"I found two."
"Two halfbloods? Here?"
Percy, Thalia, and Annabeth had just arrived at Westover Hall, a large, castle-like structure that apparently was supposed to be a high school. After a run-in with the school's principal and vice-principal, Mr. Thorn (who, Percy was confident, possessed a fake eye. It had to be the brown one) and Mrs. Gottschalk (Percy was still having trouble trying to hold in laughter at the ridiculous name. Seriously, who named their child Got Chalk?), the team of three managed to reunite with their long-time friend and satyr, Grover Underwood, a satyr who had sent up an emergency alert after being stationed in Westover Hall for a short while. Of course, the three demigods were quick to respond.
"Yeah," Grover says. "Looks like we struck the jackpot, doesn't it?"
"Who're their parents?" Annabeth asks.
"I dunno. A brother and a sister, ten and twelve respectively. They're obviously pretty powerful though."
"Any monsters?"
"One," Grover says. "He suspects that there are demigods here, but he's yet to confirm it. Today is the end of the term in this school, so I doubt he's gonna let any students out without finding out who they are. But every time I try to get close to them, it somehow always gets in my way! I really need you guys' help here!"
"Are the demigods at the dance?" Thalia asks.
Grover nods.
"Okay then, let's dance," the daughter of Zeus says. "Oh, by the way, you don't happen to know who the monster is, do you?"
"Oh, I do. You just met him, he's vice principal Thorn."
The three demigods just stared at the satyr for a moment.
"And you couldn't have told us that before because…?" Annabeth asks.
"There were other things on my mind, okay?!" Grover exclaims, nearly letting out a bleat.
The satyr leads the three demigods through the many hallways of the huge castle/military academy and towards the gym. Along the way, Percy couldn't help but admire the place. It looked pretty cool in a medieval-castle kind of way.
Finally, the party of four arrived at a set of wide-open double doors. Even without the sign above the door, Percy could tell that it lead into the gym.
And sure enough, there was a party going on inside of it.
The satyr lead the other demigods into the large gymnasium, walking past many partygoers, dressed in bright colors. Despite the chaos that was going on, none of the teachers seemed to really care about what was going on. Percy just looked concerningly towards a group of very tall boys in football gear who looked like they were about to kill each other with their wrestling.
"There they are," Grover says, pointing to a boy and girl arguing on the bleachers. "Nico and Bianca di Angelo."
It was obvious to Percy that the two of them were siblings. They both had crow-black hair and olive-white skin. As they argued, they seemed to wave their hands around in the air wildly, with the boy nearly dropping a set of cards in his hands.
"Do they…I mean, have you told them…?" Annabeth asks.
"No," Grover says. "I wouldn't dare to. Especially not with how close they are to the monster everyday. I don't want to risk Professor Thorn finding out about them."
"So? Why don't we just grab them and get out of here?" Percy asks.
He starts walking forward towards them, but stops when Thalia puts a hand on his shoulder. She nudges her head somewhere to the side. The other three turn to see the heterochromatic Professor Thorn staring intently at them.
"Ah, looks like we didn't fool him completely," Annabeth says.
"Don't look at the kids," Thalia says. "We'll need to pretend that we don't know them while looking for a chance to nab them before Professor Thorn does."
"How?"
"We're three powerful demigods. Their scent is bound to get mingled with ours. Just act natural and split up and eventually, he'll have to let go of those two just long enough for us to grab them and get out of here. Mingle. Act natural. Do some dancing."
"Dancing?" Annabeth asks, as if the prospect scared her.
"Yeah," Thalia says. Then her face scrunches. "Ugh. Who chose Jesse McCartney?"
"I did," Grover says, sounding hurt.
"Geez, Grover," the daughter of Zeus says. "Couldn't you have chosen like Green Day or some-"
"Oh hey, Grover!"
A voice cuts in through their conversation. The three demigods turn to see a teenage boy walking up to them from the side. He had short, scruffy red hair and unusually-colored, golden-brown eyes. From his facial features, Percy guessed he was at least somewhat Japanese. He was wearing a casual white and blue-sleeved t-shirt and jeans. Most unusual about him, however, was his left arm, which was entirely wrapped up with some kind of red cloth, from his fingers all the way up to his shoulder. There was a cup of punch in each of his hands.
"Oh, Shirou!" Grover greets back with a smile and a wave. "Hey!"
"New kids?" the redhead asks with a smile.
Thalia snaps her fingers again.
"Oh no, not at all," she says. "We're just here to enjoy the party."
Shirou raises an eyebrow at that. He just stares at Thalia confusedly for a moment, as if something didn't quite feel right, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it. The two just stare at each other for the next couple of seconds before the redhead finally shrugs.
"Okay then," he says. "Well, you guys have fun. See ya around, Grover."
"Yeah, you too," the satyr says.
The redhead waves him off before walking off to somewhere else in the gymnasium.
"Real upstanding guy," Grover says. "He started working here as a janitor around half a year ago and now half the girls in the school have a crush on the guy even though he's sixteen. Too bad for them that he's already got a super hot girlfriend."
"Yeah, too bad…" Thalia mutters, uncharacteristically absentmindedly. She's soon to snap out of it though. "But enough of that. Start mingling!"
Things were quick to go downhill.
Several minutes after Annabeth and Percy were separated from the other two demigods to "act casual," the two had noticed that the di Angelo siblings had disappeared. While Annabeth had run off to find Grover and Thalia, Percy ran off after Professor Thorn, who he saw grabbing the two kids and dragging them out of the gym and down a hallway.
Percy found the two siblings sitting at the end of the hallway, huddled together and obviously frightened. Just as the son of Poseidon started approaching them, Riptide in hand, he found himself suddenly ambushed by the professor.
Thorn, having poisoned the only person capable of defending the di Angelo siblings, forced the three of them out of the school and out into the snowy forest. There, Percy learned of a new potential threat: the monster's employer, someone named "The General."
After reaching a cliff overlooking a body of water of some kind, the monster had instructed the demigods to stop. As if things hadn't already been bad enough, a military helicopter had arrived to pick them up and bring them to "The General," according to the monster.
Luckily enough, it was at that exact moment that Thalia, Annabeth, and Grover had finally arrived to provide reinforcement.
But things were still not looking good. Professor Thorn finally did away with his human disguise, revealing his true monstrous form, a lion with the tail of a scorpion. Almost immediately, Annabeth identified the monster as a manticore, a highly dangerous threat. Percy and Thalia attempted to take down the monster, fighting together this time, but it still proved futile, even with the combined power of the son of Poseidon and the daughter of Zeus, causing Annabeth to get slung off the clifftop by the manticore at some point during the battle. The only thing that stopped him from jumping off and into the ocean was the manticore itself and the fact that he hadn't felt his friend hit the ocean's surface, as if she had disappeared completely. On top of that, there was still the looming threat of a military helicopter overhead.
The two demigods prepared right then and there to make their final stand. Percy was on the lookout for an opportunity to drop into the sea with the di Angelo siblings, preferably while not getting him or the two of them killed, but it didn't seem that one was about to present itself. At that moment, everything seemed lost.
But then, something unexpected happened.
Percy and Thalia both looked at each other, then nodded, silently agreeing to attempt one final rush at the monster. But before any of them could take a step forward, both demigods felt something whoosh right past the sides of their heads.
The next thing they knew, two blades, a black and a white one, had found themselves sheathed within the manticore's sides. The monster let out a guttural roar of pain.
"Get out of the way!"
Percy and Thalia didn't have enough time to do more than instinctively get out of the way just as a boom resounds throughout the landscape. A distinctly human-sized figure blurs right past the two demigods, much too fast to be recognized. The manticore fires its poisonous barbs at the figure, but they were sliced cleanly in half in the air by a seemingly invisible force. The monster raises its claw to slash away at the figure, but it was much too slow.
There is a blur of black and white. Then…
The manticore's head goes flying into the air, blood trailing from the stump of its neck where it was sliced. The lion head falls down the cliff just as the rest of the monster's body falls over onto its side before exploding into a cloud of golden dust.
The figure finally comes to a stop, revealing the back of a figure with red hair wearing a familiar, white and blue-sleeved t-shirt and jeans. Wrapped around the entirety of his left arm was red cloth and in the figure's hands were black and white swords. He turns around, revealing golden-brown eyes and distinctly Japanese facial features.
On the figure's back, in a piggyback position, was a girl, around Shirou's age, with unusually-violet eyes and equally violet, long hair. She was dressed in a long, purple skirt and a casual white shirt with a red hair ribbon. The look on her face was one that reflected more curiosity than anything else.
"Shirou?!" Grover exclaims, his eyes widening in surprise. "And Sakura?!"
The redhead doesn't respond. Instead, he just stares at the three demigods, a serious expression on his face. The look in his eyes was a cold analytical one. Sakura just cocks her head to the side questioningly at the satyr.
The party of three just stares back, unsure of whether to consider him a threat or not. Thalia and Percy still had their weapons out, but their guard was lax due to confusion.
Then suddenly, a ratatat sound rang out throughout the cliffside.
Shirou suddenly disappears into a blur before suddenly tackling Percy and Thalia out of the way just as bullets from the military chopper above peppered the ground. Grover quickly dives behind a rock just as more gunshots pepper the ground he was standing on not a few moments before.
Shirou gently lets Sakura down from his back before standing up to do something about the helicopter.
But before he could, the helicopter suddenly explodes, making his eyes widen in surprise.
Even more surprisingly, instead of scattering flame and heat just as an explosion would normally do, it exploded into black-feathered ravens, which all flew off in every direction, leaving behind no trace of the chopper.
There was silence as everyone just stared up at the sky where the helicopter was just a few seconds in surprise.
Then the sudden sound of a zip suddenly goes off. Shirou's eyes widen just as a projectile of some kind whizzes right past the side of his head, leaving behind a scratch on his earlobe. That snaps him out of his shock just as he gets back into combat position, his two swords held out defensively in front of him.
Percy, Thalia, Nico, and Bianca all dive to the ground just as more small, silver blurs suddenly pepper the air between the cliffside and the trees. Sakura takes shelter behind Shirou as he parries away the many projectiles out of the air, his sparks ringing out as metal clashed with metal. Finally, the barrage comes to a stop. Shirou drops the sword in his right hand just as one last blur whizzes from the trees. He simply shoots an arm outward, catching it from the air. He looks down at his hand to see that what he caught was an arrow, the entirety of it made of silver.
"Oh no," Thalia says, eyes fixed on the arrow. "Don't those arrows belong to…?
The bushes and the trees of the woods rustle just as Shirou drops the arrow to pick up his sword. From the greenery, dozens of figures appear, wearing identical silvery-white parkas and jeans. In all of their hands were bows, silver arrows nocked in them and aimed at the red-haired boy.
"Those are…the Hunters?" Grover asks, peeking out from the rock he had dove behind.
"Oh great," Thalia mutters with an annoyed grunt.
Shirou, Sakura, and the demigods all stared at the Hunters as they stared back, the tension palpable enough to be cut with a knife.
Then, the Hunters all lowered their bows. Percy and Thalia slowly got up from the ground, their swords held defensively in front of them, before ushering Nico and Bianca behind them. Shirou didn't lower his guard, though he obviously seemed confused.
"Um, my Lady…," one of the Hunters says questioningly.
The shortest of the Hunters steps out from the woods, her bow grasped tightly in her hand.
"Yes, I am aware, Zoe," she says, her voice making her sound like a child just going into her teenage years. "It appears that I've made my first mistake in quite a few millennia. I came here expecting to hunt down a manticore, but what we've come across is something far more interesting."
The Hunter peels away the hoodie of her parka with her free hand, revealing the face of a young, teenage girl with long, dark brown hair. Despite her age, her silvery white eyes seemed to reflect a maturity that was thousands of years older than her physical appearance.
"A mortal boy with the eyes of a seasoned war veteran and a peculiar nature and something inhumanly large within him," she says with an unreadable smile. "And a mortal girl with an underlying aura that hides something rather malicious within her. Something so malicious that I had mistaken her for a monster."
"Um, My Lady, there are demigods here," one of the Hunters says.
"And a satyr," the other Hunter says. "I am aware. Bring them back to our camp. We are to transport them to Camp Half-Blood as quickly as possible."
"What about the mortals?"
The Hunter just stares at Shirou and Sakura for a moment. For a few seconds, silence permeated the environment.
"Mortals, what are your names?" the Hunter asks.
Sakura just cocks her head to the side, questioningly. Shirou's focused gaze doesn't change in the slightest. The Hunter smiles at that.
"You can relax your guard," she says. "Our goal is not to hurt or abduct anyone here. Besides, you are not capable of fighting against our numbers. I see the energy running through your limbs, boy, and even now, I can see that it is slowly trickling away as we conversate. Will you be able to slay us all while defending not just yourself but everyone around you before we shoot you down?"
The Hunters all around her tense up, reaching for arrows in the quivers strapped to their backs. The other Hunter just raises a hand though, which causes them to stop.
Shirou stares at her for a moment.
Then, he relaxes his posture. He spreads his hands, as if to drop his swords, but instead of dropping to the ground, they disintegrate into bright, turquoise particles.
"A wise choice," she says. "Now, come. I wish to have a long talk with the two of you."
"First of all, who are you?" Shirou asks.
One of the other Hunters steps forward, as if about to say something, but the first Hunter raises her hand.
"Who am I? Why is it not obvious by now?
"I am Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt."