The air became a map of trails, pure instinct took over and like Tanjiro in demon slayer they became trails leading off to some places. Hundreds of different smells swirled around but one, one mattered above the rest.
Every inhalation was data loading through his mind and senses , a chaotic symphony of chemical signatures that painted a picture of the world far more vivid than anything his eyes could see. There was the sharp, crystalline scent of frozen pine; the ancient, dusty smell of granite; the wet, alkaline tang of a hidden mountain spring.
But cutting through it all—the toxic and bright jagged line in his mind—was the scent.
It hit like a lightning strike. It was ozone and sulfur, mixed with a deep, heavy musk that smelled like a man who had been sweating out a fever for a thousand years. It was the scent of the thing that had killed the people in Silvercreek. It was the scent of the thing that had crushed a little girl's life and left her stuffed bear in the blood.
Kill it.
It wasn't a thought, he didn't think it. He felt it It was the animal inside. It lived in the base of his skull, a coiled spring of fur and teeth that had been screaming for release since he'd woken up in the snow. Something primitive in nature like a survival mechanism.
Logan leaned forward, his knuckles brushing the frozen ground. His fingers, cold and warm dug into the permafrost. His muscles—his very body that only now was he beginning to understand—bunched and coiled like steel cables.
He moved.
His figure exploding in motion. He moved like a shadow cast by a hunter. He was a low-slung blur of yellow and brown, weaving between the skeletal trees with a fluid, terrifying grace. Each footfall was silent, the weight of the metal on his bones compensated for by the sheer, raw power of his legs.
The wind whipped against his face, stinging his eyes, but he didn't blink. He couldn't. He was locked on. The trail was hot. It was a pulsating, rhythmic heat in his nostrils.
Left. Over the fallen cedar. Right. Through the brambles.
He didn't feel the thorns tearing at his skin. He didn't feel the cold biting at his ears. His healing factor kept him warm like a furnace, burning through the raw all that he'd consumed, converting every calorie into the energy of the hunt.
He was a force of nature. He crashed through the brush, his claws occasionally sliding out—Snikt—to clear a path through frozen vines. He was moving uphill, toward the high, jagged peaks where the air grew thin and the snow was as hard as iron.
The environment began to change.
He found the first sign of the Beast's passage outside the town. It was a massive pine, a tree that had stood for a century, snapped in half like a toothpick. It wasn't chopped. It hadn't fallen. It had been pushed aside by something that didn't even notice its existence.
Logan slowed down as he approached the trunk. He sniffed the jagged wood.
Toxic.
It was stronger here. It made the back of his throat itch. It tasted like green fire. He looked at the ground and saw another footprint—a crater in the permafrost, three feet across.
Big. Angry. Heavy.
Logan's instincts were screaming at him to turn back. Every survival instinct in his body was firing red alerts. Whatever slaughtered those people, whatever moved through here wasn't normal, nor was it an animal. Go back, ignore it, leave it alone. His body was driven purely by instinct and that instinct was telling him to run.
But then, he reached into his pocket. He felt the soft, matted fur of the stuffed bear he'd taken from Silvercreek. He felt the cold, hard memory of the little girl in the yellow parka.
The fear in his gut was instantly incinerated by a white-hot Rage.
The Rage Function in his mind flickered. [Berserk Rage: Ready].
"Not yet," he whispered to the beast inside. "We find him first. Then we tear him apart."
He continued the climb. The trail led him into a narrow, winding pass—a "Devil's Throat" between two towering cliffs of black granite. The sun was dipping below the horizon now, casting the world into a deep, bloody orange.
The silence here was scary. No birds. No wind. Even the snow seemed to fall quietly, as if afraid to make a sound.
Logan stopped.
He didn't see anything. He didn't hear anything. But his Mutation sent a jolt of pure electricity down his spine.
He looked at a nearby cliff wall.
There was a smear of blood on the rock. It was high up—nearly ten feet off the ground. It was dark, almost black in the twilight. Logan approached it, his nostrils flaring.
It wasn't human blood. It was... something else. It was hot. Even in the freezing air, the smear was steaming.
He touched it.
The moment his finger made contact with the liquid, his System went into a frenzy.
[WARNING: TRACE AMOUNTS OF HIGH-DENSITY RADIATED FLUID DETECTED]
[ANALYZING...]
[CONCLUSION: HIGHLY TOXIC.]
Logan wiped the blood on his suit. He looked up the pass. The scent was no longer a trail. He was standing in the middle of it. The thing was close. It was somewhere in these rocks, huddling in the dark, nursing its wounds and its anger.
He felt a flicker of something strange in the scent. Amidst the gamma and the musk and the blood, there was a new note.
Salt.
Tears.
With the X-men:
The Blackbird landed on the outskirts of the town like a dying bird, the flames of its engines dimming as Storm slowly settled the craft in the deep, bloody slush of the main road.
The ramp lowered with a hiss of hydraulics.
Scott Summers was the first out. He stepped onto the pavement, his boots sinking into the crimson snow. He adjusted his visor, his hand shaking slightly.
"Oh... God," Kitty Pryde's voice came from behind him. She phased through the side of the jet, her feet touching the ground, and immediately covered her mouth with her hand. "Professor... what happened here?"
Storm walked out, her white hair whipping in the wind. She looked at the collapsed buildings, the crumpled cars, and the absolute silence that hung over the valley. There were no birds. No wind. Just the smell of death.
"Something, or someone did this?" Storm whispered, her eyes glowing a faint, electric white.
Rogue stepped off the ramp last. She didn't look at the buildings. She looked at the ground. She saw the footprints—the massive, crater-like indentations that led from the center of the town toward the mountains.
"Logan was here," she said. Her voice was heated and a little shaky, the sight infront of her was horrific but she powered through.
"How do you know?" Scott asked, walking over to her.
Rogue knelt down. She picked up a small, yellow scrap of cloth snagged on a piece of jagged rebar. "I know because this is where he stopped. Look it's a piece of his suit, and the footsteps lead to the mountains."
Jean Grey walked to the edge of the fountain fighting not to look at the little girl before her. She was pale, her hands pressed to her temples. "I can feel them too, Rogue. The echoes. The people who were here... they were so afraid, and there was something else...It was so angry. Everything happened so fast."
Suddenly, Jean gasped, her knees buckling. Scott caught her before she hit the ground.
"Jean! What is it?"
"A spike!" she cried, her eyes wide with terror. "A powerful one... it's miles away, deep in the mountains. It's like a sun exploding on the psychic plane. And... and Logan is close to it."
"He's hunting it," Kurt said, BAMPFing onto the top of an overturned bus. "He's chasing the monster."
"We have to go," Rogue said, her eyes fixed on the peaks. "If that thing did this to a whole town... Logan doesn't stand a chance."
"We can't fly the Blackbird into those narrow passes," Storm said, her voice Tight. "The clouds are too thick up there we will lose sight. We have to go on foot."
"Then let's go," Scott barked, his leadership finally overriding his shock. "Kitty, Kurt, Evan stay with the jet. If that thing doubles back, you go straight back to the academy. Storm, Jean, Rogue... with me. We follow the trail."