Loki had already begun to move the moment he'd thrown the daggers. He expected Kratos to be a canny opponent, after the quick way the man had reacted at the beginning of the attack, and because of the impression he'd gotten previously during the night they'd gone to the medical wing.

He wasn't quite expecting the shockwave, however.

The concussive force of the wave threw him back into the wall and he hit with a resounding crack. The shock of it was enough to break his concentration. All of the illusions temporarily shattered, leaving only him and all of the blood on the floor visible.

"Ah..." he wheezed, then started chuckling. Loki pulled himself away from the dent he'd made in the wall, cracks radiating out from the impact point. He was sore and winded, one of his ribs twinging in a familiar and unpleasant way. But he'd gotten far worse from Thor, who packed a much nastier kind of shockwave. "Excellent trick, Kratos. I've some more of my own; pity I'm not allowed to use them."

He called the daggers back to his hands, catching them with a practiced motion, spinning them idly. Even as he did so, he dropped an illusion around himself, telling it to multiply and moved quickly to the side. A moving target, after all, was much harder to hit.

Thor might have taken this as some invitation for an epic clash, a great battle between warriors. Loki was not his false brother in any way. He had no desire to make this a play at war; he simply took from it the lesson that he would have to treat Kratos with more caution.