(That morning)

Everyone was preparing for battle. Every camper was either working on the fortifications, getting on armor, sharpening their weapons, going over the strategy, or anything that need to be done. Around this time the gods showed up themselves, along with all the nature spirits that Grover brought and the Hunters of Artemis.

Zeus, on one hand, was looking for someone alreeady. Though he did talk to Zetes and Calais, he needed to speak to Katie and Danny urgently.

Danny was busily putting on his armor straps on and his greaves in his cabin. His helmet was propped right by his feet. He could see if anyone was coming from the door if he needed to, but he knew that who ever it was was a friend and not a foe. Either way, he wasn't taking any chances.

As he was getting on his sandals, the last person on Earth he wanted to talk to walked into the door. Danny didn't know whether to be grateful or just ignore him. He never got the chance to do the last one when Zeus walked in and sat on the bench opposite him.

Zeus was about to say something, then paused for a moment before speaking. "Daniel.."

"Danny."

"Danny, I don't want this feud to go on any longer," said Zeus.

"Well your going to be doing what you wanted to do to me, killing sons of Gaia. Isn't that what you've been telling me since I was born?" said Danny. Zeus did not answer right away.

"Listen, I know I haven't been very....courteous to you in the past, but I want to change that," said Zeus.

"Well you screwed that chance up when you took out my dad. Do you know what it's like to lose your parent at a young age right in front of you?" said Danny, anger in his voice. Zeus wanted to speak, but words failed him.

"How may I gain your trust?" said Zeus.

"I don't know? Maybe say your sorry for making my life hell? Or maybe you could get off my mom's back for a change so that no more of her children suffer the same fate? Or maybe bring my dad back from the dead?!" he yelled at him. His brown eyes were blazing now. Zeus looked lost for words. For the first time his ego had failed him, but he needed to show Danny and the senior counselors something that could turn the tid of the battle.

"Danny, I have the Gem of Destiny with me," said Zeus, completely changing the subject. Danny remembered full well the green gem he had risked his life for in Paris.

"Okay, and?" said Danny, still treating Zeus with a cold disposition.

"The gem offers us morale, a better fighting edge, and allows us to fight even better than we could before in any engagement. That's why Napoleon was able to win so many battles," said Zeus.

"Then why did he lose at Waterloo and the Russian invasion?" said Danny.

"He had grown so confident with his abilities the gem bestowed that he stopped using it for his conquests," said Zeus. At least that made sense.

"There's also one thing. The gem is able to heal one who is close to death," said Zeus.

"Okay, I bet Napoleon could have used that on a lot of people in his army," said Danny.

"You don't understand. Once that power of the gem is use then the gem will cease to exist forever. Do you thing the Emperor of France was going to waste that opportunity on one man?" said Zeus.

"I guess not," said Danny. After pausing for a very long minute Zeus finally spoke.

"I was an idiot, no an ass, for harming you so many times in the past. I had trusted a son of Gaia once, but he betrayed me and nearly usurped my throne. After that I never trusted anymore and I was very...paranoid when it came to any that I saw in my sight. My grudge blinded my sight, and I was too quick to judge you wrong. Do you forgive me?" said Zeus.

Danny thought long and hard for a minute, not knowing what was the best response.

"I can forgive you, but I don't know if I can trust you," said Danny. He got up, prepared to leave.

"Katie's at the front drilling demigods," he said, turning and leaving Zeus in the cabin.


Zeus found her teaching the campers how to do the correct and best way for a phalanx. He pulled her aside for a moment and talked to her about the gem. She understood everything, and asked if Danny and him had reconciled their differences. Zeus said that Danny forgave him; he just couldn't trust him. Katie decided that something was better than nothing and went back to assisting the troops while Zeus told Chiron about the gem and placed it with the centaur.

Everywhere else everyone was preparing. Tyson was leading about five hundred Cyclopses, Artemis and Thalia, along with fifty Hunters, took up alongside the archers of the camp at the top of the hill, and the gods found places at any place they thought where the attack would come the hardest.

Poseidon took his post at the rear to be used when a part of the line was falling. At the front line the demigods, two hundred in count, stood defiant in a phalanx four men deep. They were ready for anything that came there way. In the very front line were Percy, Annabeth, Danny, Katie, Nico, Fred, Jamal, Clarisse, Chris Rodriguez, and their other friends. At that moment the groud quaked and everyone stood ready. From the ground came soldiers, but not the stone ones of the giants, but undead ones. Hades had finally arrived with his undead warriors.

They expected his strength to be huge, but only ten thousand had shown up: Roman legionnaires, Greek soldiers, and men from other time periods use to hand-to-hand combat.

"Hades, what has made your numbers so low?" said Zeus.

"They attacked me and taxed me of my strength. They have more stone soldiers then we expected. This is all I could salvage," said Hades. Though they were grateful he arrived, they were still too few if what he said was true. Every being who dwelled in Olympus was here and ready to fight the giants. There numbers were at fifteen thousand, but they knew they would be outnumbered.

"When will it begin?" Annabeth asked Chiron.

"Soon," said Chiron. They waited for any sign that the giants would come, there traps ready, every arrow on a bowstring, all swords and spears sharpened, all shields buffed and strong. All the gods were ready: Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Athena, Ares, Artemis, Hera, Dionysus, Hephaestus, Apollo, Hermes, amd even Demeter, Aphrodite, and Hestia. Briares was also present, and many nature spirits led by Grover and the two other satyrs leaders Silenus and Maron. Though Percy didn't want her to fight in this battle, Ms. O'Leary was in it too.

As they waited, the clouds suddenly turned a thick shade of foggy green. The sound of nature itself died down, and there was a large trembling of the earth. At first everyone looked to the ground to see what the problem was, but then they realized that by listening closelely it was the trampling of an army, an army well into the thousands.

From out of the woods they came out, there ranks looking like that of a Roman legion. Taran saw that there was now more than the twenty thousand he saw, but nearly one hundred thousand. They were outnumbered more than six-to-one. Not only that, but for every five hundred stone soldiers there was a giant version of the soldiers standing as tall as a Cyclops. In the front ranks of the entire army were the 24 Gigantes, there armor a combination of rock, stone, earth, and sand.

In front of them was Alkyoneus, his armor newly polsihed and gleaming in the sun made green by the clouds. He casually walked to the middle of the field under a flag of truce to offer them terms.

"Men of Olympus," he started out, "do not seek to fight us, for you will not win. We offer you these terms. If you lay down your arms and surrender peacefully, everyone's life will be spared. The gods may still rule their domain's in Olympus, but Gaia, our mother, will be the supreme head, the one true ruler of the gods. The demigods will be placed in high honor over our armies, and the nature spirits and satyrs will go in peace to their forests, along with our brothers the Cyclopses. All we ask is your undying loyalty, and promise that you shall never rise in rebellion again, unless you take up your arms now, in which you will all die and the gods cast into Tartarus forever. What is your answer?"

For one long minute there was no reply. Then, from the Hunters, Thalia specifically, came an arrow that flew straight at the giant and hit him in his chest directly in front of his heart. He fell to the ground and everyone cheered. Their cries stopped when he rose back off the ground and plucked the arrow from out of his chest, his face a look of fury.

"Death it is then. Archers!" he yelled. Three rows of the army came, about two thousand stone soldiers with bows and arrows. They notched the arrows to their strings and aimed up, ready to fire.

"Fire!" yelled another giant. The archers let loose their bow strings and the arrows soared into the sky before gravity took over and sent them down to the earth.

"Take cover!" yelled Zeus. Everyone who had a shield knelt down, their shields raised up. The arrows fell onto them and they could hear the clang of them against their shields. Even though the vast majority of the arrows failed to kill someone, a few found a mark. A Cyclops was hit with one straight in his eye and he collapsed to the ground, dissolving into sand. One satyr and a demigod fell dead too, the satyr turning into a violet shrub.

Once the volley was over everyone turned their shields to their original position and gave a mighty cheer, daring them to keep on attacking.

"Send in our first wave," he said to his lieautenant, his second-in command.

"First wave, forward!" he yelled. The first ten ranks came out, about twenty-thousand stone soldiers and their giant counterparts. None of the Gigantes were to join in the attack, they knew what their role was.

The stone soldiers marched forward in near perfect rank, coming closer with every step.

"Archers," yelled Chiron. The archers on the hill readied their bows.

"Fire!" yelled Chiron. The archers let loos their arrows, about one thousand in all. One thousand arrows fell into the stone soldiers. The arrows thudded into their stone covered bodies, thudding into them with such force that some collapsed into a pile of rocks. They kept marching forward, and the Olympian army realized that their arrows had no effect on the stone giants, and the regular stone soldiers only went down from repeated hits on their bodies or one hit in their head.

"Archers, fire!" Chiron yelled again. Another volley went up, this time having the same affect. There numbers were only decimated by two hundred at least, but anything was something.

The first wave of the stone army was coming ever closer. Little did they know was that there was a trap waiting for them. A horn went up from a centaur on the flank. Peercy knew what it meant and began to count to eight.

"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Now!" he yelled. A Hunter lit a flaming arrow and sent it flying into the arrow and back to the ground in the middle of the stone army. The minute the flame hit the ground, green fire erupted and soon the entire first wave was in flames. Earlier that day they had set up Greek fire traps all over the ground in that one spot knowing that the stone army would come through there.

The entire first wave disentegrated in the first few seconds of the blast. The Olympian let out another cheer, taunts flying to the stone army to come back if they wanted more.

"Charge!" yelled Alkyoneus. The entire army charged at a breakneck speed towards the Olympian army. The Gigantes, the stone giants, and the stone soldiers all in one.

"Loose catapults!" yelled Chiron. The two catapults that were held behind the hill, (the same ones from the Battle of the Labryinth), let loose their deadly projectiles. The two boulders crashed into the stone army, taking with it a number of stone soldiers and giants. They still kept coming, even when the Olympian army fired their arrows at will. Under the arrow storm they charged.

"Hold the ranks!" yelled Percy. He and Annabeth were side by side. All the demigods in the center had a spear and shield for phalanx fighting. The undead were on the flanks, the Roman legionnaires in their standard legion formation, their pilum out ready to throw when the stone soldiers got in range and ready to pull out their swords to hack it out. The Greek warriors were also in their phalanx formation and were gladly ready to meet their foes.

When the stone soldiers, giants, and Gigantes got in range the undead Romans threw their pilum. (For all you who don't know what a pilum is, it's the standard Roman spear with a soft iron tip with little barbs on the spearhead specifically used for throwing at their enemies to kill or mess up their shields so that they're not used again). Many of the front rank were struck by them and crumbled while the rest hit the shields, horribly mangling them. Still they came on and hit the phalanx-legion with such force the entire front ranks would have been barreled over had it not been for the guys behind them. The battle was on.

The demigods and undead pushed out with their shields and used their spears or swords to hack off the heads of the stone soldiers. Once a head was taken off, the soldier crumbled to dust. Sny other hits would have to cut right through the soldiers in oreder to kill them. A simple stab would do nothing but infuriate it.

The line held as close quarters combat settled between the two armies. The Olympian archers still shot into the stone army, killing hundreds, but the stone soldiers could absorb those losses.

In the middle of combat Danny stabbed a stone soldier in the face, watching it crumble into dust. Beside he saw Katie slash the head off another one with Jolt, her spear lodged in it's chest when it got stuck there. Up around the rest of the line the phalanx was holding. As long as the back ranks didn't give up they could hold the stone men at bay. And it seemed to work, until the stone giants got to the front ranks.

They waded through their own soldiers and began to swat demigod and undead away with strokes from stone clubs, their only weapons. Undead were flung into the air before landing who knows where, and the demigod ones doing pretty much the same thing.

Percy ducked as a giant swung over his head. If it had hit him he would have flew up like a baseball. He ducked it and tried to attack, but the giants was behind dome of it's smaller brethren and he would have to cut his way through in order to get to it. For now he ducked when he had to.

The phalanx was starting to break as the giants samshed their way through. If something didn't happen, they'd be overrun.

At that moment, loud war whoops, Rebel yells, and other mindless noise erupted from the forest. From out of it jumped centaurs, the Party ponies. They were, for the first time, using swords, axes and spears instead of paintball guns and other misc. things. Some had bows with celestial bronze-tipped arrows. They charged into the stone soldiers, crashing the stone men to the ground and trampling them with their hoofs.

They chopped, hacked, slashed, and stabbed their way through, temporarily disrupting the army. However, they did not count on the Gigantes.

Roaring over to where the centaurs were the Gigantes worked their damage on them. They flung some away, others using huge battle axes or spiked clubs to take out rows of them. Alkyoneus was seen taking out three of them with a wave of earth that sent them spiraling into the Olympian ranks, making holes in the phalanx. When that happened the phalanx finally broke. The stone infantry pushed until the near perfect lines now looked like curves and zigzags. In some spots was a free-for-all area.

Chiron called for the rest of the army to fight and soon the gods, satyrs, Cyclopses, and even the Hunters and archers came in. They added strength to the Olympian army and helped to neutralize the Gigantes, for now.


All the camp underneath Half-Blood Hill was a battle zone. Medium sized skirmished in certain parts around the hill were the indication that this was an enormous battlefield. Cyclopses crushed stone soldiers and fought stone giants. The gods fought who ever raised a sword against them, and the demigods and nature spirits did about the same thing.

Percy was handling one of the Gigantes, which he could get to thanks to the battle being more open. he slashed at his legs and arms, and though marks and wounds did appear, they faded away. Then Percy remembered that as long as he touched the ground, or suffered a wound that no magic could heal, he was near immortal.

Mrs. O'Leary bounded from the hill and jumped up to land on the giant, a wall of black fur flattening him. She chomped down on his arm and scratched him with his claws. The giant tried to push her off of him, but she clung on to his arm even harder. When her feet landed on the ground she used all her might to tear the arm off the giant and sent it flying into another part of the battlefield. The giant, one-armed, howled in pain. Percy took the chance to go under him and slash off the giant's leg at the kneecap. The giant fell down to the ground and Percy finished him by stabbing his sword straight between the eyes into his skull. The giant gave one last twitch, and then died.

"One down, twenty-three more to go," said quietly to himself. Elsewhere Danny and his friend Fred were taking on a stone giant and a Gigante. This giant had armor that looked like it was made of volcanic rock, and his double-bladed axe looked all too fiercesome.

"You go high and I go low?" said Danny.

"I was thinking try to find some way to kill them without dying," said Fred. Danny took on the Gigante while Fred took on the stone giant.

In another part Jamal, Katie, Annabeth, Nico, Thalia, and Grover faced off against a stone giant and twenty stone warriors. They charged into the them and their fight took off. Katie blocked an attack from a warrior and hacked it's head off. Jamal came in from behind her and slashed a warrior into two halves, killing it. Thalia, using her hunter knives, sprang onto the stone giant and began to hack at it's head with such force that chunks of it starting falling to the ground.

Nico was able to summon some undead warriors from the ground, three British redcoats, to help even the fight, and then went one-on-one with a warrior. Annabeth fended off attacks from more warriors while Grover played a tune on his reed pipes that made the grass and weeds on the ground wrap around five stone warriors and then squeeze them until they burst into powder from the sheer pressure of the attack.

"How long do we have to keep this up?" said Grover.

"Until they either give up or they all die," said Annabeth. With that she disarmed a warrior and tore his head off with a combination of her knife and her sword.

The battle was hard to compare now. Though the Olympians were fighting well, and hard, they were still vastly outnumbered. The Giant army could absorb their losses because they had the most, but the Olympian army couldn't.

Alkyoneus was facing off against Zeus and Poseidon. They fought each other sword-to-sword-to-trident, but Alkyoneus was fighting with two swords and he could block their attacks at whim. In one instance he slashed Zeus across his arm and punched Poseidon away.

"No Heracles to save you now Zeus," he sneered, pressing the two gods to their figting limit. Elsewhere the other Gigantes prved just as hard to cope with. Only the gods or very powerful half-bloods could deal with them; anyone else was dead before they could so much as look to see where the next blow came from. The Gigantes, when in the heat of battle, were nearly unstoppable. It also drove them wild. Soon they were not just killing men of the Olympian army, but some of the soldiers from their army if they got in the way of their blows. This bloodlust was what made them as savage as they were in the old days.

Only one of the tall giants were dead now, but there was still more than a score more left. (A score is twenty). Zeus and Poseidon were facing off against Alkyoneus, the other gods were facing a giant individually, Katie and Annabeth were fighting one, Danny and Percy squaring off against another one, Nico, Tyler, Percy's brother from the Poseidon cabin, and Clarisse were fighting another one, Zetes, Calais, and Grover another one, and Fred and Jamal the last one.

Chiron shot stone warriors point-blank from his bow, his brethren with bows as well doing the same as they weaved through the battle at a gallop. Some fell from blows by the giants and warriors, but their sacrifice did gurantee more time for the Olympians to rally wherever they caused confusion.

As the battle dragged on, Danny and Katie fought side-by-side against a very bulky giant, Zetes and Calais fighting alongside them. Zetes would distract the giant while Calais, Danny, and Katie would attack it as best they could. Danny sent a rock the size of the giant's head, the size of a pumpkin, at the giant's head to disorient it. Then Zetes and Calais struck it's legs while Katie summoned lightning from the sky and hit the giant squarely in the chest. The giant hit the ground with a thud. He would have gotten back up again if Zetes and Calais hadn't climbed onto his chest and stabbed him in the heart. The giant gave one last lurch, and then still, turning into a pile of rocks.

Zetes and Calais couldn't believe that they had killed one of the legendary giants of old.

"Zetes, I think we should make this a profession," said Calais, smiling. Zetes was about to congratulate him, when he saw a spear from a stone warrior barrel towards his twin. In an act of self-sacrifice, Zetes moved Calais out the. The spaer thudded into his body, the spearhead embedded into his body. Calais caught his brother just as he fell and Danny cut off the stone warrior's head. Katie rushed to her brother's side. Zetes up looked at his brother as Katie gingerly took the spear out of his body.

"I always knew I'd save you one day Calais," said Zetes, his eyes shining. Danny came and examined the wound.

"Will he be alright?" said Calais. He turned his eyes, beginning to wet, to Calais and Katie and shook his head. Calais's hand went to his brother's cheek.

"I'm sorry I got you into this," he said, his voice cracking from the sadness he would feel.

"No, remember I convinced you. I knew the dangers, and I gladly meet my fate," said Zetes, his voice starting to lose breath as he took in ragged gasps. Katie, her eyes tearing as well, tried to give him a drink of nectar from her canteen, but Zetes turned it away. With one last look at his brother, he took in his last breath and lay still, his eyes closing shut for the last time. Calais buried his face into his brother's bloody chest, crying. Danny hugged him, as did Katie, tears pouring down her eyes. At that moment, a cry went up from the Hill. They all looked to see a sight that shocked them to the core. The enemy had broken through and was now entering the camp. They could see smoke beginning to rise from the Big House, and they knew that this might be the end of Camp Half-Blood, and Olympus itself.