nothing came out.
An arrow appeared in his peripheral vision—Atreus, ten meters to the left, bow drawn, string at his cheek. The boy's face was taut with fear and determination in roughly equal measure. He didn't know where to aim. At Ethan, who was bleeding and on the ground? At the remaining draugr still pulling themselves free of the earth behind them? His eyes flickered between threats.
"I—" Ethan's voice cracked. Swallowed. Tried again. The deeper vocal cords of this borrowed throat caught and held. "I was sheltering. Nearby. When your— when the cabin was attacked, the noise—"
"You followed us for two hours."
Damn. Of course Kratos had known. Of course he'd tracked Ethan's footsteps paralleling theirs through the snow. The God of War hadn't survived centuries by being unobservant.
Ethan changed tactics. Lying about the following was pointless. "Yes. I followed. Because the Wildwoods are full of—" He gestured at the draugr still twitching in the burial grounds. "—these things, and I can't fight them. Obviously."
Kratos's expression didn't change. The axe hadn't moved from ready position. Behind them, something growled from a fresh cairn—more coming, drawn by the noise.
"I know the terrain," Ethan said. The words came faster now, the academic in him finding the argument even as the rest of him was busy bleeding. "The paths through these woods. Where the water is safe to drink and where it isn't. Where the ground holds and where it gives way." All lies. Or rather, all truths that came from a PlayStation 4 and sixty hours of exploration, not from any real experience, but Kratos didn't need to know that. "I can't fight. But I can be useful."
Silence.
The silence of Kratos was a physical force. It pressed against Ethan's chest, squeezed his lungs, made the bleeding arm fade to background noise. This was a man who communicated in silences the way other people communicated in paragraphs. Every second of quiet was a calculation—threat assessment, resource evaluation, moral calculus.
Behind them, three more draugr clawed their way free. The green fire of their eyes cast a sickly glow across the burial stones.
"Boy," Kratos said, without turning. "Behind me."
Atreus lowered the bow from Ethan's direction and moved to Kratos's left, repositioning to cover the new threats. Good discipline. Better than a kid that age should have, but then, Atreus had been trained by a god who didn't believe in gentle teaching methods.
Kratos turned his back on Ethan—a deliberate choice, the kind of choice that said you are not a threat more loudly than any words—and walked toward the emerging draugr with his axe dragging frost lines across the ground.
"Keep up," he said over his shoulder. "Or be left behind."
Something unwound in Ethan's chest. Not relief—relief was too clean a word for the messy, grateful collapse of tension that buckled his knees for half a second before he forced them straight. He pressed his good hand against the gash on his forearm. The bleeding had slowed but not stopped. It would need cleaning. Binding. Probably stitches, if anyone in the mythological Norse apocalypse carried a needle and thread.
Kratos hit the first new draugr so hard its torso separated from its legs. The Leviathan Axe sang in the cold air—a high, clean note of frost-forged steel meeting dead flesh. Atreus put an arrow through the second one's eye socket, a clean shot that wouldn't have been possible five minutes ago when his hands were shaking. The boy was adapting. Already hardening.
Ethan moved. Not into the fight—he wasn't suicidal, just desperate—but through the gap Kratos had carved, skirting the edge of the burial grounds where the cairns gave way to unbroken forest. A draugr dagger lay half-buried in the churned earth near one of the destroyed corpses. Short, corroded, ugly—but solid. His fingers closed around the grip and the weight of it was absurd, laughable, like arming himself with a letter opener against a world of gods and giants.
Better than nothing.
By the time Kratos finished, six more draugr lay in pieces across the burial grounds. Atreus was breathing hard, a thin scratch across his cheek where a flailing arm had caught him. The boy's eyes found Ethan first.
"Are you okay?" Quiet. Almost a whisper.
The question landed with the force of something much larger. Three words. The first three words anyone in this world had directed at Ethan that weren't a threat or a demand.
"Yeah." The dagger sat in his grip, unfamiliar and necessary. Blood still seeped from the forearm cut, warm against cold skin. "Yeah, I'm fine."
Atreus didn't look convinced, but he didn't push. Kratos had already turned north, moving into the treeline without waiting to see if either of them followed. The Spartan set a pace that ate distance—long strides through deepening snow, axe resting against his shoulder, never breaking rhythm, never checking behind him.
Ethan followed. Atreus fell in beside him after a few steps, matching stride, bow held at the ready. The boy kept stealing sideways glances—curious, uncertain, not yet hostile. Give him time. Give him a god-revelation and a dead brother and a few years of watching his father suppress centuries of rage, and that curiosity would sharpen into something harder.
But not yet. Right now, Atreus was a kid who'd asked a stranger if he was okay.
The Wildwoods thickened around them. Snow gave way to frost-hardened earth as they climbed a gentle rise, the burial grounds falling behind. Kratos's pace didn't slacken. The axe on his shoulder caught the last weak light of the afternoon and threw it back in pale blue sparks. Ahead, the forest canopy closed to a tunnel of dark branches, and on the trunks—
Runes.
Carved deep into the bark. Protective wards, the same style as the ones near the cabin but older, more complex. Interlocking lines that spiraled into patterns Ethan shouldn't have been able to read but could, because three hours ago a dead woman's memory had poured the knowledge into his skull through a nosebleed and a seizure.
These runes were Faye's.
Not the wards near the cabin—those were perimeter guards, simple keep-away sigils. These were different. Deeper magic. Way-markers that said this path is safe in a language the forest itself obeyed. The trees grew straighter here. The snow lay thinner. Even the wind dropped to a whisper, as though the air remembered a woman who'd asked it to be gentle.
Kratos walked through the wards without pausing. Maybe he recognized them. Maybe he didn't care. But Ethan's fingers traced the nearest rune as he passed, and the carved groove was warm against his skin—blood-warm, life-warm, impossible in a forest this cold.
She'd built roads through the wilderness. Hidden paths that only her bloodline could fully appreciate. And now a stranger wearing a body laced with faint Giant heritage was walking those paths with her husband and her son, carrying a stolen dagger and a head full of prophecy, pretending to be nothing.
The forest darkened. Kratos forged ahead without a backward glance—but the pace held steady, the gap between them constant. Not pulling away. Not slowing down.
An uneasy allowance. The thinnest possible thread of tolerance stretched between a god and a liar.
Ethan gripped the dagger tighter and kept walking.
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