A/N: Hello everybody and welcome to my new fanfiction! Prepare to be lead along a long and windy trail following the life of the demigod Alexander Llyod, son of Athena. I hope you enjoy reading this fanfic, and I will be open to any feedback, criticism, or advice you give me.
The two bronze blades were vague blurs as they clashed with each other in a violent flurry of attack and defence. Grunts of exertion and heavy breathing mingled with the clanging of metal as the duel raged on. Sweat fell from the duelist's bodies and dropped down onto the sand beneath them, invisible beneath the cloud of dust kicked up by the fast movement of feet. Occasionally there would be a whooshing sound as one of the combatants ducked or dodged a blow they couldn't or didn't want to block or parry.
An average day at Camp Half Blood, in other words. When some were told that, they assumed either some kind of racist camp, or a training ground for child soldiers. The second was true, in a way. Such things as age don't matter that much to those who are half god and half human, however. Seeing as that was the case for everyone in the Camp, such complaints ceased to matter, and so a huge training battle was raging on, swords and spears clashing with shields and armour.
Of course, half gods didn't limit their methods of combat to swinging sharp bits of metal at each other. One moment a burst of flames scorched the air where a demigod had stood a second before. Shortly after a stunning flash of light temporarily blinded another demigod. The powers wielded by demigods were powerful, but nowhere near half the power of a god; a demigods mortal side was far more prevalent than their godly side.
Not all demigods had such flashy powers, however. A perfect example of that fact is Alexander Lloyd, the son of Athena (goddess of many things, including wisdom, inspiration, the arts, strategy and warfare). He was fighting a son of Ares (greek god of war and violence) who we didn't recognize and he wasn't winning. Whereas Alex was of average height and build, his opponent was a hulking giant who wielded his weapon with extreme skill and finesse.
"I expected a harder fight from you." the son of Ares taunted.
"It's not over yet, brute." Alex replied.
The son of Ares just laughed and raised his sword high over his head. Alex's mind whirred as he tried to work out what was going to happen. Based on the way his opponent was stretching and what he had learned from the fight, he worked out the incoming attack's angle and prepared to counter it. Even the smartest of mortals would have struggled to work out the angle of the blade as precisely as Alex did. The blade arced down towards Alex and he swung his own towards it, catching it just under the handguard and sending it flying from the brute's hand. Alex put the tip of his sword to the child of Ares' neck.
"Then again..." Alex said, "My previous statement is now invalid."
Alex chuckled at his own sentence and headed further up the arena he was in. The sand beneath his feet was warm from the large amount of sunlight shining on it through the open roof of the building. His goal was to reach the top third of the arena. He was in the middle of a combat skill test, where you fought people at the same level as you and headed closer to the north wall if you won, and away from said wall if you lost. Alex was proud to say he was making fast progress upwards, and had just passed the halfway line, putting him above about 45 other demigods - it was a big camp, and a packed arena.
"Alex." called a voice the fourteen year old son of Athena was very used to, "I challenge you."
Alex turned to face his challenger, a fellow demigod he had been friends with since he first started kindergarten. Leah, the daughter of the goddess of force Bia, stood about four meters from him.
"Crap." Alex muttered, then raised his voice to shout: "If you want to move down, feel free."
"You'll be the one going down." Leah taunted.
"Excuse me?" Alex said, arching an eyebrow with a cheeky smile.
"I hate you." Leah replied.
Alex just laughed as Leah approached, sword drawn. Alex held his sword in his right hand and stood his ground. When Leah was roughly two meters away, she sprang through the air, gravity barely affecting her due to her unique demigodly powers. Gravity was a force, and her mother was the goddess of force, after all. Tom dove forward at the last possible moment as Leah slammed back into the ground at an unpredictable angle, her sword carving a furrow into the sand beneath her.
"Too slow, Leah." Alex said, then leapt and thrusted with his sword.
At least, he tried to, but at the last second his personal gravity flipped and he rose ten meters into the air. Then he fell, but at the last second he managed to twist in the air so his trajectory would hurl him into his opponent. Leah was smart enough to know ten meters of momentum could make a demigod a painful thing to collide with, so she had no choice but to slow Alex down to a safe speed. Alex used the time he knew Leah was spending recovering her power to close the distance and attack. Their blades clashed for a few seconds, with Alex striking high then low then left then right over and over again to make it harder for his friend to defend herself.
Just as he was starting to gain an advantage, he was forced to break off from the combat. He knew exactly how long it took Leah to regain her energy, and they had been crossing blades for exactly that long. Alex realized the flaw in his plan almost instantly. Breaking off from the fight really didn't help him evade Leah's unique and incredibly potent powers. Alex did the first thing that came to mind and leapt behind someone approaching the 'skill zone' he was in. He couldn't help but feel sorry for that person when their acceleration reversed and sent them flying across the arena. Alex knew if that power hadn't been blocked by his unwilling ally he would have been shot into the arena wall and knocked unconscious.
Alex tried to gauge how much power Leah had left, and wether or not he could attack without being far more vulnerable to her powers. He did some mental calculations and charged. His mass increased as he did so and he struggled to keep his speed up. Leah quickly advanced and went for a stab. Alex tried to dodge but couldn't due to his extra weight, and the sword tip stopped a centimeter from his throat.
"Well, Hades." Alex cursed.
Leah smiled and waved goodbye in a taunting way as Alex turned to trudge back down to the previous 'skill zone'.
Alex didn't quite reach his target. The first time he got close, his older brother Martin kicked him back down by using a spear to keep Alex at a distance. The second time he was defeated in a sword battle by Lucas, a son of Melinoe, goddess of ghosts. Alex had been on the cusp of victory when the little trickster turned into a ghost for a few seconds and floated straight through him in a perfect flanking maneuver.
One of Alex's flaws was the way he would get depressed when he failed, resulting in him failing even more and falling into a circle of failure until he snapped out of it, which could take an incredibly long time. That flaw didn't exactly help him fight his way back towards the top. In fact, in made it far, far harder.
Alex headed to the dining pavilion. The long day of combat testing had worn him down, and his stomach was rumbling like the San Andreas fault line. That, and it was sausage and mash night, and Alex loved sausage and mash. Or, as his father called it, "Bangers and Mash".
The older Lloyd was born in England, and embraced all the sterotypes with glee. Sometimes, Alex found it funny, but at others it was just plain annoying. With "Bangers and Mash" it had been funny until Alex and his friends had reached the age where it started to sound dirty to them.
Alex devoured his food hungrily once he reached the pavilion and made the mandatory sacrifice of a sausage to his godly parent. Mashed potatoes, sausages, peas and carrots were on a gravy covered plate one minute, and halfway through the demigod's digestive system the next. Alex loved his food.
After dinner, Alex wasn't feeling very sleepy, so instead of heading back to the Athena cabin where he and his siblings slept, he walked out into the woods surrounding the camp and made his way to a collection of boulder named 'Zeus' Fist'. When Alex had first been told of it's existence, he had pictured a cluster of boulders, some atop others, jutting up from the ground in a powerful way. What he later learnt was that it was more like a turd make of rocks from most angles. Unfortunately, Chiron, the camp's Centaur activities director, wouldn't let the demigods call it 'Poop Pile'.
Alex climbed on top of one of the boulders, then jumped and pulled himself up onto another, higher one. He sat there for a few minutes, staring into the distance and daydreaming. His thoughts eventually turned to why he hadn't reached his target. He thought for a while, and realized that while he was a good fighter and great at using his brains to figure out what moves to use, he wasn't stopping to consider his opponent's demigodly powers, and that he needed to focus more on-
"Boo." said Leah from behind him.
Alex was so absorbed in his thoughts that he was startled to the point where he fell off of the boulder. When he was about halfway down, he stopped falling and started floating upwards. As he floated back past the boulder he had been sitting on, Leah's hand grabbed his and pulled him back onto the boulder. Alex steadied himself on the boulder as his gravity returned to normal.
"I'm not sure if I should thank you or be angry at you." Alex said.
"Hey, I just saved your life." Leah said.
"You endangered it in the first place." Alex shot back.
"You're the one who forgot to pay attention to your surroundings." Leah replied.
"Why were you even here anyway?" Alex asked, having not expected to need to be aware of what was going on around him.
"I wasn't tired." Leah replied.
"Same." Alex said.
There was silence for a few moments.
"So, um, how was your day?" Alex asked to break the silence.
"Good. The best part was when I kicked your ass." Leah smirked.
"You cheated." Alex mumbled.
"Hey, they never said no using powers." Leah replied.
"It was just assumed everyone was intelligent enough to realize that you weren't meant to. But clearly not." Alex said.
"I hate you." Leah replied.
"You love me really." Alex said.
"Don't think that will save you in capture the flag on saturday." Leah said, shifting the conversation.
"You're siding with the dumb brutes then?" Alex teased, referencing the Ares cabin in a less than loving way.
"Maybe, maybe not." Leah replied.
"The suspense is killing me." Alex joked.
The pair talked for a while longer, but eventually they got tired and the conversation got slow. After a little over fifteen minutes the two went back to their separate cabins to sleep.
Alex slipped into the Athena cabin as close to silently as he could managing, not wanting to disturb his half siblings. He slipped into the changing rooms and opened his personal cupboard. He took out his pyjamas and slipped into them. He dumped his orange camp-half blood t-shirt and jeans in the bottom of his cupboard and closed the door.
A few minutes later he was lying asleep in his bunkbed.
A/N: Thanks for reading everyone! I hope you enjoyed. Please leave a review, it'll make the story better, and also make my day.