We followed our usual strategy: Run and try not to die. Once the clearing with the flag was mostly empty, cabin four began growing a wall of trees around it. I began patrolling in large circles. After a few rounds, I heard something behind me. I turned around and saw a zombie walking towards me, a very rusty sword in his hand. I raised my sword, ready to defend myself, but before I could do so, the zombie's hand was destroyed by a high velocity…pea? I looked behind the zombie and saw Katie. Between us, Nico appeared between the trees. "Hey, you can't just destroy him with a pea" "Yes, yes I can." Then she whispered "I've been wanting to do this for so long. Nico di Angelo, I challenge you to a game of real life plants versus zombies."
Nico didn't really have a choice, so he just did his best to win. Katie seemed to have the situation under control, so I continued my patrol.
The next time I came across our little camp, Nico and Katie were still were still playing their PVZ match. It appeared that Nico was slowly gaining ground, but I didn't want to interfere. After I had watched them for about a minute, Nico reached Katie, which probably meant that he had won. "You lose. Good luck getting out of this" Nico said. The ground opened up and swallowed Katie up to her chest. Then he shadow traveled away. "Do you need help?" I asked Katie. "I'm assuming that was a rhetorical question with the answer being yes, but no, I can get myself out of this." I left her where she was and continued circling the tree fortification. After about a quarter of the way, I heard something on the other side. It was Nico's voice again. "Just try to aim for the middle." I looked through a gap in the trees, but didn't see him. About one second later, a spear flew over the wall and landed next to the light. "Ha, you missed" I called out. From the other side, Clarisse answered "I. Never. Miss." "Oh right, is this one of those situation where the one person thinks the other person missed, but they actually aimed for a wall of loose rock or maybe a silo, and that now collapses over the first person?" "It's similar" The bolts of lightning on Clarisse's spear started growing towards the power plug. One of them hit it, which destroyed Jason's lightning. The light turned off. Nico and Clarisse shadow traveled inside the circle. The tree in front of me crumbled to dust (I don't know why, probably something a Demeter kid had done to let me in) and I made my way into the circle. I ran to the flag and created a ring of fast moving water around it and myself. Clarisse picked up her spear and threw it at me. The centrifugal effect of the spinning water (Annabeth, if this isn't correct, please don't kill me) shot it away, but I got a pretty bad electrical shock. I tried to keep the ring intact, but knew I wouldn't be able to hold on much longer.
Suddenly, the ground shock as if something massive was running through the trees. The steps came closer, then stopped. My water ring collapsed. Before Nico or Clarisse could reach for the flag, the ground shock one final time at a six meter tall red skinned giant landed in front of us. "A violence free-ish conflict against Ares?" Damasen said. "It's like I was born for this" Technically speaking, he was quite literally born for this. "I've heard you two belong to the Ares team. And if I understand this game correctly, you are about to win. I have a suggestion for you: don't" Damasen pushed the two uninvited visitors to the wall, then made a small hole into it and pushed them through it. After that he jumped over the wall himself, which was a very impressive feat. Even though Damasen towered over all of us, the ten meter high wall of trees was still about 3 Damasen-meters high. "I'll see you guys later. Now it's time to fulfill my destiny without violence. He ran off towards the enemy side.
Annabeth
Today, I would learn a valuable lesson about my fatal flaw. Let me explain:
Jason, Piper and I had formed one of many teams tasked with finding the enemy flag. We had been successful after only a few minutes, and had defeated the guards just as quickly. Jason had passed out during this, but when has that ever stopped us?
"All five guards down and we only lost one from our side to the usual cause. Good job Pipes" "You did just as well. Without your strategy, we would not have stood a chance." We high fived. "Now, let's get that flag." Victory seemed so close. We stepped past the guards lying on the ground, looking only at the flag. I was about to reach for it when I felt a spear tip in my back. I turned around and saw that three of the guards I thought we had disabled were now back up and had us surrounded. Two of them were children of Ares, The third was Will. "Well, I guess it's war God versus war God now" I said confidently. "Correct. Strategy versus violent force. Unfortunately for you, this is the kind of situation where strategy is useless and violent force wins. About three seconds later, we were on the ground being tied up. "Well Pipes, I guess we screwed up" "guess we'll have to wait for Jason to wake up. Or I could try to… Hey Will, don't you want to untie us?" I heard her charm speak, but for the guards, it was drowned out by the loud music that had suddenly started to play. "Time to figure out what I did wrong" "Are you seriously gonna analyze that now?" "We can't really do anything else right now. Also, unnoticed mistakes are repeated mistakes. No, I didn't just make that saying up" I did just make that saying up. "If you insist. But please do it quietly." "How about no? Two people can think more than one. In our case, the difference isn't very big, but it's there" "Hey, take that back." "I take it back. You will greatly increase the total thinking capacity" 'Gods, I hate how much her charm speak affects me' I thought to myself. "Gods, I love how much my charm speak affects you" Piper said.
"If you really think that I will help so much, I guess you can analyze the situation verbally so I can take part in it" Had Piper really just used charm speak to make me say something that convinced her to do something she had not originally wanted to do? I decided not to question it. "I'd say we start at our attack. We defeated the guards as always. Then I stepped into" "Wait, what was the last thing?" "As always?" "Yes, that" "I just said that because I'm pretty much always a lot better than my enemies, so I always win" "No, that's not true. That is your fatal flaw. Don't get me wrong, you are a great fighter, but sometimes you think you…" We discussed the recent events for a few more minutes.
"So, in conclusion, my weakness is that I'm-" Suddenly, the ground began to shake. Frank had once turned into an elephant for a fight. Whatever was marching towards us was about as heavy. As the footsteps grew closer, the guards (by now, all five had recovered from our attack. Jason had not) were starting to get just a bit worried. Another step sent vibrations through the ground. Finally, Jason woke up. He took a moment to figure out the situation, then summoned a small lightning bolt that burned through the ropes used to tie us up. The tides were turning a little bit (Yes, Percy's affinity towards nautical terms and ocean related metaphors was definitely affecting me as well.) The tides continued to turn when a six meter tall giant stepped through the trees. So that was why Malcolm had asked about who could join the game. In hindsight, it was obvious. Of course, Damasen had a very complex story and was a friend of us demigods, but if you took all of this away, he only existed for one purpose: defeat Ares. And a defeated Ares was exactly what we needed right now. He very gently swept the guards away and waited for me to pick up the flag from where the Ares team had put it. "We should get going. The earlier we win the lower the chance someone prevents it." Now, I could have said that having Damasen, one of the most powerful beings currently Alive excluding gods, on our side made losing almost impossible but decided not to argue with him. Together with Piper and Jason, we made our way to the river separating the two sides. Once we crossed it, the Boar on the flag changed to an owl, showing that we had won yet again. Everyone came over to celebrate, though they all kept their distance to Damasen. Just because he hated violence as much as Ares loved it didn't mean he didn't look scary, mostly due to his blood red skin, the assortment of scars all over his body from millennia of fighting the drakon every single day, and the fact that even the tallest of us barely reached over his knees. According to my calculations, even the tallest man in history, Robert Wadlow, would have barely reached his drakon leather belt. . There was actually a really good way to determine these things. Something that looked like one meter to a 1.8 meter tall human would look like one foot to Damasen. Greek mythology was so weird that it could even make the imperial system somewhat useful.
Whatever the case, Damasen was now celebrated as the champion of the Athena team. Before long, everyone was sent to bed. Since we didn't want to be eaten by the cleaning harpies, I said good night to Percy and turned towards my cabin. "You can spend the night with him" Piper suddenly said. "What?" "I've convinced Chiron to let you spend the night together." "Let me get this straight" Percy said. "Get what straight? This?" Piper pointed at herself "No one's gonna get this straight." "Very funny Piper. Now, let me get the thing you just mentioned straight: You convinced Chiron, a 5000 year old immortal centaur, to let us spend the night together." "Yes, it wasn't easy but w- I managed" Had Piper just accidentally said 'we'? I gave her a You-better-tell-me-the-truth look. "Fine, Drew helped" "You got Drew to do something useful?" "You know how the personalities of demigods often somewhat align with their godly parent? In our case, it means that despite our differences, we all always act in favor of Percabeth. Our conversation went a little bit like this.
'Drew?' 'Yes' 'I need your help' 'No' 'We need to convince Chiron to-' 'I already said no' 'What it I told you that it was in favor of Percabeth?' 'Why didn't you tell me earlier? What do I need to do?' You two are like the OTP of the century." "Well, thanks Piper. Also tell Drew a thank you." "From me too." I called to Piper as we began walking to cabin three. There, we got changed (of course I have spare clothes at Percy's cabin. As a child of Athena, I am always prepared for everything. Well, almost always and almost everything. There were some things I wasn't prepared for, but a sudden rule change that made me spending the night with Percy legal wasn't one of them. "By the way, realized something very interesting recently. I'm already going to tell you this: as soon as I mention who this relates to, we need to stop talking because she's not supposed to know and you know how it is with names and gods" "Uh, sure" "So, one way in which my fatal flaw manifests itself is that I sometimes am quick to assume that I have defeated an opponent when I actually haven't. When that opponent gets back up and attacks again, I am often caught by surprise. Are you following?" "Yes, that makes sense. Like when you thought you had defeated Arachne but then her web caught you?" "Like that. Thanks for reminding me that happened" "Sorry, just continue explaining and I'll shut up" to make up for the bad memories I had brought up, I gave her a hug. "Thanks. So the second thing about me is that while I am a great fighter, a large portion of that can be accredited to my planning skills, so if I'm spontaneously put into a fight and don't have prep time, I perform worse. And before you say 'bur Annabeth, you often do well in spontaneous fights', when I say no prep time, I mean it. Ten seconds is often more than enough to make a strategy, so my fighting performance doesn't really suffer beyond like five to seven seconds. On their own, both of these flaws aren't too bad, but in combination they are much worse because when I wrongly assume to have defeated the enemy, I won't prepare to fight them anymore, because I don't need to. Then, when they reveal that they weren't actually defeated, I'm right back into battle, with no time for planning, which means I'll perform quite a bit worse. In conclusion, I am very vulnerable to false surrender, and the more complex the battle is and the more strategic choices it involves, the more extreme this vulnerability is. Don't. Tell. Anyone. This." "Of course not, did you think I was just gonna go out telling everyone how to exploit your weaknesses? Also, has anyone ever told you how intimidating you can be?" "I just wanted to make sure. Also, many people, including you, have told me many times. So, as Piper just mentioned, demigods often match their parents, so this same weakness probably also exists for, and can be exploited when talking to Athena" I made sure to phrase the sentence in such a way that my mom would only hear her name and perhaps start listening to us when the conversation was over. Conspiring against someone who was listening was something so stupid not even Percy would do it.
Right after that we got into bed (Of course we both went into the same bed) and you probably know what happened next.