I'm back with another chapter!

As requested, the next installment of the Therapy arc. This particular storyline might soon draw to a close, though, so you might have to pick a new story. I might write one more chapter as an epilogue, but that's pretty much it.

Enjoy, and leave a new review!

Apollo summoned his weapon. Orion grabbed the nearest bow and a quiver of arrows, and cursed.

The arrows were blunted.

Which was fair. He had seen the mortals shoot, and it was honestly a miracle that nobody had come out with more than minor injuries so far. Still, it was slightly inconvenient when facing a god and a dozen demigods.

He was doomed, wasn't he?

That wasn't fair. He was doing so well, too. He hadn't murdered people in months. He didn't even have plans to murder people in months. He was going to die, after all that progress he made. Childe was going to be so disappointed when he came back from Egypt and found out that the babysitter he had entrusted his two siblings and Nao'hai to had been vaporized.

He was saved, inexplicably, by his boss, who slammed her hand down onto the table and demanded, "What the fuck are you doing?"

Silence. It seemed as if everyone had forgotten she was there.

"If he dies, it's a work related accident. If it's a work related accident, I have to compensate him. Do you think money grows on trees?" She snapped at them. "If you want to kill each other, take it outside." She turned away from them, slamming the door in the process.

Nobody moved. Ah, Orion thought. It seemed that no matter the situation, he could always count on his boss to be materialistic. It was reassuring that some things never change.

Nao'hai was the first to recover. "Kill each other?" She frowned. "But I thought you can't die."

"There are... exceptions," he said uneasily. He knew that allegedly, none of the kids had the power to kill him, but he wouldn't put it past them to find a way. Tonia had an entire arsenal of bizzare spells that no ten year old should know. Nao'hai could control elements without a staff or words of power. Teucer was somehow his best student at archery even though the eight year old was too weak to pull back the bow. If it was one thing he learned about this particular set of kids, it was that they do what they want.

"What!" she cried. "Hold on, you can't kill him! How am I supposed to become the Avatar?"

"The Avatar," repeated Apollo. "Wait, what? You-what?"

Tonia glared at her. "Never mind that. He never even taught me how to shoot things! I've been trying to get him to take me for weeks and you're just going to kill him off when he finally agrees to teach me? That's such a waste of effort!"

"You can learn from me," suggested Teucer.

Tonia recoiled in horror. "I'm not taking lessons from my baby brother."

"Eight is a big number!"

It was heartwarming, thought Orion, that the kids were defending him, even if their priorities were a bit skewed.

One of the demigods hesitated. "Do we kill him?"

"No!" The three kids shot identical looks of pleading at the Meliai, which Orion thought was a bit useless. Those trees were not known for being merciful.

To his surprise, they hesitated. "The small ones like him. They do not want him dead."

Huh. It seemed that even the greatest of the dryads were not immune to the power of cuteness. Orion should have weaponized that years ago. He cursed his lack of foresight.

"Well," said one of the older half-bloods. "If it comes down to it, there are, like, twenty of us, and only four of them. We can take him. The kids as well if they decide to get in the way."

Orion decided right then that he disliked him.

"Gods damn it, Lucius," said one of the other half-bloods. "Not every problem can be solved by stabbing it."

"Obviously," he retorted. "You're still here."

It took a moment for her to process that. "Alright, first of all, how dare you-"

"Is this really a good time?" the girl he had attempted to kill a few months prior, Meg, interrupted. "What are you doing here, anyway?"

"I work here," he said.

Meg took a moment to consider that. "So you took my advice after all?"

"Your advice..." It took a moment to figure out what she meant. "Yes. Your hotline was helpful."

"What hotline," Apollo demanded, looking between Meg and Orion like he was going to personally throw him into a volcano if Orion so much as kept talking to her. Ah, yes. Meg had been Apollo's master while he was mortal, wasn't she? Orion had seen Apollo get like this with Artemis as well. "Meg, how did you know him?"

"We met when I was picking up Cassius from therapy," she gestured to the child still holding the plant baby. "He tried to kill me," she added helpfully, as if it were an everyday occurrence.

Orion might have just been spending too much time with mortals and magicians, but that struck him as something that should not be taken so casually.

"You did what?" Apollo's hands tightened on his bow. Orion didn't know why he seemed so surprised, considering that it was pretty much all he did for thousands of years until very recently.

Meg shrugged, "I just wrapped him up in plant material and walked away. It wasn't hard."

"Ah...yes," Orion coughed awkwardly into his fist. "I should apologize about that. Sorry."

"It's fine. Most of my friends have tried to kill me at one point."

"Oh," said Orion, pointedly ignoring Nao'hai's whispered, "I told you that's how you make friends!" behind him. "That is. Not a good thing."

"Eh, it worked out in the end."

"Meg," Apollo said firmly, "That man killed thousands of people over the millenia, most of them girls, all for being too 'independent.' Do not become friends with him."

His words rang of truth. Mostly because it was true.

There was silence for the first time. He could feel the uncertainty from the kids behind him.

"Is that true?" Tonia asked. He never heard her sound so quiet before.

"Yes," he said, resigned. "It is."

This was it, then, because there was no excuse he could have offered that would have seemed genuine. No defense that would have been true. The truth was that he did take all those lives, and he had enjoyed it. He had lied to Childe, lied to those kids about who he really was, taken advantage of their kindness and hospitality. He might have had a change of heart in the last few months, but the truth stood.

He was-had been, at least-a monster. Whether he still was one remained to be seen.

There, he thought. That was the truth.

"That's it," he said. "We can duke it out if you want. Just take it outside. I don't want them to see," he indicated the three kids, all of whom looked on the edge of tears.

He might have deserved the Pit, but there was no need to traumatize the kids he had grown fond of on the way there.

Apollo hesitated for a long time. "I didn't think you'd have a soft spot for kids."

"Think nothing of it," said Orion, because really, did showing affection to a handful of people really cancel out the things he pulled? "I don't think it means much in the grand scope of things, do you?"

"I didn't take you to be the introspective type."

"I suppose being around mortals has that effect on people," he said. Mortals were challenging in more ways than one.

"Yeah," Apollo agreed, and Orion was fairly sure he had never seen him so quiet.

To his surprise, Apollo's murderous intent disappeared.

"Alright," he announced. "We're not killing him."

Orion blinked. "You're not?"

Apollo nodded, a faraway look in his eyes. "I'd be a hypocrite to not allow you a second chance here. I will be watching you, and I have better not hear about anything lethal you might have done, but I think, if you really have changed...your Tartarus visits are punishment enough."

Huh.

"And I don't think you need me to tell you this, but stay away from my sister and her followers. She might not be so merciful."

"I have no plans to approach them," Orion said. "Contrary to popular opinion, I do value my time on this planet, and this time I'm very keen to stay here."

"We have an understanding, then," Apollo said. "Now, don't you have an archery range to manage?"

Apollo might have said that he was letting him live his life, but that didn't mean he wasn't going to milk the fact that Orion worked at an archery range for all its worth.

He sensed the growing displeasure from the giant and hid a grin. Apollo gave him a thumbs up. Orion gave him the middle finger.

"And then we buried him in a giant block of cheese!" said the kid with the Avatar obsession. It turned out that the three young magicians had met Cassius before from one of their earlier excursions, and had by extension met the trees protecting the former imperial family.

How they were not dead yet was beyond him. It was even more baffling that the trees seemed almost fond of them.

What did they do?

Orion buried his head in his hands. "Nao'hai, please don't recount this incident to everyone you meet."

"But it was so fun!"

"You have a very interesting definition of fun," he said. "I will buy you that Momo plushie if you stop."

"I will get you an actual Momo if you continue," said Apollo.

Nao'hai considered. "No," she decided. "Animating it myself is more fun."

The smugness radiating from Orion put him off for the rest of the day.

Orion, hissing: I don't like kids.

Also Orion, when facing certain death, like a fussy mother: Not in front of the children!

Honestly, I know this is a children's series, so the protagonists have to be young, but one criticism I have with the books, as an adult, is that those kids treat having the responsibility of the world on their shoulders like it's a normal thing. Like, the teenagers are more responsible than the actual gods who lived for millennia. It's frankly a miracle that nobody declared those Olympians unfit to rule and overthrew them. After the Trials of Apollo series came out, I read through them, and honestly, I was starting to wonder why those heroes even bothered. Were the emperors evil? Yes, and it's established that Very Bad Things would happen if they won, but if that wasn't the case? Why do we root for the gods, anyway?

I'm tempted to write a fic where the demigods petition the Olympians for worker's rights. Or decide that the Olympians were incompetent rulers and overthrow them. Or both. I'm very interested in how it would go down.

Anyway, here are your options for the next chapter:

A. Therapy (This would be the last chapter I'm going to write for this arc)

B. Aradia, Medieval Tuscany, part 2

C. Iphigenia (And how she came to join the Hunters)

D. Some more AI chapters.

E. Suggest your own prompt!

Hope you enjoyed reading, and leave a review!