Inhale. Ozone. Burnt hair. Frozen copper.
Exhale. The wet, hot scent of his own healing factor working a double shift.
The Animal was in the driver's seat now. It didn't care about the cold. It didn't care about the heavy, aching weight of the metal fused to its bones. It only cared about the Scent.
The scent was a neon-green jagged line that trailed further into the jagged mountains. It was thick. It was heavy. It smelled toxic and human, both right and wrong at the same time. It was the smell of the thing that had turned Silvercreek into a slaughterhouse.
Closer
The Animal whispered, its voice a guttural vibration in the back of Logan's skull. The air is warm here. The air is wrong.
Logan skidded to a halt on a ledge that overlooked a vast, now half frozen valley dirt, and green more visible than before. His knuckles, raw and bleeding from the climb, brushed the frost-slicked granite. He sat back on his haunches, his chest heaving, steam billowing from his nostrils like an exhaust pipe.
"I know you're out there," he rasped. His voice was raspier and more breathy, changed by the wind and the scream he'd let out when he'd popped his shoulder back in. "Talk to me. Tell me I'm not just chasin' a ghost."
With the X-men:
The group continued making their way through the icy mountains, quiet but focused at least that's how they were before.
Jean Grey walked behind cyclops with her eyes closed, her fingers pressed so hard against her temples that her knuckles were white. Her red hair was a messy halo, and her face was gaunt, the shadows under her eyes looking like bruises.
Logan? Logan, talk to me. Give me something... a spark, a smell, a growl... anything.
"Jean, stop," Scott said, his voice soft but firm. He was standing behind her, his hand resting on her shoulder. "You've been at it for hours. If he's out there, he's shielded by the mountain's interference. You're going to burn yourself out."
"I can't just leave him, Scott!" Jean snapped, her eyes flying open. They were bloodshot and filled with a raw, jagged guilt. "I saw him fall. I felt the moment his mind went dark. He was protecting Rogue. He was protecting all of us. And I just... I watched him disappear."
In the back of the group, Rogue was leaning against the cold rough edge of a tree as the group came to a stop. Her gloves were off, tucked into her belt, her bare hands shoved deep into her pockets as if she were afraid they might reach out and steal the life from someone by accident.
"He ain't dead," Rogue said. Her voice was flat, still devoid of its usual Southern warmth. 'He told me 'he'll see me later'. He wanted me to keep goin'. A man doesn't say that if he's plannin' on dyin'."
"Rogue is right," Storm whispered from the seat opposite her. Storm was hugging her herself, trying to keep warm with her arms around herself. "Logan is... strong, if anyone could survive such a fall it is him?"
The group stood in silence, sadness and guilt running through them. They kept thinking back to that moment, that single second where one of them was left behind to save the rest.
The winds picked up, Ororo looked up suddenly and watched the clouds. Her white hair was whipping around her face, and the air around the group was crackling with a static charge that made everyone's hair stand slightly on edge.
"I am picking up a weather anomaly over the Adirondacks," Storm said, her voice like distant thunder. "It is not natural. There is a pocket of low pressure that feels... angry. It is radiating a heat that shouldn't exist in this winter."
"Is it Logan?" Scott asked, stepping forward.
"No," Storm said, her eyes glowing a fierce, electric blue. "It is far too large for Logan. It feels like a wound in the sky. And it's moving toward the fair mountain side."
"Thats all the way on the other side of the mountains, it'll take us a day to get there and in this weather we'll die ," Scott barked, his leadership mask sliding back into place. "We'll head back to the blackbird and circle around the mountain side, Jean contact Kurt and Kitty. Tell them to start up the blackbird."
Logan had been moving for six hours without rest. The regeneration and anger was the only thing keeping his heart from stopping. His legs were numb, his lungs felt like they were filled with crushed glass, but the Animal was relentless.
He was following a trail of destruction, trees torn from roots and boulders shattered into pebbles, the ground around the trail was ripped apart. It was catastrophic and frightening.
That was the only word for it. As he climbed higher, the mountain seemed more and more like it was physically assaulted. He passed a massive pine, a tree that had likely stood for hundreds of years, snapped in half like a toothpick.
Logan knelt by the trunk, his nostrils flaring.
//Angry, toxic//
He looked at the ground. There, in a patch of mud that had been flash-melted by the sheer radiant heat of the monster's passage, was a footprint.
It was four times the size of Logan's boot. The toes had gouged deep furrows into the frozen earth, and the heel had cracked the bedrock beneath.
Logan felt a jolt of genuine fear—not for himself, but for whatever was standing in the way of this thing.
"You're big," Logan whispered, his yellow eyes tracking the path of destruction up the slope. "But the bigger they are the harder they fall, bub"
He stood up, his joints popping with a sound like pistol shots and as he looked at the footprints, his mind flashed with images that didn't belong to Liam or Logan. He saw a dark forest in Transylvania. He saw a wolf the size of a carriage. He saw the "Hunter's Intuition" highlighting the weak points in a monster's gait.
He's limping, Logan realized. The right foot is dragging. He's hurt. Or he's tired.
Logan began to run again.
The environment was changing. The trees were getting thinner, the rocks more jagged. Suddenly, he stopped.
The Scent had changed. The ozone and the toxic scent were still there, but they were being drowned out by something new.
Blood.
Not the old, frozen blood of Silvercreek. This was still fresh. Still steaming.
Logan crested a final, jagged ridge and looked down into a small, high-altitude cirque—a bowl-shaped valley cut into the side of the peak.
In the center of the bowl, half-buried in the snow, was a Grizzly Bear.
It was a massive specimen, likely a thousand pounds of muscle and fur. It was the king of these mountains.
But it had been torn apart.
It wasn't a kill for food. The bear's body had been shredded with a mindless, terrifying ferocity. Its head was ten feet away from its torso, and its ribcage had been crushed inward as if by a hydraulic press.
Logan approached the carcass, his claws sliding out with a slow, lethal hiss. He sniffed the bear.
The monster had done this. Not because it was hungry.
Because it was Angry.
Logan looked up at the towering peaks that surrounded the valley. The scent was swirling here, caught in the downdrafts. It was everywhere.
Thump.
Logan froze.
He didn't hear it with his ears. He felt it through the soles of his boots. It was a low-frequency vibration that rattled the adamantium in his shins.
Thump.
It was a heartbeat. Not his own. It was a slow, powerful rhythm that seemed to echo from the very heart of the mountain.
Logan dropped into a hunting crouch, his eyes glowing a fierce, predatory amber. He reached into the Rage Function of his mind, feeling for the handle.
"I know you're here," he growled into the wind.
The only answer was the scream of the blizzard.
He began to move toward the far side of the cirque, where a massive cave mouth yawned like a black throat in the granite. The snow around the cave was melted, turned into a black, steaming mire.
Logan stepped into the mire. The heat was staggering. It was like stepping into a furnace.
As he approached the cave entrance, he saw something lying in the mud.
He knelt down and picked it up.
It was a scrap of purple fabric. It was shredded, looking like it had been ripped from a pair of heavy-duty trousers. But it wasn't the fabric that caught his eye.
It was the scent on it.
Amidst the blood and the musk and the ozone, there was a faint, lingering smell of Soap.
Cheap, hotel soap.
Logan's brow furrowed. A man? The monster is a man?
Every part of him screamed that he knew who this was, that he knew who the created that caused all the destruction and death he had seen was. And now his nose knew too, that the monster that had destroyed Silvercreek carried the scent of a human.
A human who was crying.
Logan looked into the blackness of the cave. He could hear it now—the wet, rattling sound of a man sobbing in the dark. A sound of pure, unadulterated misery.
He stepped into the shadows.
"Hey," Logan barked, his voice echoing off the cavern walls. "You in there. The one who hit the town."
The sobbing stopped.
The silence that followed was more terrifying than the wind. It was a heavy, pregnant silence, the kind that precedes a landslide.
Then, the heartbeat changed.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
The ground began to shake. A pebble fell from the ceiling, bouncing off Logan's shoulder.
A massive, glowing green eye opened in the darkness.
It burned with anger so profound and frightening that an ordinary person would have shit himself the moment they looked at them.
Logan didn't back down. He didn't run. He took a step forward.
SNIKT!!!!
Both claws came out his fists their edges shimmering from the suns light reflecting off them. "You got a lot to answer for, Big Guy," Logan growled, his claws shimmering in the faint, green light radiating from the eye.
" ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!