GOD OF WAR

BLOOD ON ICE

The first creature lunged before Vetrblod finished speaking.

Kratos moved on instinct, throwing the Leviathan Axe in a horizontal arc. It caught three of them mid-leap, shattering them into fragments of ice and black mist. But more came behind, scrambling over their dying brethren, fingers outstretched, mouths open in silent screams.

"Boy! High ground!" Kratos roared, catching his axe as it returned to his hand.

Atreus was already moving, scaling a pillar of ice at the chamber's edge, bow singing as he fired arrow after arrow into the mass. Each shot found a target—eye socket, throat, chest—but the creatures barely slowed. They came on like an avalanche, unstoppable and cold.

Kratos planted his feet and met them head-on.

The first wave broke against him like water against stone. He swung the axe in wide arcs, each strike releasing bursts of frost that competed with the creatures' own unnatural cold. Limbs shattered. Bodies exploded. Black blood sprayed across pristine ice, steaming where it landed.

But they kept coming.

For every one he destroyed, two more crawled from the walls. They clawed at him, grabbed at his arms, his legs, trying to drag him down through sheer weight of numbers. Kratos felt cold fingers dig into his flesh, felt the wrongness trying to seep through his skin.

He roared—a sound from deep in his chest, primal and furious—and triggered the axe's runestone. Frost erupted outward in a devastating wave, flash-freezing everything within ten feet. The creatures shattered like glass, giving him a moment to breathe.

"There's too many!" Atreus shouted from above, still firing with mechanical precision. "We need to get out!"

"No!" Kratos scanned the chamber, looking past the immediate threat to the source. Vetrblod sat on his throne, watching with that eyeless face, that terrible smile never wavering. "We end this here!"

He charged toward the throne, axe leading, smashing through the wall of creatures between him and his target. Bodies flew. Ice cracked. Blood—his own now, mixing with theirs—painted the floor in red and black.

Vetrblod didn't move. Didn't even flinch as Kratos closed the distance.

"Yes," the ancient thing whispered, voice somehow audible over the chaos. "Yes, show me. Show me the rage that killed Zeus. The fury that broke Olympus. I want to taste it."

Kratos swung the Leviathan Axe with everything he had.

Vetrblod caught it.

One hand, pale and perfect, closed around the axe's blade mid-swing. The impact should have sheared through flesh and bone. Should have taken the arm clean off. Instead, the axe stopped dead, frost spreading from the point of contact, trying to freeze the weapon solid.

"Impressive," Vetrblod said, tilting his head. "Forged by dwarves, blessed by magic, wielded by a god. But still just metal and ice. And I am so much more than that."

He yanked the axe from Kratos's grip and hurled it across the chamber. It embedded in the far wall with a crack like thunder.

Kratos didn't hesitate. His fists came up, wreathed in the red lightning of Spartan Rage, and he drove them toward Vetrblod's chest.

The ancient being laughed and caught both fists in his hands.

"There it is," Vetrblod breathed, bringing his eyeless face close to Kratos's. "The power that won't die. The wrath that burns eternal. I can feel it, Ghost of Sparta. Burning inside you like a sun. So hot. So bright. So—"

Kratos headbutted him.

Vetrblod's head snapped back, and for the first time, that smile faltered. Black blood trickled from where a nose should have been, steaming in the cold air.

"Delicious," Vetrblod finished, licking the blood with a tongue made of ice. Then he moved.

Fast. Impossibly fast for something so large. His hand shot out and grabbed Kratos by the throat, lifting him off the ground like a child's doll. The cold was immediate and agonizing—not just temperature, but something deeper. Something that tried to freeze the blood in his veins, the marrow in his bones, the very rage that kept him alive.

"Father!" Atreus's scream cut through the sound of battle.

An arrow sprouted from Vetrblod's shoulder. Then another in his neck. Another in his chest. Atreus was firing as fast as he could draw, each shot perfectly placed, each one sinking deep into the ancient being's flesh.

Vetrblod didn't even look at him.

"Your son has spirit," he said conversationally, still holding Kratos aloft. "I like that. It'll make breaking him more satisfying."

Kratos grabbed Vetrblod's wrist with both hands and pulled, muscles straining, rage building. The hand around his throat was like iron wrapped in ice, unyielding. But Kratos had broken iron before. Had shattered gods who thought themselves unbreakable.

He was the Ghost of Sparta.

And he did not yield.

The Spartan Rage exploded outward in a wave of crimson light and heat. Vetrblod's grip loosened—just slightly, just enough. Kratos twisted, breaking free, and drove his knee into the ancient being's stomach with enough force to crack stone.

Vetrblod doubled over, that smile finally disappearing.

"Good," he wheezed, straightening. "Very good. You might actually make this—"

Kratos's fist caught him in the jaw. Then the other fist. Then another headbutt that sent black blood spraying. He didn't stop, didn't give Vetrblod a chance to recover. Each blow was backed by centuries of battle, of survival, of refusing to die when gods and monsters demanded it.

He beat Vetrblod back, step by step, away from the throne. The ancient being's perfect white skin split and cracked, revealing something underneath—not flesh, but more ice, crystalline and sharp, pulsing with that pale sickly light.

"Father, the walls!" Atreus shouted.

Kratos risked a glance. The creatures had stopped attacking. They stood frozen—literally frozen now, turned to statues of ice. And in the walls, the bodies trapped there were beginning to move. Their eyes shifted. Their mouths opened wider. They were waking up.

"You see?" Vetrblod said, blood dripping from his broken face. "You can't kill me. I'm not a god you can murder. I'm not a titan you can topple. I'm the cold itself. The absence of heat. The silence after the last breath." He gestured to the waking corpses. "I'm every death by winter. Every frozen body left in the snow. Every life stolen by the cold."

"Then I'll kill the cold," Kratos growled.

Vetrblod laughed—genuinely laughed, a sound like glaciers calving.

"Oh, I'm going to enjoy you. Both of you." His eyeless face turned toward where Atreus crouched. "Tell me, boy—does your father know what you are? Really are? What you'll become when the lies fall away?"

"Don't listen to him," Kratos snapped.

"He's going to watch it happen," Vetrblod continued, ignoring him. "Watch you transform. Watch you embrace what you were always meant to be. And then—oh, then—you're going to kill him for me. Won't that be beautiful?"

An arrow hit Vetrblod directly in the throat, sinking so deep only the fletching showed.

"Shut up," Atreus said, voice steady despite the fear in his eyes. "Just shut up."

Vetrblod reached up and pulled the arrow out like a splinter, letting more black blood pour down his chest.

"Such spirit," he said softly. "Just like her. Your mother. I tasted her death, you know. Felt it ripple through the realms. Such sadness. Such loss. She tried so hard to protect you from the truth."

"I said shut UP!"

The shout echoed through the chamber, and with it came something else—a pulse of light, golden and warm, completely at odds with the frozen wasteland around them. It emanated from Atreus, from his chest, spreading outward in waves.

The ice nearest to him began to crack.

Vetrblod's smile returned. "There it is. The god-spark. The divine blood mixing with mortal fear. Yes, yes, YES—"

Kratos recalled the Leviathan Axe. It tore from the wall and flew across the chamber, trailing ice crystals, returning to his outstretched hand with the weight of finality.

"You want to see what I am?" Kratos said, Spartan Rage still burning in his veins, mixing with the frost magic of his weapon. "You want to witness the god-killer?"

He slammed the axe into the ground.

The ice beneath them shattered.

Not just cracked—shattered completely, the floor exploding into a million fragments as the competing forces of heat and cold met and annihilated each other. The throne crumbled. The walls cracked. And the chamber itself began to collapse inward, centuries of frozen preservation undone in seconds.

"No!" Vetrblod lurched forward, reaching for them. "NO! You can't—this is MY domain! MINE!"

"Boy! NOW!" Kratos roared.

Atreus leaped from his perch, and Kratos caught him mid-air, already running for the spiral staircase. Behind them, Vetrblod's scream shook the entire structure, rage and disbelief mixing into a sound that made reality itself shudder.

They hit the stairs at a dead run, taking them three at a time. The ice walls around them fractured, spilling the ancient dead out into the collapsing void. Above, daylight beckoned—distant but real, a circle of grey sky that meant survival.

The stairs began to crumble beneath their feet.

Kratos grabbed Atreus and jumped, using the last solid section as a launching point. They sailed upward through empty space, through falling ice and screaming wind, through the howls of something ancient that refused to accept defeat.

Kratos's hand caught the rim of the well. Ice bit into his palm, but he held on, muscles burning, and hauled them both up and over.

They tumbled onto the frozen village ground, gasping, covered in frost and blood and black ichor that steamed in the cold air.

Behind them, the well collapsed completely, the ice pillar crashing down into the depths with a sound like the world ending.

Then silence.

Kratos lay on his back, chest heaving, waiting for the next attack. Waiting for Vetrblod to emerge from the ruins, furious and unstoppable.

Nothing came.

"Is... is he dead?" Atreus asked between gasps.

"No." Kratos sat up slowly, every muscle screaming protest. "Wounded. Delayed. But not dead."

"Then what do we do?"

Kratos looked at the ruined well, at the village still encased in ice, at the forest beyond where frost continued to spread like disease.

"We find another way to kill him," he said. "Because he was right about one thing—he's not a god. He's something older. And old things..." Kratos stood, retrieving his axe from where it had fallen. "Old things have weaknesses. We just need to find his."

Atreus nodded, getting to his feet with the resilience of youth. But Kratos could see the fear still lingering in his eyes. Fear of what Vetrblod had said. What he'd implied.

They'd talk about it later. They had to. But for now—

The frozen villagers, the ones who'd stood as markers, began to crack. One by one, they shattered into powder, released from whatever binding had held them. The wind caught the dust and carried it away, scattering it across the snow like ashes.

"Father," Atreus said quietly. "What did he mean about mother? About tasting her death?"

Kratos was silent for a long moment.

"I don't know," he finally admitted. "But we're going to find out."

Because Vetrblod had made a critical mistake. He'd threatened Kratos's son. He'd invoked Faye's memory. He'd made it personal.

And when things became personal with the Ghost of Sparta, they ended only one way.

In blood.

The wind picked up, carrying with it the distant sound of children's laughter—wrong, twisted, mocking.

Somewhere in the deep places, Vetrblod was laughing too.

Let him laugh.

Kratos had brought down Olympus with nothing but rage and determination. He'd killed his own father. Destroyed the god of war himself.

One ancient winter demon wouldn't be any different.

He'd find Vetrblod's weakness. He'd learn his secrets. And then he'd end him, permanently and without mercy.

That was a promise.

And Kratos always kept his promises.