Ares, still shouting his defiance at Zeus, never saw it coming. His first hint was a stinging shock in his right hand-and then he felt no more the weight of Pandora’s Box.
The thunderbolt had struck home and done its job, severing the chain that joined the box to the hand of the god.
“What?” Ares stared blankly at his fist as though it had somehow betrayed him. “What have you done?”
From Ares’s upraised fist to the ground below was fully a hundred feet. Kratos judged where the box would land and made for it with all his speed. His guess was good. The box landed on a pile of rubble only steps in front of him, and he dashed to it before Ares understood what had happened.
Reaching up, Kratos gripped the lid and shoved as hard as he could. Unlike his attempt at Pandora’s temple, the lid slid away without effort, almost as though the box wanted him to open it.
Among the ruins of the Temple of Athena, Kratos of Sparta had opened Pandora’s Box for the first time since it was hidden in the temple atop Cronos’s back a millennium ago.
Kratos scrambled up the rubble and stood on the rim of the box, staring into its warm sunny glow. Whatever was within shone too brightly for Kratos’s eyes. He experienced a terrible instant of vertigo, as though he were about to plunge headlong into a hole deeper than the universe. But when that vertigo passed, his entire body warmed in the light-and the box seemed to shrink, dwindling to the size of a matron’s jewel box.
Kratos cried out as power surged through his body, filled his soul
… and more. His arms rose above his head, and tiny sparks danced between his spread fingers. Never had he imagined such power. Was this what it felt like to be a god?
Then Kratos looked at the God of War and discovered it was not the box that had shrunk.
He had grown.
Where before he had not stood as tall as Ares’s anklebone, he now looked the god square in the eyes. And in those eyes he saw a flicker of fear.
Ares chased away his dismay with towering fury. His face twisted in a contemptuous sneer. “ You are still just a mortal, every bit as weak as the day you begged me to save your life.”
“I am not the man you took that day.” Kratos straightened, and when he spoke, his voice, too, shook the mountain. “ Ten years I have waited. Tonight you die.”
Ares’s sneer expanded into dark laughter. “Athena has made you weak.”
Kratos dropped into his fighting crouch. “Strong enough to kill you!”
“Never!” The god spread wide his arms, as though welcoming the arrival of his favorite son. “Give my regards to your family.”
Instead of meeting Kratos hand to hand, the god tapped some dark and eldritch power that washed over Kratos, and into him, and seized his mind entirely. The temple, the mountain, Athens, and the god himself were all wiped from before Kratos’s eyes, replaced by a village in flames.
He fell to his knees. He knew this terrible place. He suffered it nightly in his dreams, in the visions that racked his days and filled every instant of his life.
Mocking laughter rang in his ears. “I taught you many ways to kill, Kratos. Flesh burns, bones break-but to shatter a man’s spirit is to truly destroy him.”
Snarling wordless rage and denial, Kratos shoved himself to his feet. He staggered through the flames in front of the village temple where he had killed his wife and daughter.
“Do you recognize this place, Spartan? Perhaps you can undo your crime. If you beg me for mercy, I might let you stay your murders.”
Kratos burst through the temple door. His wife, his daughter, alive and unhurt, stood before him like the answer to every prayer to every god of his life. He tried to speak, but no words could break through the grip of the emotion that held his throat closed. Every nightmare during this terrible decade of torment whirled around him, smeared into one another, and took physical form before his eyes.
“Kratos?” his wife said uncertainly, shading her eyes against the flames at his back. “What is happening? Where are we?”
“Daddy!” His daughter threw herself toward him, but her mother caught the little girl’s arm and held her back.
The only time in his life Kratos had felt a blow so powerful and soul-killing was when Ares’s javelin column had pinned him to the door of the Temple of Pandora. “By the gods, can this be real?”
“Kratos?” his wife said. “Have you come to take us home?”
The wall of the temple suddenly shimmered, rippling as if it was no longer wholly a material thing, and out through that shimmer stepped…
Kratos.
His younger self, the Kratos of a decade past, came striding into the temple to slay everything that moved.
HE PUT HIMSELF between his family and his younger self.
His younger self came at him with the efficient, straight-ahead style that had been his trademark. Every step was a strike. Every strike was a step. His younger self was faster and stronger than Kratos was now-but strength and speed were never the only elements of victory.
The air sizzled with the song of the Blades of Chaos. As they flashed around him, opening small cuts across his body, Kratos discovered he didn’t like being on this side of the blades.
The next time Young Kratos hurled a blade outward to whip through the air, Old Kratos stepped inside the strike and caught the blade by the chain. Its heat seared his hands, but he didn’t care. He was used to pain. To win back his family, he could endure anything.
He grabbed the blade’s haft and yanked with all his might. His strength threw Young Kratos into the air, but his younger self was fully as agile as he’d ever been. Instead of tumbling helplessly, Young Kratos turned his flight into a pounce, the other blade raised for the kill.
Old Kratos guessed it must have come as a considerable shock to Young Kratos when his weapon arm was severed at the elbow, so that his hand, blade, and chain all fell harmlessly to the floor. Old Kratos mercifully spared him any additional shocks by slicing his skull into two pieces.
“Are you watching, Ares? You took them once. I will never lose them again!”
As if in reply, spots on the temple walls shimmered again. Three of them.
From each one, a young, strong, fresh Kratos stalked forward.
Kratos cursed Ares as he swung his Blades of Chaos at the trio of himself. “One at a time would have been too easy.”
As the three advanced on his family, Kratos felt his uncontrollable bloodlust return, fed by the familiar Blades of Chaos in his grip.
Kratos waded into them without hesitation, engaging two at once. The third took advantage of this opportunity to flank Kratos and kill his family-but he discovered to his dismay that his attack had been anticipated. And countered. Blood showered from his severed neck, while his head bounced across the floor.
These duplicates were younger and stronger, but they fought with the same blood-crazed ferocity that had driven Kratos to the worst of his crimes. Old Kratos, whatever else he might be, fought to control this blood rage and was no longer a mindless killing machine. As his wife had wanted, he discarded the need only for spilled blood and substituted a fight for honor and family. Within ten seconds, both of the remaining duplicates lay dead before him.
Kratos stood over them, panting harshly, bleeding from dozens of cuts.
Waiting.
“Kratos, please, I don’t know where we are!” cried his wife. “Take us home.”
“Soon, I hope,” Kratos said softly. “There is still work for me here.”
This time, there were five.
They met the same fate as the others.
“You’ll never get them, Ares. Send ten of me. Send a thousand. I’ll kill them all. Not one of them will touch my family.”