Prologue
Nico POV
He was going to kill Percy when he got back.
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The Manticore was hot on Nico's trail and Percy seemed to have turned tail and ran. Even with a Manticore behind him and his ally long gone, Nico couldn't help but feel annoyed. Sure, he knew that the whole "monster attacks at the most inconvenient times" thing was in the demigod job description, but really? He was outside McDonald's for Hera's sake!
Nico could still feel the beast behind him. He took a deep breath and with a silent prayer to Hades, made a sharp turn…
And met with a brick wall. Curse his luck!
The Manticore calmly strode into the compact alleyway, a sly smile on its humanoid face. It had already caught its prey.
Nico did a quick search of his surroundings, looking for any shadow he could hitch a ride in.
There was none. Unless…
Nico ran full speed at the Manticore and launched over it, hoping to the gods he didn't get stung by its spiky tail. He landed roughly onto its smooth stinger, identical to one of a scorpion. The appendage swung as the Manticore tried to throw him from its body. Working quickly, Nico found his grip and sliced off the flailing extremity with one of his stygian iron knives. All the while ignoring the angry screams of pain from the Manticore, Nico wielded the crudely cut off stinger as a spear and pierced the creature in its back. With a final scream of pain, the Manticore fell limply to the pavement before crumbling to dust.
With the adrenaline in his system gone, Nico slumped tiredly on the redbrick wall behind him. He mentally checked himself over for any wounds, but felt nothing but a bruised bum from his harsh landing on the Manticore's back. His backpack was left a few feet away so he stood to retrieve it along with a single square of ambrosia. Chewing slowly, he thought of how exactly he should get home. He couldn't quite make the full trip to Long Island from his place in Seattle with the state he was in, so New Rome it is.
He was prepared to depart when suddenly felt a crippling wave of death. Nico staggered and tried to pinpoint where such a strong feeling of death could be coming from. Although he readjusted quickly to the feeling, being the son of Hades, Nico was still left with a slight sense of dysphoria from the sheer surprise of the feeling.
The curiosity he felt was overwhelming. No being with the exception of Thanatos and his father had the power to exude such a feeling of death at will. Unless he was dealing with a particularly restless Lemure, no mortal living could be capable of that kind of aura.
Going against all sense of logic and every fiber of his being telling him to get the Hades out of there, Nico reached out to the shadows and told them to lead him to whomever or better yet whatever was giving off that vibe.
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London?
Nico turned slowly in a full circle, keeping an eye out for danger. How he possibly made it to London when he just barely had the energy to get to San Francisco, he had no idea.
He reached out and tapped into his powers as the son of Hades to comb the nearby city for any sort of dark energy. It took a while but he found it, within the almost invisible space between numbers 11 and 13 on the apartment buildings.
Nico isn't in any way a suspicious person, but a feeling if death was rolling off the building in waves. He inched closer to the immensely small gap, and pushed his knife inside.
It was repelled with a crack, an invisible force pushing him back.
Nico was shocked but still too stubbornly angry to give in. With the remaining bit of reserved energy, Nico surged forward, the shadows ahead of him seeming to rip apart the invisible force between the buildings.
Slowly but surely, the two structures pulled apart from each other as another third building appeared.
It was identical in size and shape to the two next to it, but seemed older, with blackened bricks and dusty windows. For a second Nico could've sworn he saw something in the window, but a quick blink and it disappeared. Satisfied that the shadows cleared away the shield around the building, Nico tried once again to reach out and shadow travel inside. As the shadows surrounded him a pulled him in, he hoped to gods there was no alarm.
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I don't actually know if a manticore can be killed with its own poison, but just ignore that if you can. Also if there are some things that you want to see specifically, just comment your request and I will try to make it happen. BYEEE
-ghostking