Ares snarled obscenities through his locked teeth as he punched with his free hand again and again into Kratos’s kidney. A spreading numbness there buckled the Spartan’s knee. Feeling his joint give way, Kratos-as any Spartan would-used what he was given. If he couldn’t stand on that leg, he could still slam it into Ares’s groin. For every punch the god delivered, Ares took a knee shot to the testicles in return, until even through the firelight of his hair and beard, his face began to show the pain.
Kratos gave over the chin pressure in favor of slamming his elbow into the side of Ares’s head, staggering the already weakened god. As Ares fell off balance, Kratos dived to his left, using his grip on the god’s wrist to make Ares’s sword hand take the full impact of both their weights as they fell sideways to the ground.
Ares’s fist shattered the bedrock where it struck-and the rock did the same to Ares’s knuckles.
Kratos got his knee between them then and kicked the god away from him, while twisting the sword from Ares’s grasp. Ares scrambled drunkenly to his feet, cradling his broken hand. Kratos rolled up smoothly and slashed the air with a blurring flourish of Ares’s sword.
Lips peeled back from the Spartan’s teeth. “ How do you like your monster now?”
Ares straightened and let his injured hand fall to his side. His feral predator’s grin was a near-exact mirror of Kratos’s face. “You have no idea what a true monster is, little Spartan. You get one lesson.”
Ares hunched over, and his face blackened with strain. Bursting through the impenetrable armor on his back came jointed appendages, writhing like the legs of some nightmarish scorpion, armored in black shell, and ending in blades longer than the columns of the Parthenon. “You won’t live to need another.”
With a clatter of his bladed limbs, Ares sprang like a wolf spider, every blade angled to drink deep the Spartan’s blood.
Kratos backpedaled. This was a foe he’d never imagined. Ares pressed the assault, stabbing his scorpion blades in concert, in a complex sequence impossible for Kratos to counter. The Spartan kept giving ground, parrying furiously, cutting at the limbs when he could, but their black shells were no less impenetrable than the god’s mystic armor. But that mystic armor, Kratos noted, did not cover the war god’s whole body…
The next time Ares came for him, Kratos lunged and ran ten yards of red-hot great sword through the god’s inner thigh.
On a mortal, that would have been a deathblow; cutting the large artery in the thigh would cause a man to bleed out in seconds. Gooey black ichor came oozing from the wound, but the only real effect it seemed to have was that Ares now used his blade limbs to lift his body from the ground. Just as they had served him for a sword arm, they now served him for legs.
He lunged at Kratos again and again. Kratos gave ground, trying to circle, seeking any opening in the limbs’ baffling weave of death through which he might strike at the god’s more-vulnerable flesh. He was tiring rapidly now. Without the Blades of Chaos to feed life energy into him, his wounds stayed open and poured his strength out on the courtyard’s flagstones.
For one brief moment, he actually thought that he would lose… but in that instant, the faces of his wife and his daughter rose up within his mind and ignited a fury unlike any he had ever known. All his strength roared into him, and more. The next time Ares came for him, Kratos smashed aside one limb’s stab with such force that its blade struck a neighboring limb-and cracked its armor.
Kratos blinked at the obsidian ichor that leaked from the crack. A weakness?
Ares drew back, his confidence shaken for a moment, but then he gathered himself for another assault.
Let’s make it final, Kratos thought. He let his knees buckle, so that he swayed dizzily, and let the sword droop out of line. When the tip scraped on courtyard stone, his fingers opened nervelessly and the sword clanked to the ground. Seeing such weakness, Ares sprang into the air, leaping high so as to fall upon Kratos and impale him on two blades at once.
But as the war god leaped, Kratos’s weakness vanished and he sprang up to meet Ares in the air. His hands closed around the joint of one blade limb, and he twisted and bent it with irresistible strength, jamming its needle point through Ares’s cuirass into the god’s chest. Ares spasmed, and they Sell-and Kratos wrenched his weight to fall on top of the god, letting his weight drive the blade limb fully through Ares’s chest and out the back.
With a roar that was more outrage than pain, Ares flung Kratos from him and spidered to his feet, staring down at the immense blade jammed through his chest with a kind of bafflement Kratos recalled all too well-it was exactly how he’d stared at the column with which Ares had speared him at the Temple of Pandora.
Ares fell to his knees.
Kratos rose and recovered the war god’s sword.
Ares stared up at him, in his eyes only fear and pleading.
“Kratos… Kratos, remember… it was I who saved you at your hour of greatest need!”
Kratos raised the sword.
“That night… Kratos, please… that night I was trying only to make you a great warrior!”
Kratos thrust Ares’s own sword through the god’s chest.
As he limped away from the god’s corpse, it began to twinkle with myriad lights. The lights turned into dancing motes that pulled away from the body and then swirled upward to the heavens, until with a blinding flash and a clap of thunder like the end of the world, nothing of Ares remained.
Kratos was battered, and bleeding, and, once again, only a man. He stared in awe up at the vast blade that only moments before he had wielded so lightly. Now he wasn’t half as tall as the blade’s narrowest point was wide.
He limped back over the broken walls of the ruined temple to stand before the statue of the goddess.
“Athena,” he said, “your city is saved. Ares is dead.” He gazed up into the blank marble eyes. “I’ve done my part. Now do yours. Wipe away these nightmares forever.”
The shimmering glow of immanent godhead played over the marble. The eyes came alight, and the lips moved as Athena spoke.
“You have done well, Kratos,” the statue said. “Though we mourn the death of our brother, the gods are indebted to you.”
Kratos stood a little straighter. A dark chill trickled into his veins.
“We promised your sins would be forgiven, and so they are. But we never promised to take away your nightmares. No man, no god, could ever forget the terrible deeds you have done.”
“You can’t-Athena, I’ve done everything you asked! You can’t! ”
“ Farewell, Kratos. Your service to the gods is at an end. Go forth into your new life, and know that you have earned the gratitude of Olympus!”
The shimmer of the goddess faded. Kratos stood alone in the ruined temple above the shattered remnant of the city. He stood there for a long, long time.
Then he started walking.
EPILOGUE
At the brink of nameless cliffs he stands: a statue in travertine, pale as the clouds above. He can see no colors of life, not the scarlet slashes of his own tattoos, not the putrefying tatters of his wrists where chains were ripped from his flesh. His eyes are as black as the storm-churned Aegean below, set in a face white as the foam that boils among the jagged rocks.
Ashes, only ashes, despair, and the lash of winter rain: These are his wages for ten years’ service to the gods. Ashes and rot and decay, a cold and lonely death.
His only dream now is of oblivion.
He has been called the Ghost of Sparta. He has been called the Fist of Ares and the Champion of Athena. He has been called a warrior. A murderer. A monster.