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….
"Hey, you alive in there?!"
"If I were you, I'd look around, because trees don't just fall on cars by themselves," I warned the mutant as I clicked the lock open.
I didn't remember exactly how the canonical Sabretooth attack went down, but apparently, exactly like this.
Just then, the bushes crunched, and the expected "caveman" attacked the man who had just managed to "unsheathe" his claws.
His dash was quite fast, much faster than the move Wolverine showed in the arena, which allowed him to avoid the claws, momentarily stunning Logan.
And it became immediately clear that he knew exactly who he was facing, because Sabretooth, and this beast could be no one else, didn't bother trading punches.
Instead, he grabbed his opponent by the jacket, spun him around, and sent him back-first into the nearest tree, clearly aiming to cause at least massive spinal trauma, and at most, a concussion and knockout.
"We need to help him!" Freed from the belt, the girl tumbled out of the wrecked van and stood unsteadily on the snow.
"Why? Looks to me like he's having fun."
At that moment, the man clad in furs, with a face so feral even Vikings would have been respectful, decided to play baseball with Wolverine.
Ripping a log out of the ground, he thoroughly walloped the clawed hero just as he started to rise.
"Weather's clearing up though…" I followed the flight of our driver along a much steeper arc right onto our own hood.
Now that is definitely a concussion. Logan agreed with me, evidenced by his motionless state.
"Let me through," I squeezed past the seat and hopped onto the snow next to Rogue.
My appearance drew the enemy's attention, and this severe Norwegian version of Conan the Barbarian moved toward us with a genuine tiger-like growl.
"You know, buddy, you really remind me of a feral Viking," a strange thrill seized me.
Sabretooth moved fast and was clearly strong, but neither his speed nor his strength could compare to Thor's stats, fights Loki had observed repeatedly.
And from that fact followed a very simple conclusion: those stats couldn't compare to mine either.
"And I hate Vikings."
A throwing dagger materialized in my hand, and in the next instant, it sliced through the air with a whistle and sank precisely into Sabretooth's eye.
The enchanted steel, designed to kill immortals, couldn't fully overcome the mutant's purely "material" healing factor, but it clearly caused a lot more trouble than an ordinary knife would have.
At the very least, the menacing roar immediately turned into a pained howl.
I had no intention of waiting for the mutant to recover.
Pulling another dagger from my pocket dimension, I sent it straight into the enemy's heart. A third one settled in my hand, instantly spawning two copies of itself in the hands of my own illusions.
Seeing the world from three angles is pretty amusing. I'm not sure if, as a human, I could have maintained even basic coordination in this state, but Loki's brain was used to it.
He could synchronize the actions of three to five "bodies" quite well, depending on the speeds involved and the uniqueness of the movements.
If I needed to land one strike on one point, we could be talking about three dozen pseudo-material illusions.
But if each one had to attack in a unique style at a different point, that got complicated.
The first strike was delivered by the copy to my left, piercing the liver. The second came from the right, under the knee. The third, my own, struck the throat.
Sabretooth tried to brush them off, but I was right, his speed wasn't enough to even tag a phantom, and the hits from three directions kept landing.
For my predecessor's memory, this was unusual.
Even Volstagg, not the most agile of the Warriors Three, would hardly have let my illusion hit him more than once without managing to damage the external contour somehow.
But here, I could do whatever I wanted, however I wanted.
However, despite the multitude of wounds, the enemy was still alive, though he was clearly losing interest in resistance in particular and the situation in general.
Nevertheless, leaving him alive wasn't part of my plan. Sweeping him off his feet with a leg sweep during another combo, I sharply brought the enchanted dagger down on his neck.
The magical steel passed through flesh and bone like a knife through butter. Only then did it occur to me that I hadn't even stopped to think about the fact that this was my first kill.
"Blargh..." Rogue articulated from somewhere near the car, clearly having caught a glimpse of my handiwork.
"Everyone's a critic!" I felt insulted in my best feelings, examining the mutant's severed head.
The realization that I had just brutally and pleasurably killed a sentient (we-ell… more or less) being caused absolutely zero discomfort.
After everything I inherited from Loki's memories… ahem, I suspect the feeling of squeamishness is gone for good.
True, I somehow, again on reflex, managed to remain completely clean and just as elegant, yup, despite the butcher's work and the knife bloodied to the hilt… ah, no, that one had already absorbed Sabretooth's blood.
"Ohh…" Logan groaned a minute later as I took my hand off his head. Nothing nefarious, just a little magical stimulation to help him wake up.
"You've got a thick skull, but you lack the habit of taking a hit from a log," I sympathized with him.
"Where is that thing?" Wolverine asked, sitting up on the smashed bumper and surveying the scene.
In response, I silently raised my other hand, holding the severed head by the hair, and nodded at the body off to the side, which was being watched by my copy.
The visible regeneration of the mangled organism had stopped, but I hadn't had time to run diagnostics yet, and without the Soul Forge it's tricky.
That ultra-advanced techno-magic operating table remained in Asgard.
Seeing my handiwork, Logan's face did something like a cheek twitch, but then he nodded silently, though he started looking at me a bit askance.
"What? He was a regenerator," I shrugged. "And everyone knows: if you want to finish off an immortal, unkillable beast, chop off its head." I shifted my gaze to the body.
"Besides, he looks too much like a Viking. And I really don't like Vikings."
"Loki…" the mutant grimaced, "just… shut up. And throw that head somewhere already! Rogue, you okay?"
….
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