I saw Gard hit the line of snake women before I had even closed half the distance. When her axe hit a monster with the bronze side, monsters turned to dust instantly. They were the lucky ones, though. The ones who were hit with the normal steel side were the ones I almost felt bad for. With each stroke of that steel blade, ruins flared on the metal and the monsters bled golden blood, Limbs went flying, hisses and shrieks coming from the now limbless monsters as they clutched at their bleeding stumps. They didn't seem used to pain, most of them freezing where they stood from any physical injury, no matter how minor. I guess when the one weapon that can really hurt you tended to dust you immediately, pain wasn't really a factor.

I was jerked from my philosophical musings by an attempted spear thrown at my face. It's amazing what a large, pointy projectile being thrown way to fast to be from a human can do for your concentration levels. My body moved on autopilot, Winter Knight instinct kicking in to bring an arm up covering my face, spear smashing against my duster, which hurt enough I knew it would leave a nasty bruise in the morning but it was better than, you know, being skewered in the face. My other hand, the one with the blasting rod in it, raised, and with a sweep sent out a sweeping ring of fire, infused with a bit of my soul as, according to Bob, it was the only way to actually hurt these monsters. It worked. The monsters burned just as well, if not better, than anything else I'd ever faced. I hit the opening Gard had conveniently left me, Grimalkin still at my side, and kept moving forward, never letting my momentum stop, because I knew if I did I'd be dead. Time became a blur.

At one point I had a sword in my hand, and I was back to back with Gard as we fought a gigantic and absolutely horrible smelling Cyclops, eventually managing to bring it down when I froze its legs and the Valkyrie shattered them. At another, I was with a trio of kids I didn't know, smashing these seal looking things with my staff, breaking noses and their weird little flippers.

Percy joined me at one point, both of us tag-teaming a pair of hellhounds as I shot fireballs at them, and he did a slide Babe Ruth would have been proud of, slicing them down the middle. Gard came out of the mess, pistol drawn and shooting a third hellhound in the head with a bronze bullet.

We seemed to be in the quiet for a few moments, and I leaned on my staff, panting. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Percy wiping his face with a shirtsleeve as well. The only one who seemed unaffected was Gard, even Grimalkin sitting down and licking his paw in obvious weariness. "We cant keep this up much longer." The kid said, and I looked around to see that the enemy had grown stronger since I had charged in, though much less uniform. Instead of interlocked shields and armored snake women, it seemed to be a random assortment of monsters, all of them deadly.

"What can we do? We can't let them into the city." Said a voice from thin air, a voice to which I most definitely did not jump three feet in the air from, ahem.

I spun around, blasting rod pointing at thin air. Or what I thought was thin air. The blonde girl from before suddenly appeared in front of me, as completely hidden as someone under Molly's best veil. She was holding a baseball cap in her hand, and raised an eyebrow as she moved away from the glowing tip of my blasting rod. "Percy, they just keep replacing the ones we kill. I don't know how many monsters Kronos has, but from the reports that have managed to get through to me, every battlefield has mortal mercenaries on it to some degree or another."

Hells bells. These kids weren't prepared for that, not like Marcone's men had been. There were no troubleshooters to come set up their own counter nests. Once again I cursed the Accorded Nations in my mind, and while I was doing that I almost missed the next insane suggestion that Percy said. "We need to break these guys now. Monsters aren't all that brave on their own. I'm betting that if I can go play Knock Down The Minotaur it will do a lot more damage than killing endless hordes of monsters."

"Oh sure kill the freakin' Minotaur just like that, huh?" I looked at Gard, who just kind of shrugged.

"Man, I've done it once, and that was when I was 12. I reckon old Snot Nose hasn't improved all that much."

My jaw hit the pavement, and I think I created new wrinkles in my forehead with how far my eyebrows shot up. "You defeated the Minotaur when you were twelve?"

The kid grinned, a truly disturbing expression on his young face, and sketched a little bow, "Save your applause for later, please."

And with that, he was off running across the ground in that unnaturally fast speed of his, dodging flaming javelins and sliding under leaping hellhounds. And with him went our brief reprieve from combat. I was once more surrounded by claws, teeth and weapons of all ancient descriptions, laying out deadly damage with my staff, sweeping them off the sides of the bridge with blasts of kinetic force, or when I had enough time to manage it, wind. With my other hand, I was sending out fireball after fireball, and in an effort to put out their flaming clothing, the monsters did the work for me, bounding off the bridge into the water far, far below.

There were a few close calls, but Grimalkin was at my back the entire time, protecting me from what my duster wouldn't have been able to handle, which after a fresh year of renewing and strengthening my enchantments, wasn't much. The thing that struck me as most remarkable, most different from the fight at the Battle of the Bean, was the terrain. There was no mud to slog through, no liquid running whether it be rain or blood that could slip you up. There was only solid ground beneath my feet. I stumbled and nearly tripped over a dead body beneath my feet, I looked down, shocked at finding something that hadn't turned to dust there to trip me and was abruptly reminded that while this was much better than that desperate, ugly fight in Chicago, there were still downsides.

Beneath my feet lay a body of a kid, hand outstretched and holding a bow in her limp fingers, the other hand in a quiver of arrows that was attached to her belt, no more than thirteen at the most. She had a claw slash across her throat, and deep furrows raked into her armor, the little of it she was wearing. I looked down at her face, peaceful in death, not so much the slackness of the muscles relaxing but more the calm you get when you've put down a heavy burden and could finally rest. Slowly I crouched, and swept a hand over her eyelids, closing them. "Rest now." I murmured softly, not knowing where the words came from but letting them well up from between my lips all the same. I looked down at her face one last time before I stood up and grabbed my staff from where it rested on my hip.

Before, I had been letting the Winter Mantle run my body on autopilot, allowing my instincts to carry me along as I fought to keep moving, not stop. I closed my eyes and saw the young girl lying dead on the pavement, killed by monsters. Now, it had become personal.

"Fine, you bastards. You wanna play?" I drew in power from the air, the constant spell that kept everyone asleep providing my staff to charge quicker than normal but not by much. "Let's play."

I strode forward, that image of the girl burned into my retinas, as clear and present as if I had seen it with the Sight. Hellhounds kept at me. I burned them to crisps before their paws even touched the ground again. Snake women threw burning javelins or spears, I'm not a weapon expert, I just knew they were big and pointy. I twisted my staff and cold Arctic wind swept in from the oceanfront, turning the spears in midair and sending them back to their casters, burying squarely in their necks. Things out of every description of nightmare tried to skewer me, claw me, bite me, hit me with enough pure strength to stop a semi truck in its tracks or just plain shoot me. Claws and teeth found no purchase. Weapons bent on my duster. Bullets bounced off my shield. Pure physical force I leaned out of the way of each punch or kick, my body swaying as naturally as if I had been Neo in the Matrix. I killed them all. They were not going to hurt another person if I had my way.

A cyclops as big as River Shoulders threw one of the burning cars at me, and I dropped to a knee, raising my shield so it hit my defense at an oblique angle, the car skittering over me and slamming into several other monsters behind me. The giveaway was the shriek and then dust. I raised my staff and pointed it at the cyclops, which was already reaching for another burning automobile projectile to use as ammo. "Forzare!" With a blast of kinetic force that could have blown in a brick wall, the single ugly eyeball in the center of its face shot out the back of its head with an ugly squelching sound. The cyclops mouth dropped open for all of one second, golden ichor flowing from where its brain used to be, before it too was dust. I strode through the dust cloud, gaze locked ahead, focused on the next monster.

There is no better fuel for destructive magic than rage, any apprentice wizard can tell you that. And I was working with more power than was usually available to me as well. But even that wasn't enough to sustain me forever. I could feel fatigue starting to set in around the corners of my awareness. Already my fire spells weren't burning quite as hot, my wind not blasting quite as strong. I took a hit on the shoulder, white static erupting to mask the pain that I knew was there, regardless of whether I could feel it or not. I turned a very surprised looking thing looking down at his bent sword into a miniature ice sculpture and swung my staff to shatter it. No, I definitely couldn't keep this up forever.

I fought on for a few more yards, trust me it's a lot harder than it sounds, before I found that the monsters seemed to have gotten the memo and were steering far clear of me, giving me a wide berth. No, wait. I shook my tired head and realized that they weren't steering clear of me, they were steering clear of…

I looked up, and up some more. Towering over me in the center of this unexpected circle of clearness was the Minotaur. And standing across from him, looking like a dwarf next to a professional wrestler, was the kid Percy. I realized that I had accidentally intruded on a private shit talking session. Trust me, we fellow smartasses take them very seriously.

"Hey Beef Boy!" The sandy haired kid shouted, and the Minotaur narrowed its glowing red eyes and- oh I didn't mention the glowing red eyes? Yup this thing had glowing red eyes. Because of course it did. "Didn't I kill you already?"

A snake lady threw a spear at him, javelin whatever, and he batted it aside without ever breaking gaze from the monstrous creature. And as I watched, the Minotaur did something strange. Did you ever have those toys as a kid, a small foam dinosaur that if you put it in the water it would grow bigger and yet never lose its proportions to itself? It was like that. The arms grew longer, thicker somehow. The thing began to get taller as well, skin becoming more leatherier while the horns seemed to go from the smooth horns of a bull you'd expect to a more ribbed, with a slightly more pronounced curl at the end of them. Now, I was new to the whole Greek Monsters are real-world, and I wasn't fully caught up on my biology classes covering half human half animal people, but I was pretty sure Minotaurs weren't supposed to be able to do that. For the barest second the wind shifted in my direction and I caught the smell of brimstone and sulfur on the air.

"Hells bells." My eyes widened just as a second, luminescent pair appeared above the already glowing red ones on the Minotaur's forehead.

"Things… have changed." The Minotaur's voice was strangely echoey and contorted from the muzzle it possessed (or maybe it was a snout, like I said I missed those classes). "Prepare to die, little demigod."