Chapter 75: The Wolf God’s Evil Thoughts

Chapter 75: The Wolf God’s Evil Thoughts

Cole gently leaned Sophia against a stone pillar.

She was so light. He wiped the dried golden bloodstain from the corner of her mouth with his thumb, then wrapped her in a thin golden shield.

Cole stood up, turned around, and faced Odin.

Bodies were scattered everywhere across the altar — clones, wolf warriors — piled on the ground, heaped against broken stone pillars.

Gunnar was slumped against a far wall, his severed arm bound tight with a tourniquet by Ingrid, his face white as paper.

Elena lay in another corner, her stomach wound roughly bandaged, no longer bleeding.

"Odin!" Cole said, his voice low and hard. "Time to settle this."

Odin stood in the center of the altar, staring down at the bodies of clones covering the floor.

He raised his head, and his expression twisted into something wild and unhinged.

Like a man who had bet everything on a single hand — and just watched the table get flipped.

"My ritual!" Odin's rage broke loose. "My wolf god! You destroyed everything! I'll kill every last one of you!"

He tore open his high priest robes with both hands, baring his chest.

A black wolf's head was branded into his skin.

Odin began chanting. With every syllable, the residual dark chaos energy deep in the altar answered back.

The chaos fluid still pooled in the floor cracks reversed course and surged upward. The runes on the walls that hadn't fully gone dark flared back to life. All of it — every thread of chaos energy — rushed toward Odin and poured into the wolf's head brand on his chest.

His body began to change.

From human to something else.

His leg bones stretched and thickened, joints bending the wrong way. His hands became claws. Black fur split through cracking skin. Both eyes bled into solid, burning crimson.

In under thirty seconds, Odin had become a half-man, half-wolf chaos monster nearly five meters tall.

He stood in the center of the altar, chaos energy radiating outward from his body. The obsidian floor beneath his feet cracked in a web of fractures under the pressure.

"The power the first priest could never claim a thousand years ago..." Odin's voice dropped into a deep, resonant rumble. "I have it now. The wolf god's dark will — it will help me tear this world apart."

"Die."

The moment Odin moved, Cole moved too. A golden war blade took shape in his right hand, three forces coiling together and spiraling from hilt to tip, the blade humming with a low, steady tone.

He charged at Odin. Mid-sprint, his body shifted into half-wolf form on its own, his fur going from dark gold to molten gold.

Blade met claw.

BOOM.

Gold and black energy exploded at the point of contact. The shockwave sent every loose stone and piece of debris flying in all directions.

Cole felt the recoil shudder back through the blade, but his core held.

Kyle's sacrificed soul. The wolf god's primal will. The last ember of phoenix flame Sophia had passed into him. Three forces roared through him at once, pushing every muscle fiber to its limit.

He drove the blade into Odin's right claw.

It cut roughly two inches deep before it caught.

Odin let out a shriek. His injured claw grabbed the blade in a reverse grip, chaos energy pouring from his palm and crawling up the steel.

Cole yanked the blade free. The edge tore out of Odin's hand and pulled a spray of black blood with it.

He grunted and swung back, driving the blade into Odin's shoulder.

The edge cut through the layer of chaos energy and the hardened outer skin and buried itself in the muscle beneath. Golden fire ignited inside Odin's body, clinging to the wound like something alive.

Odin screamed and stumbled back, a burst of gold-laced flame erupting from his shoulder, wrapping around the wound and refusing to let go.

"Is that all you've got?" Odin pressed a hand to his shoulder, but he was smiling. "And you think that's enough to kill me?"

Cole took a slow breath and brought the blade up in front of him.

"This one..." He raised it above his head. Gold-white light blazed from the steel and lit up the entire altar. "For everyone you killed."

Odin came at him.

Cole swung down.

Blade and claw crashed together again. The shockwave hadn't even cleared before the ground split open.

Energy surged up from deep below, pushing the earth upward from underneath, then tearing it apart.

The bottom of the cracks glowed dark red. A low, continuous roar came with it — like something enormous had been buried too long and was finally turning over.

Heinrich's voice broke through: "Cole! The volcano's erupting! The ritual triggered it! Magma is rising faster than any model predicted — at the current rate, the entire caldera will blow in an hour and a half, maybe less!"

Odin stood at the edge of the crack and looked down at the widening split beneath his feet. Then he looked back up at Cole, his eyes full of venom.

"Good. Let it blow. I want every one of you buried here."

He drove both claws into the ground. Chaos energy poured from the backs of his hands and flooded into the cracks, seeping down through the fault lines in the earth's crust.

The volcano answered. The ground shook.

Cole blocked Odin's claws with his blade and glanced back at Marcus. His chest was still heaving. The chaos corruption on his right arm had been pushed back by the wolf god's will, but the ravaged skin hadn't fully healed — every swing drew fresh blood from the edges of the wound. He scanned the fighters behind Marcus. Fewer than twenty. Over six hundred had come to the Arctic. Fewer than twenty were still standing.

"Elena — get everyone out. Take Sophia, Gunnar, all of them. I'll hold Odin."

Elena didn't move. "No. We leave together."

Cole kept his voice low. "Odin's gone. He's pumping chaos energy into the volcano. If I don't hold him here, he'll push it into the magma and set off a chain reaction — it won't just be this volcano. The entire North Atlantic volcanic belt will go. Get to the port. Give me thirty minutes. If I'm not back, you leave."

Elena looked at him. They held each other's eyes across the battlefield — reading each other, checking for lies. Then Elena slid her blade into its sheath and gave Cole a single nod.

"Be careful. We'll wait for you at the port."

She turned and started moving people out.

Elena was the last one to leave.

At the altar entrance, she stopped and looked back. Cole stood where she'd left him. He gave her a nod, then turned to face Odin.

Two people left in the altar.

Odin kept feeding chaos energy into the ground. The volcano's roar grew louder, visibly, with every passing second.

Magma had already pushed up through the cracks, flooding the lower level of the altar in a slow, rising lake of fire.

Odin straightened up from the chaos energy and looked at Cole. "You see it now? Hell is already here. None of you are walking out today."

Cole pulled his golden blade from the ground. He fixed his eyes on Odin's twisted face and didn't look away. "Then I'll send you there first."