Wolf and Tiger (Two-in-One)

"Be obedient. Once we reach Chicago, you'll take the train back to Edmonton. Bob will accompany you," James said patiently to the sulking O'Hara.

After bidding farewell to President Lincoln in Washington, he had headed south, partly to search for Victor and partly to survey the current state of the American South for potential land purchases and business investments later on.

However, the war was not yet over, and the search for Victor was likely to involve dangers beyond what he had anticipated.

Whether Victor had been influenced by vampires, what role Adam had played in this matter, and the possibility of encountering remnants of the bloodline—all these factors made taking a woman to wander through the southern states truly absurd.

Seeing that she couldn't get her way, O'Hara could only beg James to spend a few days in Illinois before heading to Chicago to catch the train back to the estate. James figured a few days wouldn't hurt, so he agreed.

Joliet Town was not far from Chicago and had been developing rapidly in recent years, nearly reaching the scale of a city. The town even had a train line that went straight to Arkansas.

James now possessed a sort of "property-scouting" instinct; wherever he went, if he saw land or cities worth investing in, he couldn't help but ponder whether he should buy a plot or two.

Their group, including the carriage driver, totaled five people. They settled into an inn in Joliet Town that was relatively quiet and located away from the town center. It was said that the slope next to the inn was the best place in town to watch the sunset.

Under the enthusiastic recommendation of the innkeeper, who seemed to understand their intentions, James brought O'Hara there for a picnic. They ate afternoon tea and waited together for the sunset.

As for the other three old hands from the Howlett estate, they had agreed to go to the liveliest bar in town to relax, leaving the private time to the two of them.

"James, why do I feel like you haven't changed at all?" O'Hara cupped her cheeks, watching James peel an apple for her.

"How could I have changed? How long have you known me? Don't say silly things."

"No, it's just that your appearance hasn't changed. Look, if you shaved your beard, you'd look exactly the same as you did at twenty. Look, your skin is still so smooth."

O'Hara gestured at James's face with her hand, occasionally touching her own face to compare.

The fruit knife in James's hand paused, and he brushed her off with a casual denial. O'Hara teased him, insisting he shave his beard tomorrow to see. As the two were laughing and joking, James's expression suddenly changed, and he sniffed the air deeply with a strange look.

"O'Hara, go back to the room, now!"

This was the second time O'Hara had seen James like this; the last time had been because of those terrifying vampire monsters. Seeming to understand, she hurriedly turned and ran toward the inn. It was only a few hundred meters away, not far at all.

Having experienced it once before, she felt at ease regarding James's personal safety.

James stood up and looked at a patch of woods to the south. He found the scent he caught hard to believe. It was still some distance away, but his nose now had a keen sensitivity to scents he had specifically marked in his memory.

The scent was very similar to Victor's, but it definitely wasn't the one he was familiar with.

The sunlight near sunset shone obliquely into the woods, and James waited patiently. After a while, a figure gradually elongated, and Victor emerged from the woods, looking at James from afar.

"Good. This way I don't have to run so far to find you in Edmonton." Victor seemed to have become more talkative.

"What did you do?" James's eyes turned terrifying. Victor's scent had become very similar to Adam's; it seemed as if two auras were intertwined, along with the scent of fresh blood.

Victor shrugged noncommittally and said, "I finished what you didn't."

"You accepted Adam's power."

"No, I took his power. All of it." Victor grinned. His eyes began to change—not into the deep, pitch-black pupils of Adam, but into bright yellow sclera with tiny black pupils. They were the eyes of a tiger.

"ROAR!"

A roar exploded from Victor's chest, and in an instant, the hair on James's body stood on end.

Immediately after, it seemed as if countless wriggling creatures inside Victor's body wanted to crawl out, churning beneath his skin. His stature began to grow, and his clothes were torn apart.

Crack, crack, crack! The teeth-grinding sound of bones rubbing against each other rang out incessantly. The finger bones and nails of both his hands pierced through his flesh, merging into one. They grew thicker, longer, sharper, and more pointed than before.

The bones at his elbows also broke through his skin, growing into ten-centimeter-long, cone-like exoskeletons. His four massive canines grew further, and brown-yellow fur sprouted along his spine, extending to his hair. He became even taller than before, his muscles stacked like solid rock, and his skin took on a faint earthy yellow hue with the texture of bedrock. Victor had become a true behemoth.

"Don't underestimate me, James." His vocal cords sounded like coarse sandpaper, producing a harsh, grating noise.

BANG!

The grass around James was pressed flat against the ground. His heart beat violently and rapidly, like an ignition engine, drumming with the sound of flesh and blood. A scorching heat radiated from his body, distorting the surrounding air. His shoulder-length black hair was blown up by the surging airwaves, dancing rhythmically.

James looked at Victor with a coldness he had never shown before, not saying a single word.

"Very good!" Victor opened his sharp maw in excitement and roared.

BOOM! BOOM!

The two charged at each other simultaneously, like two high-speed steam trains colliding in a suicidal rush.

Victor crouched on the grass, sprinting like a true beast. With every kick against the ground, two deep furrows were plowed into the lawn. James, meanwhile, had his fists clenched, his footwork exploding with immense power as if propelled by gunpowder beneath his soles.

The distance between them vanished in an instant. Victor's tiger claws and James's fists slammed into each other at the same time. Victor retreated two steps, a blood pit ten centimeters deep exploded in his chest, but he was not pierced through. Given Victor's current monstrous physical strength, this was an acceptable level of injury. Having seized all of Adam's source blood, his self-healing ability had also significantly improved, seemingly surpassing James's.

James, however, was swatted away by Victor's immense force. The bones from his shoulder to his collarbone were shattered, and large chunks of muscle were torn apart by Victor's claws. After rolling twice on the ground, he stabilized his stance and crouched in place. He glanced at his healing bones and muscles, his eyes filled with a gravity he had never felt before.

Victor twisted his neck, looked at his hands with great satisfaction, and pounced again, not giving James any more time to recover.

The two wrestled together, fists and claws meeting flesh. Both were immortal, and every attack was a lethal blow delivered without restraint. Their roars of pain and excitement provided the perfect background music for this battle.

BANG! CRACK! BOOM!

James's swinging punch was caught by Victor's tiger claws. Victor seized the opportunity to turn and deliver a knee strike, the cone-like exoskeleton on his elbow piercing James's right chest and exploding into a fist-sized bloody hole.

Whenever Victor got close to James, he would still suffer from the radiation-like burning and stinging sensation, but Victor didn't care. He let his skin and muscles melt away as if being corroded, while his further enhanced self-healing ability allowed his body to keep up with the speed of the damage.

"Why won't you accept yourself? Why?"

James was increasingly falling into a disadvantage. Every attribute of Victor's current body was a cut above the prime Adam.

In particular, the strength and explosive power of Sabretooth meant that every attack James endured caused destructive damage to his body, even with his perfect combat techniques used to dissipate and cushion the force. This was the result even after his kung fu had reached a state of mastery and his skeletal structure had been further strengthened.

Victor kept asking James the same question, seemingly for no reason. Each of his interrogations was accompanied by an even more violent attack. The flesh and blood on James's body had almost completely regrown once over. After awakening the power of Wolverine, this was the first time he felt a trace of helplessness.

Snap! Bang!

Victor completely abandoned all defensive maneuvers, taking James's barrage of punches to his chest head-on. As Victor spat blood from his ruptured internal organs, he gathered his strength and slammed both claws into James's head, then kicked him into a giant boulder a dozen meters away.

One of James's eyeballs was crushed, his face was unrecognizable, his neck was snapped in two, his chest cavity was sunken, and the boulder behind him cracked inch by inch.

He vomited blood intermittently, momentarily lacking the strength to climb back up.

"Still refusing to accept yourself? What are you afraid of? Afraid of becoming like me!"

Victor walked forward step by step.

James squinted his one remaining eye, his lips moving slightly as if he wanted to say something.

"Is this what you wanted, Victor? This?"

Clusters of flesh-worms squirmed beneath the skin of James's arms, and two pairs of bone claws, nearly thirty centimeters long, slowly pierced out from between his knuckles, mottled and ghastly pale.

His body healed rapidly, and soon his shattered eyeball was restored as well.

James's pupils turned olive-shaped, seemingly glowing with a green light. His body erupted with Huajin once more, and those bone claws looked like tempered steel blades.

"That's it! This is who you are!"

Watching James thrust out his bone claws, Victor laughed maniacally. He felt the greatest joy he had ever known, a joy so pure and overwhelming—he was finally no longer alone.

James clenched his fists, bone claws extended, and shot toward Victor like a cannonball.

As he gave in to his absolute rage and revealed his claws, his body's strength and speed seemed to increase, and his Huajin became even more violent and surging, as if his instinctual power was meant to be fueled by anger.

Swish!

The tiger claws Victor swiped were pierced through by James's bone claws. James twisted his wrists, and Victor's elbow joint—Snap!—was snapped. Sabretooth roared, watching as James hysterically used his other bone claws to frantically puncture his body.

"AH!!!"

Every punch from James drove his bone claws deep into Victor's body, followed by a heavy impact from his knuckles that exploded the muscle into a crater. In an instant, he landed over a dozen blows, shredding Victor's massive frame into a sieve.

Bang! Bang!

Sabretooth vented his frustration by slamming his other uncontrolled tiger claw into the side of James's head. James ignored the sound of his own cervical vertebrae snapping and delivered an uppercut from below, shattering Victor's thick jaw. The bone claws pierced through Victor's lower jaw and mouth, driving straight into his skull.

Victor's brain suffered trauma, and he stumbled like a drunkard, blood streaming from his eyes. Having lost conscious awareness, he roared on instinct. He gripped the tiger paw that James had pierced, his palm bones locking onto the bone claws, and twisted with all his might, ignoring the pain.

Crack!

The bone claws on James's left hand were snapped off clean. The three jagged stumps revealed the ruddy marrow tissue between the bones.

He roared in agony, stepped forward, and crouched, slipping behind Victor. Victor's reactions and speed were sluggish now; in that moment of hesitation, James drove his right claws into Victor's neck. He clenched his left fist, and even though the bone claws were broken, the shattered bone, encased in scorching Huajin, pierced into Victor's back and drove straight into his spine.

Just then, the unexpected happened.

The marrow from James's broken bone claws and Victor's spinal cord connected in this highly coincidental way. Both felt a suction force rising between them, as if they were draining each other's marrow tissue. The pain of that marrow being extracted surpassed any other moment in their fight today.

Flesh and bone began to proliferate where the left bone claws met Victor's spine, tightly wrapping the connection point together to form a solid mass of tissue.

James tried desperately to pull his claws away, but the mind-shattering pain and the incredibly tough, overgrown tissue that had fused them together held them fast. It was as if the desires from the depths of their bloodlines were finally being realized.

They howled in pain simultaneously, instinctively using every ounce of their strength to try and absorb the other's marrow.

James reined in his Huajin, his years of martial arts training allowing him to quickly control his blood and energy. He could clearly feel waves of energy-rich matter flowing from Victor's body into his own bones.

It was a sensation of power constantly expanding; his entire skeleton was quickly filled with abundant heat, then overflowed. James's bone cells began to divide, die, and regenerate at a rapid pace.

Soon, his entire skeleton was completely replaced, becoming thicker and tougher, far exceeding the density of a normal bone structure.

His skeleton began to take on a new form; his original spine became three interlocking, spiral-shaped columns with an alternative biomechanical aesthetic. Similar changes were occurring throughout James's body, followed by the regeneration of flesh cells and the replacement of skin and hair tissue.

The bone claws on his right hand grew thicker and longer, extending from between the knuckles. The skin on his forearms split open, and jade-white bone grew out from within, forming a shape like an arm shield that encased his hand up to his elbow.

The new bone claws protruded from the arm shield, over half a meter long. The shield itself featured three sharp, shark-fin-like barbs, and his elbows grew long, sharp bone spikes just like Victor's.

His bone texture became more metallic, with only sporadic, mottled scars on his claws and arm shield.

Beyond the power absorbed from Victor's skeleton, a cold, liquid-like substance also merged into him. Unlike Victor's marrow, which could fuse perfectly with James without rejection, this substance brought a dark, bloodthirsty emotion into his mind upon entering his body.

James had absorbed too much new power; he could no longer control his body's blood and energy as easily as before, and his martial arts realm fell from Huajin.

Victor's body withered visibly. His nearly two-meter-forty frame slowly shrank, his thick, broad shoulders narrowed, the hair and beard on his head turned white in a flash, and his skin gradually became wrinkled and loose.

The flesh tissue that had been forced to grow together withered and vanished automatically once James finished absorbing. Victor lay on the ground, gasping for breath like a dying old man. His eyes turned gray, and his lips moved slightly.

James's body was filled with explosive power he couldn't control. The bone claws on his left arm had also proliferated into the same form as his right, yet he knelt helplessly beside Victor, dazed and sluggish, staring at Victor's face. His lips moved softly, and James leaned in unconsciously.

". . . Thank . . . you, Jamie. If only we could have had a fight like this . . . a day sooner."

James felt a bit panicked, not knowing how to face this situation. What Victor wanted was for him to face his true self, for both of them to cast aside all reservations and fight to their hearts' content.

Even with this outcome, Victor seemed satisfied. He had found his own kind, and he had found a truly hearty battle.

His eyes held a complexity never seen before—a touch of reluctance, yet a deep sense of satisfaction and relief. His wrinkled, cracked lips curled upward. The sun was finally setting, and as the sunset shone on Victor's face, he smiled happily.

This was the first time in his life that Victor Creed, the Sabretooth, had ever smiled.