About to read the rest of this chapter but mildly confused considering the Campers had lost last chapter?
Of Demigods and Wrackspurts (PJO/HP - Luna Lovegood)
- Thread starter Firewillreign
- Start date
Crap. You saw nothing
Last edited:
- Location
- Elsewhere
I'm sure they could bring themselves to do it anyway.
The Greek Gods are (un)fair like that.
Odd1todd89
The strange tightrope
- Pronouns
- It
thank you for writing.
I hope you have a wonderful day/night.
I hope you have a wonderful day/night.
- Location
- Somewhere over there
I haven't read the third PJO book in ages, but I feel like we're getting some major plot divergences here. Did the barricade happen in canon? Luna invoking Dionysus's Roman self definitely didn't, and I'm not sure if the summoning of the Titan cousin, whoever it is (Prometheus?) happened, or if Atlas was so eager to help the protagonists in canon. Curious just how different things are gonna get. We're really upping the ante here. Also, the prophecy's worse.
Super fun story so far, looking forward to more. Luna is a delight.
Super fun story so far, looking forward to more. Luna is a delight.
Chapter 5: The Wrath Of The Gods - Part 1
Over the span of a day and a half, Nico's whole world had been flipped on its axis.
Heck, if anything, that was an understatement.
His life hadn't just been flipped around - it had cartwheeled off the path of sanity, sprinted around in circles until everything was spinning into chaos, and then immediately leapt head first off a cliffside and into a ravine full of crazy.
And Nico?
He had been and was still loving every last second of it.
Greek gods, greek monsters, and the demigods in between - it was like a deluxe edition of mythomagic come to life, and he got to live through all of it for real!
Better yet, all three of them did.
Luna and Bianca were right there with him, along for the ride just like he was, and neither of them (Ahem, Bianca) could blow him off this time around because they were busy with homework or found it boring.
Ha! How sweet was that?
Sure, the manticore thing had been kind of/sort of/definitely a little petrifying (He'd always known that Dr. Thorn was a bully of a teacher and a nasty piece of work, but he hadn't expected him to be a literal monster) and the undead mummy and her crazy death-prophecy-of doom sounded like all kinds of bad news even to him, but as far Nico was concerned, the good still outweighed the bad.
By about a hundred metric tons at least. How could it not?
At least one of his and Bianca's parents wasn't only still alive, but an actual immortal god. They were both demigods, like Hercules or Achilles or Thesueus - How many other orphaned ten-year-olds could say the same?
How many others dreamed that they could do the same?
It hadn't even been forty-eight hours yet and Nico had already started having the kind of adventures people only ever heard about in myths or read about in children's stories.
He'd met the Artemis, and gotten to ride the sun chariot with the Apollo (Which had been amazing, even if he hadn't understood it at all - wasn't the sun supposed to be a giant ball of gas in outer space?). He'd even gotten to hold a real sword and compete in a real war game with a small army of other demigods!
(He might not have actually done anything, but the experience still counted! Everybody had to start somewhere!)
Even the whole mess that followed after that with the creepy Oracle of Delphi hadn't been too bad.
( Luna had shielded him and Bianca from the Pythia's poisonous gaze, and Nico had been so unnerved by the thing that he hadn't even had the time to feel embarrassed about hiding behind her. He didn't say a word about it but even beyond being a literal walking talking corpse, something about that mummy had just felt wrong - and strangely angry)
Now, the whole Mr.D thing that came after that - honestly, Nico was torn.
On the one hand, being in the presence of an enraged god?
Not fun. Very not fun, even - Extremely not fun.
On the other hand, Luna had once again pulled a Luna and taken down an enraged god with nothing but words, and just four at that.
Not even a complete sentence sentence, barely a phrase, and down he went. The bragging rights alone made the unease (read: mind-numbing terror) of the experience so freaking worth it.
"Yeah, that's right. That's my friend. She beat a god. What are you going to do about it?"
And hey, pretty much everyone in any kind of position of authority at Camp Half-Blood had seen it, so no one could try to deny it happened or fudge the details to make Mr. D (who was a massive jerk, stacked mythomagic profile or no) look better.
Awesome. Just... Awesome.
Which brought them neatly to the present.
And the Portkey.
("Do not let go, Nico - the anchoring charm shouldn't allow you to, but don't even try, just to be safe")
Now, Nico hadn't known what a portkey was. He hadn't known a thing more than anybody else Luna had talked to, which basically amounted to 'hold on tight, don't let go if you can somehow manage it, and take a deep breath if you need to'
"Butterbeer!"
Luna yelled the nonsensical word out (was that even a thing?) and woah gods-!
It happened immediately.
The world dissolved in an eruption of bright lights and before any of them had the time to even breathe, they vanished, sucked into an ocean of color and howling air!
Nico felt like a hook just behind his navel had been suddenly jerked irresistibly forward. His feet left the ground; he could feel Thalia and Percy on either side of him, (They'd volunteered to keep an eye on him, not that he needed it) their shoulders banging into his; they were all speeding forward in a howl of wind and swirling color.
Somebody screamed. The part of Nico's mind that was capable of conscious thought didn't blame them.
The world continued to swirl.
His sense of balance vanished in the throes of vertigo, and the pressure didn't let up - if anything, it got worse with every second. The entire experience felt like riding the world's most unstable rollercoaster straight into the eye of a hurricane. He held on to Percy and Thalia as tightly as he could, pressing his eyes closed to focus, but even with his best effort and Luna's assurance ringing in his head, he was sure his grip was going to break any second and he'd be flung into oblivion.
(It was exhilarating - and insanely terrifying. )
And just as soon as it began, it was also over.
The lights winked out. The wind and the pressure vanished. Reality came hurtling back to his senses, and his feet landed on solid pavement as the world reasserted itself. They materialized in a drab and grey alleyway of sorts, crammed between two tall buildings and empty of anything save a large, rusty green dumpster that looked like it hadn't been used in fifty years. The sound of honking cars and general mid-day traffic drifted in from somewhere behind them.
"Hey," was his first excited thought "I stuck the landing-!"
Naturally, that was the very second Thalia and Percy staggered into him and all three of them tumbled onto the ground in a groaning heap.
"Augh!"
"Sorry!"
It wasn't just them, either. Except for Luna (of course, ) Zoe, and a couple of the more nimble hunters, everyone present was getting thoroughly acquainted with the ground beneath them,
"Oh, Styx." Thalia gasped, rolled to the side and clutched her stomach "Son of a-"
"Hey! Watch the language!" Percy protested weakly, struggling to his feet and pulling up Nico. "The kid's barely twelve."
"Ten." Nico corrected.
"See?" Percy glanced at Thalia reproachfully. "That's even worse."
Then he paused and shuddered, looking disturbed.
"Oh my gods, I sound like my mom."
The daughter of Zeus looked about as impressed with that statement as Nico was.
"Go to Tartarus, kelp-head."
The jab was probably supposed to sound harsh, but Thalia was so green in the face that the bite was sapped right out of it. She looked about five seconds away from puking her guts out.
Nico and Percy both frowned at her.
What was up with her? She hadn't landed that hard - No one had.
"Let's avoid names of power, please," Luna called out from a couple of feet away, sighing as she helped Bianca up. "We're very lucky we managed to get away as it is. Drawing any kind of attention to ourselves right now would be a ruinously bad idea."
"She's right. No names." Annabeth pulled herself up, staggering slightly but remaining on her feet. "We defied a direct order from the king of the gods and the Olympian council by proxy - I can't even begin to describe how much trouble we're in. Great heroes have been smote for less. And what happened with Mr. D-"
Her eyes flickered to Luna and she hesitated, biting her lip. Confusion and wariness warred over her expression, but Luna only smiled in that consistently knowing way of hers, calm and collected as ever.
"In my defense, he was attempting to prevent us from going on an oracle-sanctioned quest. Trying to interfere with prophecized events often achieves nothing or hastens them, and it's historically proven to be a terrible approach either way. Even the Council of Twelve can't supersede the fates." Luna pursed her lips a bit. "And if we're being entirely honest, I didn't much like the idea of being turned into a fruit. I doubt any of the hunters would have enjoyed it either, so I'd say that things worked out for the better."
Everybody looked at her with wide eyes.
Well, Annabeth and a few others did. Bianca just looked tiredly amused and resigned and Nico for his part didn't even try and hide his grin.
"She...has a point?" Percy offered and raised his arms in surrender when Annabeth rounded on him with a withering glare. "Hey, wise girl, I'm just saying. The Big Three tried to stop a prophecy swearing off having kids and... well, we all know how that worked out for them."
Percy pointed at himself, then at Thalia, who rolled her eyes and waved theatrically.
"You'd think millennia of existence would help have helped our fathers work on their self-control, but nope." Thalia snorted and ran a hand through her hair. She looked loads better already. "They didn't even make it a hundred years before going at it again. Typical."
Annabeth spluttered a bit, probably on account of not having a good answer for any of that.
"You - that's not the point!" She turned back to Luna. "You brought an Olympian god to his knees. You attacked him and made him scream. That's - That's-"
She made a violent motion with both hands.
"How?"
Luna gave her a little frown and raised an eyebrow
"I didn't attack him - I just greeted him. Very, very enthusiastically. Technically, he attacked himself" She raised a hand when Annabeth opened her mouth to speak. "And before you ask, the full explanation happens to involve a remarkably long story that I can't get into in the kind of detail a child of the wisdom goddess would appreciate without a good bit of time on hand and a very thorough lecture on the adaptive and almost paradoxical nature of the greco-roman pantheon, but I promise I'll try as soon as we're somewhere safe."
Annabeth didn't look happy with that and Nico really couldn't blame her for not being satisfied. He'd understood maybe one in every five words of that - Which was pretty good for any conversation with Luna, actually - and he still had enough questions of his own to fill a notebook or three.
"She's right," Zoë said, mirroring Annabeth's earlier words before she or anyone else could get a word in edgewise. "There's been enough time wasted and enough treasonous talk as it is."
Thalia scoffed. "Weren't you all for treason five minutes ago? Or is that only on the table when it's you getting what you want?"
Zoë's eyes flashed, and Grover winced. "Oh, here we go."
Nico knew that Zoe and Thalia didn't like each other. He'd seen them glaring at one another and heard the way they argued back at the council meeting in the big house (before everything had gone straight to Hades in a handbasket), but for the most part, he thought they'd probably be happy to stay out of each other's way.
Maybe it was the fear and the lingering stress, or the still-hounding knowledge that the gods were probably already out for their heads.
Or maybe it was as simple as an old festering grudge finally exploding after simmering for who knew how long.
Whatever it was, it had Zoe whirling on Thalia with genuine fury all but pouring off of her in waves.
"Just because I happen to be ready and willing to cross any boundary set by the Council of Twelve to aid my lady," The lieutenant hissed sharply "does not mean I am keen to. Unlike you, I happen to have the foresight to avoid unnecessary risks."
"Hah!" Thalia crowed. "Don't make me laugh. Which one of us had to be saved from being blasted into a bowl of grapes by a twelve-year-old girl?"
"Thirteen." Luna corrected, but neither of them was listening.
"Face it, Zoë, you're full of it, and you always have been!"
"Hold thy tongue!"
"Make me!"
"Are you two seriously doing this right now?" Percy tried to interject, but again, neither of them was willing to stop.
"Thou are a hypocrite, Thalia Grace!" Zoe was out and out snarling now, expression as fierce and savage as any predator she had ever hunted. Her speech seemed to change with her anger - becoming denser, more formal and archaic with every passing word. "Thou are so quick to lambast me for perceived slights and ignore that everything I warned you off came to pass. Betrayal from that boy-"
"Don't you dare bring him into-!"
"was inevitable, and rather than hold him and thyself responsible for the consequences of thy poor judgment, thou seek to burden me with thy misery!"
"Oh, everything just has to be about you, doesn't it!?" Thalia roared "Why am I not surprised? Gods, you can't stand the idea that the reason I hate you isn't because you were right about Luke,-"
(Annabeth and Grover flinched, and Percy's eyes widened before he scowled)
"-it's because you're a cold-hearted, stuck-up, self-centered arrogant bitch!"
...
Total. Silence.
Nobody said a word or moved a muscle. Nico was pretty sure most of them had stopped breathing together.
"Interesting."
Zoë's face was a mask of perfect calm - her voice, on the other hand, was so blisteringly cold it would have made antarctic glaciers cry with envy.
"Thou are so vehement in your hatred for me." She said softly and stepped forward until she and Thalia were almost nose to nose. The other girl didn't step back, but it had to be a near thing - Nico was nowhere close to them and he still wanted to flinch back himself. "Perhaps thou are even correct, and I am everything thou accuse me of being."
Nico swallowed.
(Something awful was coming, he could tell)
"But at the very least, I can say that have never failed so momentously, so colossally and completely as to necessitate being cursed into a tree like a nymph of old, and by mine own father at that." Thalia went white. "All those years lost, all that sacrifice... all of it bared for the sake of a treacherous would-be rebel who betrayed everything you stood for without a single regret and sold his soul to the Crooked One for the promise of ill-gotten power and glory."
Zoe shook her head one final, damning time,
"How pathetic. How shameful."
...
...
...
There was no warning.
One second Zoe and Thalia were face to face, and the next the daughter of Zeus had her foot buried in Zoe's abdomen with so much force and speed the huntress was lifted clean off the ground and flung back some six feet in an instant.
She collided with the wall behind her with a painful thudding impact and gasped in pain, and Nico surged towards her before he was even aware he was moving.
"Thalia!" Annabeth screamed and lunged, Percy and Grover hot at her heels and yelling just as loud. The Hunters were already charging.
Thalia was still faster.
Nico swore a part of his soul left his body when her spear suddenly materialised in her hand, the smell of crackling ozone flooding his nostrils and helpfully informing him that his chances of getting roasted as collateral had gone from 'barely any' to 'you're dead'.
He'd seen Thalia blast Percy with a lightning bolt at point-blank range, and he had no delusions whatsoever that he could shrug it off like the son of Poseidon had. As amazing as it had looked (Sorry, Percy), actually getting hit by one of those things was a whole other bucket of nope.
"Stupefy!"
But of course, Luna was still there, and Thalia hadn't had the time to learn that turning your back on Luna Lovegood without a plan was never a good idea.
Ordinarily, the demigoddess would have been more than capable enough to evade, but she couldn't dodge what she couldn't see coming, and the enraged demigod was seeing nothing but the target of her ire. The jet of red light caught her in the side and she was out like a light, slumping to the ground like a puppet with cut strings.
"No!" Annabeth bolted for her. "You-"
"She's just stunned, like the others back at camp. Give her fifteen minutes and she'll be right as rain. Maybe even less if she's as hardy as I think she is." She raised a hand in surrender "I didn't hurt her, I simply stopped her from tapping into her father's domain and drawing his attention to us."
That brought them all up short.
"Demigods with more tangible magical powers actively draw on their parent's domains and spheres of influence. They're... wired in, so to speak" Luna explained. "The divine parents usually ignore it, but the king of the gods is actively looking for us. If she had summoned lightning - and we all know she was about to, let's not deny it - he would have been able to pinpoint our location like that."
Luna snapped her fingers for emphasis.
Bianca hesitated and poked at her shoulder. "Couldn't you have just told her that?"
"Too slow, and she wouldn't have listened." Nico had never heard Luna sound so... flatly uspet. She turned to Zoë with an expression that was placid, but may as have been carved from rock. "She wasn't very fair to you, but that was still exceptionally ill-done. And cruel."
"I - I did not intend-" Rather than getting angry, Zoe looked... ashamed. She closed her eyes and sighed, steadying herself "That was a mistake."
"Yeah, no kidding." Percy glared, and Phoebe moved to step in his way before stopping as Zoë.
"No. Enough of this. Enough of all of this. I will-" She grimaced. "Make amends in my own time."
She turned to Luna.
"Where are we?"
Luna looked at her for a long moment, a strange pressure to her regard, before she shrugged.
"Los Angeles."
The sudden tension popped like a soap bubble, replaced with instant incredulity.
"Wait, what?" Grover shook his head in disbelief. "What?"
"We were just on Long Island," Annabeth muttered. "That's impossible - LA is thousands of miles away - it's a forty-three-hour drive!"
"It is." Luna agreed, her smile finally sliding back into place. "But who has that kind of time to spare? I prefer my portkeys for a reason."
"Port-what nows?" Percy looked so lost it was almost funny.
"Point-to-point mass teleportation spell, centered on a physical object. Hideously exhausting to make, but well worth the price."
"Cool!" Nico grinned.
"Crazy." Bianca countered, but she looked awed too.
"But how?" One of the hunters whose name Nico wouldn't even try to guess at shook her head in disbelief.. "Even the greatest witches would struggle to achieve such a feat. Only the gods, perhaps - Lady Arte-"
"No names!" yelled... pretty much everyone present.
"And you can make these any time?" If Annabeth's eyebrows rose any higher, they'd probably achieve orbital lift-off. "You can travel anywhere like this?"
The Hunters and demigods alike looked unabashedly jealous at that, even as Luna shook her head.
"Not quite anywhere." The jealous looks intensified. "Really. There are plenty of places that are warded against external travel, or have too much power for a portkey to safely anchor itself to without the risk of... bouncing off. Los Angeles is one of the few exceptions after the fact even though the mortal entrance to the Underworld is nearby somewhere."
"It is, and let's not go anywhere near it," Percy said vehemently, and Grover nodded vigorously.
"Why would the Underworld be an exception?"
"Reasons."
"Reasons?"
"Reasons." Luna agreed.
Annabeth went to ask again, before pausing and closing her mouth. She looked a bit miserable as she shook her head.
"That's all I'm going to get from you, isn't it?"
Luna had the grace to smile apologetically. "Sorry. A lady must have keep secrets."
Zoë frowned and said nothing at all.
Annabeth made a strangled noise of frustration and turned away, covering her face with both palms. Her shoulders heaved a little as she took several deep breaths.
Bianca made a sympathetic noise and stepped closer to pat her on the back gently.
"There, there. It gets better with time, I promise."
"...Really?"
"Not even a little, but hope either kills you or saves you, and I'm not dead yet."
"That's the spirit!" Luna cheered encouragingly, "Now let's head out. I didn't pick this city just because it's easy to get to, and I know a great place we can regroup."
She stopped and eyed Thalia, who was still out cold where Grover had propped her against the alley wall, her head slumped to one side.
"I've nearly exhausted myself already. I can't levitate her all the way and hide us from prying eyes with the mist - who wants to carry her?"
There was a pause.
Percy frowned when most eyes turned to him, then it donned on him and he scowled.
"Oh, you guys are the worst."
A few minutes later, they set out.
"She can never know about this' Percy had looked them all dead in the eye as he hefted Thalia up in a piggyback hold. "Never. She'll stab me in my sleep."
(Grover had laughed so hard he'd nearly cried, and even Annabeth hadn't managed to hide her smirk fast enough either. Percy's betrayed look just made the whole thing better.)
Walking through the streets of LA was a treat and a half.
True, they didn't get to see much of it as Luna led them through back alleys behind and between rows and rows of low-rise buildings, but Nico didn't mind - After four months at Westover and its grey-bleached walls devoid of colour or soul, any change of scenery was enough for him.
Besides, he'd never been in a big city before.
There was Las Vegas and that one hotel he and Bianca had stayed in for a couple of weeks, the one with a game room so large it seemed to stretch on forever, but that was pretty much it.
Before that, they'd... had something. Probably. It couldn't have been anything too important if he couldn't even remember it, right?
(Right?)
Still, they probably made quite a sight in the few instances where they crossed a busy road or weaved through oncoming traffic. Nico and the rest of the demigods were dressed more or less normally in jeans and t-shirts and whatever else they'd had on them during the escape, but the hunters were all dolled up in their silver gear and had their packs and bows hefted over their shoulders.
A handful of people had given them an odd look or two already.
When he asked Percy about it, the older boy had only shrugged lightly, careful to avoid jostling Thalia.
"The mist is pretty good at what it does, Nico. The mortals probably think the hunters are... I dunno, mean-looking girl scouts or something."
One of the hunters closest to them turned and glared over her shoulder, and both of them had to look away to muffle their laughter.
Eventually, though, they reached their destination.
And, well... it was a surprise?
It was a small double-story diner on the side of the road with its own little parking lot and a large sign by the driveway that read Poultry Planet! - 10 AM to 10 PM Everyday!
"Luna?" Bianca looked just as lost as Nico felt. "Are you sure this is the right place?"
"Sure is." Luna nodded.
"It smells like monsters," Grover said fretfully. Everybody tensed, but Luna just looked at the Satyr like he'd said something silly.
"Of course it does. I'd be very surprised if it didn't."
And with that entirely unsatisfying statement, she started to cross the parking lot and headed straight for the front door. Nico and Bianca exchanged a look, and then they bolted after her first, quickly followed by the rest of them.
Nico caught up with Luna just in time to see her place her hand on the doorknob.
There was a sign on the door - Closed for repairs - and the front windows were boarded up, but she didn't look at them at all.
"Is it locked?" He prodded, and Luna's free hand came up to ruffle his hair reassuringly.
"Not for long. Alohomora."
Her palm flashed a bright blue and the door clicked open in the time it took Nico to blink.
"Shall we?"
As the sign said, the inside of the diner was, in fact, in need of repairs. Oh, it wasn't a wreck or anything, but it clearly wasn't anywhere near ready for business.
The floor was polished marble with black and white domino patterns, and the front wall and the ends were dominated by a row of quaint little booths, but the central service counter to their left was missing all of its stools, and a literal brick wall stretched out from behind it, running along the length of the diner and dividing it nearly in half, save for a door at the far end of the walk-way marked for staff.
"Hmm. He's remodeling." Luna looked a little put out as she took it all in. "That's a shame. I liked the original - it was lovely."
Bianca blinked and sidled closer to her.
"Who's remodeling, Lu?"
"My fr-"
She was caught off when a loud clanging noise drowned out her words and half of them reared back several steps, like someone had struck a metal shutter hard enough to have the material rattling on its hinges.
Zoë was already slipping her bow into her hand before Luna caught the tail end of the motion and shook her head.
"No weapons, please. He's a friend."
Zoë's eyes narrowed.
"Who is he?" Nevertheless, she lowered the bow (but kept an arrow knocked all the same, because... well, she was Zoë.)
The clanging continued sounding from behind the closed door, and Nico and Co were so caught up in it that they almost missed Luna's pleased murmur.
"You'll find out in... just about - ah, here we go. And three, two, one..."
Right on cue (A cue that all of them would greatly appreciate being let in on) the door flew open and the honest to gods giant burst through the door, roaring at them furiously.
"Intruders!" He bellowed, towering so high up that his head practically scraped against the ceiling, and Nico would have wondered how annoying it must have been to duck under the doorframe every time he wanted in or out if his soul hadn't been scared halfway out of his body.
Bravery was all well and good, but having an eight-foot-tall (at least) and visibly enraged giant not ten feet away from you in an enclosed space was not good for his blood pressure, and he was only ten.
Yikes
"Lastroginian!" Zoe hissed, and the giant eyes snapped to hers. He clenched his fists, and his bare, heavily tattoed biceps flexed with the force of the motion - those things were as big as Nico's head.
Double yikes.
"Huntress!" He snarled and took a step forward, and it was probably Luna's quickly raised hand that stopped Zoe from raising her bow again. "Get out of my diner! No Olympian affiliates are allowed under my roof without signing the pact of nonaggression with HR, and we don't open back up for another four months. Leave, or I'll knock the-!"
Whatever unpleasant threat that was going to end with faltered into stunned silence when the Gian't eyes flickered, landed on Luna, and promptly went wide as dinner plates.
"-Luna!?"
"Hello, Larry." The blonde girl raised a hand and waved cheerily. "How've you been?"
"Larry?" Percy's jaw dropped, and he almost faceplanted from where he'd been trying to balance Thalia's weight with one hand and fish through his pocket for his sword with the other. "Reformed cannibal Larry? Chicken-tastes-better-than-people Larry?"
"What?"
Instead of answering (or maybe just choosing to answer without words), Larry bounded forward with two thunderous steps and scooped Luna up into a hug so tight it hurt to look at, twirling around and the spot as he crushed her against his chest.
"Luna!"
"Oh, gods." Annabeth had a dazed, faraway look in her eyes. "It's Tyson all over again."
Nico didn't know who Tyson was, but the way Grover and Percy twitched made it clear they did.
"I've missed you too, Larry. We have a lot of catching up to do." Luna patted the giant's arm gently as he finally put her down. He beamed toothily as she did, displaying a mouthful of sharp, uneven yellow teeth so jarring the sight of them alone would have given every dentist in the state a nervous breakdown. "I know the diner could use some work, but I don't suppose your kitchen is in working order? Even by my standards, it's been a very long day, and I think we could all do with some food."
After welcoming them inside and apologising profusely for all the yelling, Larry headed off into his kitchen.
Before long, they heard the sound of pots clanging, a fryer sizzling, and a scent of deep-fried goodness wafted over to them well before
"Oh, wow," Bianca whispered, and Luna giggled and poked her with her elbow.
"You have no idea."
Soon enough, Larry came marching back out with trays heaped with what may as well have been Elysium to the rest of them with how hungry they were - fried chicken with sides of fries, salads, fruit cups, and enough milkshakes and cold water bottles to go around.
"Dig in!" He said cheerfully, and they fell on the food like wolves. For his part, Larry seemed happy enough with dragging an oversized stool closer to their table and going at his own plate of chicken wings, popping the things into his mouth one at a time like little pieces of popcorn.
When they were finally done, Luna was the first to lean back against her seat cushion and say in satisfaction. Nico felt that - he'd eaten so much his stomach felt like it was about to burst.
"That was wonderful, Larry, thank you."
"Oh, this was nothing. It's a shame my new Rotisserie Oven delivery was delayed - damn amazons and their lousy shipping" He muttered under his breath. "If you'd come here the day after tomorrow, I could have served you the really good stuff."
What?
"You're kidding, right?" Nico asked. "This stuff is amazing! I've never eaten so much in my life!"
Larry flushed - which was something, given how fierce he looked when not wearing that expression - and he waved a hand awkwardly. "I'm glad to hear it."
"It was generous, and we are grateful," Zoë said on her part. "I-"
"Do we owe you anything?" Thalia interrupted, and pretty much everyone listening paused carefully.
Thalia either didn't notice or didn't care, sitting up and polishing her plate as well - she'd woken up a few minutes after Larry had settled them into the booths and hadn't had a chance to do much more than groggily blink her eyes before Annabeth had jumped out of her seat and dragged her out the door.
Nico had no idea how the daughter of Athen had done it, but when the duo came back a little while later, Thalia didn't immediately go for Zoë throat. She still hadn't even looked in the hunters's general direction - it was like she refused to acknowledge her existence entirely, and for the moment, Zoë seemed happy enough to return the favour.
"Of course not. It's on the house. Any friend of Luna is welcome here." The giant said firmly, and Thalia offered him - well, it wasn't a smile, but it wasn't the sullen grimace that the daughter of Zeus had been aiming at anyone bold enough to look her in the eye for the past hour and that was probably about as good as it was going to get.
Then she went right back to glaring at her empty plate, and the sudden tension popped.
Phew. Crisis averted
(for now)
"So what brings you to Los Angeles?"
"Divine affairs," Luna answered, which was true enough even if incredibly vague. "A quest."
That was a lot less vague, and Larry frowned. The comfortable ease drained from his features, and his lips pressed together tightly.
"A quest?" Even his voice changed. It deepened with wariness, rumbling ever so slightly at the edges. "Dangerous business, quests. Never good for heroes."
His gaze shifted to Zoe.
"Or hunters."
"Thy concern is noted."
"We'll be careful," Luna added, but Larry didn't look any happier.
"Is there anything I can do to help?" He asked "I don't mind. I could close up shop and come with you-"?
"No," Luna answered so quickly that Larry flinched back, a wounded look on his face and she hurriedly shook her head. "Larry, I would love to have you along with us, but this quest has just started and it's already shaping up to be horrifically dangerous. I'd never forgive myself if you got hurt on my behalf - and there's a limit on the number of quest-goers as it is."
Larry nodded slowly. "I suppose twenty-seven is a bit much for any quest."
"Oh, we're not all going. The prophecy specifically numbered seven"
"Only seven?"
And the giant's frown came running right back
"It is for the best. Twenty-seven questers, demigods and divine touched alike." Zoe offered out of the blue. "Unfriendly monsters would be able to pick up our scent from miles away. It would be suicide."
"I guess that's true." He admitted, sounding entirely too displeased about it.
Luna smiled gently. "You already have. We've only just started anyway. We still don't even know for certain where the prophecy is leading us, only that we have to head west."
Larry stilled and straightened. "West?
Nobody missed the change in posture.
"Yes," Annabeth said slowly. "'Seven shall flee west-"
She cut herself off before she finished the line, but Larry didn't seem to have noticed. His eyes had gone hazy in thought, and his features had visibly darkened.
"Larry?" Luna prodded gently "Larry, why does that upset you?"
"West is bad." He mumbled. "West is dangerous."
That sounded just peachy, didn't it?
"Larry?"
"Monsters," He said at last, looking all too uncomfortable about it. "There have been stories and rumours hovering about for some time now. Dracaena, hell hounds, empousa - even more. All kinds of monsters moving across the country in big, big numbers, and all of them heading west - to San Francisco."
Luna's face twisted in blatant shock for the first time since anything to do with this quest had happened. Across from her, Zoe went silent and so still she may as well have been carved from stone.
"It's not just the regular chumps either. Dangerous things are coming out of hiding, Luna. They're calling it the Great Rousing."
Percy jolted in recognition - why, Nico didn't know, but the son of Poseidon flicked his eyes to Zoë, who responded with a single nod and nothing else.
A memory niggled at the back of Nico's mind - Hadn't Dr. Thorn said something almost exactly along those lines before Luna had dusted him?
The realization was chilling.
He felt Bianca shift beside him, and when he looked at her he could tell that she'd made the connection too.
"It's all one big mess." Larry missed the byplay entirely, lost in his story. "Very old, very powerful monsters waking from their slumber or crawling straight out of the Pit to join the calling, and it's provoking all the lesser ones into following in their footsteps."
He scowled heavily.
"A few of my thick-headed cousins came after me a few weeks ago. They said they were looking to head west too, just like you, and they wanted me to come with them. Didn't quite like it when I said no, so I had to give them a good thumping to send them away, but they'll be back sooner or later looking for trouble. They always are."
Luna looked troubled by that. "Will you be alright?"
"Always am." The giant said gruffly. "But you're the one heading west, and no matter how good you are, Luna, no one is safe in San Franciso these days. Promise me you'll stay away from it?"
Luna gave him a very careful look.
"I promise I'll do my best to stay out of San Francisco if I can at all avoid it."
He brightened up.
"Good! Now, there's still some leftover chicken in the kitchen, so I'll pack you a few take-out boxes for your quest." He hopped off his stool and spun off the spot "Back soon!"
For a long minute after he left, no one said a word.
It was Percy who broke the silence at last.
"So, San Francisco is crawling with all kinds of nasty monsters, and it's probably one of those places we a hundred percent shouldn't get anywhere near." he sounded like a soldier marching off to his death - entirely too resigned to the inevitable. "So that's probably exactly where we need to go, isn't it?"
Everyone nodded grimly.
"It seems likely," Luna said lightly as she looked at Zoë "But I suppose the decision ultimately lies with our quest leader."
"We go." Credit where credit was due, Zoë didn't even hesitate. She didn't even stop to consider it - whether that was because she didn't have to or because she'd already chosen her course alone was anyone's guess. "As soon as our packs are ready, we set out. Luna."
"Yes?"
"Can you create a portkey to San Francisco?"
"No. I wouldn't dare try. There's so much mist and divine interference centered on that city that even attempting to portkey to its general vicinity would be foolish to the point of insanity. At best, we'd end flung far and wide across the other end of the country. At worst..." She shook her head slowly. "You don't want to know."
Zoë grimaced, but she didn't look surprised.
"Very well then. We can take a train-"
"Wait a second," Annabeth interjected. "Who's we?"
There was a pause.
"The prophecy specifies seven. We're over the limit by twenty. We can't take everyone. It's Zoe's quest - that's one. Who are the other six, and what happens to the rest?"
"I'm almost certain a line of the prophecy applies to me. I'll go, if you'll have me." Luna offered, and Zoë nodded. "But Bianca and Nico come with me."
"What?" Bianca asked
"Yes!" Nico crowed.
"Impossible." Zoë crossed her arms.
"I wasn't asking, sorry." Luna countered, and the lieutenant clenched her jaw. "They're involved in this. Our escape from camp implicates them in the possible consequences. They'll be seen as co-conspirators in our defiance of the Olympian council. The gods would punish them every bit as harshly as they'd try to punish us, and that's a risk I refuse to take. I'm not letting either one of them out of my sight until I know they're safe, whenever that may be."
"You would bring them on a quest-"
"And risk throwing them out of the frying pan and into the fire. Believe me, I'm well aware of the irony." Her brows furrowed and her eyes narrowed. For maybe the first time since he'd met her, Luna looked... not angry, but closer to it than he'd ever seen her get (closer than he'd ever thought she could get. Today was a day firsts all around it seemed, and only a few of them were any good) "Ours is a world of extremes. If I have to choose between them being in danger where I can help and them being in danger where I wouldn't even be aware of it..."
She trailed off and shook her head.
"It isn't even close."
Zoë looked like she wanted to say something scathing, really she did... but she paused. Her eyes went first to Nico, who did his best not to flinch, and next to Bianca.
"Very well." she ground out. Likely because she knew Luna was way too useful to give up. "Very well. Who else?"
"I'll go." Annabeth offered. Zoe looked at her. "The hunters saved us once, a long time ago. I owe it to your lady to try."
"I'll go too."
Nico was pretty sure he wasn't the only one to blue-screen a little when Thalia of all people spoke up, not looking up from the table.
Zoë didn't look happy (did she ever?) but she didn't refuse either one of them out of hand.
"Wait, hold on." Percy sat up quickly. "I'm going too-"
"Absolutely not." Zoë hissed "The child is bad enough. I will not have two boys on this quest if I can help it-"
"But you can't help it." Thalia stood up from her seat suddenly, and half the hunters in the diner sprung up with her until Zoe stilled them with a hand. "Percy's got a better track record than most adult demigods."
"Are adult demigods even a thing?" Bianca muttered.
"You'd be surprised," Luna whispered back.
"That is irrelevant."
"Irrelevant my ass. He fought the Minotaur, the Hydra, Polyphemus-"
"Thalia, names," Annabeth said warningly, looking nervously from side to side as if expecting those same monsters to pop out from behind the countertop or something.
"Whatever. Percy's good, and I trust him to have my back. He goes."
"That is not thy - your decision to make."
"Too bad. I'm making it anyway." Her eyes narrowed dangerously. "And just so we're clear, it's either he goes on this quest, or you and I go at each other right now and fuck whatever happens next."
Zoë leaped from her chair. "Do you think I fear you, you-"
"Zoë." Phoebe put a hand on her shoulder. "Perhaps it's for the best."
"What-?"
"We can't afford a fight, not now of all times," she said brusquely. "The gods are no doubt already scouring the west for us, and we can ill-afford to draw their attention. We need to split up as it is, and this works as well as anything. The rest of us can head back east, draw their attention, pull the heat off of you."
"You're going to draw the god's attention?" Annabeth asked, "On purpose?"
Her tone screamed Are you crazy?, but Zoë's current second-in-command just grinned with way too many teeth.
(Seriously, did the hunters practice being intimidating and approachable? Nico bet that they did.)
"We're hunters." She declared. "We don't just follow trails - we know a thousand and one ways to throw them off. And believe it or not, this is hardly the first time we've had to evade gods."
Phoebe turned to Thalia.
"Your father chief among them. For all that he's lauded as the 'lord of honor,'" She snorted derisively. "We've been afforded very little of it from him over the millennia."
Thalia crossed her arms.
"He's a hypocrite and a shithead. I'm not apologizing for him. If I start, I'd never be able to stop."
The hunter inclined her head.
"True, and I'm not asking you to. However, I will tell you this much," She put her hands on the table and leaned forward. "You're going on a quest to save my patron, and your obstinance has prevented the presence of another hunter on this quest in place of the boy."
"The boy has a name," Percy muttered, but Annabeth drove an elbow into his ribs so quickly it almost knocked him off the edge of his seat.
"If this quest fails, and by some chance you survive, I will be holding you at least partially responsible," Phoebe promised, and Thalia glared so fiercely that Nico expected her to shoot lightning out of her eyes.
"If this quest fails and we make it out by the end, then between the Titans, the Olympians and everything in between, you'll have to get in line."
"I will. In the meantime," Pheobe turned to Zoe, who'd been watching the proceedings with a resigned, off-handed kind of anger. "We'll get your gear ready. Weapons, clothes, drachma and ambrosia - the works."
Zoe glowered darkly for another little while, eyes latched on Thalia and Percy, before she nodded so stiffly it was a miracle she didn't break her neck.
"Wait, what about Grover?" Bianca asked, and all of them suddenly remembered the Satyr who'd stayed silent for the entire. conversation.
"The limit's been reached," Annabeth said, and she sounded a little guilty. "We can't add him on, or we'd be going against the prophecy."
"But won't the gods be looking for him too? What if they catch him?"
"It's okay." Grover gave a brave smile. "I can lay low too. There's probably a nice park or something nearby and-"
"Phoebe," Zoë said, and the other hunter nodded.
"Satyrs can be useful. He can stay with us."
"Ohgodsthankyou!" He collapsed in relief immediately and Phoebe rolled her eyes.
"Wimp."
"Hey! I'll have you know I kicked Medusa in the head that one time! And-"
Zoë's palm cracked against the table and he clammed right up. Percy gave her a reproachful look for that one, but she didn't seem to notice.
"No more talk. As soon as the packs are gathered, we leave at once."
"And go where?" Annabeth asked.
"Union Station can't be too far from here." Percy offered. "We could catch a direct line and be at San Fransico by tomorrow."
Everybody stared.
"What?" He crossed his arms defensively. "I know can have ideas too!"
"He's right."
"I know." Zoë didn't sound too happy about that, and Nico swore he saw Thalia's lips twitch. "Let's move."
And that was when Larry finally came back out of the kitchen, two bags full of take-out boxes in either hand.
Luna flashed him a thumbs-up.
And then it was time to go.
They said their goodbyes quickly.
Larry gave Luna another crushing hug and offered each of them a solid handshake. When it was Nico's turn, the motion almost lifted him off his feet. That had been fun.
Then he gave them each a fifty percent discount coupon.
"For your next visit," He explained with a smile. "Something to look forward to. Good luck!"
Larry was cool, Nico decided. Not Luna or Percy cool, but cool enough.
The Hunters (and Grover) followed them all the way to Union Station. It took them twenty minutes to cross the distance, and everyone had at least one hand on a weapon of some sort the entire way there, wary of monster attacks.
(Or worse - God attacks)
But nothing happened.
It was almost too easy, and Nico could tell that made the more experienced demigods twitchy as all heck. There was this poorly hidden manic energy to them, as if they were ready to leap into action at a moment's notice. Luna's hand never once let go of his the entire way there.
When they finally got to the station it was Grover who slipped in first. "I got this."
He hopped up the stairs, past the milling crowds and through the main entrance faster than Nico had ever seen him move. Less than ten minutes later, he came running back out, seven tickets ready to go.
"Here. One each."
"Wait," Percy did a double take. "First class?"
Thalia looked just impressed "Grover, how much did these even cost?"
Grover shook his head and smiled nervously. "Don't worry about it. Every Satyr with a Searcher's license gets a pretty generous spending budget at the start of the year. I saved it up a bit, converted some of it to mortal money and... well, it's not like I'm using any of it right now."
"Dude."
"Seriously, don't worry about it. I can't help you on the quest, but I can at least do this much."
Annabeth and Thalia gave him a quick hug, and Percy gave him a big high-five.
"See you soon, G-man."
"I hope so." He muttered. "Come on, you should go. Stay safe."
With a final wave at Nico and Bianca, the Satyr turned around and headed off to where Phoebe and the rest of the Hunters were waiting for him. Zoë nodded at them once, and that was all the farewell the needed before walking back the way they came and melting off into the crowds.
"Will they really be okay?" Bianca asked lowly, and Zoë exhaled wearily.
"We can only hope. Let's continue."
Boarding the train was the easiest part.
Grover had gone above and beyond, and they'd wound up with three neighbouring compartments back to back.
Or two, technically, because Thalia had marched right into hers the second they'd stepped onto the train and slammed the door shut behind her with so much force it'd nearly bounced back twice before the click of a lock sealed it in place.
"Such a child," Zoë muttered, and Annabeth shot her a glare.
"It's a ten-hour trip." Luna stepped in between them before things could get out of hand for the hundredth time that day. "We've all had a very long day, and something tells me tomorrow isn't going to be any easier. We should try and get some sleep."
"I have questions I want to ask you."
"I'm sure you do." Luna smiled a little wistfully "You'd have been such a Ravenclaw, Annabeth."
"What?"
"Nothing. I'll answer your questions, but now now. You're dead on your feet. We all are."
And maybe Nico could have argued against that, but at that point, he was barely even listening. He's made the mistake of sitting against one of the insultingly comfortable seat cushions and his eyes had started dropping almost immediately.
Before he knew it, he was out like a light.
Two men stood face to face on the edge of a cliff, the wind howling furiously around them but failing to so much as ruffle their clothes.
The first might as well have been a living statue. Seven feet tall, with dark slicked-back hair, grey eyes like stone and light brown skin. His form was rippled and corded with muscle, clearly visible even over the expensive-looked business suit he wore. His face had a brutal quality to it, and he had hands that looked like they could snap a flagpole in half. He kept clenching and unclenching his fists, as if in anticipation for a fight.
His companion was only a little less intimidating. Every bit as tall, only a little leaner, with long black hair that trailed in a ponytail behind his back and a face that was riddled with silver scars and horrifically marred flesh.
The scarred man spoke first, his voice far more gentle and poised than his appearance suggested, but no less powerful for it.
"I must admit, I would not have expected this from you, general."
"Did you think you were the only one capable of planning ahead?"
Unlike the scarred man, the general's voice matched his appearance perfectly. Rough and heavy, and with and added quality to it reminiscent of a rockslide.
"Hardly, cousin. But I wouldn't have thought that you of all our kin would choose exercise such ... discretion. It is most unlike you."
"Bah! Why should I put in the effort of crushing the demigod brats when the Olympians so readily offer them up on a silver platter? Only fools do not seize advantages so readily given, and it will make our inevitable victory that much sweeter in the end."
"Zeus and his ilk falling to their hubris would be poetic." The scarred man agreed. "But why come to me?"
"Isn't it obvious? I want no room for failure. I will provide the forces and the heavy hand to bend the would-be saviors to our will, but it will be your silver tongue that forces them to lay down their arms of their own accord." The general sneered "Unless you think yourself incapable of it?"
The scarred man smiled, unbothered by the implied insult.
"Oh, hardly. I just wanted to hear you say it. I think... yes, I have just the right thing in the mind."
"Well?"
"Now, cousin, it would be poor of me to spoil the surprise so soon. " The scarred man chided, and then he turned and looked straight at Nico. "Especially when one of the very same demigods you're so fixated on is currently present listening to every word. I'll be seeing you again very soon, Mr. Di Angelo, but until then, I'm afraid your little dream is at an end."
Then he raised his hand and snapped his fingers, and the world dissolved into motes of blinding light.
Nico's eyes snapped open.
(Something was wrong.)
"S'going on." He mumbled tiredly, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Had he just been dreaming?
The rest of the six were already up and hovering over him.
"No," Luna said. Her lips were pursed, and the others looked just as grim. "We're still at least an hour short, but the train's stopped and all the lights have been knocked out."
"This is bad," Thalia murmured, tightly gripping her spear shaft. She tensed as a sound washed over their compartment, loud and shrill and all too familiar.
A growl, deep and rumbling. Screams began to echo down the train.
"God or monster?" Bianca asked with wide eyes, and Percy clenched his jaw as he uncapped his pen. Riptide sprung into being in all its glory, the celestial bronze blade glowing in the darkness.
"It doesn't matter. We aren't sticking around to find out."
He turned and swung the sword at the window, and it exploded outwards in a shower of spraying glass. He gestured with the window, where Nico could see nothing but miles and miles of flat, dry land, and the only light was coming from the moon.
(Were they in a desert?)
"Time to go."
Thalia went first, raising her foot onto the ledge and catapulting herself out. She landed with a grunt and gestured for Annabeth, who jumped out after her, followed by Zoë and Bianca hand in hand.
Nico didn't get a chance to try.
Luna jumped next, and then raised her hand behind her.
"Wingardium Leviosa."
Gently but quickly, he floated right through the broken window and dropped down beside her, and Percy hopped out last, still glancing beside him with his sword out and ready.
(The screams had gotten louder.)
"Go!"
They bolted., leaving the train behind.
Nico didn't know how how they ran after that, or how they knew where to go. He didn't know how he kept up, even when his feet felt like they were screaming and his lungs burned. His heart alone felt like it was being squeezed by a cruel, uncaring fist, but somehow he still managed to keep up.
What he did now for sure was that things started going truly wrong when a road appeared in front of them so abruptly that it had to be magic of some kind.
They stopped, heaving with breath and staring warily.
Ahead of them was a two-lane road half covered with sand. On the other side of the road was a cluster of buildings too small to be a town: a boarded-up house, a taco shop that looked like it hadn't been open since before Zoë Nightshade was born, and a white stucco post office with a sign that said GILA CLAW, ARIZONA hanging crooked above the door.
Beyond that was a range of hills… but Nico noticed they weren't regular hills. The countryside was way too flat for that. The hills were enormous mounds of old cars, appliances, and other scrap metal. It was a junkyard that seemed to go on forever.
"Whoa," He gasped, partly in awe and partly because he still couldn't steady his breathing.
"Something tells me we're not going to find a car rental here," Thalia said.
"This place is dangerous," Luna said, and her voice was laced with such uncharacteristic iron and urgency that had them all on edge instantly. "It's roiling in so much magic I can almost taste it."
She shook her head.
"We shouldn't go anywhere near it."
Naturally, that was when the fates finally came calling.
"You punks aren't going anywhere at all."
They turned - it almost didn't matter. The sheer presence and tangible power of the figure who'd appeared behind them still just about knocked them to their knees.
Percy's face drained of color
"Oh, no."
He was a big man with a crew cut, a black leather biker's jacket, black jeans, a white muscle shirt, and combat boots. Wraparound shades hid his eyes, but genuine flames flickered from just beneath their surface, and the air shimmered from the sheer heat.
"Oh yes, Jackson." He smirked cruelly "I've been waiting a long time for this."
Looking at him, Nico felt smaller and more pitiful than he'd ever had. Dr. Thorn might as well have been a kitten when compared to this being. Just being in his vicinity was making it hard to breathe.
"Lord Ares," Zoë said calmly, but the grip on her bow had gone white-knuckled. Nico recognized the name immediately.
This was the god of war - and he meant business.
"Zoë Nightshade." He tutted and shook his head. "You made a big mistake when you refused to play ball."
"My lady needs me."
"Not my problem," Ares said bluntly, and Zoë's calm expression broke. For just a second, her face screwed up in an expression so hateful it would have made a Drakon run for the hills.
Ares just laughed.
"Artemis knew the risks, and she still messed up. Whatever happens to her from now until or if we get her back is on her." He shook his head. "Just like whatever comes next is on you. Orders are orders, and you willingly disobeyed an edict from the council. The trip's over, punks. Time to face the music."
"We go nowhere until Artemis is safe!" She raised her bow, arrow aimed directly at Ares's face. "
The god shrugged.
"Refuse all you want. One way or another you'll be on Olympus inside of an hour. Beating you to a pulp before I slap the chains on isn't going to be a problem." He grinned. "Hell, it's my bonus for dealing with this waste of time."
"Lord-" Luna barely opened her mouth before Ares raised a hand. A huge, two-handed sword materialized in his grip. The hilt was a large silver skull with a ruby in its mouth.
"Luna Lovegood." Ares swung the sword around in a lazy circle, as if he were testing its weight. No one missed the implied threat. "The girl who knows things she should have no business of knowing. I heard about your stunt with the old drunk. Fair warning - try that shit with me, and I swear by the moirai that I will flay the skin off your flesh, fashion it into a rope and strangle you to death with it."
"Back off!" Percy and Thalia stepped up and hefted sword and spear respectively.
Ares didn't look even a little intimidated.
"Oh, just you wait. I'll get to you in a second. You too, daughter of Zeus." He shook his head. "Man, you little shits have no idea how badly you're in for it, do you? Half the councils wanted to blast you to dust because of the Great Prophecy, and now you've given us the perfect excuse. Not even daddy dearest will save you, assuming he'd even want to."
"Screw you." Thalia spat.
"That's the spirit. It's no fun if you don't at least try." He raised his sword menacingly "Now let's get started."
Then a burst of golden light that interrupted Ares for half a second before he would have charged. The air swelled with heat. When the light died, a red-hot car was parked between them and the war god.
A very familiar car.
"No way," Nico whispered, even as Apollo hopped out of the driver seat of his Maserati, decked out in greaves and armor with his bow slung over his shoulder."
"Apollo," Ares growled and yanked his shades off. Nico almost recoiled at the sight of the flaming sockets the god had for eyes. "What the Hades do you think you're doing?"
"Oh, nothing much." The sun god hummed cheerily, turning back half a second and waving. "Hey guys. How've you been?"
"Apollo." Ares snarled, but Apollo didn't turn around just yet. Instead, he gave a wink and a nod at Zoe, who didn't look as annoyed as she had the last time she met Artemis's twin.
No, if anything, she looked... hopeful.
What?
"Apollo." Ares spoke through gritted teeth. "I'm not going to ask - again. What do you think you're doing?"
"Well, I was following Father's orders, of course - scouring the west in search of these unlucky dudes so I can drag them to Olympus as requested, but then I realized something." Apollo titled his head with a contemplative look. "If someone were to succeed in capturing the these questors, then their quest fails automatically. The quest who's purpose mind you, is to free my baby sis. Meaning Artemis will remain in the hands of the Titans, chained like a slave, possibly for the rest of eternity."
Apollo's countenance twisted with fury.
"Fuck. That."
His voice rumbled with so much power that those two words alone nearly burst Nico's ear drums. The air grew warmer and warmer until it bordered on uncomfortable.
Across from him, Ares barred his teeth.
"So you'd go against the council too? You'd risk losing everything for your defiance?"
"For my twin?" Apollo chuckled and leaned forward. In his hands, a sword materialized. The hilt was solid gold and the blade was a pillar of pure flame. "If you have to ask, then you're an even bigger fool than you look."
Ares's expression hardened. The air grew warmer by several degrees again, and now it was outright sweltering.
"You know what? fine." He raised his sword Father will make you beg for mortality by the time he's done with you for this betrayal, Apollo."
"You know, he just might." The sun god admitted and leaned forward one final time. "But that's a risk I'm happy to take. And hey, on the plus side, no matter what happens next, I still get to give you the beating you've been begging for for centuries, and that's a reward all on its own!"
Ares's eyes blazed.
"Then come forward and try if you dare, ανόητε!"
The two Olympians charged and Annabeth screamed.
"RUN!"
The seven of them turned and fled for their lives right as the gods clashed, and everything went straight to Tartarus in an explosion of light and power.
As always, leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it, please be courteous.
Heck, if anything, that was an understatement.
His life hadn't just been flipped around - it had cartwheeled off the path of sanity, sprinted around in circles until everything was spinning into chaos, and then immediately leapt head first off a cliffside and into a ravine full of crazy.
And Nico?
He had been and was still loving every last second of it.
Greek gods, greek monsters, and the demigods in between - it was like a deluxe edition of mythomagic come to life, and he got to live through all of it for real!
Better yet, all three of them did.
Luna and Bianca were right there with him, along for the ride just like he was, and neither of them (Ahem, Bianca) could blow him off this time around because they were busy with homework or found it boring.
Ha! How sweet was that?
Sure, the manticore thing had been kind of/sort of/definitely a little petrifying (He'd always known that Dr. Thorn was a bully of a teacher and a nasty piece of work, but he hadn't expected him to be a literal monster) and the undead mummy and her crazy death-prophecy-of doom sounded like all kinds of bad news even to him, but as far Nico was concerned, the good still outweighed the bad.
By about a hundred metric tons at least. How could it not?
At least one of his and Bianca's parents wasn't only still alive, but an actual immortal god. They were both demigods, like Hercules or Achilles or Thesueus - How many other orphaned ten-year-olds could say the same?
How many others dreamed that they could do the same?
It hadn't even been forty-eight hours yet and Nico had already started having the kind of adventures people only ever heard about in myths or read about in children's stories.
He'd met the Artemis, and gotten to ride the sun chariot with the Apollo (Which had been amazing, even if he hadn't understood it at all - wasn't the sun supposed to be a giant ball of gas in outer space?). He'd even gotten to hold a real sword and compete in a real war game with a small army of other demigods!
(He might not have actually done anything, but the experience still counted! Everybody had to start somewhere!)
Even the whole mess that followed after that with the creepy Oracle of Delphi hadn't been too bad.
( Luna had shielded him and Bianca from the Pythia's poisonous gaze, and Nico had been so unnerved by the thing that he hadn't even had the time to feel embarrassed about hiding behind her. He didn't say a word about it but even beyond being a literal walking talking corpse, something about that mummy had just felt wrong - and strangely angry)
Now, the whole Mr.D thing that came after that - honestly, Nico was torn.
On the one hand, being in the presence of an enraged god?
Not fun. Very not fun, even - Extremely not fun.
On the other hand, Luna had once again pulled a Luna and taken down an enraged god with nothing but words, and just four at that.
Not even a complete sentence sentence, barely a phrase, and down he went. The bragging rights alone made the unease (read: mind-numbing terror) of the experience so freaking worth it.
"Yeah, that's right. That's my friend. She beat a god. What are you going to do about it?"
And hey, pretty much everyone in any kind of position of authority at Camp Half-Blood had seen it, so no one could try to deny it happened or fudge the details to make Mr. D (who was a massive jerk, stacked mythomagic profile or no) look better.
Awesome. Just... Awesome.
Which brought them neatly to the present.
And the Portkey.
("Do not let go, Nico - the anchoring charm shouldn't allow you to, but don't even try, just to be safe")
Now, Nico hadn't known what a portkey was. He hadn't known a thing more than anybody else Luna had talked to, which basically amounted to 'hold on tight, don't let go if you can somehow manage it, and take a deep breath if you need to'
"Butterbeer!"
Luna yelled the nonsensical word out (was that even a thing?) and woah gods-!
It happened immediately.
The world dissolved in an eruption of bright lights and before any of them had the time to even breathe, they vanished, sucked into an ocean of color and howling air!
Nico felt like a hook just behind his navel had been suddenly jerked irresistibly forward. His feet left the ground; he could feel Thalia and Percy on either side of him, (They'd volunteered to keep an eye on him, not that he needed it) their shoulders banging into his; they were all speeding forward in a howl of wind and swirling color.
Somebody screamed. The part of Nico's mind that was capable of conscious thought didn't blame them.
The world continued to swirl.
His sense of balance vanished in the throes of vertigo, and the pressure didn't let up - if anything, it got worse with every second. The entire experience felt like riding the world's most unstable rollercoaster straight into the eye of a hurricane. He held on to Percy and Thalia as tightly as he could, pressing his eyes closed to focus, but even with his best effort and Luna's assurance ringing in his head, he was sure his grip was going to break any second and he'd be flung into oblivion.
(It was exhilarating - and insanely terrifying. )
And just as soon as it began, it was also over.
The lights winked out. The wind and the pressure vanished. Reality came hurtling back to his senses, and his feet landed on solid pavement as the world reasserted itself. They materialized in a drab and grey alleyway of sorts, crammed between two tall buildings and empty of anything save a large, rusty green dumpster that looked like it hadn't been used in fifty years. The sound of honking cars and general mid-day traffic drifted in from somewhere behind them.
"Hey," was his first excited thought "I stuck the landing-!"
Naturally, that was the very second Thalia and Percy staggered into him and all three of them tumbled onto the ground in a groaning heap.
"Augh!"
"Sorry!"
It wasn't just them, either. Except for Luna (of course, ) Zoe, and a couple of the more nimble hunters, everyone present was getting thoroughly acquainted with the ground beneath them,
"Oh, Styx." Thalia gasped, rolled to the side and clutched her stomach "Son of a-"
"Hey! Watch the language!" Percy protested weakly, struggling to his feet and pulling up Nico. "The kid's barely twelve."
"Ten." Nico corrected.
"See?" Percy glanced at Thalia reproachfully. "That's even worse."
Then he paused and shuddered, looking disturbed.
"Oh my gods, I sound like my mom."
The daughter of Zeus looked about as impressed with that statement as Nico was.
"Go to Tartarus, kelp-head."
The jab was probably supposed to sound harsh, but Thalia was so green in the face that the bite was sapped right out of it. She looked about five seconds away from puking her guts out.
Nico and Percy both frowned at her.
What was up with her? She hadn't landed that hard - No one had.
"Let's avoid names of power, please," Luna called out from a couple of feet away, sighing as she helped Bianca up. "We're very lucky we managed to get away as it is. Drawing any kind of attention to ourselves right now would be a ruinously bad idea."
"She's right. No names." Annabeth pulled herself up, staggering slightly but remaining on her feet. "We defied a direct order from the king of the gods and the Olympian council by proxy - I can't even begin to describe how much trouble we're in. Great heroes have been smote for less. And what happened with Mr. D-"
Her eyes flickered to Luna and she hesitated, biting her lip. Confusion and wariness warred over her expression, but Luna only smiled in that consistently knowing way of hers, calm and collected as ever.
"In my defense, he was attempting to prevent us from going on an oracle-sanctioned quest. Trying to interfere with prophecized events often achieves nothing or hastens them, and it's historically proven to be a terrible approach either way. Even the Council of Twelve can't supersede the fates." Luna pursed her lips a bit. "And if we're being entirely honest, I didn't much like the idea of being turned into a fruit. I doubt any of the hunters would have enjoyed it either, so I'd say that things worked out for the better."
Everybody looked at her with wide eyes.
Well, Annabeth and a few others did. Bianca just looked tiredly amused and resigned and Nico for his part didn't even try and hide his grin.
"She...has a point?" Percy offered and raised his arms in surrender when Annabeth rounded on him with a withering glare. "Hey, wise girl, I'm just saying. The Big Three tried to stop a prophecy swearing off having kids and... well, we all know how that worked out for them."
Percy pointed at himself, then at Thalia, who rolled her eyes and waved theatrically.
"You'd think millennia of existence would help have helped our fathers work on their self-control, but nope." Thalia snorted and ran a hand through her hair. She looked loads better already. "They didn't even make it a hundred years before going at it again. Typical."
Annabeth spluttered a bit, probably on account of not having a good answer for any of that.
"You - that's not the point!" She turned back to Luna. "You brought an Olympian god to his knees. You attacked him and made him scream. That's - That's-"
She made a violent motion with both hands.
"How?"
Luna gave her a little frown and raised an eyebrow
"I didn't attack him - I just greeted him. Very, very enthusiastically. Technically, he attacked himself" She raised a hand when Annabeth opened her mouth to speak. "And before you ask, the full explanation happens to involve a remarkably long story that I can't get into in the kind of detail a child of the wisdom goddess would appreciate without a good bit of time on hand and a very thorough lecture on the adaptive and almost paradoxical nature of the greco-roman pantheon, but I promise I'll try as soon as we're somewhere safe."
Annabeth didn't look happy with that and Nico really couldn't blame her for not being satisfied. He'd understood maybe one in every five words of that - Which was pretty good for any conversation with Luna, actually - and he still had enough questions of his own to fill a notebook or three.
"She's right," Zoë said, mirroring Annabeth's earlier words before she or anyone else could get a word in edgewise. "There's been enough time wasted and enough treasonous talk as it is."
Thalia scoffed. "Weren't you all for treason five minutes ago? Or is that only on the table when it's you getting what you want?"
Zoë's eyes flashed, and Grover winced. "Oh, here we go."
Nico knew that Zoe and Thalia didn't like each other. He'd seen them glaring at one another and heard the way they argued back at the council meeting in the big house (before everything had gone straight to Hades in a handbasket), but for the most part, he thought they'd probably be happy to stay out of each other's way.
Maybe it was the fear and the lingering stress, or the still-hounding knowledge that the gods were probably already out for their heads.
Or maybe it was as simple as an old festering grudge finally exploding after simmering for who knew how long.
Whatever it was, it had Zoe whirling on Thalia with genuine fury all but pouring off of her in waves.
"Just because I happen to be ready and willing to cross any boundary set by the Council of Twelve to aid my lady," The lieutenant hissed sharply "does not mean I am keen to. Unlike you, I happen to have the foresight to avoid unnecessary risks."
"Hah!" Thalia crowed. "Don't make me laugh. Which one of us had to be saved from being blasted into a bowl of grapes by a twelve-year-old girl?"
"Thirteen." Luna corrected, but neither of them was listening.
"Face it, Zoë, you're full of it, and you always have been!"
"Hold thy tongue!"
"Make me!"
"Are you two seriously doing this right now?" Percy tried to interject, but again, neither of them was willing to stop.
"Thou are a hypocrite, Thalia Grace!" Zoe was out and out snarling now, expression as fierce and savage as any predator she had ever hunted. Her speech seemed to change with her anger - becoming denser, more formal and archaic with every passing word. "Thou are so quick to lambast me for perceived slights and ignore that everything I warned you off came to pass. Betrayal from that boy-"
"Don't you dare bring him into-!"
"was inevitable, and rather than hold him and thyself responsible for the consequences of thy poor judgment, thou seek to burden me with thy misery!"
"Oh, everything just has to be about you, doesn't it!?" Thalia roared "Why am I not surprised? Gods, you can't stand the idea that the reason I hate you isn't because you were right about Luke,-"
(Annabeth and Grover flinched, and Percy's eyes widened before he scowled)
"-it's because you're a cold-hearted, stuck-up, self-centered arrogant bitch!"
...
Total. Silence.
Nobody said a word or moved a muscle. Nico was pretty sure most of them had stopped breathing together.
"Interesting."
Zoë's face was a mask of perfect calm - her voice, on the other hand, was so blisteringly cold it would have made antarctic glaciers cry with envy.
"Thou are so vehement in your hatred for me." She said softly and stepped forward until she and Thalia were almost nose to nose. The other girl didn't step back, but it had to be a near thing - Nico was nowhere close to them and he still wanted to flinch back himself. "Perhaps thou are even correct, and I am everything thou accuse me of being."
Nico swallowed.
(Something awful was coming, he could tell)
"But at the very least, I can say that have never failed so momentously, so colossally and completely as to necessitate being cursed into a tree like a nymph of old, and by mine own father at that." Thalia went white. "All those years lost, all that sacrifice... all of it bared for the sake of a treacherous would-be rebel who betrayed everything you stood for without a single regret and sold his soul to the Crooked One for the promise of ill-gotten power and glory."
Zoe shook her head one final, damning time,
"How pathetic. How shameful."
...
...
...
There was no warning.
One second Zoe and Thalia were face to face, and the next the daughter of Zeus had her foot buried in Zoe's abdomen with so much force and speed the huntress was lifted clean off the ground and flung back some six feet in an instant.
She collided with the wall behind her with a painful thudding impact and gasped in pain, and Nico surged towards her before he was even aware he was moving.
"Thalia!" Annabeth screamed and lunged, Percy and Grover hot at her heels and yelling just as loud. The Hunters were already charging.
Thalia was still faster.
Nico swore a part of his soul left his body when her spear suddenly materialised in her hand, the smell of crackling ozone flooding his nostrils and helpfully informing him that his chances of getting roasted as collateral had gone from 'barely any' to 'you're dead'.
He'd seen Thalia blast Percy with a lightning bolt at point-blank range, and he had no delusions whatsoever that he could shrug it off like the son of Poseidon had. As amazing as it had looked (Sorry, Percy), actually getting hit by one of those things was a whole other bucket of nope.
"Stupefy!"
But of course, Luna was still there, and Thalia hadn't had the time to learn that turning your back on Luna Lovegood without a plan was never a good idea.
Ordinarily, the demigoddess would have been more than capable enough to evade, but she couldn't dodge what she couldn't see coming, and the enraged demigod was seeing nothing but the target of her ire. The jet of red light caught her in the side and she was out like a light, slumping to the ground like a puppet with cut strings.
"No!" Annabeth bolted for her. "You-"
"She's just stunned, like the others back at camp. Give her fifteen minutes and she'll be right as rain. Maybe even less if she's as hardy as I think she is." She raised a hand in surrender "I didn't hurt her, I simply stopped her from tapping into her father's domain and drawing his attention to us."
That brought them all up short.
"Demigods with more tangible magical powers actively draw on their parent's domains and spheres of influence. They're... wired in, so to speak" Luna explained. "The divine parents usually ignore it, but the king of the gods is actively looking for us. If she had summoned lightning - and we all know she was about to, let's not deny it - he would have been able to pinpoint our location like that."
Luna snapped her fingers for emphasis.
Bianca hesitated and poked at her shoulder. "Couldn't you have just told her that?"
"Too slow, and she wouldn't have listened." Nico had never heard Luna sound so... flatly uspet. She turned to Zoë with an expression that was placid, but may as have been carved from rock. "She wasn't very fair to you, but that was still exceptionally ill-done. And cruel."
"I - I did not intend-" Rather than getting angry, Zoe looked... ashamed. She closed her eyes and sighed, steadying herself "That was a mistake."
"Yeah, no kidding." Percy glared, and Phoebe moved to step in his way before stopping as Zoë.
"No. Enough of this. Enough of all of this. I will-" She grimaced. "Make amends in my own time."
She turned to Luna.
"Where are we?"
Luna looked at her for a long moment, a strange pressure to her regard, before she shrugged.
"Los Angeles."
The sudden tension popped like a soap bubble, replaced with instant incredulity.
"Wait, what?" Grover shook his head in disbelief. "What?"
"We were just on Long Island," Annabeth muttered. "That's impossible - LA is thousands of miles away - it's a forty-three-hour drive!"
"It is." Luna agreed, her smile finally sliding back into place. "But who has that kind of time to spare? I prefer my portkeys for a reason."
"Port-what nows?" Percy looked so lost it was almost funny.
"Point-to-point mass teleportation spell, centered on a physical object. Hideously exhausting to make, but well worth the price."
"Cool!" Nico grinned.
"Crazy." Bianca countered, but she looked awed too.
"But how?" One of the hunters whose name Nico wouldn't even try to guess at shook her head in disbelief.. "Even the greatest witches would struggle to achieve such a feat. Only the gods, perhaps - Lady Arte-"
"No names!" yelled... pretty much everyone present.
"And you can make these any time?" If Annabeth's eyebrows rose any higher, they'd probably achieve orbital lift-off. "You can travel anywhere like this?"
The Hunters and demigods alike looked unabashedly jealous at that, even as Luna shook her head.
"Not quite anywhere." The jealous looks intensified. "Really. There are plenty of places that are warded against external travel, or have too much power for a portkey to safely anchor itself to without the risk of... bouncing off. Los Angeles is one of the few exceptions after the fact even though the mortal entrance to the Underworld is nearby somewhere."
"It is, and let's not go anywhere near it," Percy said vehemently, and Grover nodded vigorously.
"Why would the Underworld be an exception?"
"Reasons."
"Reasons?"
"Reasons." Luna agreed.
Annabeth went to ask again, before pausing and closing her mouth. She looked a bit miserable as she shook her head.
"That's all I'm going to get from you, isn't it?"
Luna had the grace to smile apologetically. "Sorry. A lady must have keep secrets."
Zoë frowned and said nothing at all.
Annabeth made a strangled noise of frustration and turned away, covering her face with both palms. Her shoulders heaved a little as she took several deep breaths.
Bianca made a sympathetic noise and stepped closer to pat her on the back gently.
"There, there. It gets better with time, I promise."
"...Really?"
"Not even a little, but hope either kills you or saves you, and I'm not dead yet."
"That's the spirit!" Luna cheered encouragingly, "Now let's head out. I didn't pick this city just because it's easy to get to, and I know a great place we can regroup."
She stopped and eyed Thalia, who was still out cold where Grover had propped her against the alley wall, her head slumped to one side.
"I've nearly exhausted myself already. I can't levitate her all the way and hide us from prying eyes with the mist - who wants to carry her?"
There was a pause.
Percy frowned when most eyes turned to him, then it donned on him and he scowled.
"Oh, you guys are the worst."
...
A few minutes later, they set out.
"She can never know about this' Percy had looked them all dead in the eye as he hefted Thalia up in a piggyback hold. "Never. She'll stab me in my sleep."
(Grover had laughed so hard he'd nearly cried, and even Annabeth hadn't managed to hide her smirk fast enough either. Percy's betrayed look just made the whole thing better.)
Walking through the streets of LA was a treat and a half.
True, they didn't get to see much of it as Luna led them through back alleys behind and between rows and rows of low-rise buildings, but Nico didn't mind - After four months at Westover and its grey-bleached walls devoid of colour or soul, any change of scenery was enough for him.
Besides, he'd never been in a big city before.
There was Las Vegas and that one hotel he and Bianca had stayed in for a couple of weeks, the one with a game room so large it seemed to stretch on forever, but that was pretty much it.
Before that, they'd... had something. Probably. It couldn't have been anything too important if he couldn't even remember it, right?
(Right?)
Still, they probably made quite a sight in the few instances where they crossed a busy road or weaved through oncoming traffic. Nico and the rest of the demigods were dressed more or less normally in jeans and t-shirts and whatever else they'd had on them during the escape, but the hunters were all dolled up in their silver gear and had their packs and bows hefted over their shoulders.
A handful of people had given them an odd look or two already.
When he asked Percy about it, the older boy had only shrugged lightly, careful to avoid jostling Thalia.
"The mist is pretty good at what it does, Nico. The mortals probably think the hunters are... I dunno, mean-looking girl scouts or something."
One of the hunters closest to them turned and glared over her shoulder, and both of them had to look away to muffle their laughter.
Eventually, though, they reached their destination.
And, well... it was a surprise?
It was a small double-story diner on the side of the road with its own little parking lot and a large sign by the driveway that read Poultry Planet! - 10 AM to 10 PM Everyday!
"Luna?" Bianca looked just as lost as Nico felt. "Are you sure this is the right place?"
"Sure is." Luna nodded.
"It smells like monsters," Grover said fretfully. Everybody tensed, but Luna just looked at the Satyr like he'd said something silly.
"Of course it does. I'd be very surprised if it didn't."
And with that entirely unsatisfying statement, she started to cross the parking lot and headed straight for the front door. Nico and Bianca exchanged a look, and then they bolted after her first, quickly followed by the rest of them.
Nico caught up with Luna just in time to see her place her hand on the doorknob.
There was a sign on the door - Closed for repairs - and the front windows were boarded up, but she didn't look at them at all.
"Is it locked?" He prodded, and Luna's free hand came up to ruffle his hair reassuringly.
"Not for long. Alohomora."
Her palm flashed a bright blue and the door clicked open in the time it took Nico to blink.
"Shall we?"
As the sign said, the inside of the diner was, in fact, in need of repairs. Oh, it wasn't a wreck or anything, but it clearly wasn't anywhere near ready for business.
The floor was polished marble with black and white domino patterns, and the front wall and the ends were dominated by a row of quaint little booths, but the central service counter to their left was missing all of its stools, and a literal brick wall stretched out from behind it, running along the length of the diner and dividing it nearly in half, save for a door at the far end of the walk-way marked for staff.
"Hmm. He's remodeling." Luna looked a little put out as she took it all in. "That's a shame. I liked the original - it was lovely."
Bianca blinked and sidled closer to her.
"Who's remodeling, Lu?"
"My fr-"
She was caught off when a loud clanging noise drowned out her words and half of them reared back several steps, like someone had struck a metal shutter hard enough to have the material rattling on its hinges.
Zoë was already slipping her bow into her hand before Luna caught the tail end of the motion and shook her head.
"No weapons, please. He's a friend."
Zoë's eyes narrowed.
"Who is he?" Nevertheless, she lowered the bow (but kept an arrow knocked all the same, because... well, she was Zoë.)
The clanging continued sounding from behind the closed door, and Nico and Co were so caught up in it that they almost missed Luna's pleased murmur.
"You'll find out in... just about - ah, here we go. And three, two, one..."
Right on cue (A cue that all of them would greatly appreciate being let in on) the door flew open and the honest to gods giant burst through the door, roaring at them furiously.
"Intruders!" He bellowed, towering so high up that his head practically scraped against the ceiling, and Nico would have wondered how annoying it must have been to duck under the doorframe every time he wanted in or out if his soul hadn't been scared halfway out of his body.
Bravery was all well and good, but having an eight-foot-tall (at least) and visibly enraged giant not ten feet away from you in an enclosed space was not good for his blood pressure, and he was only ten.
Yikes
"Lastroginian!" Zoe hissed, and the giant eyes snapped to hers. He clenched his fists, and his bare, heavily tattoed biceps flexed with the force of the motion - those things were as big as Nico's head.
Double yikes.
"Huntress!" He snarled and took a step forward, and it was probably Luna's quickly raised hand that stopped Zoe from raising her bow again. "Get out of my diner! No Olympian affiliates are allowed under my roof without signing the pact of nonaggression with HR, and we don't open back up for another four months. Leave, or I'll knock the-!"
Whatever unpleasant threat that was going to end with faltered into stunned silence when the Gian't eyes flickered, landed on Luna, and promptly went wide as dinner plates.
"-Luna!?"
"Hello, Larry." The blonde girl raised a hand and waved cheerily. "How've you been?"
"Larry?" Percy's jaw dropped, and he almost faceplanted from where he'd been trying to balance Thalia's weight with one hand and fish through his pocket for his sword with the other. "Reformed cannibal Larry? Chicken-tastes-better-than-people Larry?"
"What?"
Instead of answering (or maybe just choosing to answer without words), Larry bounded forward with two thunderous steps and scooped Luna up into a hug so tight it hurt to look at, twirling around and the spot as he crushed her against his chest.
"Luna!"
"Oh, gods." Annabeth had a dazed, faraway look in her eyes. "It's Tyson all over again."
Nico didn't know who Tyson was, but the way Grover and Percy twitched made it clear they did.
"I've missed you too, Larry. We have a lot of catching up to do." Luna patted the giant's arm gently as he finally put her down. He beamed toothily as she did, displaying a mouthful of sharp, uneven yellow teeth so jarring the sight of them alone would have given every dentist in the state a nervous breakdown. "I know the diner could use some work, but I don't suppose your kitchen is in working order? Even by my standards, it's been a very long day, and I think we could all do with some food."
...
After welcoming them inside and apologising profusely for all the yelling, Larry headed off into his kitchen.
Before long, they heard the sound of pots clanging, a fryer sizzling, and a scent of deep-fried goodness wafted over to them well before
"Oh, wow," Bianca whispered, and Luna giggled and poked her with her elbow.
"You have no idea."
Soon enough, Larry came marching back out with trays heaped with what may as well have been Elysium to the rest of them with how hungry they were - fried chicken with sides of fries, salads, fruit cups, and enough milkshakes and cold water bottles to go around.
"Dig in!" He said cheerfully, and they fell on the food like wolves. For his part, Larry seemed happy enough with dragging an oversized stool closer to their table and going at his own plate of chicken wings, popping the things into his mouth one at a time like little pieces of popcorn.
When they were finally done, Luna was the first to lean back against her seat cushion and say in satisfaction. Nico felt that - he'd eaten so much his stomach felt like it was about to burst.
"That was wonderful, Larry, thank you."
"Oh, this was nothing. It's a shame my new Rotisserie Oven delivery was delayed - damn amazons and their lousy shipping" He muttered under his breath. "If you'd come here the day after tomorrow, I could have served you the really good stuff."
What?
"You're kidding, right?" Nico asked. "This stuff is amazing! I've never eaten so much in my life!"
Larry flushed - which was something, given how fierce he looked when not wearing that expression - and he waved a hand awkwardly. "I'm glad to hear it."
"It was generous, and we are grateful," Zoë said on her part. "I-"
"Do we owe you anything?" Thalia interrupted, and pretty much everyone listening paused carefully.
Thalia either didn't notice or didn't care, sitting up and polishing her plate as well - she'd woken up a few minutes after Larry had settled them into the booths and hadn't had a chance to do much more than groggily blink her eyes before Annabeth had jumped out of her seat and dragged her out the door.
Nico had no idea how the daughter of Athen had done it, but when the duo came back a little while later, Thalia didn't immediately go for Zoë throat. She still hadn't even looked in the hunters's general direction - it was like she refused to acknowledge her existence entirely, and for the moment, Zoë seemed happy enough to return the favour.
"Of course not. It's on the house. Any friend of Luna is welcome here." The giant said firmly, and Thalia offered him - well, it wasn't a smile, but it wasn't the sullen grimace that the daughter of Zeus had been aiming at anyone bold enough to look her in the eye for the past hour and that was probably about as good as it was going to get.
Then she went right back to glaring at her empty plate, and the sudden tension popped.
Phew. Crisis averted
(for now)
"So what brings you to Los Angeles?"
"Divine affairs," Luna answered, which was true enough even if incredibly vague. "A quest."
That was a lot less vague, and Larry frowned. The comfortable ease drained from his features, and his lips pressed together tightly.
"A quest?" Even his voice changed. It deepened with wariness, rumbling ever so slightly at the edges. "Dangerous business, quests. Never good for heroes."
His gaze shifted to Zoe.
"Or hunters."
"Thy concern is noted."
"We'll be careful," Luna added, but Larry didn't look any happier.
"Is there anything I can do to help?" He asked "I don't mind. I could close up shop and come with you-"?
"No," Luna answered so quickly that Larry flinched back, a wounded look on his face and she hurriedly shook her head. "Larry, I would love to have you along with us, but this quest has just started and it's already shaping up to be horrifically dangerous. I'd never forgive myself if you got hurt on my behalf - and there's a limit on the number of quest-goers as it is."
Larry nodded slowly. "I suppose twenty-seven is a bit much for any quest."
"Oh, we're not all going. The prophecy specifically numbered seven"
"Only seven?"
And the giant's frown came running right back
"It is for the best. Twenty-seven questers, demigods and divine touched alike." Zoe offered out of the blue. "Unfriendly monsters would be able to pick up our scent from miles away. It would be suicide."
"I guess that's true." He admitted, sounding entirely too displeased about it.
Luna smiled gently. "You already have. We've only just started anyway. We still don't even know for certain where the prophecy is leading us, only that we have to head west."
Larry stilled and straightened. "West?
Nobody missed the change in posture.
"Yes," Annabeth said slowly. "'Seven shall flee west-"
She cut herself off before she finished the line, but Larry didn't seem to have noticed. His eyes had gone hazy in thought, and his features had visibly darkened.
"Larry?" Luna prodded gently "Larry, why does that upset you?"
"West is bad." He mumbled. "West is dangerous."
That sounded just peachy, didn't it?
"Larry?"
"Monsters," He said at last, looking all too uncomfortable about it. "There have been stories and rumours hovering about for some time now. Dracaena, hell hounds, empousa - even more. All kinds of monsters moving across the country in big, big numbers, and all of them heading west - to San Francisco."
Luna's face twisted in blatant shock for the first time since anything to do with this quest had happened. Across from her, Zoe went silent and so still she may as well have been carved from stone.
"It's not just the regular chumps either. Dangerous things are coming out of hiding, Luna. They're calling it the Great Rousing."
Percy jolted in recognition - why, Nico didn't know, but the son of Poseidon flicked his eyes to Zoë, who responded with a single nod and nothing else.
A memory niggled at the back of Nico's mind - Hadn't Dr. Thorn said something almost exactly along those lines before Luna had dusted him?
The realization was chilling.
He felt Bianca shift beside him, and when he looked at her he could tell that she'd made the connection too.
"It's all one big mess." Larry missed the byplay entirely, lost in his story. "Very old, very powerful monsters waking from their slumber or crawling straight out of the Pit to join the calling, and it's provoking all the lesser ones into following in their footsteps."
He scowled heavily.
"A few of my thick-headed cousins came after me a few weeks ago. They said they were looking to head west too, just like you, and they wanted me to come with them. Didn't quite like it when I said no, so I had to give them a good thumping to send them away, but they'll be back sooner or later looking for trouble. They always are."
Luna looked troubled by that. "Will you be alright?"
"Always am." The giant said gruffly. "But you're the one heading west, and no matter how good you are, Luna, no one is safe in San Franciso these days. Promise me you'll stay away from it?"
Luna gave him a very careful look.
"I promise I'll do my best to stay out of San Francisco if I can at all avoid it."
He brightened up.
"Good! Now, there's still some leftover chicken in the kitchen, so I'll pack you a few take-out boxes for your quest." He hopped off his stool and spun off the spot "Back soon!"
For a long minute after he left, no one said a word.
It was Percy who broke the silence at last.
"So, San Francisco is crawling with all kinds of nasty monsters, and it's probably one of those places we a hundred percent shouldn't get anywhere near." he sounded like a soldier marching off to his death - entirely too resigned to the inevitable. "So that's probably exactly where we need to go, isn't it?"
Everyone nodded grimly.
"It seems likely," Luna said lightly as she looked at Zoë "But I suppose the decision ultimately lies with our quest leader."
"We go." Credit where credit was due, Zoë didn't even hesitate. She didn't even stop to consider it - whether that was because she didn't have to or because she'd already chosen her course alone was anyone's guess. "As soon as our packs are ready, we set out. Luna."
"Yes?"
"Can you create a portkey to San Francisco?"
"No. I wouldn't dare try. There's so much mist and divine interference centered on that city that even attempting to portkey to its general vicinity would be foolish to the point of insanity. At best, we'd end flung far and wide across the other end of the country. At worst..." She shook her head slowly. "You don't want to know."
Zoë grimaced, but she didn't look surprised.
"Very well then. We can take a train-"
"Wait a second," Annabeth interjected. "Who's we?"
There was a pause.
"The prophecy specifies seven. We're over the limit by twenty. We can't take everyone. It's Zoe's quest - that's one. Who are the other six, and what happens to the rest?"
"I'm almost certain a line of the prophecy applies to me. I'll go, if you'll have me." Luna offered, and Zoë nodded. "But Bianca and Nico come with me."
"What?" Bianca asked
"Yes!" Nico crowed.
"Impossible." Zoë crossed her arms.
"I wasn't asking, sorry." Luna countered, and the lieutenant clenched her jaw. "They're involved in this. Our escape from camp implicates them in the possible consequences. They'll be seen as co-conspirators in our defiance of the Olympian council. The gods would punish them every bit as harshly as they'd try to punish us, and that's a risk I refuse to take. I'm not letting either one of them out of my sight until I know they're safe, whenever that may be."
"You would bring them on a quest-"
"And risk throwing them out of the frying pan and into the fire. Believe me, I'm well aware of the irony." Her brows furrowed and her eyes narrowed. For maybe the first time since he'd met her, Luna looked... not angry, but closer to it than he'd ever seen her get (closer than he'd ever thought she could get. Today was a day firsts all around it seemed, and only a few of them were any good) "Ours is a world of extremes. If I have to choose between them being in danger where I can help and them being in danger where I wouldn't even be aware of it..."
She trailed off and shook her head.
"It isn't even close."
Zoë looked like she wanted to say something scathing, really she did... but she paused. Her eyes went first to Nico, who did his best not to flinch, and next to Bianca.
"Very well." she ground out. Likely because she knew Luna was way too useful to give up. "Very well. Who else?"
"I'll go." Annabeth offered. Zoe looked at her. "The hunters saved us once, a long time ago. I owe it to your lady to try."
"I'll go too."
Nico was pretty sure he wasn't the only one to blue-screen a little when Thalia of all people spoke up, not looking up from the table.
Zoë didn't look happy (did she ever?) but she didn't refuse either one of them out of hand.
"Wait, hold on." Percy sat up quickly. "I'm going too-"
"Absolutely not." Zoë hissed "The child is bad enough. I will not have two boys on this quest if I can help it-"
"But you can't help it." Thalia stood up from her seat suddenly, and half the hunters in the diner sprung up with her until Zoe stilled them with a hand. "Percy's got a better track record than most adult demigods."
"Are adult demigods even a thing?" Bianca muttered.
"You'd be surprised," Luna whispered back.
"That is irrelevant."
"Irrelevant my ass. He fought the Minotaur, the Hydra, Polyphemus-"
"Thalia, names," Annabeth said warningly, looking nervously from side to side as if expecting those same monsters to pop out from behind the countertop or something.
"Whatever. Percy's good, and I trust him to have my back. He goes."
"That is not thy - your decision to make."
"Too bad. I'm making it anyway." Her eyes narrowed dangerously. "And just so we're clear, it's either he goes on this quest, or you and I go at each other right now and fuck whatever happens next."
Zoë leaped from her chair. "Do you think I fear you, you-"
"Zoë." Phoebe put a hand on her shoulder. "Perhaps it's for the best."
"What-?"
"We can't afford a fight, not now of all times," she said brusquely. "The gods are no doubt already scouring the west for us, and we can ill-afford to draw their attention. We need to split up as it is, and this works as well as anything. The rest of us can head back east, draw their attention, pull the heat off of you."
"You're going to draw the god's attention?" Annabeth asked, "On purpose?"
Her tone screamed Are you crazy?, but Zoë's current second-in-command just grinned with way too many teeth.
(Seriously, did the hunters practice being intimidating and approachable? Nico bet that they did.)
"We're hunters." She declared. "We don't just follow trails - we know a thousand and one ways to throw them off. And believe it or not, this is hardly the first time we've had to evade gods."
Phoebe turned to Thalia.
"Your father chief among them. For all that he's lauded as the 'lord of honor,'" She snorted derisively. "We've been afforded very little of it from him over the millennia."
Thalia crossed her arms.
"He's a hypocrite and a shithead. I'm not apologizing for him. If I start, I'd never be able to stop."
The hunter inclined her head.
"True, and I'm not asking you to. However, I will tell you this much," She put her hands on the table and leaned forward. "You're going on a quest to save my patron, and your obstinance has prevented the presence of another hunter on this quest in place of the boy."
"The boy has a name," Percy muttered, but Annabeth drove an elbow into his ribs so quickly it almost knocked him off the edge of his seat.
"If this quest fails, and by some chance you survive, I will be holding you at least partially responsible," Phoebe promised, and Thalia glared so fiercely that Nico expected her to shoot lightning out of her eyes.
"If this quest fails and we make it out by the end, then between the Titans, the Olympians and everything in between, you'll have to get in line."
"I will. In the meantime," Pheobe turned to Zoe, who'd been watching the proceedings with a resigned, off-handed kind of anger. "We'll get your gear ready. Weapons, clothes, drachma and ambrosia - the works."
Zoe glowered darkly for another little while, eyes latched on Thalia and Percy, before she nodded so stiffly it was a miracle she didn't break her neck.
"Wait, what about Grover?" Bianca asked, and all of them suddenly remembered the Satyr who'd stayed silent for the entire. conversation.
"The limit's been reached," Annabeth said, and she sounded a little guilty. "We can't add him on, or we'd be going against the prophecy."
"But won't the gods be looking for him too? What if they catch him?"
"It's okay." Grover gave a brave smile. "I can lay low too. There's probably a nice park or something nearby and-"
"Phoebe," Zoë said, and the other hunter nodded.
"Satyrs can be useful. He can stay with us."
"Ohgodsthankyou!" He collapsed in relief immediately and Phoebe rolled her eyes.
"Wimp."
"Hey! I'll have you know I kicked Medusa in the head that one time! And-"
Zoë's palm cracked against the table and he clammed right up. Percy gave her a reproachful look for that one, but she didn't seem to notice.
"No more talk. As soon as the packs are gathered, we leave at once."
"And go where?" Annabeth asked.
"Union Station can't be too far from here." Percy offered. "We could catch a direct line and be at San Fransico by tomorrow."
Everybody stared.
"What?" He crossed his arms defensively. "I know can have ideas too!"
"He's right."
"I know." Zoë didn't sound too happy about that, and Nico swore he saw Thalia's lips twitch. "Let's move."
And that was when Larry finally came back out of the kitchen, two bags full of take-out boxes in either hand.
Luna flashed him a thumbs-up.
And then it was time to go.
...
They said their goodbyes quickly.
Larry gave Luna another crushing hug and offered each of them a solid handshake. When it was Nico's turn, the motion almost lifted him off his feet. That had been fun.
Then he gave them each a fifty percent discount coupon.
"For your next visit," He explained with a smile. "Something to look forward to. Good luck!"
Larry was cool, Nico decided. Not Luna or Percy cool, but cool enough.
The Hunters (and Grover) followed them all the way to Union Station. It took them twenty minutes to cross the distance, and everyone had at least one hand on a weapon of some sort the entire way there, wary of monster attacks.
(Or worse - God attacks)
But nothing happened.
It was almost too easy, and Nico could tell that made the more experienced demigods twitchy as all heck. There was this poorly hidden manic energy to them, as if they were ready to leap into action at a moment's notice. Luna's hand never once let go of his the entire way there.
When they finally got to the station it was Grover who slipped in first. "I got this."
He hopped up the stairs, past the milling crowds and through the main entrance faster than Nico had ever seen him move. Less than ten minutes later, he came running back out, seven tickets ready to go.
"Here. One each."
"Wait," Percy did a double take. "First class?"
Thalia looked just impressed "Grover, how much did these even cost?"
Grover shook his head and smiled nervously. "Don't worry about it. Every Satyr with a Searcher's license gets a pretty generous spending budget at the start of the year. I saved it up a bit, converted some of it to mortal money and... well, it's not like I'm using any of it right now."
"Dude."
"Seriously, don't worry about it. I can't help you on the quest, but I can at least do this much."
Annabeth and Thalia gave him a quick hug, and Percy gave him a big high-five.
"See you soon, G-man."
"I hope so." He muttered. "Come on, you should go. Stay safe."
With a final wave at Nico and Bianca, the Satyr turned around and headed off to where Phoebe and the rest of the Hunters were waiting for him. Zoë nodded at them once, and that was all the farewell the needed before walking back the way they came and melting off into the crowds.
"Will they really be okay?" Bianca asked lowly, and Zoë exhaled wearily.
"We can only hope. Let's continue."
Boarding the train was the easiest part.
Grover had gone above and beyond, and they'd wound up with three neighbouring compartments back to back.
Or two, technically, because Thalia had marched right into hers the second they'd stepped onto the train and slammed the door shut behind her with so much force it'd nearly bounced back twice before the click of a lock sealed it in place.
"Such a child," Zoë muttered, and Annabeth shot her a glare.
"It's a ten-hour trip." Luna stepped in between them before things could get out of hand for the hundredth time that day. "We've all had a very long day, and something tells me tomorrow isn't going to be any easier. We should try and get some sleep."
"I have questions I want to ask you."
"I'm sure you do." Luna smiled a little wistfully "You'd have been such a Ravenclaw, Annabeth."
"What?"
"Nothing. I'll answer your questions, but now now. You're dead on your feet. We all are."
And maybe Nico could have argued against that, but at that point, he was barely even listening. He's made the mistake of sitting against one of the insultingly comfortable seat cushions and his eyes had started dropping almost immediately.
Before he knew it, he was out like a light.
...
Two men stood face to face on the edge of a cliff, the wind howling furiously around them but failing to so much as ruffle their clothes.
The first might as well have been a living statue. Seven feet tall, with dark slicked-back hair, grey eyes like stone and light brown skin. His form was rippled and corded with muscle, clearly visible even over the expensive-looked business suit he wore. His face had a brutal quality to it, and he had hands that looked like they could snap a flagpole in half. He kept clenching and unclenching his fists, as if in anticipation for a fight.
His companion was only a little less intimidating. Every bit as tall, only a little leaner, with long black hair that trailed in a ponytail behind his back and a face that was riddled with silver scars and horrifically marred flesh.
The scarred man spoke first, his voice far more gentle and poised than his appearance suggested, but no less powerful for it.
"I must admit, I would not have expected this from you, general."
"Did you think you were the only one capable of planning ahead?"
Unlike the scarred man, the general's voice matched his appearance perfectly. Rough and heavy, and with and added quality to it reminiscent of a rockslide.
"Hardly, cousin. But I wouldn't have thought that you of all our kin would choose exercise such ... discretion. It is most unlike you."
"Bah! Why should I put in the effort of crushing the demigod brats when the Olympians so readily offer them up on a silver platter? Only fools do not seize advantages so readily given, and it will make our inevitable victory that much sweeter in the end."
"Zeus and his ilk falling to their hubris would be poetic." The scarred man agreed. "But why come to me?"
"Isn't it obvious? I want no room for failure. I will provide the forces and the heavy hand to bend the would-be saviors to our will, but it will be your silver tongue that forces them to lay down their arms of their own accord." The general sneered "Unless you think yourself incapable of it?"
The scarred man smiled, unbothered by the implied insult.
"Oh, hardly. I just wanted to hear you say it. I think... yes, I have just the right thing in the mind."
"Well?"
"Now, cousin, it would be poor of me to spoil the surprise so soon. " The scarred man chided, and then he turned and looked straight at Nico. "Especially when one of the very same demigods you're so fixated on is currently present listening to every word. I'll be seeing you again very soon, Mr. Di Angelo, but until then, I'm afraid your little dream is at an end."
Then he raised his hand and snapped his fingers, and the world dissolved into motes of blinding light.
...
Nico's eyes snapped open.
(Something was wrong.)
"S'going on." He mumbled tiredly, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. Had he just been dreaming?
The rest of the six were already up and hovering over him.
"No," Luna said. Her lips were pursed, and the others looked just as grim. "We're still at least an hour short, but the train's stopped and all the lights have been knocked out."
"This is bad," Thalia murmured, tightly gripping her spear shaft. She tensed as a sound washed over their compartment, loud and shrill and all too familiar.
A growl, deep and rumbling. Screams began to echo down the train.
"God or monster?" Bianca asked with wide eyes, and Percy clenched his jaw as he uncapped his pen. Riptide sprung into being in all its glory, the celestial bronze blade glowing in the darkness.
"It doesn't matter. We aren't sticking around to find out."
He turned and swung the sword at the window, and it exploded outwards in a shower of spraying glass. He gestured with the window, where Nico could see nothing but miles and miles of flat, dry land, and the only light was coming from the moon.
(Were they in a desert?)
"Time to go."
Thalia went first, raising her foot onto the ledge and catapulting herself out. She landed with a grunt and gestured for Annabeth, who jumped out after her, followed by Zoë and Bianca hand in hand.
Nico didn't get a chance to try.
Luna jumped next, and then raised her hand behind her.
"Wingardium Leviosa."
Gently but quickly, he floated right through the broken window and dropped down beside her, and Percy hopped out last, still glancing beside him with his sword out and ready.
(The screams had gotten louder.)
"Go!"
They bolted., leaving the train behind.
Nico didn't know how how they ran after that, or how they knew where to go. He didn't know how he kept up, even when his feet felt like they were screaming and his lungs burned. His heart alone felt like it was being squeezed by a cruel, uncaring fist, but somehow he still managed to keep up.
What he did now for sure was that things started going truly wrong when a road appeared in front of them so abruptly that it had to be magic of some kind.
They stopped, heaving with breath and staring warily.
Ahead of them was a two-lane road half covered with sand. On the other side of the road was a cluster of buildings too small to be a town: a boarded-up house, a taco shop that looked like it hadn't been open since before Zoë Nightshade was born, and a white stucco post office with a sign that said GILA CLAW, ARIZONA hanging crooked above the door.
Beyond that was a range of hills… but Nico noticed they weren't regular hills. The countryside was way too flat for that. The hills were enormous mounds of old cars, appliances, and other scrap metal. It was a junkyard that seemed to go on forever.
"Whoa," He gasped, partly in awe and partly because he still couldn't steady his breathing.
"Something tells me we're not going to find a car rental here," Thalia said.
"This place is dangerous," Luna said, and her voice was laced with such uncharacteristic iron and urgency that had them all on edge instantly. "It's roiling in so much magic I can almost taste it."
She shook her head.
"We shouldn't go anywhere near it."
Naturally, that was when the fates finally came calling.
"You punks aren't going anywhere at all."
They turned - it almost didn't matter. The sheer presence and tangible power of the figure who'd appeared behind them still just about knocked them to their knees.
Percy's face drained of color
"Oh, no."
He was a big man with a crew cut, a black leather biker's jacket, black jeans, a white muscle shirt, and combat boots. Wraparound shades hid his eyes, but genuine flames flickered from just beneath their surface, and the air shimmered from the sheer heat.
"Oh yes, Jackson." He smirked cruelly "I've been waiting a long time for this."
Looking at him, Nico felt smaller and more pitiful than he'd ever had. Dr. Thorn might as well have been a kitten when compared to this being. Just being in his vicinity was making it hard to breathe.
"Lord Ares," Zoë said calmly, but the grip on her bow had gone white-knuckled. Nico recognized the name immediately.
This was the god of war - and he meant business.
"Zoë Nightshade." He tutted and shook his head. "You made a big mistake when you refused to play ball."
"My lady needs me."
"Not my problem," Ares said bluntly, and Zoë's calm expression broke. For just a second, her face screwed up in an expression so hateful it would have made a Drakon run for the hills.
Ares just laughed.
"Artemis knew the risks, and she still messed up. Whatever happens to her from now until or if we get her back is on her." He shook his head. "Just like whatever comes next is on you. Orders are orders, and you willingly disobeyed an edict from the council. The trip's over, punks. Time to face the music."
"We go nowhere until Artemis is safe!" She raised her bow, arrow aimed directly at Ares's face. "
The god shrugged.
"Refuse all you want. One way or another you'll be on Olympus inside of an hour. Beating you to a pulp before I slap the chains on isn't going to be a problem." He grinned. "Hell, it's my bonus for dealing with this waste of time."
"Lord-" Luna barely opened her mouth before Ares raised a hand. A huge, two-handed sword materialized in his grip. The hilt was a large silver skull with a ruby in its mouth.
"Luna Lovegood." Ares swung the sword around in a lazy circle, as if he were testing its weight. No one missed the implied threat. "The girl who knows things she should have no business of knowing. I heard about your stunt with the old drunk. Fair warning - try that shit with me, and I swear by the moirai that I will flay the skin off your flesh, fashion it into a rope and strangle you to death with it."
"Back off!" Percy and Thalia stepped up and hefted sword and spear respectively.
Ares didn't look even a little intimidated.
"Oh, just you wait. I'll get to you in a second. You too, daughter of Zeus." He shook his head. "Man, you little shits have no idea how badly you're in for it, do you? Half the councils wanted to blast you to dust because of the Great Prophecy, and now you've given us the perfect excuse. Not even daddy dearest will save you, assuming he'd even want to."
"Screw you." Thalia spat.
"That's the spirit. It's no fun if you don't at least try." He raised his sword menacingly "Now let's get started."
Then a burst of golden light that interrupted Ares for half a second before he would have charged. The air swelled with heat. When the light died, a red-hot car was parked between them and the war god.
A very familiar car.
"No way," Nico whispered, even as Apollo hopped out of the driver seat of his Maserati, decked out in greaves and armor with his bow slung over his shoulder."
"Apollo," Ares growled and yanked his shades off. Nico almost recoiled at the sight of the flaming sockets the god had for eyes. "What the Hades do you think you're doing?"
"Oh, nothing much." The sun god hummed cheerily, turning back half a second and waving. "Hey guys. How've you been?"
"Apollo." Ares snarled, but Apollo didn't turn around just yet. Instead, he gave a wink and a nod at Zoe, who didn't look as annoyed as she had the last time she met Artemis's twin.
No, if anything, she looked... hopeful.
What?
"Apollo." Ares spoke through gritted teeth. "I'm not going to ask - again. What do you think you're doing?"
"Well, I was following Father's orders, of course - scouring the west in search of these unlucky dudes so I can drag them to Olympus as requested, but then I realized something." Apollo titled his head with a contemplative look. "If someone were to succeed in capturing the these questors, then their quest fails automatically. The quest who's purpose mind you, is to free my baby sis. Meaning Artemis will remain in the hands of the Titans, chained like a slave, possibly for the rest of eternity."
Apollo's countenance twisted with fury.
"Fuck. That."
His voice rumbled with so much power that those two words alone nearly burst Nico's ear drums. The air grew warmer and warmer until it bordered on uncomfortable.
Across from him, Ares barred his teeth.
"So you'd go against the council too? You'd risk losing everything for your defiance?"
"For my twin?" Apollo chuckled and leaned forward. In his hands, a sword materialized. The hilt was solid gold and the blade was a pillar of pure flame. "If you have to ask, then you're an even bigger fool than you look."
Ares's expression hardened. The air grew warmer by several degrees again, and now it was outright sweltering.
"You know what? fine." He raised his sword Father will make you beg for mortality by the time he's done with you for this betrayal, Apollo."
"You know, he just might." The sun god admitted and leaned forward one final time. "But that's a risk I'm happy to take. And hey, on the plus side, no matter what happens next, I still get to give you the beating you've been begging for for centuries, and that's a reward all on its own!"
Ares's eyes blazed.
"Then come forward and try if you dare, ανόητε!"
The two Olympians charged and Annabeth screamed.
"RUN!"
The seven of them turned and fled for their lives right as the gods clashed, and everything went straight to Tartarus in an explosion of light and power.
...
As always, leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it, please be courteous.
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- Location
- Elsewhere
"I mean, really, can't I be a vegetable at least? Maybe a nice, crunchy radish?"
Well, practice makes perfect.
And they have millennia of practice indulging their every whim.
ScissorSlipper
Barber cat
- Pronouns
- She/Her
That is very true.... Those 2.. what, ten year old kids don't even know how to fight. I assume Luna knows that their parent is Hades?
Lol, gods are always so ostentatious and want to show off their power in front of demigods...
Nice chapter, thanks
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Luna doesn't know for certain, though she strongly suspects. Not enough to actually march into the underworld without explicit permission from Hades himself, because that would just be suicide.
As for taking Nico and Bianca being irresponsible, I fully agree. However:
Bringing Nico and Bianca is super irresponsible, and Luna knows it.
Unfortunately, she's not willing to let them out of her sight - not with what she has to assume is the entirety of Olympus scouring the West. The gods do horrible, horrible things to mortals who displease them, and Bianca and Nico would just be collateral. She isn't willing to risk that.
It's a shitty situation and everybody knows it, but that's just how it is.
As for the prophecy, wait and see. We've barely begun.
verycoolname
Not actually cool
I mean, failing a quest in Greek mythology just means you die. Angering one of the Greek gods often means a fate worse than death or an excessively unpleasant afterlife. If I were in Luna's shoes, I'd have made the same decision.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Take train from LA to San Fran, end up in Arizona.
Wat.
Wat.
Take train from LA to San Fran, end up in Arizona.
Wat.
Oh my gods, thank you for noticing this. I was worried people would miss it.
As for an explanation… no spoilers!
Remember how Apollo fucked with the train in canon and made it physcially cross an impossible distance in a few hours despite there being no way for it to navigate without going through literal cities on it's way?
It's like that, only someone else is pulling the strings.
I assume a god forced a detour. Wouldn't be too hard, Dionysus had powers that included screwing with navigation for one.
Also for the decision....Luna had already had to deal with all her friends dying heroically where she can't do anything about. So she's going to be hard on it here however good or bad a choice it may br
Also for the decision....Luna had already had to deal with all her friends dying heroically where she can't do anything about. So she's going to be hard on it here however good or bad a choice it may br
- Location
- Somewhere over there
This is a really good catch, I didn't even notice that.
The plot butterflies are piling up. Can't wait to see where this goes!
LocalCatHybrid
Now I am become floof, the floofer of floofs.
- Location
- You know where...
- Pronouns
- Il/Lui
Maybe retcon by having Luna's portkeys get dragged off-course by whatever supernatural turmoil is going on, necessitating a detour taking them through Arizona.
I feel like portkeying directly to LA is a bad idea anyway, given IIRC the entry to the Underworld is there
I feel like portkeying directly to LA is a bad idea anyway, given IIRC the entry to the Underworld is there
Alsor Daechir
Self designated potato.
- Location
- Probably hiding in a corner playing an idle game.
Ah, but from what I could infer from the way Luna mentions it being an exception, it seems like she has permission to do so there from Hades.
Apparently, you're thinking of Vegas.
Anyway, I get the impression that them ending up in Arizona is the result of deific shenanigans.
Chapter 6: The Wrath Of The Gods - Part 2
Annabeth hates Ares.
To some, that might have sounded like a no-brainer.
Athena and Ares's ancient rivalry was an olden, brutal thing. The warrior's spirit and the stratagem of battle had been at odds since her mother had first burst out of Zeus's skull, and for all that their feuds had simmered down in the present day and age, if Annabeth had a drachma for every other conflict and literal war that had been spawned by or brought on as a result of their clashes, she'd be rich enough to buy half of Olympus.
There was a reason the Athena and Ares cabins were always at each other's throats at Capture the Flag or any of the other camp war games, and it wasn't because Clarisse and her siblings were stubborn as mules and liked to use every minor disagreement as an excuse to punch someone in the face.
(Well, not entirely)
The demigod children of both war-governing Olympians were damn near biologically wired to challenge and compete against one another... but that wasn't why Annabeth hated Ares, no.
If it was something as shallow and downright asinine as inheriting a grudge then Athena and Poseidon's equally volatile history would've meant she'd have hated Percy, and that couldn't be farther from the truth.
(Quite the opposite, actually, but that was a whole other kind of problem)
Unlike most of her siblings, Annabeth didn't just oppose Ares and everything associated with him on principle. No, her grudge was personal, and it traced its way all the way back when she, Grover, and Percy had gone on that (literally) fateful quest to retrieve the master bolt.
She'd disliked him from the second he'd shown up in that diner even if she'd had the obvious self-preservation instincts not to to show it. The way his mere presence had purposefully twisted Percy's emotions left and right and twirled him halfway out of his mind all so Ares could play at being magnanimous and assert his dominance over them had been enough to press half a dozen of her buttons in one go.
When he'd sent them off on that ridiculous side-quest and nearly gotten them killed by mechanical spiders, it had taken genuine effort and all her willpower not to draw her dagger and try to stab him right in the flaming eye socket, but that was practically the default setting for most any mortal interacting with Ares while unprepared for it - And any child of Athena being exposed to any spider ever, but again, that was a whole other kind of problem.
It wasn't until the very end of the quest when they'd escaped the Underworld by the very skin of their teeth and found Ares waiting for them on that beach did Annabeth truly begin to loathe the god of war.
It wasn't enough that he had played them like fiddles (What was it Percy had called it... a plan worthy of Athena? Talk about adding insult to injury), Or that he had almost succeded in getting them all killed and used as a catalyst for what would have been a civilization-ending war, no. In the end, after everything they'd been through and all the terrifying near-death experiences they'd just barely survived (Grover had nearly been dragged down to Tartarus), Ares still had the gall and the cruelty to stand in their way and try to stop them from returning the bolt.
When Percy had stepped up to duel him, Annabeth had felt part of her shrivel up and die at the sheer unfairness of it all. She was the child of wisdom and strategy - she should have had a plan, a plot, a clever trick to tip the scales in their favor, but she'd had nothing. She was forced to watch and pray for a miracle, any miracle, for what strategy could three twelve-year-olds use to stand up against an Olympian god?
It was just like the night Thalia had sacrificed herself all over again. All her years of training at camp, all that time sharpening her mind and body to prepare for anything amounted to nothing in the end. Once again, Annabeth was the useless spectator watching a friend throw themself into an unwinnable farce of a fight because it was a choice between that or rolling over and dying right then and there, and neither Percy nor Thalia would ever go down without a fight.
Ares had forced her to relive that hopeless despair, and even if Kronos had been the one pulling his strings all along, Annabeth would still despise him for his part in it for the rest of her life and until the end of time after that.
The fact that he'd chosen to curse Percy after he'd lost like an idiot because he was too drunk on his own power to remember never to underestimate any opponent just cemented her loathing because seriously, how petty could you get?
(Stupid question - Ares was a god, and while Annabeth would never dare say it aloud, she was pretty convinced you could better categorize them not by age or power or position in the divine hierarchy, but by the number of times they lashed out like a group of unimaginably overpowered and horrifyingly vindictive prima donnas).
Annabeth knew that wouldn't be the last time they'd come face to face with a god, be it Ares or another Olympian or one of the litters of other minor and not-so-minor non-Olympians out there - between Percy's role in the great prophecy, her tendency to ignore her better sense and follow him everywhere (and she always would, caution be damned) and the fact the fates were almost definitely borderline psychopaths out to get them, the odds were so heavily stacked against them that they'd have more luck beating Argus in a staring contest than they would at avoiding the inevitable.
The gods couldn't be beaten, not by any demigod or even an army of them at that - but maybe they could be outsmarted. Tripped up. Stalled and delayed until she could figure something out - whatever.
The point was, Annabeth would do something.
Anything at all
(She swore she'd never sit on the sidelines like that again, and to Hades with the consequences)
Well, two years and two quests later, as all seven of them turned and bolted away from the rampaging gods, a slightly hysterical part of Annabeth couldn't help but thank her past self for having the brains not to swear that on the river Styx because there were no words in any language to describe how badly she would have broken that oath if she had and how utterly screwed they all were either way.
"RUN!"
They made it about ten feet, sprinting full-tilt towards the entrance of the ludicrously vast junkyards at the kinds of speeds only adrenaline-crazed demigods could output when Apollo and Ares's blades finally met.
Boom.
The first blow wasn't so much a blow as it was a cataclysm. The earth bucked and ruptured. The air burst deafeningly. An unholy blast of scalding heat and light and hellish pressure slammed into their fleeing backs like a super-volcano going off right behind them and flinging them up and away so violently that Annabeth's neck nearly snapped and she almost blacked out from the vicious acceleration.
The disorientation from the sheer impact couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity. An eternity that they spent flying, a million tons of force blowing them so high up that, had Zeus been watching, they'd have been smote a thousand times over before they could ever hope to hit the ground.
And then they stopped rising, and Annabeth felt enough clarity rush back into her brain in an infinitesimal instant to recognize how far below them the junkyard and the growing carnage from the battle of the gods was-
Holy -
- and then gravity struck like a viper and they began to fall.
Most of the screamed - Thalia howled.
The air nearly deafened her to it anyway as it whistled past her ears. The mountains of garbage and ruin stretched up towards them as they hurtled straight down, like the fingers of death itself as it (or was it he?) prepared to close its fist and crush them into oblivion.
Percy's hand latched around her wrist and hauled her through the air even as they fell, close enough to wrap both arms around her with a hold tight enough to make her ribs creak and leave bruises in its wake - Annabeth wouldn't have bothered questioning how he'd managed it even if she'd had the will to. It was Percy, so, of course, he was there, somehow trying to do anything even though there was no water below or anywhere close enough to save even him, let alone any of the rest of them.
(Or maybe he was still trying despite that, - Yes, that sounded more like Percy. Loyal and steadfast to the point of suicidal stupidity and until the very end)
Annabeth didn't have time to process all the feelings that came with that (regret, crippling guilt, sorrow, the whole fun-size package) - there wasn't enough time for that. Instead, what little part of her was even capable of rational thought was in the middle of absolutely losing it over how ridiculously, brutally unfair it was for this to be the end after everything they'd lived through before.
Kronos must be laughing himself to literal pieces.
She didn't know where the ugly thought came from, but as the ground came up, and up and up, Annabeth had just a heartbeat to brace and close her eyes-
"ARRESTO MOMENTUM!"
-and snap them right back open again.
She'd forgotten about Luna, who stretched out her arms and bellowed out the two words maybe five seconds before they hit the ground and splattered like bugs on a windshield.
Annabeth stopped.
As in, she literally, completely, halted, and so did the rest of them - like someone had hit the pause button and frozen them mid-motion.
Unlike every other bit of extraordinary magic Luna weaved in the day and a half Annabeth had known her, there was no visible tell to this one, no light or pressure or force. One second, they were at death's door, and the next they froze above the still-rumbling ground, the momentum going from terminal to nonexistent in a way that would have had physicists the world over ripping their hair out by the handfuls in hysterics.
And speaking of hysterics -
They dropped down to solid earth so gently they might as well have just been stepping off a curb, and just as soon as her feet hit the ground Thalia dropped to her knees and threw up in a violent heave.
Zoê staggered back and steadied herself by reaching for Bianca, who was getting a crash course on the wonders of hyperventilation, hand pressed over her ears and staring down at her feet like she couldn't believe they were back on solid ground and not pasted all over it instead.
Percy let go of Annabeth and stumbled off to the side, face blanched and wobbling like he was a second away from toppling, and she would have toppled if Luna hadn't seized her arm around the bicep and forced her upright with a sharp tug. Her other hand tugged on Nico's wrist, whose hair had been blown back by the wind and had his lips parted in an expression so frozen with disbelief it would have been hilarious if things were any different.
As it was, the sight of the ten-year-old who'd nearly just died on their watch felt less funny and more like a dagger to the heart, especially when his features started contorting and his eyes grew wet.
"Luna-"
Luna plopped her hand down on his head. There was a brief flicker of white-gold light, and Nico paused, twitched, and beamed.
"That was so cool!"
She'd heard the youngest Di Angelo use the same phrase some ten thousand times in the last six hours alone, but this one was different. He was nearly bouncing on the balls of his feet, his eyes were a little too wide, and his smile stretched a little too long, to the point where looking at it made her jaw twitch in sympathy.
"Can we do that again!?"
Even his voice was off, a hint of hyperactive mania beyond any ordinary demigod ADHD lingering beneath the words.
"What did you do to him?"
"Cheering charm. A terribly unhealthy emotional suppression technique, but he's too young to control his panic and he can't lock down now." Luna glanced at her, and she never looked more like a fellow daughter of Athena than she did then, a hurricane brewing in those halfway familiar eyes of hers. "There are very few forms of magics I dislike using, Annabeth, and even fewer still that I hate, but those of the mind-altering variety have more than earned it."
Luna jerked her head away
"But needs must." She looked at Zoë first, then panned her eyes between the four of them left, bar Thalia, who was still on her knees.
"Needs must." She repeated firmly. "We need to move, right now."
"Luna," Bianca cut herself off with a gasp, the words clogging her throat. Her chest heaved and rattled. "W-We just- We just-!"
"Bianca."
The older of the Di Angelos snapped her eyes to Luna, who crossed the distance between them with an honest-to-the-gods leap and seized both of her shoulders with a white-knuckled grip, the only sign of panic Annabeth had ever seen from her.
"Not now, alright? Not now." She stressed the words when Bianca went to shake her head. "That was terrifying, I know. Believe me, I know, but you can't think about that now. None of us can."
As if to agree with her, the earth rumbled and shuddered with power. In the distance, Annabeth could see mountains of rubble collapse from the force of the vibrations.
"Push it down, Bianca, focus on moving, alright? Because we just nearly died, but if we don't get out of here right now, we will die."
Annabeth didn't see what Bianca's reactions to that was. The earth tremored again, and she made the mistake of turning around to assess the danger.
Bad idea.
Bad, bad idea.
Even at a distance, Apollo and Ares's battle wasn't a fight meant for mortal eyes - it wasn't a fight meant for any sane eyes, mortal or immortal alike.
The god of war was a behemoth shrouded in blood-red mist, and every swing of his sword was carnage incarnate. He drove Apollo back with gargantuan overhead strikes, lacking grace or finesse but making up for it in weight and power. Every time their blades clashed, he drove the sun god back a step, and the earth buckled under sheer strain. The entire junkyard shook and heaved under the pressure.
And Apollo gave as good as he got. Every one of Ares's strikes was stronger, more savage, and barbaric, but for every blow that landed, Apollo handed back three more. He ducked and weaved slashed vicious rents across the metal of Are's breastplate, biting at the flesh below.
Worse, Apollo was the sun incarnate, and he was covered in a pulsing corona of golden light that ignited the air itself. Every time Ares locked blades with him, his sword and armor glowed red-hot and dripped molten metal that had the other god howling in fury.
Around them, a circle of superheated molten metal and bubbling debris was expanding as the heat and pressure of the god's mere presence destroyed and reshaped everything around them with every passing moment.
Annabeth tore her eyes away from the sight and resisted the urge to scream. She had to clench her fists hard enough to draw blood to ignore the stinging pain in her eyes and blink the spots out of them, and her entire face felt like she'd been baking out in the sun for hours.
(Later, she'd wonder how she'd even survived glancing at them, for divine form or no, Apollo and Ares's power made manifest should have blinded her at best and disintegrated her at the most likely.)
When her eyes stopped flickering in agony, everyone was already up.
Except, again, for Thalia.
"Thalia, snap out of it!"
Percy was trying, he really was, but Thalia was nearly insensate and just about decked him in the face when he tried to help her up. Her hair stood up at the ends, her skin crackled with sparks of blue and white, but she stayed on her knees, half-gasping and half-snarling at something only she could see.
He dodged another raking blow and shot Luna a desperate look.
"Can you do anything about her?"
"A cheering charm won't work. Her constitution is too dense and I can't overpower her without spending too much magic. " Luna said grimly and turned to rummage through her pack with the speed of someone who'd learned to work under pressure, if only just. A second later, she pulled out a corked vial of amber. "Diluted calming drought."
She didn't hand it to Percy, though. Instead, she pitched it to Zoë, who caught it with a look of dawning understanding.
"Make her drink it. Force it down her throat if you have to."
To her credit, Zoë didn't hesitate.
Thalia's fists flailed and lashed out when the huntress approached, hitting nothing but air as she snarled and gasped at everything and nothing at all, but Zoë - Annabeth stood up too slowly to catch what exactly the hunter did next, but between one blink and the next she maneuvered Thalia's arms behind her back, pinned them there while uncorking the vial with her teeth and pulled her head back to tip it down her throat.
It was messy, borderline disgusting what with Thalia snarling and spitting up what little of it she could manage, but Zoë held her study long enough for the first swallow, and she went abruptly still on the second.
Zoë stepped back, and Thalia staggered to her feet, her face eerily blank aside from the very beginnings of a grimace.
"I'm going to kill you for that."
She said the words with no inflection and almost no tone to speak off, the results of whatever it was that she'd just drunk.
Zoë barely even acknowledged the threat.
"You might not get the chance." The hunter's eyes flickered to the right, where the divine light show had grown in pressure and intensity. "Move. Apollo's blessing protects us from the heat and the fire, but nothing will save us if we tarry."
She turned and bolted, and Thalia gave a full-body twitch before leaping after her. It was almost impressive - even when drugged into sensibility, her pride rankled at having to obey Zoë.
Regardless, everybody followed.
Behind them, a scrap mountain was boiling, rising up. The ten toes tilted over, and Annabeth realized why they looked like toes. They were toes. The thing that rose up from the metal was a bronze giant in full Greek battle armor. He was impossibly tall—a skyscraper with legs and arms. He gleamed wickedly in the moonlight. He looked down at them, and his face was deformed. The left side was partially melted off. His joints creaked with rust, and across his armored chest, written in thick dust by some giant finger, were the words WASH ME.
"Talos!" Zoë gasped.
"Who—who's Talos?" Bianca stuttered.
"One of Hephaestus's creations," Thalia said, her tone still blank but with her features drawn back in alarm "But that can't be the original. It's too small. A prototype, maybe. A defective model."
The metal giant didn't like the word defective.
He moved one hand to his sword belt and drew his weapon. The sound of it coming out of its sheath was horrible, metal screeching against metal. The blade was a hundred feet long, easy. It looked rusty and dull, but Annabeth didn't figure that mattered. Getting hit with that thing would be like getting hit with a battleship.
"That sure doesn't look defective!" Percy yelled, brandishing his sword, for all the good that would do. Compared to Talos, he looked like a gerbil waving about a toothpick.
"Hephaestus must have roused him to stop us." Zoë cursed viciously, drawing her bow and readying an arrow. "He will not move to aid Ares, but he can command his creations to attack us in his stead!"
"So the god can't even be bothered to show up, but he can kill us by proxy?" Percy snarled back. "Oh yeah, that's just golden!"
"Looks bronze to me," Nico muttered, and Luna dragged him even closer to her side and held him close.
Annabeth didn't have much time to think about how furiously bitter Percy sounded (not that she or anyone else was any better. What the fuck was wrong with the Olympians?), because the giant defective Talos took one step toward them, closing half the distance and making the ground quiver even more fiercely than before.
"Run!" Bianca yelped.
Great advice, except for the part where it was utterly useless. At a leisurely stroll, the celestial bronze giant could outdistance them easily.
They scattered instead. Thalia drew her shield and held it up as she ran down the highway. The giant swung his sword and took out a row of power lines, which exploded in sparks and scattered across Thalia's path.
Zoe's arrows whistled toward the creature's face but shattered harmlessly against the metal.
"Incarcifors horriblis!"
A bolt of green light lanced out and hit the ground at Talos's feet, and the ground melted. Talos stumbled as the earth surged up like quicksand and entangled his feet up to the ankles in vine formations, tripping him over and dropping him to his knees with enough force to bring down a small building.
The titanic prototype's twisting joints creaked loud enough to raise the dead, but he was far from finished.
"Leave Talos to me!" Luna's voice rang out thunderously, rolling over Annabeth like the other girl was bellowing out a megaphone. "Look out for the strays!"
"Strays?" Percy asked from where he'd sprinted next to her, and Annabeth's eyes went wide as she caught a flicker of bronze hurtling to his side.
"Strays!" She yelled back and tackled him down just as something large and fast blurred over them, the air above them distorting from the speed of its passing. They rolled over the side, and Annabeth ignored the flash of pain as something sharp cut into her shoulder on account of the adrenaline and leaped up to her feet beside Percy, dagger sliding into her hand neatly.
Still, both of them gaped when they caught sight of the celestial bronze monstrosity looming over them.
"Oh," Percy shook his head in disbelief. "Hephaestus must think he's funny."
The eight foot tall replica of the minotaur must've disagreed, because it let loose a bellowing roar of challenge. Smoke exploded out of its quivering nostrils, and sparks erupted out of a gnarly open cut on the side of its neck. Its left half was deformed and littered with dents and pockmarks, and instead of an arm, it had two misformed lumps for limbs on its right side.
"Why is it always bulls!?" Percy yelled as it lowered its head horns first and charged. "I don't even like bulls!"
They threw themselves to opposite sides on unspoken command. The minotaur automata rumbled past like a freight train and barely had the time to turn before Riptide lanced down on it from behind. It tilted, but the Celestial bronze arc still cleaved through the top of its skull and lobbed a chunk of it clean off, horn and all, exposing whirring golden circuitry below.
"Oh, yeah. This is real familiar."
With a kind of fluidity solid celestial bronze shouldn't have been able to manage, the minotaur twisted forward and lashed out with his misshapen limps. Percy's eyes widened and he tried to dodge, but the end of its second arm caught him in the ribs with sickening force and knocked him off his feet wholesale.
He landed hard and gasped, losing his grip on Riptide just as the minotaur rumbled towards him, a metallic hoof raised and ready to stamp down on his head. And it would have, too, had Annabeth not sprinted in behind it and jumped on its back, seizing it by the remaining horn and driving her dagger through the opening in its neck.
Immediately, the minotaur screeched and bucked violently, trying to throw her off, but Annabeth gritted her teeth and pulled. With a shower of sparks and an even louder screech of sliding metal, her dagger sliced halfway threw its neck and it froze. Its arms went limp at its sides, its form seemed to tilt side to side before it slowly, ponderously toppled snout-first into the rubble.
Annabeth had the presence of mind to leap off before the hundred tons (at least) of divine scrap metal face-faulted.
"Thanks." Percy struggled to his knees and shot her an unsteady grin. Her eyes narrowed at the hand that was pressed against his side. "Man, I hate bulls."
"Are you alright?"
"Fine." He paused, gingerly pressing his side. "Okay, pretty bruised and I'm counting at least two cracked ribs-."
"Percy!"
"It's fine. A little dip in some water and I'll be good as new."
"We're in a desert, seaweed brain. Where exactly-?"
The words died on her lips as her mind blue-screened. She reviewed her memory of the last ten-something hours, tried to connect them to the situation they were in right now, and failed miserably.
"We're in a desert." She whispered, momentarily ignoring the carnage of Are's and Apollo's ongoing fight and the cacophony of half a dozen other problems piling up in the background.
Percy tilted his head in confusion. "... Yes?"
"In Arizona."
"Yeah, I read the sign too."
Dear gods (The very, very few who weren't after their heads), how was he not seeing this?
"We took a train in LA... and ended up in Arizona"
"Is this a trick question? Because I'm not so good with those-"
"For the love of-!" She waved a hand furiously. "Percy, we're in Arizona. We took a train from LA to San Franciso! That's a ten-hour trip along the Pacific. Arizona-"
His eyes grew as it dawned on him "-That's... that's a whole other direction."
They exchanged grim, stunned looks.
Something was very, very wrong-
They were cut off when a spire of lightning descended from above and struck Talos' gargantuan head straight on. When the light and the abhorrently loud thunder faded, the giant slumped over and collapsed. Naturally, because of his size that meant that the impact felt like having a land mind go off beneath their feet, minus the physical explosion.
How Annabeth and Percy managed to stay upright was a mystery, but when the rumbling was done, both of them stared as Thalia leaped off the side of Talos's head, limping on one leg towards them but otherwise looking none the worst for wear.
Percy looked like she felt. "How even-?!"
"Luna bound his legs." Thalia gritted her teeth. "And then she did something to me to make me hit harder than I ever have, but only once-"
"Tapped into the deeper layers of the Duat-" Luna offered from somewhere, but Thalia cut her off with a growl.
"Nope. Don't bother, no one's going to get it anyway." She glared at the two of them. "So can the two of you actually help now, or do you need some more time to make out?"
Both of them flushed and spluttered.
"We were busy!"
"Oh, I'll bet."
"Back off!" Percy snapped, gaze flickering to Luna. "I thought whatever you gave her was going to chill her out!"
"It was a mild calming drought. It only prevents emotions from overwhelming the drinker. It doesn't stop them wholesale." Luna frowned. "Still, you are a very angry person, aren't you Thalia?"
Thalia rounded on her, a snarl on her lips, but she paused. "What's wrong with you?"
Luna smiled weakly, skin pale and shimmering with sweat. Her hand was pressed to her abdomen, and to Annabeth's alarm, she could see hints of crimson spreading from beneath her grip.
"Too much magic. And a fragment of shrapnel from Talos's landing."
"Luna!" Bianca sounded horrified.
"It's alright. I've had far worse. Perhaps I'll tell you of the time I wound up in my Grandmother's Mansion. Father was livid." She chuckled and made to take a step forward and staggered forward instead. She would have faced fault had Zoë not reached out to grab her. "I'm fine. It's time to go!"
She pointed to the distance, where the glow of Ares and Apollo's battle still raged.
"Even if Apollo can hold Ares at bay forever, their fight will attract more attention than we could hope to afford. We need to leave, now."
"She's right," Zoë declared, throwing Luna's free hand over her shoulder and pulling her up. "We need to leave before any more of the Forge-lord's creations rise after us. Or worse."
"And go where?" Annabeth interrupted, and everyone turned to her.
Quickly, she told them what she'd told Percy, and Zoë's expression darkened like a thundercloud at the realization.
"I did not even think-" She spat and shook her head angrily. "We make our way on foot, then."
"But what if whatever sent us here sends us somewhere else?" Bianca asked, and Thalia grimaced.
"We'll burn that bridge when we get to it. Right now, the big question isn't about how we got here, it's about how we're getting out."
"Oh, that one's easy." A new voice called out behind them, loud and inescapable. "You're not."
Thalia didn't even hesitate. She whirled on her feet and lobbed her spear, still crackling with lightning, straight at the source. It whistled threw the air at a pace that was borderline terrifying, its tip gleaming with power-
"Oh, please."
-only for its intended target to swat it aside bare-handed, a dark, contemptuous look on his face as he watched it arc to the side and snap as its shaft cracked against Talos's side.
Thalia made an aborted attempt a yell before freezing, and a part of Annabeth that wasn't dipped in ice wondered whether that was because she refused to show weakness in front of an enemy or because she recognised said enemy as she had.
"Oh, fuck."
Tall, middle-aged, dressed in full Greek armour with no helm to hide his curly black hair and blue eyes. His features would have been charming in a smile, but right then they may as well have been carved from marble. In his free hand, he held a three-foot-long oak staff with dove wings and two snakes wrapped around the shaft. The Caduceus.
Annabeth wished that was the end of it - she would have given up so much for that to be the end of it, but it wasn't.
Her eyes strayed to the even more familiar figure standing beside Hermes, dressed in her own gleaming armour, equally devoid of a helm, and meeting an identical pair of grey eyes with trepidation.
Athena stared back, features still, and her lack of an expression did nothing to hide her from the disappointment in her eyes.
For a long moment, no one dared even breathe.
"Annabeth." When her mother finally spoke, her voice was iron. Cold, unyielding in every way, and she almost buckled beneath the weight of it. "Daughter of mine."
Annabeth swallowed, fingers limp in terror. "Mother-"
"Do not speak." Athena's voice didn't rise an octave, but it may as well have slit Annabeth's throat for how effective it was at silencing her. "You have disappointed me, child."
A pit to Tartarus could have opened up at her feet and swallowed her whole, and Annabeth wouldn't have felt any more despair than she felt right then.
If Athena noticed, she made no sign of it.
"Disobeying the will of the council, playing party to an assault on an Olympian" Athena's eyes flickered to Luna, who was so pale now she looked a step away from passing out. "Attempting to act on a quest with no knowledge of its requirements and no possible comprehension of its ramifications."
She shook her head.
"Foolish beyond description. Unwise."
Coming from the goddess of wisdom, unique was all but a direct synonym for unworthy.
(Having her still-beating heart carved out of her chest would have hurt less.)
Hermes remained silent as a grave.
At her side, she could feel Percy's fear give way to outrage as he puffed up, and her hand automatically shot out to grab his wrist before he could leap forward and get himself smote on her behalf, but she shouldn't have bothered.
Of all people, it was Zoë who stepped in front of her and met her mother's gaze, handing Luna off to Bianca with one shrug of her shoulders.
"Is it unwise, Lady Athena," The lieutenant's voice was calm in the same way a predator baring its teeth would have been. "To forsake my goddess? To forsake Lady Artemis, who has often been your stalwart ally over the millennia and against innumerable foes time and again?"
Athena's eyes narrowed.
"I do not forsake your lady lightly, Zoë Nightshade. I would have thought you with all your years would be intelligent enough to recognize that.
Zoë's expression twitched in momentary rage, but she said nothing as Athena spoke.
"I do not double in malice or hedonistic cruelty. I do not forsake Artemis lightly. I observe, Lieutenant, and I learn, and when I have, I make the most logical choice. Very rarely is it a kind choice, and very rarely do I enjoy it, but I follow it all the same. This is one of them, and whether or not you understand the full scope of it, the fact of the matter remains the same. You have committed treason against Olympus, and now the consequences come calling."
"We are on a quest!" Zoë snapped, fury shaking her words. "Sanctioned by the fates! You cannot interfere!"
"Couldn't." Hermes finally spoke up, and Zoe's gaze turned to him. He looked as grim as ever, or grimmer still. "We couldn't interfere until Zeus himself ordered us to. This should tell you exactly how serious this is, that even the king of the gods would defy Fate."
"And you would obey him on this?" Zoe spat, but this time there was something desperate to her rage. "You would also sacrifice Lady Artemis out of fear."
Annabeth couldn't blame her for the suicidal impudence or the despair. The quest was over - they couldn't escape one Olympian, much less two. It was so far out of their hands that even trying would be the height of stupidity, and with her mother right there, they couldn't even hope to negotiate.
It was over.
And Hermes knew it too, because he didn't look angry
"Girl, this last century had been one entire pile of shit after the other. I've sacrificed enough in the last decade to drive you insane a hundred times over." He chuckled ruefully, bitterly. "At this point, goddess or no, Artemis is just another name on the moirai-damned list. Now let's get this over with."
His caduceus lit up with a sharp, viridian glow, and he raised it towards Zoë-
There was a burst of light, and Hermes reared back as Apollo and Ares materialised standing between them.
Or, Apollo did at least, his armour tarnished and banged up, and bleeding golden ichor from a cut across his brow, but otherwise fine for the count.
Ares, though?
When the god of war landed in a crumpled heap at Apollo's feat, he did so stiffly, as if paralysed and incapable of movement. Worse still, his skin was black as rot and covered in boils, with poisonous green foam bubbling out of his mouth and eyes the colour of pond scum, weeping trails of coagulated pus and coloured slime.
Hermes swore violently and reared back even further, looking nauseous. "What did you do to him?"
"Nothing less than he deserved," Apollo smirked cruelly, the glow to his skin savage in it's intensity. "Everyone sees my sun chariot, my poetry, and my bow, and they forget that I'm the god of plagues as well."
He aimed a particularly vicious kick to Ares's side, who heaved with the blow but remained immobilised, his face locked in an expression of clear and utter agony.
"This little masterpiece? One part bubonic plague, one part Spanish influenza, a pinch of gangrene, a few more bits and pieces mixed together, and then all of it multiplied by... oh, let's be safe and say ten thousand." Apollo's eyes flickered to Hermes and then to Athena as he hefted his sword between "He'll burn through it sooner or later. Until then, back off, brother, sister, or you're next."
"Apollo." A spear appeared in Athena's grip, though she didn't heft it in the sun god's direction yet. "You court calamity."
"And you court my rage." Apollo snarled, his glow growing brighter, the air growing warmer. "Ask the muscle headed fool how that's going for him."
"These questers won't be leaving this yard, Apollo. The council won't have it."
"You mean Father won't have it."
"Do you believe there's a difference?"
At that, Apollo actually laughed. The sound made Annabeth's eardrums scream. "If there was, things would look a damn sight better than they do right now."
There was a tense silence as the gods assessed one another, and Annabeth and the six slowly, without even consciously realising it, inched back.
"This is bad." Bianca whimpered under her breath. "This is so bad."
Understatement, thy name is Bianca Di Angelo. This wasn't bad, it was lethal. They barely survived the opening salvo of two gods clashing - three was a death sentence in every way.
"I think I finally understand that line of the prophecy," Luna whispered, so low that Annabeth barely heard her. Her head was lolling to the side, and she looked like she was hanging on to consciousness by sheer force of will alone. "The daughter's strife, to invoke death... Father, please."
"Apollo." Hermes leaned forward. "Don't do this. You can't hope to best us both."
"You are outnumbered." Athena stepped forward. "Surrender. You have no allies."
Apollo bared his teeth like a beast and crouched, and Annabeth's breath shuddered in her lungs.
Right as it became clear that the gods were going to charge, right as Apollo was about to swing his sword, the air changed.
The heat was replaced by a powerful chill, the wind calmed and died, and a powerful, tangible presence dropped down on all of them like an anvil of impossible weight.
"He has me."
All three Olympians stiffened and turned as the fourth god manifested beside Apollo - and he was a god, for there was no other explanation for the power Annabeth could feel roiling against her very bones as it washed over all seven mortals and stole the breath out of them.
He was draped in a cloak of darkness, standing lean and muscular, with a regal face, honey-gold eyes, and black hair flowing down his shoulders. His skin was the colour of teakwood, and his dark wings (Annabeth barely batted an eye at the sight) glimmered in shades of blue, black, and purple.
"Thanatos." Hermes rumbled, and Athena's eyes narrowed. Zoë went very, very still at the name. "Why are you here? This is no business of yours."
"That," The God of Death spoke in a deep, melodic voice "Is what you think, little Olympian."
When he turned to the seven of them, Annabeth almost flinched at the sight of him. Thanatos was beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with the physical, not entirely. It was a timeless beauty, remote and untouchable, and laced with something she suspected she literally could not comprehend.
(And it scared her. Very, very much)
His golden eyes passed over her first, and all five of them, before settling on a beaming Luna Lovegood.
"Luna."
What?
"You came."
What?
"Of course," The god of death's eye's softened, ever so slightly. "You called, daughter."
What?
She wasn't the only one that twitched. The demigods looked just as stunned, Zoë was no better, and Hermes and Apollo both looked like they'd just taken a hammer to the face.
Athena's features had gone stock-still, the same as Zoë's.
"Death can not beget a child."
Thanatos chuckled deeply as he turned around to face her. "How very rich, coming from the maiden goddess with a brood of her own nearly a dozen strong. Perhaps even larger"
Athena didn't so much as twitch in reaction.
"You intend to interfere, then?"
"But of course. Or do you think that I will allow you to drag my child and her friends to Olympus and present them to that unsightly disaster of a king unopposed?"
"So the Underworld declares war on Olympus" Hermes spat, hefting his Caduceus.
"Ah, Olympians." Thanatos's smile was cold as ice. "So quick to assume, so quick to pounce on any perceived opportunity. My Lord Hades's affairs are his own, as is the rest of the Underworld. I come alone and for the sake of my daughter and those she's chosen to throw her lot in with. They fall under my protection by that virtue alone, and if your King takes offence to my interference, he can come forth and face me himself."
Thanatos leaned forward, and behind him, his wings expanded and shook.
"If. He. So. Dares."
"Bold words." Hermes's face twisted in a rictus at the insult. "From the god who was chained and conquered by a mortal."
Thanatos didn't show an iota of rage at the barb, unbothered by his ancient humiliation.
If anything, he seemed only amused.
"Was that the best you could do?" Hermes hissed and Athena said nothing at all. "I genuinely can not tell if you say that to insult me, or if your youth-"
"Youth!?"
"-Truly conveys your ignorance and stupidity, little page, but allow me to educate you all the same."
Thanatos stretched out a hand, and the darkness of night solidified into a spear of stygian iron, engraved with symbols Annabeth wouldn't have been able to make heads or tails of if she'd dared to pull her attention away from the gods.
(Identical to Luna's, a voice whispered in her mind)
"I am Thanatos." The god's voice rumbled with power. "Born of Nyx and Erebus I was. The Night and The Eternal Darkness gave me form, and I was old long before the Titans and their ilk walked the lands. I was ancient millennia before Zeus Olympios was but a smidgen of recalcitrant seed clogging Kronos's loins, and I will be here long after your vaunted ruler fades into the Chaos of nonexistence."
Thanatos stepped forward, and it was like all of Arizona shook with his movement.
"I am Death, little godling, and death can not strike out against the mortals it will reap. I could not rend Sisyphus's essence for his treachery for the living were not mine to seek, only to collect. But you are immortals, are you not?" Thanatos's smile was the fruit of nightmares, and Athena's spear raised immediately. The tension skyrocketed just like that. "The rules that bound and still bind me now do not apply to you, do they?"
"You think we fear you?"
"I suppose we're about to find out. No more words now, for those are wind and doubly so from Olympians. Instead, Let me show you what it means to invoke the wrath of a Primordial!"
And with that terrifying declaration, Death hefted his spear and charged.
...
As always, leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it, please be courteous.
To some, that might have sounded like a no-brainer.
Athena and Ares's ancient rivalry was an olden, brutal thing. The warrior's spirit and the stratagem of battle had been at odds since her mother had first burst out of Zeus's skull, and for all that their feuds had simmered down in the present day and age, if Annabeth had a drachma for every other conflict and literal war that had been spawned by or brought on as a result of their clashes, she'd be rich enough to buy half of Olympus.
There was a reason the Athena and Ares cabins were always at each other's throats at Capture the Flag or any of the other camp war games, and it wasn't because Clarisse and her siblings were stubborn as mules and liked to use every minor disagreement as an excuse to punch someone in the face.
(Well, not entirely)
The demigod children of both war-governing Olympians were damn near biologically wired to challenge and compete against one another... but that wasn't why Annabeth hated Ares, no.
If it was something as shallow and downright asinine as inheriting a grudge then Athena and Poseidon's equally volatile history would've meant she'd have hated Percy, and that couldn't be farther from the truth.
(Quite the opposite, actually, but that was a whole other kind of problem)
Unlike most of her siblings, Annabeth didn't just oppose Ares and everything associated with him on principle. No, her grudge was personal, and it traced its way all the way back when she, Grover, and Percy had gone on that (literally) fateful quest to retrieve the master bolt.
She'd disliked him from the second he'd shown up in that diner even if she'd had the obvious self-preservation instincts not to to show it. The way his mere presence had purposefully twisted Percy's emotions left and right and twirled him halfway out of his mind all so Ares could play at being magnanimous and assert his dominance over them had been enough to press half a dozen of her buttons in one go.
When he'd sent them off on that ridiculous side-quest and nearly gotten them killed by mechanical spiders, it had taken genuine effort and all her willpower not to draw her dagger and try to stab him right in the flaming eye socket, but that was practically the default setting for most any mortal interacting with Ares while unprepared for it - And any child of Athena being exposed to any spider ever, but again, that was a whole other kind of problem.
It wasn't until the very end of the quest when they'd escaped the Underworld by the very skin of their teeth and found Ares waiting for them on that beach did Annabeth truly begin to loathe the god of war.
It wasn't enough that he had played them like fiddles (What was it Percy had called it... a plan worthy of Athena? Talk about adding insult to injury), Or that he had almost succeded in getting them all killed and used as a catalyst for what would have been a civilization-ending war, no. In the end, after everything they'd been through and all the terrifying near-death experiences they'd just barely survived (Grover had nearly been dragged down to Tartarus), Ares still had the gall and the cruelty to stand in their way and try to stop them from returning the bolt.
When Percy had stepped up to duel him, Annabeth had felt part of her shrivel up and die at the sheer unfairness of it all. She was the child of wisdom and strategy - she should have had a plan, a plot, a clever trick to tip the scales in their favor, but she'd had nothing. She was forced to watch and pray for a miracle, any miracle, for what strategy could three twelve-year-olds use to stand up against an Olympian god?
It was just like the night Thalia had sacrificed herself all over again. All her years of training at camp, all that time sharpening her mind and body to prepare for anything amounted to nothing in the end. Once again, Annabeth was the useless spectator watching a friend throw themself into an unwinnable farce of a fight because it was a choice between that or rolling over and dying right then and there, and neither Percy nor Thalia would ever go down without a fight.
Ares had forced her to relive that hopeless despair, and even if Kronos had been the one pulling his strings all along, Annabeth would still despise him for his part in it for the rest of her life and until the end of time after that.
The fact that he'd chosen to curse Percy after he'd lost like an idiot because he was too drunk on his own power to remember never to underestimate any opponent just cemented her loathing because seriously, how petty could you get?
(Stupid question - Ares was a god, and while Annabeth would never dare say it aloud, she was pretty convinced you could better categorize them not by age or power or position in the divine hierarchy, but by the number of times they lashed out like a group of unimaginably overpowered and horrifyingly vindictive prima donnas).
Annabeth knew that wouldn't be the last time they'd come face to face with a god, be it Ares or another Olympian or one of the litters of other minor and not-so-minor non-Olympians out there - between Percy's role in the great prophecy, her tendency to ignore her better sense and follow him everywhere (and she always would, caution be damned) and the fact the fates were almost definitely borderline psychopaths out to get them, the odds were so heavily stacked against them that they'd have more luck beating Argus in a staring contest than they would at avoiding the inevitable.
The gods couldn't be beaten, not by any demigod or even an army of them at that - but maybe they could be outsmarted. Tripped up. Stalled and delayed until she could figure something out - whatever.
The point was, Annabeth would do something.
Anything at all
(She swore she'd never sit on the sidelines like that again, and to Hades with the consequences)
Well, two years and two quests later, as all seven of them turned and bolted away from the rampaging gods, a slightly hysterical part of Annabeth couldn't help but thank her past self for having the brains not to swear that on the river Styx because there were no words in any language to describe how badly she would have broken that oath if she had and how utterly screwed they all were either way.
"RUN!"
They made it about ten feet, sprinting full-tilt towards the entrance of the ludicrously vast junkyards at the kinds of speeds only adrenaline-crazed demigods could output when Apollo and Ares's blades finally met.
Boom.
The first blow wasn't so much a blow as it was a cataclysm. The earth bucked and ruptured. The air burst deafeningly. An unholy blast of scalding heat and light and hellish pressure slammed into their fleeing backs like a super-volcano going off right behind them and flinging them up and away so violently that Annabeth's neck nearly snapped and she almost blacked out from the vicious acceleration.
The disorientation from the sheer impact couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity. An eternity that they spent flying, a million tons of force blowing them so high up that, had Zeus been watching, they'd have been smote a thousand times over before they could ever hope to hit the ground.
And then they stopped rising, and Annabeth felt enough clarity rush back into her brain in an infinitesimal instant to recognize how far below them the junkyard and the growing carnage from the battle of the gods was-
Holy -
- and then gravity struck like a viper and they began to fall.
Most of the screamed - Thalia howled.
The air nearly deafened her to it anyway as it whistled past her ears. The mountains of garbage and ruin stretched up towards them as they hurtled straight down, like the fingers of death itself as it (or was it he?) prepared to close its fist and crush them into oblivion.
Percy's hand latched around her wrist and hauled her through the air even as they fell, close enough to wrap both arms around her with a hold tight enough to make her ribs creak and leave bruises in its wake - Annabeth wouldn't have bothered questioning how he'd managed it even if she'd had the will to. It was Percy, so, of course, he was there, somehow trying to do anything even though there was no water below or anywhere close enough to save even him, let alone any of the rest of them.
(Or maybe he was still trying despite that, - Yes, that sounded more like Percy. Loyal and steadfast to the point of suicidal stupidity and until the very end)
Annabeth didn't have time to process all the feelings that came with that (regret, crippling guilt, sorrow, the whole fun-size package) - there wasn't enough time for that. Instead, what little part of her was even capable of rational thought was in the middle of absolutely losing it over how ridiculously, brutally unfair it was for this to be the end after everything they'd lived through before.
Kronos must be laughing himself to literal pieces.
She didn't know where the ugly thought came from, but as the ground came up, and up and up, Annabeth had just a heartbeat to brace and close her eyes-
"ARRESTO MOMENTUM!"
-and snap them right back open again.
She'd forgotten about Luna, who stretched out her arms and bellowed out the two words maybe five seconds before they hit the ground and splattered like bugs on a windshield.
Annabeth stopped.
As in, she literally, completely, halted, and so did the rest of them - like someone had hit the pause button and frozen them mid-motion.
Unlike every other bit of extraordinary magic Luna weaved in the day and a half Annabeth had known her, there was no visible tell to this one, no light or pressure or force. One second, they were at death's door, and the next they froze above the still-rumbling ground, the momentum going from terminal to nonexistent in a way that would have had physicists the world over ripping their hair out by the handfuls in hysterics.
And speaking of hysterics -
They dropped down to solid earth so gently they might as well have just been stepping off a curb, and just as soon as her feet hit the ground Thalia dropped to her knees and threw up in a violent heave.
Zoê staggered back and steadied herself by reaching for Bianca, who was getting a crash course on the wonders of hyperventilation, hand pressed over her ears and staring down at her feet like she couldn't believe they were back on solid ground and not pasted all over it instead.
Percy let go of Annabeth and stumbled off to the side, face blanched and wobbling like he was a second away from toppling, and she would have toppled if Luna hadn't seized her arm around the bicep and forced her upright with a sharp tug. Her other hand tugged on Nico's wrist, whose hair had been blown back by the wind and had his lips parted in an expression so frozen with disbelief it would have been hilarious if things were any different.
As it was, the sight of the ten-year-old who'd nearly just died on their watch felt less funny and more like a dagger to the heart, especially when his features started contorting and his eyes grew wet.
"Luna-"
Luna plopped her hand down on his head. There was a brief flicker of white-gold light, and Nico paused, twitched, and beamed.
"That was so cool!"
She'd heard the youngest Di Angelo use the same phrase some ten thousand times in the last six hours alone, but this one was different. He was nearly bouncing on the balls of his feet, his eyes were a little too wide, and his smile stretched a little too long, to the point where looking at it made her jaw twitch in sympathy.
"Can we do that again!?"
Even his voice was off, a hint of hyperactive mania beyond any ordinary demigod ADHD lingering beneath the words.
"What did you do to him?"
"Cheering charm. A terribly unhealthy emotional suppression technique, but he's too young to control his panic and he can't lock down now." Luna glanced at her, and she never looked more like a fellow daughter of Athena than she did then, a hurricane brewing in those halfway familiar eyes of hers. "There are very few forms of magics I dislike using, Annabeth, and even fewer still that I hate, but those of the mind-altering variety have more than earned it."
Luna jerked her head away
"But needs must." She looked at Zoë first, then panned her eyes between the four of them left, bar Thalia, who was still on her knees.
"Needs must." She repeated firmly. "We need to move, right now."
"Luna," Bianca cut herself off with a gasp, the words clogging her throat. Her chest heaved and rattled. "W-We just- We just-!"
"Bianca."
The older of the Di Angelos snapped her eyes to Luna, who crossed the distance between them with an honest-to-the-gods leap and seized both of her shoulders with a white-knuckled grip, the only sign of panic Annabeth had ever seen from her.
"Not now, alright? Not now." She stressed the words when Bianca went to shake her head. "That was terrifying, I know. Believe me, I know, but you can't think about that now. None of us can."
As if to agree with her, the earth rumbled and shuddered with power. In the distance, Annabeth could see mountains of rubble collapse from the force of the vibrations.
"Push it down, Bianca, focus on moving, alright? Because we just nearly died, but if we don't get out of here right now, we will die."
Annabeth didn't see what Bianca's reactions to that was. The earth tremored again, and she made the mistake of turning around to assess the danger.
Bad idea.
Bad, bad idea.
Even at a distance, Apollo and Ares's battle wasn't a fight meant for mortal eyes - it wasn't a fight meant for any sane eyes, mortal or immortal alike.
The god of war was a behemoth shrouded in blood-red mist, and every swing of his sword was carnage incarnate. He drove Apollo back with gargantuan overhead strikes, lacking grace or finesse but making up for it in weight and power. Every time their blades clashed, he drove the sun god back a step, and the earth buckled under sheer strain. The entire junkyard shook and heaved under the pressure.
And Apollo gave as good as he got. Every one of Ares's strikes was stronger, more savage, and barbaric, but for every blow that landed, Apollo handed back three more. He ducked and weaved slashed vicious rents across the metal of Are's breastplate, biting at the flesh below.
Worse, Apollo was the sun incarnate, and he was covered in a pulsing corona of golden light that ignited the air itself. Every time Ares locked blades with him, his sword and armor glowed red-hot and dripped molten metal that had the other god howling in fury.
Around them, a circle of superheated molten metal and bubbling debris was expanding as the heat and pressure of the god's mere presence destroyed and reshaped everything around them with every passing moment.
Annabeth tore her eyes away from the sight and resisted the urge to scream. She had to clench her fists hard enough to draw blood to ignore the stinging pain in her eyes and blink the spots out of them, and her entire face felt like she'd been baking out in the sun for hours.
(Later, she'd wonder how she'd even survived glancing at them, for divine form or no, Apollo and Ares's power made manifest should have blinded her at best and disintegrated her at the most likely.)
When her eyes stopped flickering in agony, everyone was already up.
Except, again, for Thalia.
"Thalia, snap out of it!"
Percy was trying, he really was, but Thalia was nearly insensate and just about decked him in the face when he tried to help her up. Her hair stood up at the ends, her skin crackled with sparks of blue and white, but she stayed on her knees, half-gasping and half-snarling at something only she could see.
He dodged another raking blow and shot Luna a desperate look.
"Can you do anything about her?"
"A cheering charm won't work. Her constitution is too dense and I can't overpower her without spending too much magic. " Luna said grimly and turned to rummage through her pack with the speed of someone who'd learned to work under pressure, if only just. A second later, she pulled out a corked vial of amber. "Diluted calming drought."
She didn't hand it to Percy, though. Instead, she pitched it to Zoë, who caught it with a look of dawning understanding.
"Make her drink it. Force it down her throat if you have to."
To her credit, Zoë didn't hesitate.
Thalia's fists flailed and lashed out when the huntress approached, hitting nothing but air as she snarled and gasped at everything and nothing at all, but Zoë - Annabeth stood up too slowly to catch what exactly the hunter did next, but between one blink and the next she maneuvered Thalia's arms behind her back, pinned them there while uncorking the vial with her teeth and pulled her head back to tip it down her throat.
It was messy, borderline disgusting what with Thalia snarling and spitting up what little of it she could manage, but Zoë held her study long enough for the first swallow, and she went abruptly still on the second.
Zoë stepped back, and Thalia staggered to her feet, her face eerily blank aside from the very beginnings of a grimace.
"I'm going to kill you for that."
She said the words with no inflection and almost no tone to speak off, the results of whatever it was that she'd just drunk.
Zoë barely even acknowledged the threat.
"You might not get the chance." The hunter's eyes flickered to the right, where the divine light show had grown in pressure and intensity. "Move. Apollo's blessing protects us from the heat and the fire, but nothing will save us if we tarry."
She turned and bolted, and Thalia gave a full-body twitch before leaping after her. It was almost impressive - even when drugged into sensibility, her pride rankled at having to obey Zoë.
Regardless, everybody followed.
Behind them, a scrap mountain was boiling, rising up. The ten toes tilted over, and Annabeth realized why they looked like toes. They were toes. The thing that rose up from the metal was a bronze giant in full Greek battle armor. He was impossibly tall—a skyscraper with legs and arms. He gleamed wickedly in the moonlight. He looked down at them, and his face was deformed. The left side was partially melted off. His joints creaked with rust, and across his armored chest, written in thick dust by some giant finger, were the words WASH ME.
"Talos!" Zoë gasped.
"Who—who's Talos?" Bianca stuttered.
"One of Hephaestus's creations," Thalia said, her tone still blank but with her features drawn back in alarm "But that can't be the original. It's too small. A prototype, maybe. A defective model."
The metal giant didn't like the word defective.
He moved one hand to his sword belt and drew his weapon. The sound of it coming out of its sheath was horrible, metal screeching against metal. The blade was a hundred feet long, easy. It looked rusty and dull, but Annabeth didn't figure that mattered. Getting hit with that thing would be like getting hit with a battleship.
"That sure doesn't look defective!" Percy yelled, brandishing his sword, for all the good that would do. Compared to Talos, he looked like a gerbil waving about a toothpick.
"Hephaestus must have roused him to stop us." Zoë cursed viciously, drawing her bow and readying an arrow. "He will not move to aid Ares, but he can command his creations to attack us in his stead!"
"So the god can't even be bothered to show up, but he can kill us by proxy?" Percy snarled back. "Oh yeah, that's just golden!"
"Looks bronze to me," Nico muttered, and Luna dragged him even closer to her side and held him close.
Annabeth didn't have much time to think about how furiously bitter Percy sounded (not that she or anyone else was any better. What the fuck was wrong with the Olympians?), because the giant defective Talos took one step toward them, closing half the distance and making the ground quiver even more fiercely than before.
"Run!" Bianca yelped.
Great advice, except for the part where it was utterly useless. At a leisurely stroll, the celestial bronze giant could outdistance them easily.
They scattered instead. Thalia drew her shield and held it up as she ran down the highway. The giant swung his sword and took out a row of power lines, which exploded in sparks and scattered across Thalia's path.
Zoe's arrows whistled toward the creature's face but shattered harmlessly against the metal.
"Incarcifors horriblis!"
A bolt of green light lanced out and hit the ground at Talos's feet, and the ground melted. Talos stumbled as the earth surged up like quicksand and entangled his feet up to the ankles in vine formations, tripping him over and dropping him to his knees with enough force to bring down a small building.
The titanic prototype's twisting joints creaked loud enough to raise the dead, but he was far from finished.
"Leave Talos to me!" Luna's voice rang out thunderously, rolling over Annabeth like the other girl was bellowing out a megaphone. "Look out for the strays!"
"Strays?" Percy asked from where he'd sprinted next to her, and Annabeth's eyes went wide as she caught a flicker of bronze hurtling to his side.
"Strays!" She yelled back and tackled him down just as something large and fast blurred over them, the air above them distorting from the speed of its passing. They rolled over the side, and Annabeth ignored the flash of pain as something sharp cut into her shoulder on account of the adrenaline and leaped up to her feet beside Percy, dagger sliding into her hand neatly.
Still, both of them gaped when they caught sight of the celestial bronze monstrosity looming over them.
"Oh," Percy shook his head in disbelief. "Hephaestus must think he's funny."
The eight foot tall replica of the minotaur must've disagreed, because it let loose a bellowing roar of challenge. Smoke exploded out of its quivering nostrils, and sparks erupted out of a gnarly open cut on the side of its neck. Its left half was deformed and littered with dents and pockmarks, and instead of an arm, it had two misformed lumps for limbs on its right side.
"Why is it always bulls!?" Percy yelled as it lowered its head horns first and charged. "I don't even like bulls!"
They threw themselves to opposite sides on unspoken command. The minotaur automata rumbled past like a freight train and barely had the time to turn before Riptide lanced down on it from behind. It tilted, but the Celestial bronze arc still cleaved through the top of its skull and lobbed a chunk of it clean off, horn and all, exposing whirring golden circuitry below.
"Oh, yeah. This is real familiar."
With a kind of fluidity solid celestial bronze shouldn't have been able to manage, the minotaur twisted forward and lashed out with his misshapen limps. Percy's eyes widened and he tried to dodge, but the end of its second arm caught him in the ribs with sickening force and knocked him off his feet wholesale.
He landed hard and gasped, losing his grip on Riptide just as the minotaur rumbled towards him, a metallic hoof raised and ready to stamp down on his head. And it would have, too, had Annabeth not sprinted in behind it and jumped on its back, seizing it by the remaining horn and driving her dagger through the opening in its neck.
Immediately, the minotaur screeched and bucked violently, trying to throw her off, but Annabeth gritted her teeth and pulled. With a shower of sparks and an even louder screech of sliding metal, her dagger sliced halfway threw its neck and it froze. Its arms went limp at its sides, its form seemed to tilt side to side before it slowly, ponderously toppled snout-first into the rubble.
Annabeth had the presence of mind to leap off before the hundred tons (at least) of divine scrap metal face-faulted.
"Thanks." Percy struggled to his knees and shot her an unsteady grin. Her eyes narrowed at the hand that was pressed against his side. "Man, I hate bulls."
"Are you alright?"
"Fine." He paused, gingerly pressing his side. "Okay, pretty bruised and I'm counting at least two cracked ribs-."
"Percy!"
"It's fine. A little dip in some water and I'll be good as new."
"We're in a desert, seaweed brain. Where exactly-?"
The words died on her lips as her mind blue-screened. She reviewed her memory of the last ten-something hours, tried to connect them to the situation they were in right now, and failed miserably.
"We're in a desert." She whispered, momentarily ignoring the carnage of Are's and Apollo's ongoing fight and the cacophony of half a dozen other problems piling up in the background.
Percy tilted his head in confusion. "... Yes?"
"In Arizona."
"Yeah, I read the sign too."
Dear gods (The very, very few who weren't after their heads), how was he not seeing this?
"We took a train in LA... and ended up in Arizona"
"Is this a trick question? Because I'm not so good with those-"
"For the love of-!" She waved a hand furiously. "Percy, we're in Arizona. We took a train from LA to San Franciso! That's a ten-hour trip along the Pacific. Arizona-"
His eyes grew as it dawned on him "-That's... that's a whole other direction."
They exchanged grim, stunned looks.
Something was very, very wrong-
They were cut off when a spire of lightning descended from above and struck Talos' gargantuan head straight on. When the light and the abhorrently loud thunder faded, the giant slumped over and collapsed. Naturally, because of his size that meant that the impact felt like having a land mind go off beneath their feet, minus the physical explosion.
How Annabeth and Percy managed to stay upright was a mystery, but when the rumbling was done, both of them stared as Thalia leaped off the side of Talos's head, limping on one leg towards them but otherwise looking none the worst for wear.
Percy looked like she felt. "How even-?!"
"Luna bound his legs." Thalia gritted her teeth. "And then she did something to me to make me hit harder than I ever have, but only once-"
"Tapped into the deeper layers of the Duat-" Luna offered from somewhere, but Thalia cut her off with a growl.
"Nope. Don't bother, no one's going to get it anyway." She glared at the two of them. "So can the two of you actually help now, or do you need some more time to make out?"
Both of them flushed and spluttered.
"We were busy!"
"Oh, I'll bet."
"Back off!" Percy snapped, gaze flickering to Luna. "I thought whatever you gave her was going to chill her out!"
"It was a mild calming drought. It only prevents emotions from overwhelming the drinker. It doesn't stop them wholesale." Luna frowned. "Still, you are a very angry person, aren't you Thalia?"
Thalia rounded on her, a snarl on her lips, but she paused. "What's wrong with you?"
Luna smiled weakly, skin pale and shimmering with sweat. Her hand was pressed to her abdomen, and to Annabeth's alarm, she could see hints of crimson spreading from beneath her grip.
"Too much magic. And a fragment of shrapnel from Talos's landing."
"Luna!" Bianca sounded horrified.
"It's alright. I've had far worse. Perhaps I'll tell you of the time I wound up in my Grandmother's Mansion. Father was livid." She chuckled and made to take a step forward and staggered forward instead. She would have faced fault had Zoë not reached out to grab her. "I'm fine. It's time to go!"
She pointed to the distance, where the glow of Ares and Apollo's battle still raged.
"Even if Apollo can hold Ares at bay forever, their fight will attract more attention than we could hope to afford. We need to leave, now."
"She's right," Zoë declared, throwing Luna's free hand over her shoulder and pulling her up. "We need to leave before any more of the Forge-lord's creations rise after us. Or worse."
"And go where?" Annabeth interrupted, and everyone turned to her.
Quickly, she told them what she'd told Percy, and Zoë's expression darkened like a thundercloud at the realization.
"I did not even think-" She spat and shook her head angrily. "We make our way on foot, then."
"But what if whatever sent us here sends us somewhere else?" Bianca asked, and Thalia grimaced.
"We'll burn that bridge when we get to it. Right now, the big question isn't about how we got here, it's about how we're getting out."
"Oh, that one's easy." A new voice called out behind them, loud and inescapable. "You're not."
Thalia didn't even hesitate. She whirled on her feet and lobbed her spear, still crackling with lightning, straight at the source. It whistled threw the air at a pace that was borderline terrifying, its tip gleaming with power-
"Oh, please."
-only for its intended target to swat it aside bare-handed, a dark, contemptuous look on his face as he watched it arc to the side and snap as its shaft cracked against Talos's side.
Thalia made an aborted attempt a yell before freezing, and a part of Annabeth that wasn't dipped in ice wondered whether that was because she refused to show weakness in front of an enemy or because she recognised said enemy as she had.
"Oh, fuck."
Tall, middle-aged, dressed in full Greek armour with no helm to hide his curly black hair and blue eyes. His features would have been charming in a smile, but right then they may as well have been carved from marble. In his free hand, he held a three-foot-long oak staff with dove wings and two snakes wrapped around the shaft. The Caduceus.
Annabeth wished that was the end of it - she would have given up so much for that to be the end of it, but it wasn't.
Her eyes strayed to the even more familiar figure standing beside Hermes, dressed in her own gleaming armour, equally devoid of a helm, and meeting an identical pair of grey eyes with trepidation.
Athena stared back, features still, and her lack of an expression did nothing to hide her from the disappointment in her eyes.
For a long moment, no one dared even breathe.
"Annabeth." When her mother finally spoke, her voice was iron. Cold, unyielding in every way, and she almost buckled beneath the weight of it. "Daughter of mine."
Annabeth swallowed, fingers limp in terror. "Mother-"
"Do not speak." Athena's voice didn't rise an octave, but it may as well have slit Annabeth's throat for how effective it was at silencing her. "You have disappointed me, child."
A pit to Tartarus could have opened up at her feet and swallowed her whole, and Annabeth wouldn't have felt any more despair than she felt right then.
If Athena noticed, she made no sign of it.
"Disobeying the will of the council, playing party to an assault on an Olympian" Athena's eyes flickered to Luna, who was so pale now she looked a step away from passing out. "Attempting to act on a quest with no knowledge of its requirements and no possible comprehension of its ramifications."
She shook her head.
"Foolish beyond description. Unwise."
Coming from the goddess of wisdom, unique was all but a direct synonym for unworthy.
(Having her still-beating heart carved out of her chest would have hurt less.)
Hermes remained silent as a grave.
At her side, she could feel Percy's fear give way to outrage as he puffed up, and her hand automatically shot out to grab his wrist before he could leap forward and get himself smote on her behalf, but she shouldn't have bothered.
Of all people, it was Zoë who stepped in front of her and met her mother's gaze, handing Luna off to Bianca with one shrug of her shoulders.
"Is it unwise, Lady Athena," The lieutenant's voice was calm in the same way a predator baring its teeth would have been. "To forsake my goddess? To forsake Lady Artemis, who has often been your stalwart ally over the millennia and against innumerable foes time and again?"
Athena's eyes narrowed.
"I do not forsake your lady lightly, Zoë Nightshade. I would have thought you with all your years would be intelligent enough to recognize that.
Zoë's expression twitched in momentary rage, but she said nothing as Athena spoke.
"I do not double in malice or hedonistic cruelty. I do not forsake Artemis lightly. I observe, Lieutenant, and I learn, and when I have, I make the most logical choice. Very rarely is it a kind choice, and very rarely do I enjoy it, but I follow it all the same. This is one of them, and whether or not you understand the full scope of it, the fact of the matter remains the same. You have committed treason against Olympus, and now the consequences come calling."
"We are on a quest!" Zoë snapped, fury shaking her words. "Sanctioned by the fates! You cannot interfere!"
"Couldn't." Hermes finally spoke up, and Zoe's gaze turned to him. He looked as grim as ever, or grimmer still. "We couldn't interfere until Zeus himself ordered us to. This should tell you exactly how serious this is, that even the king of the gods would defy Fate."
"And you would obey him on this?" Zoe spat, but this time there was something desperate to her rage. "You would also sacrifice Lady Artemis out of fear."
Annabeth couldn't blame her for the suicidal impudence or the despair. The quest was over - they couldn't escape one Olympian, much less two. It was so far out of their hands that even trying would be the height of stupidity, and with her mother right there, they couldn't even hope to negotiate.
It was over.
And Hermes knew it too, because he didn't look angry
"Girl, this last century had been one entire pile of shit after the other. I've sacrificed enough in the last decade to drive you insane a hundred times over." He chuckled ruefully, bitterly. "At this point, goddess or no, Artemis is just another name on the moirai-damned list. Now let's get this over with."
His caduceus lit up with a sharp, viridian glow, and he raised it towards Zoë-
There was a burst of light, and Hermes reared back as Apollo and Ares materialised standing between them.
Or, Apollo did at least, his armour tarnished and banged up, and bleeding golden ichor from a cut across his brow, but otherwise fine for the count.
Ares, though?
When the god of war landed in a crumpled heap at Apollo's feat, he did so stiffly, as if paralysed and incapable of movement. Worse still, his skin was black as rot and covered in boils, with poisonous green foam bubbling out of his mouth and eyes the colour of pond scum, weeping trails of coagulated pus and coloured slime.
Hermes swore violently and reared back even further, looking nauseous. "What did you do to him?"
"Nothing less than he deserved," Apollo smirked cruelly, the glow to his skin savage in it's intensity. "Everyone sees my sun chariot, my poetry, and my bow, and they forget that I'm the god of plagues as well."
He aimed a particularly vicious kick to Ares's side, who heaved with the blow but remained immobilised, his face locked in an expression of clear and utter agony.
"This little masterpiece? One part bubonic plague, one part Spanish influenza, a pinch of gangrene, a few more bits and pieces mixed together, and then all of it multiplied by... oh, let's be safe and say ten thousand." Apollo's eyes flickered to Hermes and then to Athena as he hefted his sword between "He'll burn through it sooner or later. Until then, back off, brother, sister, or you're next."
"Apollo." A spear appeared in Athena's grip, though she didn't heft it in the sun god's direction yet. "You court calamity."
"And you court my rage." Apollo snarled, his glow growing brighter, the air growing warmer. "Ask the muscle headed fool how that's going for him."
"These questers won't be leaving this yard, Apollo. The council won't have it."
"You mean Father won't have it."
"Do you believe there's a difference?"
At that, Apollo actually laughed. The sound made Annabeth's eardrums scream. "If there was, things would look a damn sight better than they do right now."
There was a tense silence as the gods assessed one another, and Annabeth and the six slowly, without even consciously realising it, inched back.
"This is bad." Bianca whimpered under her breath. "This is so bad."
Understatement, thy name is Bianca Di Angelo. This wasn't bad, it was lethal. They barely survived the opening salvo of two gods clashing - three was a death sentence in every way.
"I think I finally understand that line of the prophecy," Luna whispered, so low that Annabeth barely heard her. Her head was lolling to the side, and she looked like she was hanging on to consciousness by sheer force of will alone. "The daughter's strife, to invoke death... Father, please."
"Apollo." Hermes leaned forward. "Don't do this. You can't hope to best us both."
"You are outnumbered." Athena stepped forward. "Surrender. You have no allies."
Apollo bared his teeth like a beast and crouched, and Annabeth's breath shuddered in her lungs.
Right as it became clear that the gods were going to charge, right as Apollo was about to swing his sword, the air changed.
The heat was replaced by a powerful chill, the wind calmed and died, and a powerful, tangible presence dropped down on all of them like an anvil of impossible weight.
"He has me."
All three Olympians stiffened and turned as the fourth god manifested beside Apollo - and he was a god, for there was no other explanation for the power Annabeth could feel roiling against her very bones as it washed over all seven mortals and stole the breath out of them.
He was draped in a cloak of darkness, standing lean and muscular, with a regal face, honey-gold eyes, and black hair flowing down his shoulders. His skin was the colour of teakwood, and his dark wings (Annabeth barely batted an eye at the sight) glimmered in shades of blue, black, and purple.
"Thanatos." Hermes rumbled, and Athena's eyes narrowed. Zoë went very, very still at the name. "Why are you here? This is no business of yours."
"That," The God of Death spoke in a deep, melodic voice "Is what you think, little Olympian."
When he turned to the seven of them, Annabeth almost flinched at the sight of him. Thanatos was beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with the physical, not entirely. It was a timeless beauty, remote and untouchable, and laced with something she suspected she literally could not comprehend.
(And it scared her. Very, very much)
His golden eyes passed over her first, and all five of them, before settling on a beaming Luna Lovegood.
"Luna."
What?
"You came."
What?
"Of course," The god of death's eye's softened, ever so slightly. "You called, daughter."
What?
She wasn't the only one that twitched. The demigods looked just as stunned, Zoë was no better, and Hermes and Apollo both looked like they'd just taken a hammer to the face.
Athena's features had gone stock-still, the same as Zoë's.
"Death can not beget a child."
Thanatos chuckled deeply as he turned around to face her. "How very rich, coming from the maiden goddess with a brood of her own nearly a dozen strong. Perhaps even larger"
Athena didn't so much as twitch in reaction.
"You intend to interfere, then?"
"But of course. Or do you think that I will allow you to drag my child and her friends to Olympus and present them to that unsightly disaster of a king unopposed?"
"So the Underworld declares war on Olympus" Hermes spat, hefting his Caduceus.
"Ah, Olympians." Thanatos's smile was cold as ice. "So quick to assume, so quick to pounce on any perceived opportunity. My Lord Hades's affairs are his own, as is the rest of the Underworld. I come alone and for the sake of my daughter and those she's chosen to throw her lot in with. They fall under my protection by that virtue alone, and if your King takes offence to my interference, he can come forth and face me himself."
Thanatos leaned forward, and behind him, his wings expanded and shook.
"If. He. So. Dares."
"Bold words." Hermes's face twisted in a rictus at the insult. "From the god who was chained and conquered by a mortal."
Thanatos didn't show an iota of rage at the barb, unbothered by his ancient humiliation.
If anything, he seemed only amused.
"Was that the best you could do?" Hermes hissed and Athena said nothing at all. "I genuinely can not tell if you say that to insult me, or if your youth-"
"Youth!?"
"-Truly conveys your ignorance and stupidity, little page, but allow me to educate you all the same."
Thanatos stretched out a hand, and the darkness of night solidified into a spear of stygian iron, engraved with symbols Annabeth wouldn't have been able to make heads or tails of if she'd dared to pull her attention away from the gods.
(Identical to Luna's, a voice whispered in her mind)
"I am Thanatos." The god's voice rumbled with power. "Born of Nyx and Erebus I was. The Night and The Eternal Darkness gave me form, and I was old long before the Titans and their ilk walked the lands. I was ancient millennia before Zeus Olympios was but a smidgen of recalcitrant seed clogging Kronos's loins, and I will be here long after your vaunted ruler fades into the Chaos of nonexistence."
Thanatos stepped forward, and it was like all of Arizona shook with his movement.
"I am Death, little godling, and death can not strike out against the mortals it will reap. I could not rend Sisyphus's essence for his treachery for the living were not mine to seek, only to collect. But you are immortals, are you not?" Thanatos's smile was the fruit of nightmares, and Athena's spear raised immediately. The tension skyrocketed just like that. "The rules that bound and still bind me now do not apply to you, do they?"
"You think we fear you?"
"I suppose we're about to find out. No more words now, for those are wind and doubly so from Olympians. Instead, Let me show you what it means to invoke the wrath of a Primordial!"
And with that terrifying declaration, Death hefted his spear and charged.
...
As always, leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it, please be courteous.
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- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I may have played too much Hades because I can't see and hear anything other than that version of Than here, which renders this exchange comedic.
Excellent job with the clash of the gods though, felt epic in the truest sense of the word.
Excellent job with the clash of the gods though, felt epic in the truest sense of the word.
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ScissorSlipper
Barber cat
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yup show em who's boss. You know, when I read this I can't help but think of The Great Erectus and Faun from Royal Road. No it's actually SFW, it's a comedy where gods of all kinds of universes and worlds interact, with its serious moments on how the new godling accidentally destroyed her world and learns how to be a good "god" . It also has benevolent multiversal guilds and stuff. They treat mortals well!
The point is, yes the Olympian gods of this one world are definitely taking themselves too seriously. On the spot characterization there. Their dramas are just one big... waving contest.
The point is, yes the Olympian gods of this one world are definitely taking themselves too seriously. On the spot characterization there. Their dramas are just one big... waving contest.
- Location
- Elsewhere
"As opposed to defying Fate. How does that turn out again? Out of curiosity?"