The sail boomed once more, then it finally shredded, whipping over the deck and slapping the harpies from the air. One vanished into the spray of the storm; the other managed to right herself by tangling viciously sharp talons into the hair of an oarsman. She dragged the unfortunate sailor screaming and flailing into the sky, twisting to sink her fangs into his neck and feast upon his blood, which spewed downward in a gory shower.

The harpy saw Kratos watching and screamed her eternal rage. She ripped away the sailor’s head and hurled it at Kratos; when he slapped this grisly missile away with a contemptuous backhand, she flung the sailor’s body with enough force to kill an ordinary man.

Her target, however, was nothing resembling ordinary.

Kratos slipped aside and snatched the decapitated sailor’s rope belt as the corpse plummeted. A savage yank snapped the rope and sent the corpse over the rail into the churning sea. Kratos measured the dive of the harpy as she swooped on him like a falcon, knifelike talons extended to rip out his eyes.

Kratos reached back over his shoulders instinctively, his hands seeking the twin enormous, wickedly curved, and preternaturally sharp chopping swords that nestled against his back: His signature weapons, the Blades of Chaos, had been forged by the smith god Hephaestus in the furnaces of Hades itself. Chains from their hafts looped about his wrists and burned through his flesh until they fused with his very bones-but at the last instant he left the twin weapons where they were.

A harpy wasn’t worth drawing on.

He cracked the slain sailor’s belt like a whip. It spun out to meet the harpy’s dive and looped around her neck. He leaped from the statue to the deck below, his sudden weight wrenching the creature from the sky. He pinned her to the deck with one sandal while he hauled upward on the rope with a fraction of his full strength. That fraction was enough: The harpy’s head tore free of her body and flipped into the air.