Nico: Using some undead reinforcements borrowed from my awesome Dad for the fight

After the battle began, I had quite a long ways to go from my cabin to the mountains that Annabeth wanted me to be at. She explained that the Spartans specialized in forward momentum and when the enemy was below them, on the bottom of a plain that led to a high hill, that would give the Spartans plenty of forward momentum. So much in fact that no living object could stop them once they started traveling toward their next fight. With that in mind, I told the Spartan soldiers when I went into the Underworld that their target would be a bunch of zombie and skeleton soldiers at which they started laughing.

"Surely you could have given us a better fight with undead Persian soldiers than that. You sure this is all you have for us soldiers of glorious Sparta?" Leonidas, their leader, asked me at that time. "Yes your majesty and I know that's disappointing but this is the worst that the Titan Prometheus could come up with," I told him. "Good enough for me," he said.

That was before I imprisoned him and his army in an orb that could only properly release them if it was broken by a blade made of Stygian ice such as my sword. I held it inside a bag that Persephone provided for me before I left the Underworld. According to her, it would keep the orb safe from all harm until the time came to unleash its power upon the armies of Prometheus. And now, the time was upon me and I had to unleash them before there were too many enemy soldiers approaching the walls of the camp and too few to be effect the overall progress of the army with an attack from the flank.

Carefully, I set the orb so that it faced downwards but it didn't roll from me either. Hey, there was a rock I could take advantage of so I did before that rock could go anywhere! Anyway, I placed the orb there, I took the tip of my sword, recited an incantation that asked my father to return them to Elysium in the event that they died in battle once more, and pushed the tip of my sword so that it drove itself into the orb and cracked it in half like an coconut. The souls of the dead immediately dispersed, reformed to their original shapes, then charged down the hills toward the targeted enemy once Leonidas had them turned in the proper direction.

Once the bulk of his soldiers were on the way, he turned to me and looked at me like he was trying to spook me. A moment later and he might have but unfortunately that was not what he intended. Instead he said, "Thank you and oh by the way, make sure there's not a curse on the orb bounding you to service in the Underworld on it." Then he charged with the rest of his soldiers into battle against the forces of darkness as the night that they had begun their attack in began to fade away slowly.

They were not invincible in the night but they were much stronger than they were in daylight. Which was precisely why Annabeth thought it would be a good idea for either Percy to drown them with his control of the sea or have me summon dead souls. And now I watched as ten thousand Spartan soldiers did battle for the first time in over two thousand years and did so by first throwing their spears then hacking two men on either side of them before being cut down by others. At first, I thought it was going to be a massacre but then I realized something: for every one Spartan soldier that died, four Promethean soldiers died in the process of taking him down.

At that rate, the forty thousand, four-hundred and fifty-eight soldiers that were fighting before I unleashed the Spartan army had dwindled by a full forty thousand by the time the last Spartan soldier had been slain. Prometheus had sent an army that totaled fifty thousand strong at the beginning but not were not even half a hundredth that original number. That made me laugh with both pity for our soldiers at camp as well as the soldiers on the enemy side who had fallen to the Spartan army. After laughing, I noticed that fourteen Promethean soldiers were headed my way and I drew my sword to face them.

Luckily for me, they were having to climb up the hill and all I had to was make the ground turn against them via calling upon the powers of my father to throw the boulders around me. And that's precisely what I did and I watched as the ending result was that eight of them were crushed under the boulders despite the rest persisting. Two of them reached me but I decapitated them with one stroke of my sword before slashing down two more and tricking the final two into killing each other. After that I made my getaway before any more soldiers noticed me and decided it might be a good idea to attack me too.

I signaled to Annabeth that I was still alive and well via a flare she had given me before she sent me off. A flare was returned and I immediately ran back to the safety of the camp with the remaining strength I had in my body. The good thing was that I would be demanding my father to teach me a way to summon souls without too much of a toll like this but for now, sleep was the top thing on my mind. Believe me, that's a lot better than just slipping right into a coma for a few weeks and have to wake up right before a war.

Carefully and with close attention to detail (as close as my ADHD would permit me) I checked to make sure I hadn't been followed. I was all clear and entered the secret door Annabeth had created to the walls leading back to the camp and into my cabin where I could lounge out the rest of the night and most of the day before getting back to work. And don't say I couldn't do that because Annabeth told me that if I did a good job with the souls that Gabriel had permitted me to use and my father had given me the materials to properly use, I could lounge out the rest of it. That is, the rest of tonight's war effort and most of the day if I was not immediately needed.

"Hey Nico, I heard you did an awesome job out there today and claimed the lives of many soldiers! Care for a little fun with the ladies now that you're done with your little battle?" Drew, leader of the Aphrodite camp and sister to her predecessor, asked. "If I wanted fun with ladies I wouldn't be looking for you guys not would I? Back to your stations before I do something a little less exciting than giving my dick to you little wenches," I answered them.

"Fine, whatever, Mr. Old Skull N' Crossbones! Hope you're happy with yourself for this," Drew replied. "I am damn pleased with it actually," I said calmly before I told them to leave the vulgar way. After they left me alone, I laughed hard at comment of calling me Old Skull N' Crossbones because that was perhaps the oldest joke related to the dead that I had ever heard of.

And the funny thing was, whether they knew it or not, it was more related to pirates than death. I opened the door to my cabin, entered it, and closed it in a fluid series of motions before plopping down onto the bed I chose for just me: the one across from the door. Now this was as close to heaven as grim Hades was going to allow me for sure!