Chapter 1, Our reunion is interrupted

"Any last words Spartan?" A barbarian king taunted his nearly defeated opponent as he began to raise his huge spiked war hammer for the final strike. The fur covered armor he wore was the only thing with more hair than his beard, including his fur lined boots. His barbarian hordes were beginning to decimate the spartan army, both sides numbering in the thousands. While the Spartans had been trained by their general to use great brutality and win at all cost, barbarians were known to fight as monsters.

The king stood over his personal opponent, the Spartans' general himself. He was quite distinguished among his soldiers, a black goatee sporting the only hair on his head other than his eyebrows. A red tattoo on his face, running down his forehead and over his left eye, and another in a short spiral on his arm, was clearly a famous characteristic he'd earned with his new title, with the scar over his right eye showing signs of an old battle. His spartan hoplite armor showed a great deal of wear and tear, likely due to the sheer strength of his opponent.

As he lay on his back at the feet of the barbarian king, the Spartan looked up at the king and saw no other option for victory.

"ARES!" the Spartan cried out, calling out to his patron god, the god of war himself. "DESTROY MY ENEMIES! AND MY LIFE...IS YOUR'S!" Thunder boomed across the sky, drawing the attention of every Spartan and barbarian alike. Even the barbarian king himself ignored his chance at the final strike, frozen in fear at the sight of a real war god, stepping down from a hole in the swirling clouds of a blood red sky, the sun glowing behind this being of pure destruction.

Ares himself truly was a sight to dread. Armor of dark red metal, decorated with chains around the boots and gauntlets, faces of metal dogs on the shoulder guards and one more on the breastplate. Ares' image of terror and dread was completed with hair running down to his shoulders, but glowing with bright orange flames, a true face of destruction.

Only the Spartans knelt before their god of war, while the barbarians stared and tried to back away in fear. Their general himself was on both his hands and knees, bowing before his new master. He got up off his hands, but still knelt as he spoke a final pledge. "My life is your's Ares. From this day forward."

Fire swirled around Ares' hands, quickly gathering between his hands before being unleased as a wave through the ranks of warriors. The Spartans quickly healed and saw their weapons and armor not only repaired, but seeming to glow with sheer power. The barbarians were not so fortunate. As enemies of his people, Ares sent forth his wrath on the attacking horde, causing their own bodies to destroy themselves, necks snapping out of nowhere, barbarians floating into midair before their spines were bent all the way backwards, their very skin bursting into flames as if from a mere thought.

As for their general, no mere sword and shield would suit the servant of the god of war. From the gigantic celebratory pyre lit by the Spartans to burn the bodies of their barbarian enemies, a harpy flew from the flames, with the bald head of a nightmarish woman and the body of a large bat, the creature carried in its claws two short swords with long chains dangling from the pommels. The blades themselves were wide, curved, and had three points cut into the edge at the front. The crossguard appeared like the skulls of strange, beaked monsters.

As the harpy brought the blades to the general, the chains flew towards his arms, wrapping themselves around the arms as they bound the weapons to him, suddenly channeling enough heat to fuse the chains onto the spartan's arms forever. The Spartan held in pained screams as the chains burned themselves to his skin, then took the blades, approached the captured king, and swung the swords by their chains to different sides of the barbarian's neck, beheading his opponent.

Percy

"Well that was weird." I said as I sat up in bed. "I thought Ares' eyes were on fire, not his hair."

I should probably explain how I know that. It's a long story. I gotta warn you though. You might be like me, in which case, you're a zillion times safer if you don't know. Trust me. If you know, they'll be knocking down your door trying to get you. Don't say I didn't warn you though.

You know all the stories about the gods, titans, monsters, and demigods in Greek mythology? They're real. They're all walking around in plain sight, hidden by a force called the Mist. Trust me on this. I'm a demigod, a son of Poseidon to be exact. I get attacked by monsters on a regular basis. How am I still alive at 17 years old you might ask? I got lucky. Part of it might have been being a son of the Big Three, the most powerful kind of demigod there is. Another part might be a magic sword that can always be found in my pocket, disguised as a pen. Guess which is mightier. The biggest reason though, isn't even where I spend my summers, Camp Half Blood, which reminds me. If you're reading this now, and you're a demigod like me, go there right now. The reason I'm still alive is that I'm not alone. I've made friends with powerful demigods, including my girlfriend Annabeth. She's Athena's daughter, but don't ask how that happened. She doesn't like to talk about being the daughter of a virgin goddess. Seriously. Don't ask.

As I got up, I saw my necklace from Camp Half Blood on the nightstand. I took another look at the beads on it, thinking back on the past five years over there. The black bead with the green trident; the year I got claimed as Poseidon's son and had to prove I didn't steal Zeus' master bolt. The white bead with the golden ram; the year my friends and I had to cross the Sea of Monsters to find the Golden Fleece, the year I met Thalia, Zeus' daughter. Long story there. The gray maze, the year Annabeth and I searched through the Labyrinth to find our friend Nico, Hades' son. We'd also found Daedelus, the maze's inventor, who stopped the labyrinth from being used as an invasion route for the titans' army into the camp. The Empire State building; a list of casualties from the Battle of Manhattan, when Kronos and his followers attacked the new Olympus. That was when Annabeth and I finally started dating. The last bead held the most memories for me. It was purple with a gold laurel wreath around the letters "SPQR" which stands for a Latin phrase I can't remember to save my life. That bead held an entirely different war, with the Earth itself, in a single year.

It was all in a single year, but so much had happened. We'd discovered a camp of Roman demigods, and I'd been given amnesia before being sent there, while my friend Jason, Thalia's brother and son of Jupiter (the Roman version of Zeus), had been sent to Camp Half Blood, along with his girlfriend Piper and their best friend Leo. Jason, Piper, and Leo had been sent on a quest to free Hera, the queen of the gods, while I went with two other Roman demigods, Frank (Mars' son) and Hazel (Pluto's daughter) to free Thanatos, the god of death, so monsters would no longer be immune to death. When our group of seven demigods met up, Annabeth had to find a magical statue of her mom in order to stop a second civil war between the two camps. We all had to go to Rome (yeah. The Rome) to find it, having to get past more monsters than ever before. When we found the statue, Annabeth and I fell into Tartarus, Greek mythology's version of Hell. The group divided, we went to find the Doors of Death, to close them so monsters would stop coming back, so easily anyway. Once we sealed the doors, Nico, along with the Roman camp, Camp Jupiter's "praetor", Reyna, took the statue back to Camp Half Blood while the rest of us went to deal with the main threat, Gaia, the primordial goddess of the Earth. We may have defeated Gaia, hopefully for a least a few thousand years, but Leo sacrificed himself to do it.

I nostalgically put the necklace back on, already curious to know what this year's bead would look like. Something told me it would have something to do with that dream about the Spartans and Barbarians. If there's one thing I've learned about being a demigod, it's to never ignore your dreams. For demigods, dreams show us stuff that's happening somewhere else, which makes for amazing recon during a war, not to mention events from the past. I started to wonder if that was really the past I saw in the dream.

"Percy! Time to get up!" my mom called from the living room. "You don't want to be late! Especially not today!"

She had a point. Today was the one day I had almost always been absolutely certain would never come, my graduation from high school.

The school year had been surprisingly uneventful, except for the random dracaenae in the woodshop class. For once, broken equipment hadn't been blamed on me, mostly because I got out of there just in time. Then there was the Stymphalian bird in the cafeteria. We had to start a food fight to make sure no one saw the random death bird. Don't ask about the basilisk in the locker room. Seriously, Annabeth and I weren't supposed to be in there alone.

Anyway, the ceremony was actually free of monster attacks, so we managed to get through it with only ADHD-induced boredom. That's a pretty good sign you're a demigod; when you have ADHD and Dyslexia. After the ceremony, my mom took us all to McDonald's to celebrate before driving Annabeth and me to the camp. The whole drive up to the camp, I could barely take my eyes off Annabeth, with her long blonde hair and stormy gray eyes. Saying our goodbyes for the summer and carrying our bags up the hill, Annabeth and I were ready for one more summer before heading off to New Rome...in California.

At the top, we saw two demigods who were unmistakeable; Piper, her chocolate brown hair choppy and uneven, but in a braid, her kaleidoscopic eyes seeming to constantly change color, and Jason, his short blonde hair now looking messy, both standing there, probably waiting for someone. Annabeth and Piper ran up and hugged each other like crazy as soon as they saw each other. They'd become best friends during the trip through Greece and Rome. So had Jason and I, though he and I didn't do much more than fist bump and say hi.

"I missed you guys so much!" Piper said.

"I wanted to Iris message you guys, but after that one time when you were alone in Jason's cabin..." Annabeth suddenly stopped talking and blushed fiercely.

"Yeah." Jason said. "That was awkward." I hadn't gotten used to seeing him wearing his orange Camp Half Blood T-shirt. Most of the time during that last quest, he'd worn his purple Camp Jupiter T-shirt. I also noticed his glasses, made of Imperial Gold for some reason. I'd always thought that was a bad idea, considering the combination of how easily glasses can break with the fact that Imperial Gold weapons explode when broken. Seriously, it seemed like a horrible idea. Not to mention how big a klutz he'd seemed during the war with Gaia.

"So what've you guys been up to?" Jason asked.

"The worst possible battlefield a demigod can possibly go through." I answered. "High school."

"You're the one who set the chemistry lab on fire." Annabeth pointed out another incident.

"The exchange student was a boread trying to kill me!" I pointed out the reason. When I looked at Piper and Jason, their smiles had faded as they looked down a bit. I'd almost forgotten that fire had alot of nostalgia for them. Our missing friend, Leo, was a son of Hephaestus, with the power of fire, which was rare, even for a demigod of his parentage. He'd blown himself to smithereens to defeat Gaia last year. Since we'd never found his body, or the remains of his automaton dragon, Festus, we'd occassionally hoped that maybe Leo had survived the blast. But our friend Nico, Hades' son, sensed Leo's death, and pointed out he'd been hit with a missile of Imperial Gold which Octavian, the biggest jerk in the history of jerks, had been attached to when he shot it. It was doubtless that Leo had been vaporized with Festus.

"Guys." Annabeth started to apologize for bringing him up. "I..."

Suddenly, Annabeth's apology was interupted by a nearly deafening roar, with an unmistakeable metallic undertone. We all looked up behind me and Annabeth where it had come from, spotting an extremely familiar metallic looking dragon flying overhead towards the camp.

"No way." Jason said.

"Is that...?" Piper asked in shock.

"It can't be." Annabeth pointed out.

We all ran for the camp, unable to believe our eyes. It was Festus, circling over the cabins as a crowd of demigods cheered. We looked closely, spotting two people riding him. One was an extremely familiar looking kid with dark curly hair, a dark green jacket, and what looked like a toolbelt.

"LEO!" we all shouted in unison, shocked beyond words that he was alive.

"WOOOOOOOOO!" the crazed dragon rider shouted in response. Festus started to spiral down, landing on his celestial bronze claws. Leo tried to swing his leg over and drop down and land on his feet, but he failed miserably and slid off the dragon's back sideways, yelping as he land face first on the ground. Everyone's cheers changed to a collective "Ooh." with a 'that's gotta hurt' look. But then, Leo held up one hand. "I'm ok. I meant to do that." Yeah right. We could all tell he'd been dizzy from all the circles. I swear, Leo's ADHD was more obvious than any demigod I've ever known.

The girls ran over to help him up, then both gave him a huge hug.

"Oh my gods! You're here!" Piper screamed, unable to contain her excitement.

Suddenly, Annabeth pulled Leo out of the group hug and punched him in the stomach, pushing him up against the dragon. "YOU BIG JERK! YOU LET US BELIEVE YOU WERE DEAD!" Yep. That's my girlfriend for you. Happy to see you again one minute, pissed at you for disappearing the next. You should have seen her when we met back up again at Camp Jupiter. She kissed me, then judo flipped me and pinned me to the ground after I'd disappeared for all those months.

"WHOA WHOA W HOA! WATCH THE FACE!" Leo said when he'd recovered from the stomach punch. "My girlfriend's always worrying about my injuries.

"GIRLFRIEND?!" Since we'd all known Leo for his habit of falling for girls he had no chance with, like Jason's sister who'd sworn off men for immortality, or an actual Greek goddess, his announcement of having a girlfriend might have been a bigger shock than the fact he was alive. We'd actually almost completely forgotten his passenger until she dismounted Festus, actually waiting for the dragon to lie down and for her vertigo to wear off.

The others didn't know who she was, but I recognized her instantly, immediately feeling awkward because Annabeth was right there too. Her caramel hair was braied over one shoulder and smelled like cinnamon, her milky face and dark eyes making her look immortal, which I didn't know if she still was or not; Calypso. I'd gotten lost once during that third year and ended up on her island, Ogygia. I'd been on the verge of death, but she nursed me back to health. I wasn't trapped on her island, but she was. The Fates would only allow certain people to find the island, the kind of guys she couldn't help but fall in love with, but could never stay.

"Calypso?" I blurted out. Everyone immediately looked at her as well. Annabeth looked especially uneasy. While she and I were in Tartarus, we'd fought these monsters called Arai. They're known as the spirits of curses, and destroying one causes you to feel the pain you inflicted on another. When Annabeth destroyed one back there, she'd taken Calypso's curse, causing her to feel like I'd abandoned her, and making her teleport whenever I got near. I'd never been so scared for her in my life.

"If you don't get your hands off my boyfriend in the next five seconds..." Calypso seemed harder and more angry than I remember, probably because she'd just met Annabeth. Regardless, my girlfriend released her violent grip on Leo before she could finish. I could already tell those two weren't going to be getting along anytime soon. Annabeth came back over to me and I immediately held her hand as if to reassure her that Calypso's arrival wasn't going to change anything between me and her.

Calypso immediately started to check Leo's stomach where Annabeth had punched him. "Are you ok Leo?"

"Yeah. I'm fine." he said. "Don't worry about Annabeth. She doesn't normally do that. You should have seen the time she judo flipped Percy after seeing him again for the first time in months."

"Maybe I should have." Calypso said, not sounding very enthusiastic about meeting Annabeth.

"So you're Calypso?" Jason asked.

"Yeah. The very one." Calypso answered.

"How'd you get off the island?" Piper asked.

"More importantly, how are you still alive?" Nico asked from behind.

"AUGH!" Leo screamed like a little girl and jumped into Calypso's arms, Scooby Doo style. It was so ridiculous, the rest of us just burst out laughing. When he calmed down, a little bit, he looked at Nico. "DON'T DO THAT!" he yelled. Nico's usually off by himself, so whenever he joins a conversation, he scares the crap out of at least one person in the group, usually Leo. Nico's physical appearance doesn't really make it easier for him not to scare people. His skin's paled to an almost ghostly white, with a bluish tint from using his powers so much last year. His black hair looked longer this time, but still shaggy like he'd just gotten out of bed. It almost looked like a grim reaper hood as it hung down his face. His stitches all over his body only added to his unearthly look, causing him to somewhat resemble Frankenstein. He wasn't wearing his shirt from Puerto Rico anymore, but had put his black skull T shirt back on, his black sword of Stygian Iron hanging from his chain belt. He may have been more popular at the camp now, but he still gave people the creeps.

"Why does someone always do that when I join a conversation?" Nico asked.

"Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's because you look like Death?" Leo pointed out, after Calypso dropped him on the ground and he scrambled up.

"Speaking of which, weren't you dead? I could sense it." Nico pointed out. Yeah. He can sense death. Must be a Hades child thing.

"Yeah, but turns out you have to take that cure for death before you actually die, and there's a delayed reaction." Leo explained.

"But why are you only coming to Camp Half Blood now?" I asked.

"Well, I wanted everyone to be there when I arrived, and I figured most of the campers would be back home by the time I woke up, so Calypso and I went on a little road trip. Festus needed a few repairs too. I even threw in this upgrade I can't wait to show you guys." Leo sounded excited about this. I was curious about what Leo was talking about until he mentioned something else. "And the weirdest thing happened last night. Calypso and I had the same dream. These Spartans were fighting a horde of barbarians until their general summoned Ares."

"Wait a minute." I interupted. Leo's dream already sounded too much like mine to be a coincidence. "Did the Spartan general have red tattooes?" I asked.

"And did he get these two swords attached to his arms by chains?" Jason asked.

"And was Ares' hair on fire?" Nico asked.

"And the barbarian had a huge hammer?" Annabeth asked.

Looking around each other, we all knew we'd had the same dream, which was the worst sign we could possibly get during our reunion.

"This can't be good." Annabeth said what the others were thinking.

"I just thought of something." Jason said. "Hedge said he'd found a new group of demigods didn't he?"

"Yeah. Jason and I were waiting for Hedge to get back from recruiting. Come on. He should be here soon." Piper said. She led the rest of us back to the hill, just as a bus came skidding to a crash, tilting and falling over on its side, starting to catch fire.

"Something tells me Hedge was driving that bus." Leo guess, right before we all ran down there to check.

If you guys are wondering why there was such a difference in tone and mood between the God of War flashback and the rest of the chapter, I'm going to alternate between the brutal, violent, dark style of the God of War games and the light-hearted, comedic style of the Percy Jackson books. And yes, I'm using an AU version of the God of War storyline in order to match consistency with the Percy Jackson books.