The icy winds rushed past his face, the fog of the snow storm had covered alot of the area around him and he couldn't see but one main problem hadn't changed. He was still falling.
"GRAAAAAH!"
Logan slammed into a jutting rock outcropping halfway down the chasm. The impact was sickening. His organs crushed instantly, the bone-on-metal crunch echoing in the narrow pass. He didn't stop. He continued down, bouncing off the frozen granite like a ragdoll, his suit tearing, his blood painting the white snow a brilliant, tragic crimson.
Finally, he hit the bottom.
BOOM!CRACK-SPLASH!
It wasn't a soft landing. He crashed through a layer of thick ice into a freezing blood chilling river that snaked through the base of the canyon. The water was so cold it felt like being stabbed by a million knives.
He sank. The weight of the adamantium—its "fixed" weight—pulled him down like an anchor. And no matter how much he moved his arms to swim to the surface the cold seeping through his skin made him feel like he weighed a ton.
Darkness.
His lungs screamed for air. His vision began to fade. Death, would he really die here, alone and frozen like Captain America.
No! He thought, his consciousness slipping. Not like this. Not this time.
Using the last of his strength, Logan slammed his claws into the underwater rock wall. Snikt. The metal sparked against the stone as it burried its way through the rocky surface. He dragged himself, inch by agonizing inch, toward the bank of the river. Every movement was a battle against the "Bone Coating" that made him too heavy for the world.
He breached the surface, and used his claws to cut a circle around the thick ice above and when it sank he used the last of his strength to launch himself to the surface. Gasping, coughing up frozen water and blood he took deep breaths that hurt like hell but was better than the alternative. He dragged his body onto the jagged ice of the bank, his fingers digging furrows into the frozen earth, blue became purple and slowly blood came out cuts on his fingers.
He lay there, face-down. His regeneration was working over time, but with the cold to push it to its limit, he had to feel every single bone knitting back together. It was a slow, agonizing crawl back to life.
The blizzard roared above him, but down here, in the bowels of the mountain, it was quiet.
"Rogue..." he wheezed.
He reached into his pocket. His hand came back with the broken remains of the communicator. It had been crushed during the fall. He was cut off. No system. No X-Men. No way out.
Exhaustion had caught up, tired...So tired. He closed his eyes just for a moment, just...for...a little...while...
Meanwhile on the blackbird:
The inside of the jet was made up of silence, broken only by Rogue's sobbing while Kitty hugged her wrapped in a blanket.
Storm sat in the pilot's seat, her hands white-knuckled on the controls. She was pushing the engines to their limit, trying to keep the craft level as the blizzard attempted to swat them out of the sky. Tears tracked through her cheeks.
In the back, Jean was on her knees, her hands pressed to her temples. Her eyes were wide, staring at nothing.
"Jean?" Scott's voice was weak. He was sitting up, his head bandaged, his glasses cracked. Evan and Kurt had set him near the ac where the heater was on full blast. "What's going on? Where am I?"
Jean didn't answer. A single drop of blood ran from her nose.
"I can't feel him," she whispered. Her voice was hollow, devoid of hope. "The moment the bridge broke... it was like a candle being blown out. There's nothing, Scott. Just... static."
Rogue let out a choked cry, clutching the silver communicator Logan had given her. It was silent.
"Who?...What happened?" Scott asked, trying to stand, but Kurt held him down.
"Lie down, mein fruend. You're still weak!" Kurt yelled, his own yellow eyes shimmering with tears.
Charles looked at the team, his face an expression of grief but he couldn't bring himself to risk the entire team to save one man. Not while Scott and Rogue both needed medical attention. "We must keep going, the wind will tear the wings off. Rest up for now Scott, i'll tell you everything once you've healed."
"I'm fine professor!" Scott argued, though his voice lacked any strength at all." No Scott, you aren't now as your teacher and leader I'm ordering you to rest." Charles looked at the boy sternly and Scott couldn't find it in himself to argue so he lied back down and closed his eyes quickly fading into sleep.
Jean finally looked up, her expression haunted. "I was right there...I could have reached him."
Rogue looked at the communicator in her hand. She thought of the way Logan had looked at her—the warmth, the "See ya later, kid." His words echoed through her mind, and though she felt weak the fire in her couldn't have burned brighter.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her glove, her expression hardening with conviction. Tears wouldn't bring him back, crying wouldn't help anyone.
"He ain't dead," Rogue said to herself and to Kitty, her voice trembling but firm. "He's too stubborn to die. We'll see him again, I know it."
Several hours later:
Humid, all he could feel was the heavy warmth of a summer evening in Osaka. The smell of pine needles was overtaken by the delicate, intoxicating scent of cherry blossoms and rain-slicked stone.
Liam felt it wrap around him, completeness. It was a sensation he had never truly known in his old life. It was as if a jagged hole in his soul had been filled with liquid gold.
He felt the calloused texture of his own hand—Logan's hand—wrapped around a smaller, softer one. He looked down and saw her. Yuriko.
She was breathtaking. Her dark hair was caught in the breeze, strands of it brushing against her high cheekbones. Her eyes were deep, liquid pools of amber and obsidian, looking at him with a tenderness that made Logan's heart—his heart—thud against his ribs like a trapped bird.
"You are thinking too much again, Logan," she whispered, her voice a melody that vibrated through his skin.
He felt himself lean in. He felt the heat radiating from her body, the softness of her silk kimono under his palms. When he kissed her, it wasn't just a physical act; it was an anchor. Liam felt the sheer, unadulterated love Logan had carried—a love so profound it felt like there was only Yuriko. No one else just Yuriko
Logan was standing in a room of shadows and steam. In front of him stood a man—Kenji Oyama. Lord Dark Wind. Yuriko's father. The man whose twisted genius had birthed the process that would eventually bond metal to Logan's bones.
He was a monster. He was a visionary. He was Yuriko's father.
No, please, don't make me do this, Liam thought, his mind screaming against the inevitable tide of Logan's history.
But the memory marched on. He felt the rage—the feral, uncontrollable "Berserk" heat—bubbling up in his gut. He saw the elder Oyama's face, cold and arrogant, holding a blade that shimmered with a cruel light. His claws erupted—not silver, but raw, jagged bone.
Snikt.
Yuriko stood there.
The love that had filled the room moments ago was replaced by a hate so cold it froze the blood in Logan's veins. He saw the betrayal shatter her face, turning her beauty into a mask of pure, jagged agony.
"Murderer," she hissed.
"I HATE YOU!!"
AWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
A howl echoed around his body, loud and intense and enough to wake the man up from a sleep that felt like death. Logan groaned, the sound catching in his throat that felt like it had been scraped raw with sandpaper. He was face-down in a drift of snow so deep it threatened to swallow him whole. His eyelashes were matted with ice, stitching his lids shut.
Cold, so cold his brain whispered. If you stay still, you'll be the newest captain popsicle.
He tried to push himself up, but the moment he shifted his weight to his left side, agony tore through him.
Like a white-hot, jagged bolt of lightning shot from his shoulder, screaming down his spine and exploding in the back of his skull. Logan collapsed back into the snow, his vision whiting out. His breath came in shallow, panicked hitches. Through the fog of pain, he realized his left arm was lying at an angle that shouldn't be possible. The arm had been shoved out of the socket, twisted behind his torso by the sheer force of the fall. He hadn't noticed it before, not with the adrenaline pushing him to survive drowning in ice water.
"Son of a..." he wheezed, the words puffing out in a weak cloud of steam.
He didn't know how long he'd been down. Hours? Minutes? The blizzard that had been howling when he fell had settled into a deathly, eerie calm. The sky above was a bruised, twilight purple, casting long, skeletal shadows across the jagged canyon floor. He was alone, surrounded by the towering, walls of the northern mountains.
He couldn't wait for his healing factor to pop it back in. Not with the adamantium. The "Fixed" weight of the metal on his bones meant that if it healed wrong, he'd have to break it again just to fix it.
He found a solid, frost-slicked rock jutting out from the snowbank. He dragged his body toward it, his right hand clawing into the ice, his left arm dragging behind him like a dead weight. Every inch was a battle against the darkness creeping at the edges of his vision.
He braced his back against a secondary boulder, positioned his dislocated shoulder against the jagged edge of the rock, and took a breath that tasted like iron and frost.
"Okay, Logan," he whispered to the man inside the animal. "Don't worry, Wolverine has been through alot worse and made it out. Just... do it. Be a man!"
He didn't count. He just surged forward and twisted with a violent, desperate wrench of his hips.
CRACK-THUD.
The sound of bone and metal sliding back into the socket was sickeningly loud in the stillness.
"GAH-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!"
The scream tore from his lungs, a raw, jagged sound that ripped through the quiet of the mountains. It hit the canyon walls and bounced back, a chorus of agony that seemed to mock him. AAAAAAAAHHH... aaaahhh... ahhh... The sound echoed for miles, probably startling every living thing in a five-mile radius.
Logan slumped against the rock, his head lolling back. His vision was swimming with sparks. He could feel the healing factor finally igniting—a dull, itchy heat beginning to radiate from the joint as the shredded ligaments began to knit back together. Tears prickled his eyes, freezing instantly on his cheeks.
He sat there for a long time, just breathing, waiting for the world to stop spinning. He felt hollow. The "System" that had been his constant, buzzing companion since he'd woken up in this body was... silent. There were no prompts. No level-up sounds. Just the wind.
"System?" he rasped.
A flicker. A glitch. Suddenly, his retinas were flooded with a chaotic burst of red and blue light.
[SYSTEM RECALIBRATING... PLEASE WAIT...] [CRITICAL FAILURE IN LEGACY CODE DETECTED] [REFORMATTING USER INTERFACE... STATUS: INDEFINITE]
Logan's eyes widened. "Indefinite? You gotta be kidding me. I'm in a ditch and you're doing a Windows update!!?"
But then, the interface shifted. It didn't look like the clunky, basic RPG menu from before. It was sleek, dark, and far more complex. It looked like a high-end skill tree from a Triple-A game—the kind Liam used to spend hours theory-crafting.
"What the...?"
He focused his mind, and the tree expanded. It was divided into three primary roots, with boxes leading off into a misty, locked void.
At the base were three core boxes:
Mutant Physique (Level 2): This was his body. It was every single one of his physical abilities put into one beautiful box, from strength, to intelligence. At Level 2, he was like a mix of super soldier serum and stand Wolverine— surpassing Steve Rogers from his memories back in the world war.
Bone Coating (MAX): This box was different. It glowed with a sickly, pulsating purple light. Beside it was a small icon of a lock. Logan looked at it and felt a sarcastic laugh bubble up. This was the Adamantium. It was a 'Fixed Stat.' He couldn't upgrade it, and he couldn't remove it. It was the ultimate cheat code and the ultimate debuff. It made him indestructible, but it also made him heavy, slow, and poisoned his blood. It was like wearing a suit of armor made of gold—beautiful, lethal, and a massive pain in the ass to walk in.What made it worse was that there will skill branches around it meaning the adamantium was limiting his growth and potential which when you think about it, sucked so hard considering all the downsides of having that metal in his body.
Mutation (Level 2): The core of his X-Gene. This was the source of his heightened senses and his primary survival tool. The skill that housed his claws, his regeneration, senses. Everything that made Logan, the Wolverine.
Directly in front of the Mutation box was a glowing blue node: Passive Adaptive Regeneration. "Okay, okay, I see you," Liam muttered, his old gamer brain taking over for a second, pushing the pain into the background. "It's a skill tree. I can see the paths now. This is sick."
He looked at the box next to Regeneration. It was dim, barely visible behind the mist. [Hot Claws].
"Wait, I can get the fire claws? Seriously?" He felt a jolt of genuine excitement. This was one of Wolverines best powers, which he'd read about in comics. He looked at the cost: 2 Skill Points.
He quickly looked toward the corner of his vision where his saved points usually sat.
[Stat Points: 0]: Stat points will allow user to purchase unlocked and level up skills.To acquire stat points quests will need to be completed.
His heart sank. "Zero? Hey! I'm sure I had a few saved up! Where'd they go?"
[NOTICE: RECALIBRATION WIPED UNSPENT CURRENCY TO RESOLVE DATA CORRUPTION.]
"You son of a bitch!" Logan barked at the empty air. "That's like losing a save file from hours of gaming! Do you have any idea how hard I worked for those!!!!!?"
The system didn't answer. It just sat there, cold and indifferent.
Logan sighed, rubbing his face with his good hand. He looked deeper into the tree. Beneath the main roots were two sub-functions that made his pulse quicken.
[RAGE FUNCTION]: Equipped: Berserk Rage. This was his 'Limit Break.' It gave him a massive boost to speed, strength, and regen, and a 50% wall against telepaths like Charles or Jean. But the cost was his mind. It was the 'Game Over' for Liam and the 'Start' for the Animal. He understood now—this wasn't just a mood. It was a toggle.
[TEMPLATE]: Equipped: Gabriel Van Helsing (Shard 4/10). This was the real mystery. He only had four shards. He had the knowledge of monsters and the werewolf transformation, but the 'Right Hand of God' stuff—the angelic power—was locked behind the other six shards. It was a long-term quest line.
"So it's not just a survival sim anymore," Logan whispered, the realization hitting him. "Well...This makes all my worrying seem stupid, *sigh* and to think I thought the world was ending or that i'd die haha.
He stood up, his legs shaking, but the "passive adaptive regeneration" was doing its job. He felt stronger than he had ten minutes ago and the piercing cold in his veigns was beggining to fade. He retracted his claws
Snikt!
Snikt!
And looked toward the north. He didn't have a GPS, but his "Mutation" was giving him a direction. The scent of pine, the pull of the magnetic poles against the adamantium in his skull... he knew where home was.
"Alright," he said, his voice regaining its iron edge. "Let's try to make it back before dinner."
The Xavier Institute :
In the kitchen, the smell of breakfast had long since been replaced by the sterile scent of floor wax.
Jean Grey sat at the long oak table, her head buried in her hands. Her red hair was a messy tangle, and her eyes were bloodshot. For the last several hours, she had been doing nothing but screaming into the astral plane.
Logan? Logan, please!
There was nothing. Just the vast, empty silence of the mountains. Every time she reached out, she was met with a wall of static—the lingering psychic resonance of the blizzard and the terrifying, cold vacuum where Logan's mind used to be.
"Jean... you need to eat something."
She looked up. Evan Daniels was standing there, holding a glass of water. The usually cocky skater looked diminished, his shoulders slumped. He walked over and sat beside her, sliding the water toward her.
"I can't feel him, Evan," Jean whispered, her voice cracking. "I was right there. I was looking right at him. I could have... I could have caught him."
"You tried your best, Jean," Evan said firmly, though his own voice was thick with emotion. "And Auntie Ro was fighting a hurricane. If we'd stayed any longer, we'd all be at the bottom of that canyon."
"He threw me," Rogue's voice came from the doorway.
She was leaning against the frame, still wearing her boots, her gloves clutched so tightly in her hands that the leather was stretching. Her face was a mask of cold determination.
"If ya'll really want to help, then let's go back ." She looked at Jean, her green eyes flashing.
Jean: " But the professor".
Rogue:" Wasn't out there on the bridge, Logan was. And if you think I'm just gonna sit here and accept that he's gone, you don't know me, and you didn't know him."
"Rogue, the Professor says—" Jean started.
"I don't care what the Professor says!" Rogue shouted, her voice echoing through the rafters. "He's a telepath, not a god! He can't feel Logan? Fine! Maybe Logan doesn't want to be felt! Maybe he's too busy survivin'! And if ya truly feel so bad, then let's go bring him back !!"
Kurt Wagner appeared in a burst of purple smoke next to Rogue, his tail twitching nervously. "Rogue is right, Jean. We all know how strong Logan is. I don't believe for a second that he's truly gone, he is the Wolverine."
"I'm in too," Kitty Pryde said, phasing through the wall behind them. Her eyes were puffy from crying. "If one of us was like out there, Wolvie wouldn't hesitate for a second to go after us.So we like shouldn't hesitate to do the same for him!"
Meanwhile upstairs, in the Professor's study, the atmosphere was even heavier.
Charles Xavier sat behind his desk, his fingers pressed so hard against his temples that his knuckles were white. Opposite him, Scott Summers was pacing around the room irritated .
"We should be out there, Professor," Scott said, his voice tight with a mixture of grief and frustration. "The blizzard has cleared. We can take the Blackbird back. We can run a thermal scan of the canyon floor. We owe it to him"
"Scott, I have already scanned the area from here," Charles said softly, his voice sounding older than Scott had ever heard it. "The psychic feedback from the mountain is... blank. There is no life sign that matches Logan's signature."
"Because he's shielded!" Scott argued, stopping in his tracks. "You said it yourself, the blizzard interfered with your power, Professor! You saw it! Maybe his mind is just... submerged. We can't just leave him there lost in the snow!"
"I am not saying we abandon him, Scott," Charles said, looking up. There was a profound sadness in his eyes. "But I have to think of the students. Mystique is still out there. And we have no idea what threats may still lurk around there. If I send our only transport and the team back into those mountains, then I can't be assured of everyones safety."
"Logan is an X-men!" Scott yelled. He immediately looked ashamed of his outburst, taking a breath and adjusting his glasses. "I'm sorry, Professor. But he saved my life. He threw me into that jet like I was a ragdoll. I owe him."
"We all do, Scott," a new voice said.
Ororo walked into the room. She had changed into a simple dark robe, but the air around her was still charged with electricity. Her eyes were clear, but there was a storm raging behind them.
"The children are distraught, Charles," she said, her voice steady." If we do not act now , we will lose more than just Logan. We lose their trust."
Charles looked from Ororo to Scott, then back to the empty space on his desk. He sighed, a long, weary sound. "Very well. Scott, prep the Blackbird for a dawn departure. Ororo, you will lead the search. But we must be prepared... for whatever we may find up there."
Scott didn't wait. He nodded once and sprinted out of the room.
The Mountains:
Tired, hungry, tired, thirsty. Logan had been walking for nearly 3 hours. His "regeneration" was the only thing keeping his heart beating. He had eaten raw fish from a frozen stream, safe not at all but that's what we heal for and a handful of bitter berries that his instincts told him weren't poisonous. And for thirst he had to settle for the snow, yep that's right the snow that lay all around him to keep hydrated but the further he walked the less snow and more dirt he saw.
The system was still "Recalibrating," which meant he had no map not that there was one to begin with and he had no sense of how much HP he had left if he still even had a HP bar to speak of. He just knew he was tired. Every step felt like lifting a mountain. The adamantium—his "Bone Coating"—was a constant, throbbing weight.
What is a Wolverine without his metal? he thought, a jagged, delirious laugh escaping his lips as he climbed a steep ridge. A lot faster, probably. And a lot less likely to sink in the mud...Stronger too.
He reached the top of a snow-covered rise and stopped.
The wind had something in it.
Usually, the mountain air was clean—pine, ice, and old stone. But not right now.
The scent hit him like a slap to the senses. It was thick, metallic, and sweet.
Blood.
Lots of it.
Logan's eyes narrowed, his pupils contracting into pinpricks. The soldier in him stood up, he could feel it inside, the signs of a kill and he felt a cold pit of dread open in his stomach.
He followed the scent, cresting the final ridge.There, there it was.
Nestled in a small valley below was a town. It was a picturesque mountain village—the kind you'd see on a postcard north of New York. Wooden chalets, a small church with a steeple, and a main street that should have been bustling with tourists and locals.
But there were no lights. No smoke from the chimneys. Only destruction
Logan descended the slope, his claws sliding out with a soft shring. As he reached the outskirts, the silence was deafening. His foot stepped over something burried beneath rocks, kicking the stones away he found a sign:
WELCOME TO SILVERCREEK.
He slowly made his way onto the main street ready for anything, and the horror revealed itself.
The town was gone and all that remained was a graveyard or rubble and death.
//Gore warning//
Windows were shattered, from bodies being thrown through them, some bodies had glass lodged around their limbs and skills while others were split in half, their guts hanging on the shards of glass that still remained on the window frame and lower limbs littered the floor beneath some. The snow on the street wasn't white anymore. It was a dark, frozen crimson, slushy mixed with crushed guts and the remains of a small population.
Logan walked past an overturned car. Its top half flattened so badly that the body remaining inside look like a watermelon smashed with a sledgehammer, blood and organs splawed over the street outside.
He kept walking, his boots crunching on the bloody ice. He felt a surge of nausea.What could have done this ? why ? For what reason ? This... this was mindless. Was there even a purpose for all the death for all this chaos? Did the people of this town offend someone to the point where said someone thought it nessacery to leave nothing left. Who could be so cruel as to condem dozens of people to their deaths.
The more he walked, the more he dreaded what he saw, people torn apart, limbs all over the streets, organs and guts crushed against the grounds, buildings now just piles of concrete and brick, but then, he saw it.
In the center of the town square, near a frozen fountain, lay a small shape.
Logan approached, his breath hitching.
It was a little girl. She couldn't have been more than six. She was wearing a bright yellow parka, now stained a deep, muddy brown. Her eyes were open, staring at the grey sky with a vacant, look. He could tell from the way she laid against the fountain, her back had been destroyed, and from the bloodstain over her shirt, her organs has been pulverised.
Lying just a few inches from her cold hand was a stuffed bear. Its one button eye caught the dim light, staring back at Logan.
Logan knelt beside her. He didn't know why. He reached out, his gloved hand trembling as he gently closed her eyes and laid her down gently on her back. Grabbing her toy he wrapped her arms around it and gently brushed the hair out of her face, a tear in his eyes.
"I'm sorry, kid," he whispered.
He stood up, his gaze falling to the ground beside the body.
In the frozen red slush was a footprint.
It wasn't human. It wasn't a wolf. It was massive—nearly three feet long—gouged into the very asphalt beneath the snow.
Logan looked up. The scent of the killer was still here. It was a musky, toxic smell, mixed with the stench of rot and something... human?
A low growl started in his chest. Anger burned in his veigns, Liam had spent his entire life being taught that killing was wrong, that it was bad. But Logan had spent his entire life knowing and doing the opposite, he killed like he breathed, any threat, any enemy that threatened him, that took from him he killed. And now, now that he lived through some of those memories, now that he truly felt the way Logan felt, Liams resistance to the idea of taking a life had dimmed, he would kill the one who did this, he would kill the monster that ended all these lives. The System suddenly flickered in his vision, a single, new notification piercing the "Recalibration" fog.
[NEW QUEST DETECTED: WOLVERINE VS ??? ] [OBJECTIVE: TRACK THE BUTCHER OF SILVERCREEK] [REWARD: +1 GABRIEL VAN HELSING SHARD (4/10), +1 STAT POINT]
Logan looked at the footprint, then at the dead girl, then at the dark, looming forest that surrounded the town.
The System was broken, recalibrating and still giving out quests. He was freezing, starving, and alone. But he was angry, vengeful and looking for blood.
And as he looked at that stuffed bear, the "Liam" part of him died a little bit more.
"I don't know who you are, I don't know what you are...But you just pissed off the wrong guy Bub!" Logan growled into the dark.
SNIKT!!!
He turned and began to run.
Toward the scent.