A/N:

H-H-Hey, guys. How's it going? How's everybody been? Good? Good, good. I've been fine too. You know, still alive and everything.

Please don't kill me!

I promise I have a perfectly reasonable explanation for this.

So back at the end of Year 10 when I last updated, I had exams that I was stressing for. But when those were over, I got super into crossovers. And at first I just obsessively read them like I obsessively read regular Percy Jackson fics upon my original introduction to this lovely, lovely website. However, that soon escalated into writing my own which I then posted on my account on Wattpad (same account name and everything in case your not totally pissed at me and want to go check it out).

So there's that. And then there's now. Just before Winter Break of Year 11 and I've got more exams. Oh joy! Except these actually means something and are important and are totally something you shouldn't be procrastinating on like I am.

So yeah... Sorry for making you suffer and wait for so long! At least it wasn't a cliff-hanger (looking at you Rick Riordan **cough couch Mark of Athena *cough). Hopefully after Mocks are over and Winter Break starts I'll have plenty of writing time to get back into the swing of things. But for now? Yeah... this is it.

As always, hope you guys enjoy the chapter! Feel free to leave a review, I always love hearing from you (even if it's just to rant at me about how long I've been gone).

Stay nerdy, my lovelies! :3

The group of questers trudged through the hellish landscape of Tartarus. It seemed to go on forever, and the rising and falling malevolent dark purple ground was all they could see. Far away in the distance to their right, what appeared to be huge mountains rose up. Their peaks couldn't be seen through the clouds of blood that hovered rather low to the ground. Ahead of them, in the direction that Percy was leading them, was a cliff. An eerie orange light glowed from somewhere over the edge, and the horrible smell of sulphur grew stronger the closer to it they walked.

Hazel coughed into her fisted hand. But that simple cough soon turned into a hacking fit that had her stopping in her tracks.

"Hazel? Are you okay? What's wrong?", Frank asked, concerned.

She waved him away with her free hand, but the movement caused her to stumble.

He was instantly by her side, steadying her. And this time, she let him.

When she finally stopped coughing, the hand she had been using to cover her mouth came away red with her blood, only serving to alarm the group even further.

"What's happening? What's wrong with her?", Frank asked frantically, as his girlfriend's small frame leaned heavily against him. Nico seemed to materialise on her other side.

Percy's face was grim, and he exchanged a look with Annabeth.

"We have to keep moving. The air down here is toxic. If we breathe this for much longer we'll die", Percy said.

The group looked to Annabeth for confirmation, and she nodded. "It's probably affecting Hazel first right now because she's smaller. We have to hurry".

Frank changed into a horse, and Nico helped a dizzy Hazel to climb on his back so that he could carry her.

"The Phlegethon's just up ahead here. That's what we brought the water bottles for. The water will help us stand the effects of the air".

By the time they made it to the edge of the cliff where they could climb down, almost everybody in the group was beginning to wilt. Percy, Xavier, Annabeth, and Nico all seemed to have a stronger resistance to the air, but even they would need the healing qualities of the fire water soon.

Hazel had passed out, and Frank the horse was carrying them on his back, though he, too, was beginning to stumble.

"Percy, she's fading", Nico said quietly, smoothing back the hair that had stuck itself to his sister's sweaty forehead.

Leo walked alongside Piper, doing the beat he could to help Jason support her as they neared the edge. His eyes were half-lidded, and blood crusted at the corners of his mouth. His lungs sounded like tissue paper as he breathed in and out, and it was only getting worse.

Finally, the group reached the edge of the cliff and came to a halt. They needed the water, badly. But it was at least a 50 foot climb down a sheer cliff to get there.

Percy turned, and, along with Annabeth and Xavier, started to collect everybody's water bottles so they could go down at fill them up for them. It was obvious they were in no shape to do it for themselves.

Jason and Leo worked together to lower Piper to the ground, trying to avoid getting her too cut up on the rough ground. When Annabeth came around to collect their bottles, Leo took a step back and reached towards the clip that attached it to his belt. Only, there was no ground left for him to step back to. His eyes widened, but with his reflexes inhibited the way they were by the toxic environment around them, he could do nothing to stop himself as he fell over the edge.

"LEO!", Jason yelled out, running to the edge and stretching out his hand to hopefully catch his friend, but it was no use.

Leo's body seemed to glow from the light of the river beneath him, and time seemed to slow down as he feel. Even from so far above him at the cliff's edge, his quest mates and friends could see the sadness in his eyes as he looked up at them.

He grinned, his signature joker's grin that they all now knew was fake, and mouthed two words to them before his eyes closed and he was engulfed by the unforgiving fiery waters.

"I'm sorry".

Piper, who had been momentarily shocked back to consciousness by Jason's yell, screamed and cried as she watched her friend disappear. Black dots clouded her vision, and she welcomed them, hoping against all hopes that what she had just seen was just a nightmare and that when she woke up everybody would be fine right there beside her like they were supposed to be.

Jason just stared at the spot where Leo had fallen in, waiting in vain for his best friend to emerge from the waters, somehow completely fine as he always was. It didn't happen. And gradually, piece by piece, Jason could feel his hope crumbling the longer he stared. He sank to his knees, next to his now unconscious girlfriend.

How long had they been down here?

It felt like an eternity already, but he knew it had actually only been about a couple of hours. Only a couple of hours and they were already down a quest member. Only a couple of hours… and Leo was gone.

—

Xavier could feel his friend's intense grief through the link they shared as the two of them glided over the river, desperately searching for any sight of the fallen Leo.

By his reckoning, their search had begun about an hour ago now, and with every passing hour the feeling of hopelessness seemed to get more intense. The rest of their group was back resting at the cliffside after suffering through the effects of the river water. They were all fine, and their reactions would have been almost comical if their resident jokester hadn't just fallen off of a cliff and into a river made of fire in the middle of hell. Needless to say, nobody felt like laughing. Or talking. Or doing much of anything.

He knew that they had to head back. And he knew that Percy knew it too.

It was never good to stay in one place for too long in Tartarus. But six demigods as powerful as their friends were? They were bound to attract unwanted attention. Lots of it.

Percy nodded his head when the two of them made eye contact. His emotions were already skilfully hidden behind the mask that he always wore. The only evidence that he cared at all about what had just happened to one of his best friends was the clenching of his jaw and overall tensing of his body.

Xavier knew his friend well enough by now to know that he blamed Leo's death on himself. He also knew that it wasn't his fault. But the only way to convince Percy of that was by telling him that over and over and over again for a couple of years. Which was time they most definitely didn't have right now.

"C'mon, Perce. We have to get back. We can't leave the others on their own for too long. They're just sitting ducks", he said through their mind link.

Percy didn't respond, just turning around and flying back the way they had come towards their friends. A wave of cold air and a single frozen teardrop followed in his wake.

—

It had taken a lot of convincing to get Jason and Piper to leave after they had returned without Leo. The whole group was about as healthy as they could be in Tartarus at this point and were physically ready to move. But mentally? What now remained of the original nine knew that once they left it would be like they had given up: like they were accepting his death and just moving on. Even Nico couldn't serve to give them any closure. His death senses were all muddled up, and though he had certainly felt something weird with Leo's death, he wasn't sure what it was. After all, no mortal had ever died in Tartarus before. They weren't completely sure what would happen.

What did get them to finally move on was a horde of monsters. They all knew the monsters would eventually come. How could they not with their combined scent? What the two guardians did not expect, however, was for their two friends' grief to suddenly and violently transition to anger.

Piper and Jason threw themselves into the battle with the scattering of empusai and dracaena. Overall, they weren't very hard monsters to fight. But there were a lot of them, and the two had completely demolished them in under two minutes before storming off to find something else to subject to their ire.

Percy just shook his head in both fondness and sadness at the reaction of his two friends before moving to follow them, prompting the rest of the group to do the same.

As they walked, the terrain began to change under their feet. Instead of sharp, glass-like rocks, they now found themselves trudging through sand in a desert that they could of sworn wasn't there two seconds ago. The Phlegethon still ran as raging as ever off to their left, but none of the group could stand to look at it for long before having to look away.

Every once and a while, a shadow would flash from above their head, and an eerie cackling sound could be heard from amongst the clouds of blood. Every time they looked up to see if they could catch a glimpse, however, the mysterious creatures were nowhere to be seen.

Needless to say, it put their nerves on edge. Especially when the cackling began to clarify into certain words in the Old Tongue that neither Percy nor Xavier liked the sound of at all.

Nico and Annabeth, the only other two of the questers to recognise the language as a language, too looked nervous. Anything old enough to speak that language was definitely bad news.

Jason, who had been leading the group with the fuel of vengeance in the forefront of his mind, suddenly drew to a halt. The shuffling in the sand caused by their footsteps ceased and was replaced by silence.

"What are we—"

"Shh!", Jason held up a finger and interrupted whatever Frank was about to ask. "Listen".

Suddenly, they heard it.

Percy and Xavier looked at each other and simultaneously shot into the air, drawing their weapons just as the word that caused their reactions reached the others' ears.

"Ambush"

The others couldn't see what was happening in the fight above the clouds, but sporadic flashes of light and loud screeching sounds cued them in to the fact that it was a furious fight. Meanwhile, their stalkers still had yet to reveal themselves. Though they had certainly made themselves heard.

Low, spine-tingling growls that they all recognised as those from hellhounds sounded from all around them.

Annabeth knew they were surrounded: she could feel it.

"Close ranks!", she yelled to the others. They formed a circle, guarding each others backs and slowly turning in a circle to keep an eye on the gloom around them.

Nico, with the one with the best eyesight in the dark among them, was the first to see the first attack.

"Annabeth! Look out!", he yelled, throwing one of his throwing daggers and getting a lucky hit as the small piece of Stygian Iron struck the beast in the eye. It disappeared in a cloud of yellow monster dust. But the death of their leader only served to enrage the rest of the pack as, all at once, they attacked.

The tight circle was forced to separate in order to make room to fight, and the pack of hellhounds took advantage of that, wedging themselves in between the quest members until they could no longer see one another.

Piper was a flurry of destruction. Her knife was short but very deadly as it flashed between ribs and across throats. Her braids whipped over her shoulder as she turned her head, desperately searching through the sea of mangy black fur for her friends. But all she could see were brief flashes.

These hellhounds were bigger than any of the ones she had ever had to fight on the surface, and even as her knife found fatal points on their monstrous bodies they would not die. Their eyes burned red with hell fire, and their paws as big as her entire torso had no trouble gaining purchase on the shifting sands.

A pained yell that she recognised as belonging to Frank sounded from somewhere behind her, and that single moment of distraction was all they needed.

The hellhound she had been attempting to kill for the last five minutes pounced. As it flew through the air, time seemed to slow down. She was off-balanced, her knife on the other side of her body after a missed swipe. There was no way she'd get it back in front of her in time to protect herself.

"Stop!", she yelled, her voice was filled with so much power, that everybody across the battlefield immediately did as she demanded, even Percy and Xavier, hundreds of feet above the ground in the midst of their own battle felt the effects of her words wash over them.

She rolled out from under the beast, but her charm speak had less effect on those less-intelligent monsters such as hellhounds. They weren't restrained by her command for nearly as long as they should have been, and the pouncing hellhounds claws caught her around her left side.

She screamed as she felt the jagged edge tear through her flesh. Pain hazed her vision, and it was all she could do to slash through the exposed throat of the monster that had injured her before she stumbled over and collapsed in the sand.

Jason's electric blue eyes widened as he saw her stumble and fall to the ground with a pool of blood steadily growing larger around her.

"Piper!".

The demigods immediately closed ranks around her, protecting her the best they could by placing her on the inside of their roughly formed semicircle.

They had fought fiercely, but even after having killed close to fifteen hellhounds, it seemed as though another fifteen simply stepped up to replace them.

Their backs were to the river that had already claimed the life of one of their friends, and another one slowly bled out behind them as they were forced closer and closer together.

The hellhounds snarled as they closed in. After the frenzy of battle, they seemed to take great satisfaction they saw in the sight of their cornered prey.

Just as Jason thought he might be doomed to see his best friend again sooner than he thought, a loud unnatural gurgling from the river behind them drew whatever tense last moments they were about to have to a screeching halt.

There was a moment of complete silence before the river suddenly exploded into a tall geyser of liquid fire. The light it cast set the entire landscape in a sort of demonic, truly hellish light that monster and demigod alike couldn't help but stare at in a kind of horrified awe.

The wave crested, and nobody but Leo Valdez himself, their resident dead man strolled out to stand on the very top of it as if he owned it. A dangerous smirk lit up his face, and his brown irises danced with flames.

"Did you miss me?", he called out in a low voice that matched his smirk perfectly. His arms were held out to either side of him in his typical dramatic fashion, a flame burning in each palm.

The pack of hellhounds attempted to turn-tail and run, but small tendrils of fire only reached out from the river and engulfed them. Their pain-filled howls filled air, but it was soon replaced by silence as they were reduced to nothing more than ash amidst an infinite amount of sand.

The hellhounds were gone, they were alive, and most importantly, their resident Repair Boy had returned from the dead. Again.