"It's you!"
Archer sighed and put down his chopsticks to look at the girl from yesterday. How she managed to single him out when half his face was covered by a mask and the other half obscured by his hood he didn't know. Truthfully, he'd already known the girl was the child of another god before yesterday but she didn't seem to notice the phantasmal beasts around her like he had so he had let her be; she wasn't his concern. That was until yesterday, her perception might have improved from almost dying to a cyclops. "Do you still have it?" He didn't really have to ask since her scent was already far different from how it usually was - more muddied, indistinct - but he had to reinforce the importance of having that with her at all times.
"What?"
Instead of repeating his question, he merely raised his brow. He disregarded the looks they were getting and motioned for her to take the seat opposite him, not like anyone else was sitting at his table. "Well?" he prompted after she sat down.
"Well what?"
He sighed again. "Do you still have what I gave you yesterday?"
"Ah! Yeah." She fished out the stone that was the basis of the array he had used for the runes from out of her hoodie pocket.
He didn't quite know if he was making a form of faux pas using Elder Futhark and calling on its protection - limited as it was - as a son of Hephaestus but it worked so he didn't see anything wrong with it.
He nodded. "Good. Keep it with you at all times, it'll keep them off your back by masking your scent."
"Hey, Pers, what's that?"
He turned his gaze onto the beast masquerading as a human beside the girl. "Oh, this? He gave it to me yesterday."
"What are you, friend or foe?" The weedy teen with the beginnings of a goatee jumped in his seat and started looking around, likely for a reason to get away.
"Hey, that's not nice! Grover's my best friend." Either she ignored how wary her friend was or she was oblivious to it.
The now named Grover let out a nervous laugh that sounded suspiciously like a goat bleating and fingered the crutches at its side. "Hey, Pers, I think maybe we should sit at another table."
"No! I need to get answers for what happened yesterday." She pouted. "I keep telling you I see these things ever since I got home yesterday. There's definitely more to this."
He pitied this girl. That ill-placed excitement would get her or her mother killed one day.
"I told you you're just seeing things. No way that could've happened or- or that 'monsters' exist. I mean, c'mon!"
All the while Archer steepled his fingers and stared at the pair. "Your friend's right. You were just seeing things." Though he didn't trust a beast masquerading as human, this one seemed to hold no ill will against her so he'd let it be.
For now.
"Hekate?" Archer guessed he shouldn't have heard that since the beast named Grover muttered it under his breath. The paling of the beast's features meant it realized its mistake and frantically tried looking elsewhere than into his eyes.
The girl stalled for a second before she blinked, grunted, and shook her head. "You just did that thing again, didn't you!" And he had put more prana into that that time too. Contrary to what he expected, she instead became livelier than angry at the attempt at manipulation. "Oh, right! I'm Persephone Jackson, my friends call me Pers, and this is Grover Underwood, what's your name?"
"Not important."
She pursed her lips and continued as though he didn't just indirectly dismiss her. "You're in the same grade as we are, right? Are you going on the field trip too?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"You're going on the field trip."
He stared at his mother and asked, "Why?" Except for the annoying girl being annoying every chance she got, he was having a relatively good day. No beasts had wandered into his bounded field so he got to spend more time with his mother.
"Because you need to make friends your age, not the people at the grocery I work at, not the butchers at the deli, not the fishermen by the docks, not the handymen of our apartment, and," she huffed, "because I said so."
He let out a breath and agreed. He knew when to back down from an argument when it wasn't worth the effort to argue.
"So I thought you weren't going."
He just grunted at the quip and kept his guard up. It had been a week since they last spoke and he made it his mission to avoid the troublesome girl like the plague. He enjoyed the peace he now had, thank you very much. The fact they were being led by two non-humans posing as their teachers wasn't helping put him at ease at all.
He stole a glance at both creatures. He was fairly sure that the woman was another phantasmal beast judging from her scent but the other one, the man in the wheelchair, gave off a different feeling - a familiar feeling. His scent had undertones of a non-human being but it also held hints of bronze, dirt, and scorched earth. Archer didn't know how strong these two were and he wasn't sure if he would be able to take on both in his weakened state but he'd be damned if he let them take away the peace he now had without a fight. He was fairly sure he would've been able to put up a more than decent fight as a Counter Guardian but not now when he had a finite amount of prana to call on and just the one body instead of the pseudo-spirit vessel he got used to.
He didn't let any of his wariness show, instead showing the annoyance of a belligerent student being forced to be there by their parent. It was easy enough since the girl right next to him wouldn't sit still or stay quiet at all.
"Alright, students, it's time for lunch," the man in the wheelchair - Brunner he called himself - announced and led everyone to a designated area where they were meant to take a break.
For some reason Persephone and Grover, by extension, decided to eat their lunch with him. He chose to ignore them and ate his boxed lunch in peace and quiet which, apparently, wasn't something that this girl did as she tried to get him to speak by blabbering on a mile a minute.
"You still haven't told me your name."
"You still haven't stopped being annoying." He glanced at her from the side with only one eye but continued eating his lunch.
"Hey!"
Archer raised his brow at their simultaneous reaction.
Before the girl could go on, she flinched as a half-eaten sandwich flew right into the beast-boy's - he supposed he looked like a boy - face. "Nancy!" He watched the girl square up to another girl, a redhead - who was named Nancy, he didn't care to remember. "What did you do that for?"
"Oh, I'm sorry, Pers, my hand slipped," the redhead said with as fake concern as she could have. "Ah, and what's this? Hanging out with the weird, quiet kid now? I guess it makes sense. A freak, a cripple, and a weirdo, birds of a feather and all." She laughed, and her friends laughed with her.
"Stop messing with us or else."
"Or else what?" She looked over to the side, smirked, and proceeded to run over to one of the beasts. "Ms. Dodds! Jackson pushed me."
Disregarding the obvious lack of any bruising, the beast turned to Persephone's direction. "Ms. Jackson, there's no need for violence, you're old enough to be able to talk out any disagreements. As punishment, you will be serving a week's detention starting tomorrow." And promptly walked away to the other non-human.
Suppressing lifetimes' worth of reflexes wasn't something he was relishing in the slightest, not when it looked like he was the only one who could put up a fight against phantasmal beasts, weakened as they were.
The male beast seemed to excuse himself and wheeled away. Archer very much doubted it was actually a cripple but let it continue its charade.
There was a scream and a splash. The redhead from before was drenched from head to toe. To others it might have looked like she had slipped and fallen into the fountain but it was a different story for him. He had caught the scent of the sea with hints of ozone, a scent he associated with the use of prana in Magecraft.
A quick glance at the godling showed her surprise and guilt but what was more worrying was the intent gaze of the she-beast. Things just got more troublesome.
And he was supposed to be done with all this.
He dragged the girl aside while her friend followed. "What did you do?"
"I- I just-"
"Tell me, what exactly did you do?"
"I don't know! I just felt so angry and then the water just moved on its own!"
He cursed and rounded on her friend. "Are you going to be a problem? If you are, I'll cut you down here and now."
"No!" The girl jumped in front of her friend, arms spread wide open.
"I was hoping to catch you alone but a couple children should pose no trouble." The she-beast came out of the corner and the haze that kept up her human appearance bled away to reveal her true features.
No time for hesitation. Reinforce, leap, Trace, swing. The she-beast managed to move aside at the last moment and only got her arm lopped off. It screeched. Not good enough. He Traced Bakuya and dashed in again.
"You-!"
No room for error, no room for mercy. He threw himself into the fight with abandon. Should this beast live, it would endanger not only himself but his mother, especially. Its features finished morphing. It was missing a wing. It seemed that the arm he initially managed to cut off was its other wing. It tried to make space by hopping back but he was having none of that. With a burst of speed, he plunged both blades into the beast's chest and pushed both out to the sides. It let out another screech and landed in a heap. It writhed in pain as gold dust poured from its open wounds. Without missing a beat, he stepped up and beheaded it.
His gaze zeroed in on the other non-human, his blades at the ready.
"I must say, Mr. Yuuki, I have not seen a demigod quite as skilled in recent times." It brought its hands up placatingly as Archer fixed his hold on his blades. "No need to be on guard, I'm not here to hurt you." It turned to the girl. "Ah, yes, Ms. Jackson, while it's a bit late, please take this to protect yourself with." It threw a pen which the girl clumsily caught.
He kept the surprise from showing on his face. The unassuming pen was old. Not in the sense that it was ancient - or as ancient as some of his Noble Phantasms - as a whole but it had an underlying hint of timelessness. Anaklusmos (ανακλυσμός), a blade of three feet in length that looked like a cross between a Naue II and a xiphos made of celestial bronze, forged in the fires of Mount Etna and cooled in the waters of River Lethe. Deadly to gods, demigods, and non-humans alike, but completely safe for anyone fully mortal. Initially owned by a daughter of Atlas and Pleione, Zoë Nightshade, who gifted it to Herakles to defeat the hundred-headed dragon Ladon on his Eleventh Labor to get a Golden Apple of Immortality from the Garden of Hesperides. Several nameless hands came to hold the blade but never saw use. It then found its way to Kheiron (Χείρων), and now to Persephone. It, as it was, wasn't a Noble Phantasm - it lacked the weight of belief and legend behind it - but it had the potential to become a Noble Phantasm.
That the originals of the Heroic Spirits he knew and fought - or at least versions of them - were still alive and interacted with the Mundane was something he should have expected, really.
"A pen?" Persephone asked as she looked it over in her hands.
Kheiron continued, "To use it, simply uncap the pen. Be careful, though."
She did just that. "Woah!" The pen lengthened into its sword form and she started swinging it around.
"Its name is Anaklusmos or Riptide. It's an old blade with a long and tragic past."
The girl held the blade inches from her face, face filled with awe.
He lowered Kanshou and Bakuya but didn't dismiss them. This non-human wasn't a mere phantasmal beast and, though he didn't seem to hold the same level of combat ability as the Heroic Spirit Archer once fought, this Kheiron was still powerful in his own right.
He turned half his attention to the girl. "You okay?"
"I, uh, yeah." Her tone became subdued somewhat.
"Good." He then said, "So what's the venerable Kheiron doing masquerading as a schoolteacher?"
The man in the wheelchair blinked in surprise and stared at him. "I have not heard that name in a long while. You know who I am?"
Instead of answering the question, Archer raised a brow.
"Oh, well, that makes things easier." He cleared his throat and paused for a few seconds to gather his thoughts. "For Ms. Jackson's benefit - I'm the counselor for Camp Half-Blood, a camp that takes in young demigods and equips them with the skills they would need to protect themselves. I, along with others, go out in the field to search for errant demigods who're aware or strong enough to know of our world."
"Wait, wait, wait, I'm a demigod?"
He glanced at the girl. Now really wasn't the time for her confusion but he could understand it.
Kheiron was silent for another few seconds before he answered. "Yes, Ms. Jackson, you are but your scent seems...muddy, for want of a better term. Yours even more so, Mr. Yuuki. Monsters should be lining up to get at you with how strong your scent should be to them but I haven't seen any go after you." His watch alarm went off. "Ah, lunch has ended. Come to my classroom tomorrow and we'll discuss more, okay? Mr. Underwood can guide you there if you don't know the way." He wheeled himself away towards where the other students were.
"You're too troublesome for your own good," Archer muttered under his breath. He pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Hey! What's that supposed to mean?"
"And you," he turned to the other non-human, "you've been oddly quiet so far, non-human."
"Oh, uh, um, mehehehehe." The non-human frantically looked anywhere except in his direction.
"Hey! Don't pick on Grover! You've been doing it all day!"
"Uh, Pers, I think you shouldn't anger the guy who just killed that monster single-handed."
The girl hesitated for a moment. "Still," she began weakly. "It- It's not right."
He grunted. "Keep your sword with you. And just put the cap on it to turn it back into a pen." He turned to the beast. "If you're really her friend, you should probably come clean."
"Come clean about what?"
The boy looked incredibly uncomfortable as he fidgeted his fingers and his eyes frantically wandered. "Can- Can we talk about this some other time?"
"If you won't tell her, I will."
"Mehehehehehe." The non-human clapped hands to his mouth, panicked. He took a deep breath and seemed to gather his strength.
