Author Note: This is only a work of fan fiction, not the real deal. I take no credit for the elements similar to and originating from the book The Lost Hero and the first published chapter of the actual The Son of Neptune; all the credit goes to Rick Riordan alone.
Chapter 2: Training Hard
The coliseum was just as grand on the inside as it appeared to be from the outside; it was the size of a small football stadium, which seemed like overkill, considering the entire camp of demigods fit into the one section below the Caesar's box. The red fabric retractable roof cast the entire arena in a lurid glow, magnified by the dying sun's vibrant rays. A bonfire roared in the center of the gladiator level of the arena, offset from center to be closer to the campers; with its additional orange-based blaze, the coliseum seemed like giant bowl of tomato soup.
The sand exuded warmth into the air. Lupa had ordered me to stand out of sight in one of the tunnels gladiators used to enter the arena, while she went to address the campers. I heard the stadium kneel as she entered, then move back to their seats as she said, "Rise."
She addressed them much more warmly than she had ever spoken to me, which was slightly disheartening. She said, "Before we proceed with our usual meeting, I wish to introduce a demigod who arrived here today. He is old for the standard entry age, but powerful, and I wish you all to bid him a warm welcome."
At this, there was the shuffling sound of a hundred bodies moving slightly, and whispers that sounded like the words "griffon", "praised by Juno", and "sixteen", murmured with excitement. Lupa quickly diffused the energy by saying,
"No. It is not Jason." Her words rang coldly in the arena, spoken flatly, with a metallic tinge of bitterness. I didn't know who Jason was, but it sounded like he was important to all of them. The shuffling in the stands stopped, and the campers settled into lethargic despondency.
I walked out into the arena, my baggy sweatpants, zip-up jacket, and unrecognizable orange t-shirt clashing badly with the crisp uniform of purple and jean facing me. Now that I could see without the tunnel obstructing my vision, I noticed the campers were in blocks of similar-looking teens. They seemed to be grouped by their godly parent: the gaggle of well-dressed and beautiful teens representing the Goddess of Love; the burly pack of scarred teens paying tribute to the God of War; a group of refined intellectuals filling the bottom rows. There were more, all of the distinct groups lined in square ranks in their seats. They all looked alike in one way, however: they were battle-worn and serious, and frowned upon seeing me. There were at least three hundred of them, sitting straight-backed and rigid on the stone benches of the coliseum, and none of them looked happy to see me.
A girl in full Roman armor, glistening with sweat and blood, her wavy brown hair hanging lank around her shoulders, was standing next to Lupa and watching me intently. Her eyes were fathomless. A traditional longbow was slung across her back, a quiver hung from her hip, a sword's scabbard hanging from the other side, and I could barely see the outline of a small dagger strapped to her right thigh. She looked like a walking artillery. I made my way to Lupa to stand with her and the girl in front of the bonfire as the goddess introduced me. "This is Perseus Jackson, Son of Neptune, sixteen years old." I raised my hand in friendly greeting, but no one returned it. I lowered it, feeling uneasy.
A boy in the ranks of Ares – Mars – stood and waited for permission to speak. Lupa granted it with a nod. "You said he's powerful, Lady Lupa, but he looks weaker than our youngest Apollo archer. Are you sure?"
Before Lupa could answer, I stepped forward, suddenly blazing with anger. I was sick of having to prove myself to these people, and if they called me insubordinate, so be it. "Looks are deceiving," I said tightly, my face locked in a deep frown. "You wanna test me?" Apparently my glare was sufficiently frightening, because the warrior sat down jerkily, his eyes wide. Lupa pulled me back with a claw, but I didn't look at her. I was considering if I could get away with hurling a wall of water at the Mars kid. I decided probably not, and stepped back slowly.
"That's enough, Jackson," she growled. "Go sit in the stands."
I did as she told me, sitting next to the Minerva kids, as far from the Mars group as I could get. Then I focused my attention on the arena, where the female warrior – who couldn't be younger than me by more than a month – stood, arms crossed loosely, next to Lupa. "Reyna Marcellus, today you have achieved 144th Rank Centurion. You surpass your old position of the Legate Triumvirate and earn your twelfth class bar." The girl – Reyna, I guess – proffered her left arm, where I saw a series of black tattoos that closely resembled a barcode. Lupa extended her nose and touched the mark, and with a flash, a new bar appeared at the top of the set; Reyna winced slightly, but was grinning too widely for it to matter. The entire crowd of demigods leapt to their feet and cheered so loudly, I thought my ears would explode – I stood too, not really sure what the big deal was, but clapped anyway. Reyna bowed twice playfully, just for show; the campers slowly quieted and returned to their seats. "You are now eligible for Captaincy of your Division." Reyna nodded and prepared to return to the stands.
"Just a moment," Lupa said warmly, smiling slightly. Reyna looked back, confused. "I have a task to assign to you, in honor of your success." Reyna nodded and moved back to the huge wolf. Lupa said clearly, "I wish for you to train Perseus. He will need your skill to… learn successfully." I had a feeling she was going to say offset his failings, but she changed her wording just before speaking. Reyna nodded again, a frown tugging at the corners of her mouth, so I assume teaching the newbie how to fight isn't as big of an honor as she had expected to be assigned. She joined the Apollo group and sat, her friends leaning in to congratulate her and look at her tattoo.
"Moving on," Lupa said, "to our status updates and mission requests. The rogue dragon in the woods is getting out of hand again and needs to be subdued. Does anyone want to accept the challenge?"
Three people stood up promptly. All three adults loomed over their groups, imposing and self-assured, carrying a lot of muscle and multiple scars streaking their arms. They each rose from different sections, and wore a thick gold armband on their upper right bicep that I noticed no other campers had. It was that, more than anything else that tipped me off; these adults were the leaders of their sections.
"Captain David of the Mars Division, Captain Hyllon of Mercury, and Captain Alyssa of Vulcan. Who do you propose for the job?"
The first man looked at his division and smiled. "Bobby Hargrove can do the job on his own," he said with confidence. A short, dark brown haired boy grinned at his captain and nodded. "He would be eligible for officer advancement upon completing this job," the man said with a pleading look at the other captains. The captains nodded in understanding and took their seats.
"Bobby Hargrove, do you accept the task?" Lupa asked in the formal manner of someone completing a verbal contract.
"I do," the boy said, standing up, with the same tone in his voice.
"Good. Next, Captain Alyssa, I want a status report on the armory resupplying effort."
The woman stood up and brushed her short, ruggedly burned hair behind her ear. "The Titan War seriously depleted the armory. Fortunately, with our division's efforts, we've been able to almost completely refresh our weapon stock over the past several months. This past week alone, we forged fifty new swords, thirty lances, and seventy shields. Of each of those groups, half are morphing weapons, which we made with coin and bracelet forms. We need only another set of equal numbers to completely fill capacity." I realized morphing weapons were like Riptide – the way it transformed from a pen to a sword and back again, making it easier to carry a weapon through densely populated mortal areas. As to how to make one, I was clueless. Apparently, the Vulcan blacksmiths really knew what they were doing. "Unfortunately," the woman continued, "We're running low on raw materials. I ask permission now to send a mission to Mount Tam to mine more gold for the last set of weapons."
Lupa mulled it over and nodded. "Permission granted. Send your party in the morning, no more than five of your campers." Alyssa nodded and sat. "Venus Division, I want a status report on your attempts to re-establish contact with the gods."
Another woman, older than the other two captains, stood. She was beyond beautiful, even in the uniform purple and jean, gracefully ascending to her feet and staring confidently at the wolf goddess. She looked slightly exasperated, despite her composure. "We have tried every means necessary to establish communication with the gods, and we have tried them repeatedly over the last six weeks, as you have asked. We have received no word in reply. I believe that now is the time to take action, because it is clear our current methods are unsuccessful. I recognize the danger, but I suggest we send a party of my three strongest Charmspeakers to Mount Olympus itself." Something stirred in my memory. Mount Olympus… there was an uncomfortable shuffling of bodies at this, which I almost didn't register. Mount Olympus was in New York. I could feel it. There was something significant about it, and I thought hard, trying to break through my unwieldy brain and remember. It wasn't working. "I know New York is dangerous, but it may be the only way –"
"No," Lupa cut over her. "Permission denied, Cesara. Try with the resources you have, but we will not send a party to Olympus. Times are not yet desperate enough for such measures."
Confused by my thoughts and alarmed by my daring, I stood up to speak out of turn. The campers swiveled in their seats to lock their eyes on me. "Excuse me, but… why is Olympus dangerous?" For once, my words got a positive reaction, even though I hadn't expected them to. The campers all turned to Lupa, their eyes wide and questioning. Apparently nobody had ever asked this question and gotten a worthwhile answer.
Something in Lupa's eyes slammed shut. With a guarded expression, she said slowly, "It presents risks to Roman demigods beyond the level of an average mission; beyond, even, the level of my capabilities to combat. I hope none of you will ever have the misfortune of stumbling into the area, let alone foolishly planning to enter heedless of my warnings. Those who do not wish to die a painful death would do well to stay away from Manhattan." She delivered the words coldly, sleekly, and threatened the campers to contradict her.
Of course, I took the challenge.
"That's not true," I said loudly, and all eyes darted back to me. "I used to live there." It was the truth, but also the only thing I could remember. I had good feelings about Manhattan, not ominous fears of death. "Besides, if the gods live in New York on Mount Olympus, how is it possible that there are risks beyond your ability to deal with? You're a goddess."
"That's enough, Jackson," she barked. "Suffice it to say that the few memories you do have are faulty. Sit down."
That stung. I knew I was right and she knew I was right; but instead of conceding defeat, she was turning my amnesia into a way of discrediting my opinions. It wasn't like the campers would've believed me anyway, given how much they disliked me, but she still had to go and make them think I was an idiot deluded by faulty memories. Stunned and rejected, I collapsed back into my seat and refused to make eye contact.
"Mercury Division," she clipped callously. "Status update on your data collection."
Through my peripheral vision, I saw a tall, lean shape stand. A booming male voice announced, "In conjunction with the Minerva Division, we have gathered information worthy of note. In our mission to the underworld, we witnessed the open gates of Tartarus. The pit is allowing monsters to escape into our world without slowing them down at all. The result is obvious. Monsters are going to continue regenerating with increasing speed, to the point where they may regenerate before they have been fully destroyed. Monsters may become impossible to kill." He paused here to take a breath, and I could hear the campers around me shifting in their seats in concern. I was thinking about how the gorgons wouldn't die, and I agreed with the Captain's analysis. The monsters refused to die every time I killed them. It was nice to know why, even if it did sound disturbing. "We're not sure what caused a disruption powerful enough to open Tartarus, but it must have been something huge and powerful. A Minerva camper suggested the work of a Titan." He paused to allow an interjection. Lupa didn't answer, so he continued. "Even worse, two of my campers had a conflict with a well-known mortal. Agamemnon. He was the leader of the Grecian armies in the battle of Troy, and a notoriously skilled swordsman. He should be dead, but… well, we assume from the encounter that the Doors of Death are open, and the dead are flocking back to the world of the living. We destroyed the nearest entrance to the Underworld, but I don't know how long that will hold the dead back. They'll find another route up, I'm sure." The speaker sounded troubled. I thought back to the gorgons, and the Doors of Death being open…
I jumped to my feet, wordless with energy. Lupa glared at me, looking terrifying standing in front of the roaring blaze of the bonfire, but it didn't matter to me. "What is it now, Jackson?" she demanded coldly.
I answered, "I know I'm bad at this formality stuff, but I just thought – on my way here, the gorgons who were chasing me said that – uh, Gaea, I think, had opened the Doors of Death, so they could return to fight demigods again and again until they destroyed us all." The expressions of irritation and anger at my outburst morphed into those of horror.
"Terra?" a girl from Minerva whispered thoughtfully. I sat down, to dodge the questioning that was sure to follow. "Is it possible?" she called to Lupa. Her voice was laced with fear.
Lupa looked grim. "Not just possible. Likely." She looked at us all. "It appears that the next Great Prophecy may be fulfilled sooner than we thought. For now, we will continue doing what we can. Minerva Division, I implore you to look into the rising of the giants and keep us posted weekly. Thank you, Perseus. And you, Hyllon. Apollo Division," she called into the darkening stadium.
Behind me, a girl of roughly eighteen stood to answer Lupa's call. She stood at barely five feet high and her frame was slightly rotund, but she her eyes shone with strength and vitality. "We've identified the beast in the mountain to be either an extraordinarily powerful chimera or the reincarnation of the Erymanthian boar. Unfortunately, because whatever-the-thing-is breathes fire, we can't really get close enough to tell. I request the aid of the Vulcan Division, if they have yet discovered the ability to withstand fire."
Alyssa stood, fifty feet away. "We haven't, but we're working on it. As soon as one of us figures out how to do it, I'll let you know. But I doubt we'll be able to help you before we finish restocking the armory anyway. It requires all of us working together to successfully temper the gold in the river of Jupiter."
"Thank you. Well then, other than that, I'm not sure how to proceed. Unless someone else has an immunity to fire?"
There was a short silence, and the girl sat.
"Gwyneth, abandon your attempts to subdue the beast for now. Train your campers and let your Division have a rest until we figure something else out," Lupa ordered. "I believe that we're done with reports. Now, back to training."
I glanced around at the campers, who were standing and drawing their weapons as they made their way to the practice fields. Reyna marched down from her position in a higher row and assessed me, her left hand resting on the hilt of her sword. "'Back to training'?" I asked her reluctantly. I was tired, cold, and hungry, not to mention the cool, inky darkness that had fallen during the meeting. The bonfire was extinguished by one of the Vulcan campers in passing. It would be impossible to see, let alone learn new fighting moves.
"Of course," she said, giving me a look like I claimed the Egyptian Gods were real or something. "We always train until midnight." She finished staring me up and down and seemed to decide I was a tough case. "You got steel?" she asked.
Following all the formality the campers used to address each other and Lupa, her slang unbalanced me. "Uh, yeah, actually." I pulled Riptide out of my pocket and handed it to her.
"A pen?" she asked, incredulous, and handed it back to me.
"Well, it's a morphing weapon, but it doesn't have as cool of a base shape as yours. It works, though," I said, feeling defensive. This pen had saved my life multiple times. I wasn't going to let some prissy 144th-Rank-Centurion-or-whatever diss it.
"Fine," she said, rolling her eyes. "Let's go. That thing'll work for now."
We went out onto the practice fields with everybody else. I couldn't see well in the low light, because the moon and stars were obscured by the thick cloud cover that had been gradually developing all afternoon, so it was difficult to make out the shapes of three hundred demigods sparring loudly in the fields. I barely saw it when Reyna spun on me and tried to slice my head off. I drew Riptide and blocked her attack in one smooth – if slightly off guard – motion. My senses sharpened immediately (impending doom tends to do that to you) and I followed her strikes with parries and swift counterstrikes. It was easy at first, while she measured my abilities, and then became nearly impossible to stay up to speed. She increased the swiftness of her movements progressively, to the point where it was difficult to see anything but a mane of wavy brown hair and a flash of gold in the scattered moonlight.
I blocked the sound of the other sword lessons out, so I could focus better. The background noise faded until I could only hear the clash of our blades and our heavy breathing. I tried not to hurt her at first, but when she came close to decapitating me, I realized I didn't need to hold back. She shouted, "Hit me!" her voice sounding like marble dragging across a bed of slate, and for the first time, I actually tried to hurt her. Then it was more of a stalemate, sucking on both of our endurances. When we had been going for nearly twenty minutes, I decided enough was enough. I focused on the sound of lapping waves, the feel of a sea breeze, the taste of salty air; before long, water droplets whirled around my head and pelted Reyna in the face. She stumbled backwards, unable to see, and rubbed the water out of her eyes – but I kept throwing it her face. I didn't know where the water was coming from – it didn't really matter – but I drew more and more on my power, until I knocked Reyna down with the force of a wave I summoned from a creek I hadn't noticed earlier. I capped Riptide and offered her a hand, breathing hard but happy with my success. The creek babbled happily through the fields.
It was then that I noticed the silence wasn't just in my head. Coming out of my focus, I didn't hear the sounds of other campers sparring anymore. With my eyes adjusted to the light, I knew why.
They were all staring. Three fields of demigods were staring at me, openmouthed. I looked back at Reyna. She was on the ground, wiping water out of her eyes and rolling onto her side. It must have been a painful landing, with her bow strapped to her back. She sat up and shook her head to dry her drenched hair, accepted my open hand, and pulled herself to her feet. She glared at me. "When we spar, we're focusing on swordsmanship," she hissed. "Special powers are out-of-bounds. You cheated."
At this, campers all around us went back to their training, as if they were afraid to be seen eavesdropping. Reyna's eyes softened. "I admit, though, I've rarely seen anyone your age come in fresh and be that good of a swordsman. You're fighting style is weird – it's like you don't know what an effective defense is, but it's still really refined. That's an ancient style that nobody uses unless the last thing they want to see is the back of a monster's throat." She pursed her lips while she thought. "I'll start with teaching you more modern moves and build you a solid defense. Might even be able to perfect a few Class-A offensive moves, if we have the time. You'll be almost unbeatable in couple weeks."
"Thanks," I said, relieved to have finally earned praise for something.
"Take a break. Be ready to fight in ten minutes, or I'll stab you in the foot and we can see how good you are injured." Reyna laughed like it was a good joke; I chuckled under my breath as she walked to a water fountain, thinking of her expression when she would try and my skin would deflect it.
I lay down in the grass, staring up at the false sky. While I knew it couldn't be real, it was an unexpectedly accurate representation. The clouds had started to disperse, leaving patches of constellations to twinkle through the gaps; from what I could see, all the stars were in the proper positions, which would be a pretty difficult thing to arrange just for a false sky. I remembered the constellation myths, sifting through memories I didn't think I would have. Apparently, my amnesia didn't deem astronomy important enough to erase.
Andromeda, who was so vain, she claimed to be more beautiful than the Nereids. The Nereids had complained to Poseidon – Neptune, I corrected myself – who sent Cetus, the Kraken, to destroy her homeland. Her parents chained her to a chair in the surf and offered her as a sacrifice to Cetus to appease the god. My namesake had saved her by paralyzing Cetus with the head of Medusa, but the gods put a constellation of her chair in the sky to mock Andromeda for the rest of her life…
Corona Borealis, the crown of Ariadne, given to her by Hephaestus – no, Vulcan – for her aid in guiding Theseus safely through the Labyrinth…
Hercules, the hero who, to atone for his sins, performed the famous twelve labors. When he finished his last labor, stealing a golden apple from the garden of the Hesperides and their many-headed dragon, the gods placed a starry likeness of the hero in the sky for his efforts…
Pegasus, the famous winged horse that sprung from Medusa's severed head…
All of the stories dredged up some kind of reaction in the deepest recesses of my mind, but I couldn't bring any of them to light. I knew there were stories behind the constellations that related to me directly, but every time I came close to remembering, the answer slipped away. The process of repeatedly failing to recall my own memories was exceedingly frustrating. Eventually I growled, threw my hands above me in the grass, and abandoned the attempt. I stared moodily at the clouds, shifting in the breeze of the night.
"What is it?" asked a voice right next to me. Startled, I jerked into a sitting position and peered through the darkness. It was Reyna. She was lying back in the grass and inspecting me with interest, like she was trying to read my mind.
"Nothing," I muttered, in a foul mood, and lay back against the rustling grass.
"Come on…" she chided me.
"It's just…" I found myself saying, "The constellations. The stories behind them remind me of my life before here, but I can't actually remember it. Bits and pieces come back to me at random, things that aren't really important. It's infuriating," I complained.
"So in the coliseum? You were telling the truth when you said you lived in New York," she said, deciding that my frustration validated my statement about living in the big apple. "I've never heard of that before. A demigod surviving there."
"Yeah," I murmured. For some reason, eating blue candy sounded like the best thing in the world right then, but I couldn't fathom why. That kind of thing was really getting on my nerves. "I wonder why Lupa doesn't want us to go to Mount Olympus. The real reason."
"Hmm," she hummed meditatively. Not exactly the answer I was looking for. I sighed and let it go. I had a funny feeling I would find out sooner than I thought.
"I was wondering…" I said, talking to the sky. "They never really said what the ranks are. What's so special about your tattoo and being a 144th Rank Centurion?"
"I forgot you didn't know," Reyna said, and sat up cross-legged. I followed suit to hear her better over the clash of swords. "Well, someone has to explain it to you." She showed me the interior of her left wrist, where twelve blackened stripes notched her arm, with the letters SPQR at the bottom, and a bow and arrow surrounded by a laurel wreath. "See each of these stripes?" she asked, pointing. "These each stand for the class levels that I've earned. To earn a class, you have to perform twelve grueling tasks. If you perform them all successfully and with only minor injuries, you are awarded that class level and branded with a bar to signify your status. The whole thing is because the Roman Empire has always taken the twelve labors of Hercules really seriously; the idea is that if you can perform twelve labors similar in difficulty to those that Hercules performed, then you've proved your passion, skill and readiness to move up a class and have more people under your command."
"Then why are you called a 144th Rank Centurion, and not a 12th Class Centurion?" I asked, confused.
"The ranks are just another way of saying how many individual labors you performed. As you have to do twelve per class and I've completed all twelve classes…" she drifted off.
"Twelve times twelve is 144. Yeah, I know," I snorted. "So it's just because it sounds more impressive?"
"Yeah," she sighed, sounding tired. "Well anyway, when you get your first tattoo, you're also branded with the letters SPQR, standing for the motto of the Roman Empire, Senatus Populusque Romanus, and the symbol of your godly parent. That's mine, there," she said, pointing unnecessarily at the laurel and bow. "So that's what I was doing today in the arena, today. Earning my final class level. Everybody has to watch, or otherwise it isn't valid. We can't have people running off and saying they slew a dragon without some kind of verification."
"What's a centurion?" I asked. I didn't want to sound ignorant, but unfortunately, I was. I had to find out sometime or another.
"It's your officer position in the army. Usually it's not important until you get to be at least a Duplicarius. That's Latin for 'Major' in case you're wondering," she explained. "Going from lowest to highest rank from there, its Duplicarius, Centurion, Praetor, Tribune, and our General, Lupa," Reyna said happily. "To move up past Duplicarius, you have to be of the 144th Rank. Then you have to prove your worth as a leader, either by performing exceedingly well in the arena or completing a difficult mission." She tacked on as an afterthought, "I moved up an officer position today, not just in my twelve class levels." She said up straighter with pride. Against my will, I was impressed.
"Nice," I said. "You must've done really well today then. You should've had a party or something." At this, Reyna's smiled slipped and turned into a slight frown. She lay back in the grass, and I followed suit. Apparently, I'd struck a nerve. We stared at the sky in silence for a few minutes, listening to the other kids train in the cool, breezy darkness.
"I wish the people here we're more like you and Jason."
I glanced over at her through the grass, startled. "Why?" And would someone tell me who Jason is? I thought.
"You're so laidback. Everyone here is constantly on their toes, following orders, orders, orders. They never think about what they're doing or act based on what they feel. It's absurd," she sighed. "Jason was all about loyalty to his friends. Now everyone else is figuring that out, because he's disappeared." We laid there for a moment, staring at the stars. "But right now, I'm your weapons instructor. My job," she regained her steely tone, "is to train you enough to get your first class. From then on, you're on your own. Now get up off your sorry butt and let's get back to training."
After sitting for so long, I was even more tired and hopelessly stiff. I stretched to my feet with a groan, silently cursing my thoughts of Annabeth for making me miss dinner, and turned to face my teacher. "Draw your sword," she ordered, all the softness in her eyes gone. "Let's start with basic defense…" Reyna demonstrated a complex series of movements that kept most of her more vulnerable spots protected, then shifted the power of her opponents against them, turning defense into offense. I attempted to duplicate the sequence, but I got lost and generally stumbled around like an idiot. It took another hour for me to perform it to her satisfaction, and then she started to attack me with basic thrusts so I could test out the move in combat. I felt like I was just demonstrating my amazing ability to look like a fool, rather than any command over the sword, but after another half hour, the stopped and declared the move a success.
"What?" I panted. "You almost killed me about ten times."
"But I didn't. You blocked the strikes," she insisted. "You'll have it down by the end of tomorrow, I swear." I almost cried. Just thinking about what training sessions tomorrow would include made me wish fervently that I had let the gorgons beat me with festive bowling pins. "Before lights out, how about a nice jog around campus?" she said, sounding cheerful.
She's insane. She must be insane, I thought numbly. But before I knew what was happening, she snapped a vice grip around my wrist and started jogging in the direction of the obsidian Pantheon in the distance.
Every day, I woke up in a cabin full of campers of my same rank at six in the morning, just when the sun was yawning its pink and orange hues across the sky. We went for a jog around campus, the higher-ranking officers calling out encouragement and orders to hurry up. Then, an hour later, we sat down for a breakfast of emmer flatbread, scrambled eggs, and grapes that were grown on campus. From eight in the morning to one in the afternoon, we trained extensively in every possible way – I climbed the rumbling mountain more times than I could count, Reyna ordering me rather unhelpfully to 'climb or die'; I shot pathetically at archery, while little miss Apollo shot accurately from two hundred yards and constantly nagged at me to correct my form; I left the land loving campers in the dust in water sports, where I ignored the flatbed canoes and worked on surfing on vitreous sheets of lake water; and of course, sword fighting. Swordsmanship was the one required skill for all campers, regardless of their talents. After lunches that generally consisted of pulled boar meat and sliced lamb, emmer bread, milk, and honey, we spent the afternoon practicing skills that I deemed pretty much pointless: tree climbing, zip lining, tracking, survival skills, and especially basic Roman history. That stuff could bore even a god to death. Then we ate some kind of zesty pasta with vegetables and fruit, and spent the evening at the camp meeting and further skills training. We collapsed in the barracks at almost one in the morning. It was tiring, tedious, and intense.
Class challenge days were the only exceptions to the schedule. When a camper informed Lupa of their intent to try to move up a class, the entire camp got to spend the next afternoon in the coliseum spectating. The challengers had to battle their way past massive beasts from the woods and outwit monsters Lupa gathered from outside the camp's protective boundaries. I noted that very few challengers actually managed to succeed in their task, generally ending up in the infirmary with serious injuries for a few days. I gained new respect for Reyna's achievement on my first day, but also became more nervous for the day I would have to challenge my class. Would they throw me out if I was twenty years old and still didn't have my first tattoo? I wondered, seriously considering not even trying for first class.
This idea only became stronger in my head over the next few days: one of the first class challenges I saw was of an eight-year-old Vulcan boy trying for his second class bar. He creamed his first six challenges; building nifty little automatons out of Imperial Gold sheet metal he kept in a satchel, and had them attack the beasts or retrieve the goal object while he watched from a safe distance. On his seventh, he faced a massive Sicilian scorpion, which was the size of a few semi-trucks put together, about as fast, and had an exoskeleton as hard as steel. He didn't have time to make anything worthwhile before the scorpion stabbed him in the shoulder with its tail, and the boy went down. Lupa had to intervene before the scorpion made bug-food out of the little writhing body in the dirt.
We went back to training early that day.
Once, I tried to lighten the monotony of camp by telling jokes and barely pulling off a few awesome surfing tricks in the lake, but I was only rewarded with blank stares and a whack upside the head with the butt of a gladius. After that, the other campers came to a consensus that it was safest to not even come near me with a ten-foot pole, just in case having a personality was a disease communicable by close contact.
I resolved myself to enjoying the two highlights of my days: surfing and sword fighting; one activity that came as naturally as breathing and felt just as necessary, the other that I spent time learning something new every day. Reyna was right; I learned to be able to do each sequence in my sleep. Even with the tight schedule, I managed to pick up a new skill every day. After two weeks, she announced that my defensive patterns could keep a faun away from a dryad, and we moved on to practicing offensive moves of increasing difficulty. I learned to slide my sword into a well-defended chink in my opponents armor in between their shoulder blades, to circle my opponent to get behind them, to disarm them with a wrist flick, to dig my the tip of my sword into the dirt and toss the dust into my opponents' eyes (my eyes stung for hours after that lesson), and to vault off my opponents legs to flip over them and behead them from behind. When I got tired during training, she flicked her sword at my feet and chanted mercilessly, "Be alert. Be swift. Be strong."
In my third week, after another meal of tomato-slathered cheesy pasta, Reyna and I went straight to the practice fields. "Ready for something new?" she teased me.
"You know it," I said, practically dancing as I bounced on the balls of my feet and set my grip into the hilt of Riptide.
"Then put away your sword," she said.
Baffled, I felt my hands cap Riptide of their own accord. I was so used to following her orders, that I did it almost unconsciously. I waited for her to say something – like, Now I'm going to teach you to wrestle a heavily armed opponent to the ground without using any weapons or special abilities; should be fun!, but she didn't say anything. She stuck out her branded arm and smiled.
I accepted her hand and shook it, more than a little confused. First lesson, Percy, is to grab their wrist during a hand shake, then twist their arm behind their neck and –
"Congrats," she said. "There aren't any more moves for me to teach you."
"What?" I said stupidly, still imagining the new move. – kick their legs out using the pressure point behind their knees, then put your foot in their back and force them down, like this –
"You have all the skills necessary to earn your first class. Actually, if you wanted, you could probably become at least a fifth class on your first try in the arena. You have all the skills, and you're much more imaginative than most of us. You've created new moves that I've never seen before and used them on me, though I don't think you noticed at the time," she said approvingly.
"So what do I do now? Do you stop sparring with me?" I felt disappointed. Reyna made the days at camp fun. Well, she made them better than having your eyeballs clawed out by a dragon, anyway.
"Far from it," she said, and with speed that would've made Lupa proud, darted forward with her sword drawn. I drew Riptide and launched into one of my defense sequences almost without recognizing it, pushing her back. "Now," Reyna said, when our blades met and we were staring at each other in a stalemate, "We start to use our special abilities." She spun away from me and unleashed a series of powerful offensive attacks she had never used before, but I was able to hold her off using almost every skill she had taught me.
Unbelievably, Reyna's attacks picked up accuracy and speed. I heard her singing something, but I couldn't understand the lyrics – the words were in Latin – and her voice adopted an ethereal quality, like a naiad speaking in your mind. As her voice gained strength and volume, so too did the brunt force and velocity of her strikes. Before long, she was practically dancing circles around me, making thrusts that I barely managed to hold at bay, jerkily slamming Riptide into place just before she could seriously wound me.
I realized in a stunned heartbeat what she was doing. Apollo – god of music, poetry, and archery, an accuracy based sport. I had to stop the song if I wanted to have any chance of beating her.
Much like the first time I had sparred with Reyna, I forced bullets of water to rise from the creek and pelt her in the face. I hoped that if her mouth was full of water, she would splutter and stumble in her song. But with speed surpassing human possibility, she dodged the projectiles, getting closer and closer to slicing my skin with each second.
No, I thought forcefully. I won't lose. I backed up slowly but surely, barely sliding my sword into position to rake away hers while I moved, inching towards the creek that twisted through the practice fields. My sneakers connected with the pebbly bank. I ordered the stones and sand to wrap around my feet as an anchor; I willed the creek to rise in a surge, and it obeyed, rearing ten feet in the air like a snake about to strike. Just as Reyna took a breath to continue the lyrics, a manic fire burning in her eyes, I forced the wall of water forward, sweeping over both of us. With my feet grounded firmly in the bank, it passed harmlessly over me, but it knocked Reyna five feet away from me and onto her back. She didn't move.
"Reyna?" I asked when she didn't stir for a few seconds. I pulled my feet free of the rocks and ran to her, dropping Riptide in the grass. Her eyes were closed and she wasn't breathing. I knelt next to her and reached my hand forward to find a pulse – but her eyes flicked open, the fire still dancing in them, and whipped a dagger into a deadly position against my chest.
Momentum carried me forward slightly, my chest scraping against the dagger and – being invincible – pushing it aside. I was left unharmed, but my new purple shirt had a huge gash across when my heart would be. Reyna stared up at me, her eyes wide and cold, and dropped the dagger to the ground, where it clattered against a few pebbles from the creek.
"You're still alive," she said, dumbstruck.
"So are you," I said with some relief, having thought I killed her a few moments ago.
"But – but – you're not even bleeding," she said, a whine creeping into her voice. "How is that possible?" I offered her a hand and she accepted it, climbing to her feet.
"I bathed in the river Styx and took on the curse of Achilles," I explained uncomfortably, "but I don't really remember it." Which was a lie, of course. It was actually my clearest memory, yet simultaneously the most bizarre. I'm pretty sure no one would take me seriously if I told them what I remembered: a Goth kid with a black sword convinced me to go into the most polluted river I'd ever seen; I had taken one step, then fallen in face first because the water felt like acid; I couldn't breathe underwater, which was normally my most impressive skill; then Annabeth (who I had recalled to be a steely grey-eyed girl with an athletic tan and curly blonde hair) had the decency to pull me out, and immediately disappeared with a flash of light as I fell face flat on the bank. I felt like a maniac every time the vision of that popped into my head, which was actually fairly often. In all honesty, I was still wondering why I had followed the Goth kid's advice and done it.
Reyna had decided the best way to react to this news was to glare at me and cross her arms. Great. "And you felt it best to keep this a secret because…?" she drifted off, threateningly.
"It's not the sort of thing you advertize," I answered in a low voice. "People will try to figure out your mortal point."
"Do you even know where it is?" she demanded, familiar with my amnesia.
"Yeah," I lied with as much conviction as I could muster. If I said no, she would try to help me find it, which would defeat the point; it had to be a secret from everyone for my defense to stay as effective as possible. And besides, I did have some idea: any time I thought about Annabeth or the Styx, a tingle started in the base of my spine and worked its way up to my neck. I figured that it had to be on my back then, and took meticulous care to defend behind me when fighting. I hoped my pre-amnesia self had the good sense to put it somewhere on my back that was well protected, not, say, right at the edge of my armor or something.
"Uh huh," said Reyna, disbelieving, but didn't press the subject. Then her eyes gleamed.
"Why are you smiling like that?" I asked wearily, backing towards Riptide.
"Because now that I know I can't kill you, I can work you ten times harder," she said with a growing smirk.
With Reyna harassing me to sign up for a class challenge, I didn't have much choice but to go to Lupa before bed that night. I walked hesitantly onto the porch of headquarters and knocked softly with the bronze eagle. The door swung open, and this time, the lights were all on, warming the interior of the foyer with a yellow glow that burned my eyes after training in the dark. There wasn't any furniture, just weapons, severed animal heads, and other demigod trophies mounted on the beige walls. Lupa sat expectantly in the room, her strange eyes boring into me.
"Jackson," she greeted with a nod. I knelt quickly until she said, "Rise."
"Lady Lupa," I said slowly, unsettled by her presence. When she was fifty feet away and I had a herd of demigods in front of me, I was okay, but being in close proximity with such an unpredictable being with a façade of innocence unnerved me. I noticed even 144th Rank campers shifted their weight uncomfortably around her and fidgeted slightly. "I want to…" I swallowed and tried to speak with more confidence. "I want to challenge for my first class."
Lupa nodded like this didn't surprise her. "I already have your trials ready. Go to the armory after lunch tomorrow, and Alyssa will suit you up with proper armor. And get you a new camp shirt," she said, eyeing the wide, bloodless gash.
I nodded, muttered "thank you" and hurried to my bunk in the barracks as fast as I could. When I got to the small, four-person marble cabin labeled with the Roman numeral XIX, I slipped inside, avoided the acidic gaze of my cabin mates, and fell into my cot. I feigned sleep for half an hour, thinking about what horrors would await me in the arena tomorrow and waiting for the other three demigods to fall asleep. When their breathing was deep, I rolled over and stared at the peaked marble roof. I sighed, wishing the stone ceiling would fall and crush me to save some kind of giant-fire-breathing-fish-with-pterodactyl-wings the bother of killing me tomorrow.
Despite everything, my exhaustion won out. I drifted off into sleep, but was immediately disturbed by a dream.
It started really strange. A faun was standing right in front of me, waving vigorously, dancing on his cloven hooves, making a racket with reed pipes, and yelling my name. The sounds were really muted, like he was calling to me from miles away, even though he was standing right in front of me. He tried to say something else, but I couldn't understand, so I just stood there, unmoving, until the dream faded away.
Then I was running along an underground corridor, chasing after Annabeth. The walls were becoming unbearably hot, glowing an eerie red in the darkness. We both stopped when we reached an opening that led into a massive cavern. Instead of a stone floor, the walls fell away a hundred feet to a sluggishly bubbling lava lake. On the level of the corridor, metal catwalks lined the walls and extended like a spider web into the center, where shadowy beings the size of houses lumbered around a block of steel. Before I could say anything – I had a horrible feeling about the place – Annabeth put on a hat and disappeared.
Worried but slow moving in my dream state, I circled the cavern on the catwalks until I came to a cart. The next few moments were a blur, filled with barking dogs, crashing metal, and running footsteps clattering loudly on the catwalk. The next thing I knew, I was sprinting back towards the stone corridor, a hundred terrifying beings on my tail that I didn't dare to look at, and Riptide in my hand. Suddenly, Annabeth appeared in front of me, said, "Be careful, Seaweed Brain," kissed me, and vanished again. I was furious with her for leaving me in this pinch alone, but also happy that she would make it out alive.
I ran to the center of the catwalk, the dream blurring in and out of focus, until I was surrounded by the beasts working with the anvil. The smaller creatures chasing me caught up and circled around, blocking the entrances. Telekhines, I remembered they were called, looking at their dog-like faces, their grey, slippery skin, and their seal flippers. Their skin shone in the lava-lit cavern, their faces glowing with malicious glee.
The dream suddenly became crystal clear; to my horror, the telekhines started chucking globs of molten rock at me. I couldn't dodge all of them, and the glowing red lumps latched onto my skin like leeches. I freaked out, trying to brush them off, but they stuck to me with a vengeance. At first, they were only warm, but then they lit on fire and started to genuinely burn me. I crumpled to the floor, screaming, burning – dying. "Your father's nature protects you. Makes you hard to burn. But not impossible, demigod. Not impossible," barked the gravelly voice of one.
I did the only thing I knew how to do. I called on the ocean, even though there wasn't any trace of running water nearby, and prayed to my father. The water is within me, I thought, just as an explosion of superheated steam erupted into the air, extinguishing the flames ripping across my chest and vaulting me into the air. Kicked higher by another blast as the water met with the lava below, I flew out of the top of the cavern, and fell, fell fast, plummeting towards the earth.
Just before I slammed into the ground a thousand feet below, I woke up, gasping for air. It was pre-dawn, the sky still dark and starry outside the doorway of the cabin. Restless and concerned about my dream, I threw my light covers off me and went out into the chilly, dew-coated morning. I leaned against the outside of XIX, breathing hard and staring up at the stars, my head thrown back against the building.
It had seemed so real. More like – like – well, a memory. When Annabeth and the monsters had spoken to me, it had struck a chord, resonating deeper than any other dream I'd ever had. My heart was still pumping hard, my fingers slick with sweat. My skin was tingling with pins and needles, and I shivered.
My skin still felt like it was burning.