If the mutant brawler Wolverine is famous for two things, they’re his deadly claws and his unbeatable healing factor – however, his daughter X-23 found a shockingly simply way to cancel out his healing, taking Logan to pieces with her own claws while ensuring he couldn’t recover.
In X-23: Target X #6 by Christopher Yost, Craig Kyle, and Mike Choi, Laura ventures to Xavier’s institute to find and kill Wolverine. After stalking him for days, she finally confronts him at the Canadian border and attempts to kill him, hoping that she can prevent any future deaths caused by him or any potential clone. Laura tears into Logan’s skin then starts driving handfuls of dirt into his lacerations. Logan soon realizes that Laura is stopping him from healing by using the dirt to prevent the cuts in his skin from closing. This gross but simple workaround is used by X-23 to keep Logan bleeding, sapping his strength and doing damage his healing factor is unable to address.
X-23 Figured Out How to Beat Logan’s Healing
As an X-Man and part-time Avenger, Logan frequently survives wounds from bullets, explosions, blades, and beatings from characters as strong as the Thing. He’s even survived a radioactive explosion and his entire adamantium skeleton being ripped from his body. But throughout his costumed career many villains have found ways to circumvent Wolverine’s healing. Deadpool once found a weapon known as ‘the Annihilator’ that can dissolve anything into atoms, and Daken incorporated the healing-negating Muramasa blade into his own claws. But Laura Kinney found a much less complicated way of defeating him in her first encounter with her eventual mentor.
Wolverine’s healing factor is a marvel, but it can only restore his body to its natural state. By preventing his wounds from closing Laura made it so that even as his body regenerated blood, he lost it before it could do him any good. Wolverine has healed from far worse, but only once he’s free of the conditions of an attack. By preventing this recovery, X-23 beat Wolverine, and would have been able to defeat him with something more permanent – such as drowning or incineration – had he not talked her into ending her attack by pleading with her not to destroy herself in her quest to stop further living weapons being created.
Wolverine’s Daughter Holds the Secret to Destroying Him
A common misconception about Wolverine’s healing is that his body can remove foreign material that’s harming him. In actuality, any object that has pierced and remained stuck in his body would have tissue forming around it given enough time – indeed, his son Daken has been trapped by this in the past. While it would likely be unable to kill him by itself, even Wolverine admits X-23‘s method is a perfect way to counteract his healing factor and end his ability to fight back, showing that even at the start of her career, Laura Kinney had what it takes to claim Logan’s legacy as the deadliest mutant alive.
