XIV
Nico
Athens wasn't that spectacular.
There were monuments everywhere, yes, but almost no one was on the streets.
Coach Hedge grunted. "The debt crisis thingy that's happening in Greece. Everyone's probably rioting."
"Coach?" Nico asked.
"Yeah?"
"How did you know all that?"
Coach Hedge snorted. "I don't just watch cage matches and Kung Fu movies, you know, although lately I just got into the Kung Fu Panda franchise. You should watch it too!"
Nico shrugged. Movies wouldn't matter if he couldn't save the world. He'd heard of Kung Fu Panda before, but he couldn't imagine watching it now.
Coach Hedge kicked marble statues all the way to the edge of the city, where a huge mob was gathering. The group scooted around them and found themselves at the edge of the woods. They then started their trek.
"Why couldn't we take the highway or something?" Nico grumbled as they trudged along. His Cetus floated behind him, and made useless attempts to cheer him up as he walked. After six hours' worth of walking, they had made quite a lot of progress. Nico pulled out map and pointed out that they had covered halfway already. Coach Hedge halted the group and yelled, "Everyone, dinnertime!" and pulled out two tents from his bag. "One for the boys, one for the girls. Fix 'em up while I'm cooking!"
And he started to cook.
Everyone puzzled over the tents, until Leo cheated. He took out his Archimedes sphere and typed in a command. It absorbed the assorted mess of picks, flaps and steel tubes and spit them all out, perfectly shaped.
They were about to do the girls' tent when Coach Hedge yelled, "Don't do that anymore! You've got to learn survival skills! Carry on without the sphere, or I'll make you start both tents over from scratch!"
Finally, after a long time fiddling around, Leo fixed up the tents one last time and they were set.
Coach Hedge yelled, "Dinnertime!"
The sun was already setting as they sat around a fire, eating canned soup. "Coach, why did it take you this long to cook soup?" Nico asked.
Coach Hedge didn't answer, and Nico thought it was best that he dropped the subject.
The tents weren't any better. With Coach Hedge sleeping in a tree on "Guard Duty" to make sure they weren't out after curfew, the boys' tent wasn't very clogged, but there were no sleeping bags or blankets, so the boys slept on the ground. Nico had to smell Jason's feet all night long, and they didn't smell good.
The next morning, Nico woke up with an aching back. He sat up, and went outside to get his shoes. Coach Hedge was up too, and the sky was still a little grey, not completely bright yet. Nico walked over to Coach Hedge, and started to eat his breakfast- ABC soup. Coach Hedge sympathetically patted Nico's shoulder. "Couldn't sleep because of somebody's feet?"
Nico grumbled a bit, but didn't object.
"Well, sorry, but I had to keep you guys safe. I was up all night." Nico realized that Coach Hedge had bags under his eyes. "In a place like this, monsters would be pretty common."
When the others started to wake up, Coach Hedge went back to his tree and slept while everybody packed up. By midday, they had broken camp and were trudging through the woods when Nico noticed some statues in the middle of a clearing, with a road leading to them from some cliffs high above. Nico was so exhausted that he slumped onto one of the statues, which was an Egyptian sphinx. After a couple of seconds, Frank screamed and pointed at his statue.
It was moving.