You can't beat a monster that far above you. Percy knew that going in. Great Sage had told him the odds in cold blue letters: less than one percent.
But you don't always have to beat it. Sometimes you just have to last long enough for someone else to get there.
Tisiphone came at him like a falling building. Her claws were as long as his forearm, her wings blotted out the gallery lights, and the sound she made was the scream of every murdered person who had ever cried out for vengeance. Percy didn't try to meet her. He'd learned that from the Hobgoblins. He moved.
Left, behind a marble sarcophagus. The claws came down and split the sarcophagus in half.
Right, under a swinging wing, rolling on the slick floor, coming up with the training sword in a low guard. The Monk class was one day old in him. It gave him almost nothing yet, but it gave him this: a lightness in his feet, a half-step of speed he hadn't had the night before.
[Evasion (Monk Lv 1) — Attack avoided.]
"What are you?" Tisiphone hissed. She was circling him now, wings half spread, eyes burning. "You're not a demigod. You smell like a mortal." She sniffed. Her face changed. "No. You smell like something else. You smell like the Pit. Like the deep places. How does a mortal boy smell like Tartarus?"
"Long story," Percy panted.
"I have time."
"I don't."
He reached into his inventory, thought Summon Card: Slime, and flung the glowing card straight at her face.
It burst in midair. A Green Slime the size of a beanbag chair materialized two feet in front of the Eldest of the Erinyes and hit her square in the face with a wet, enormous splat.
For one second, the Avenger of Murder, daughter of Night, older than Olympus, simply stood there with a slime on her head.
Percy had never been so proud of anything in his life.
She shrieked and tore it off, and in that second he was inside her reach. Riposte, a cut along the inside of her wrist where the skin was thin, with every scrap of Stamina he had.
[RIPOSTE — -61 damage.]
[Tisiphone HP: 99.6%]
It was a scratch. Less than a scratch. But the bronze edge was celestial bronze, and the scratch smoked, and the Fury stared down at her own wrist in disbelief.
"You cut me," she said.
"Yeah," Percy said, and lifted the split shield again. "Get used to it."
She lunged. He wasn't fast enough this time. Her claws raked across the shield and through it and across his chest.
[-160 HP]
[HP: 30 / 380]
[SECOND WIND! +95 HP]
He stayed on his feet. Barely.
Then a golden arrow took her through the wing. A second hit her shoulder, and this one went in deep. Across the gallery, Mr. Brunner had thrown off his blanket, and he wasn't in a wheelchair anymore. He was standing, seven feet tall, the rear half of his body a white stallion's, a great horn bow in his hands, his face very old and very grim.
"Leave," Chiron said. "Daughter of Night. You have no right to this boy. Not in this world. Not yet."
Tisiphone looked at the centaur. At Ezra, cowering behind a pillar. At the satyr struggling to his hooves in the broken glass. And then, for a long time, at Percy.
She smiled. It was the worst thing he'd seen since the Pit.
"Not yet," she agreed. "But I will be watching both of you. The boy who will do it, and the boy who has already paid for it." She spread her wings. "Little mortal. I don't know what you are. But I will find out."
She was gone in a burst of black smoke and the smell of old blood.
[MAIN QUEST UPDATE: The Boy Who Would Be Hero]
[Stage 1 Complete: Ezra Coleman survived the attack of the Greater Fury.]
[+3,000 EXP]
[LEVEL UP! Level 20 → Level 21]
[Stage 2: Ezra Coleman must reach Camp Half-Blood.]
[FAITH EARNED: The Host stood against a Greater Fury in defense of a child of the gods, before divine witnesses.]
[+180 Faith Points.]
Percy blinked at the last line. His first Faith. Not from the hundreds of monsters in The Loom, but from this. From one fight in the real world, in front of people who mattered.
The Loom has no audience, the System had told him. It will only make you strong.
Out here, he thought, the gods are watching.
The gallery was wrecked. Sprinklers had come on somewhere. Alarms were howling. Mortals were pouring in through the far doors, and he could see the Mist settling over them like fog, their eyes sliding off the centaur and the shattered glass.
"Hey," said a voice. "Hey! You."
Ezra Coleman was coming out from behind his pillar, soaked and shaking and pale, and trying very hard to look like none of those things. He jabbed a finger at Percy. "Who are you? What the hell was that? I had that, okay? I was just about to—"
Percy looked at him.
He didn't mean anything by the look. But something must have been in it, something from the black shore of the Cocytus, because Ezra took a full step back and the words died in his throat.
"You're welcome," Percy said quietly, and turned away before he said anything worse.
He found himself face to face with Grover.
The satyr stood three feet away with blood on his forehead, staring at Percy like someone listening very hard to a song he almost remembered.
"I know you," Grover said slowly. "Don't I? I've been dreaming about you for weeks. There was a bus, and a pair of cursed sneakers, and a tree, and..." He pressed a hand to his forehead. His eyes were filling and he didn't seem to know why. "Why does it hurt to look at you?"
Percy wanted to grab him and hug him and say it's me, G-man, you were there, you were the only one who held my hand. He wanted it so badly his whole body ached.
He didn't. Push too hard, too fast, and it might break something. He just reached out and squeezed Grover's shoulder, the way Grover had squeezed his once, in the throne room of the gods.
"Yeah," he said softly. "You know me. It'll come back. Don't force it."
"Young man."
Chiron had folded himself back into the wheelchair. To every mortal in the room he was just a teacher in tweed. But his eyes were the eyes of a centaur who had lived three thousand years and had never once seen anything like this.
"You are mortal," Chiron said. It wasn't a question. "I can see it. I can smell it. And you stood against Tisiphone herself with a practice sword and a wooden shield. And cut her." He leaned forward. "Who are you?"
Percy smiled at him, a small, tired, crooked smile he hadn't been able to give Chiron in a very long time.
"A friend," he said. "Get them to camp, Chiron. Both of them. I'll see you on Half-Blood Hill."
He walked out into the howling alarms and was gone before the old centaur could ask how he knew that name.
[FLOOR 3: THE CRYPT OF THE DEAD]
[Rank: F]
[Enemies: Lv 20–30]
[Main Quest: Defeat the Necromancer.]
[Side Quest: LAST RITES — Lay 13 restless spirits to rest.]
[Hidden Quest: ???]
Floor 3 was cold, and it didn't stay dead.
He came out of the Gate into a long ossuary corridor. The walls were made of skulls, thousands of them, packed in neat rows with their empty eyes all facing inward, and a gray light came from nowhere at all. His breath smoked. Somewhere far ahead, something was chanting in a language that set his teeth on edge.
The first skeleton came out of the wall.
It literally came out of the wall, pulling itself free of the packed bones with a sound like dice in a cup, and lurched at him with a rusted sword. He took it apart in three strokes. It fell into a pile of bones.
Thirty seconds later, the pile of bones stood up again.
[NOTE: The undead of Floor 3 respawn. This floor tests endurance and crowd control.]
Of course they do, Percy thought.
It was the hardest floor yet, and not because the monsters were strong. They weren't, mostly. Skeletons were brittle. Zombies were slow. The wraiths were the worst, cold gray shapes that slid through walls and drained the warmth out of him when they touched him, but even the wraiths died to a good cut. The problem was that nothing stayed dead. Every fight was a fight he'd have to have again in a minute, and again after that. There was no clearing a room. There was only getting through it before it filled back up.
So he learned to move through the crypt like a swimmer through a current. Never stop. Never fight what you don't have to. Break the skeleton's legs and step past it. Shove the zombie into the next zombie and go around them both. He learned which sarcophagus rooms opened when you walked past, and stopped walking past them. He learned that the chapel near the center of the floor was a safe zone, where nothing rose, and that he could rest there.
And in the chapel, on the third tower-night, he met the first of the thirteen.
She was a girl. Maybe ten. A ghost, faint and gray, sitting on the altar steps with her knees pulled up, and she wasn't trying to hurt him. She was just crying.
[Restless Spirit (1 / 13)]
"Hey," Percy said, very gently, and sat down on the step below her. "Hey. What's wrong?"
She looked at him with huge dark eyes. "I can't find my brother," she whispered. "We came in together. The man in the library took us. He put me in the wall. I don't know where he put Matthias."
Percy thought about another girl, a long time ago, in another life. Bianca di Angelo, telling him to take care of her little brother. Promising, and failing.
"What does he look like?" he asked.
It took him two tower-days. He found Matthias's ghost at the bottom of the bone bridge, wandering in circles in the dark, calling his sister's name. He led him up to the chapel. When the two small ghosts saw each other, they ran and held each other, and they both went bright, so bright Percy had to shield his eyes, and then they were gone.
[Restless Spirits laid to rest: 2 / 13.]
He found the others one at a time. A soldier who wanted his sword buried with him. A mother looking for her baby. An old man who just wanted someone to hear his name said out loud, and Percy said it, three times, and he smiled and went. Each one cost him time. Each one made the floor a little quieter.
[SIDE QUEST COMPLETE: LAST RITES. 13 / 13.]
[Reward: Wraith-Ward Charm (Rare) — Resistance to cold and life-drain.]
[Reward: Slime Ring HP Regeneration +13 (one for each act of mercy).]
[The respawn rate of Floor 3 has been reduced by half.]
The Necromancer's library was at the end of the bone bridge, and it was full of books.
Percy stopped in the doorway, because books had never been his friends. In both lives, letters had swum on the page. In this one too. The System had told him on his first day: Dyslexia noted. Spellbooks read at -50% speed.
But the book lying open on the reading stand in the middle of the room wasn't written in English.
It was Ancient Greek. Broken Greek, half the letters wrong, written by someone who had learned it from a dead tongue and never heard it spoken. But Greek. And Percy's brain, the one that had been wired by a god's blood in another life and carried the wiring over in its soul, looked at the jagged letters and simply read them.
On the binding of the risen. On the theft of storms. On the calling-back of what was taken.
He read for an hour, standing at the stand, while skeletons rattled in the hall outside. He didn't understand most of it. But he understood enough.
[HIDDEN QUEST COMPLETE: THE NECROMANCER'S BOOK.]
[The Host read a spellbook of the Wizard school without penalty.]
[Class Eligibility unlocked: WIZARD.]
[Item acquired: The Necromancer's Grimoire (Epic) [Wizard] — sent to Locked Inventory. Requires a Wizard Class Slot (Host Lv 100).]
Lv 100, Percy thought. Okay. Something to look forward to.
And behind him, in the doorway, the chanting stopped.
[FLOOR BOSS: THE NECROMANCER — Lv 35]
[HP: 3,100 / 3,100]
[Abilities: Raise Dead (waves), Stolen Storm, Bone Ward]
He was tall and gaunt, in black robes stiff with dust, with skin like old paper stretched over his skull. He held a staff of twisted black wood topped with a cage of finger bones, and inside the cage something crackled. Blue-white. Bright. Familiar.
Lightning.
"A reader," the Necromancer whispered. His voice was dry as a page. "How rare. How delicious. You will make a fine librarian, boy, once I have hollowed you out."
He raised the staff, and the dead came.
They came from the walls and the floor and the shelves, skeletons and zombies and wraiths in a tide, and every one of them was crackling. Blue sparks danced in their empty eye sockets. Lightning crawled over their bones. When the first one swung at him and Percy blocked it with his shield, the charge went up his arm like he'd grabbed a live wire.
[-45 HP. Status: Shocked.]
And something in his chest answered.
It was small. Barely there. A flicker, deep down under his ribs, like a pilot light in a cold furnace. The bloodline. The sleeping sky. It had felt the stolen storm in the Necromancer's staff and it had turned over in its sleep, the way a dog lifts its head at a familiar footstep.
[ALERT: Dormant bloodline has reacted to a storm source.]
[The bloodline does not wake. But it remembers what it is.]
That's mine, Percy thought, staring at the crackling cage on top of the staff. He didn't know where the thought came from. That's my dad's. He stole it.
The fight took forty minutes.
It was endurance, the way the whole floor had been endurance. Waves of crackling dead, wave after wave after wave, and Percy in the middle of them with a sword and a shield and two classes' worth of tricks. He didn't try to kill them all. He couldn't. He pushed through them. Trip, step, cut, move. Monk speed to slip a wraith's touch. Fighter's endurance to take the hits he couldn't slip. Goblin Totem, cracked over his own head, for thirty seconds of raw strength when the third wave pinned him against the bookshelves.
And always moving toward the Necromancer. Closer and closer. Because the dead didn't matter. Only the staff did.
[HP: 112 / 410]
He was ten feet away when the Necromancer realized what he was doing.
"No—"
[ACTION SURGE!]
[DISARM!]
The staff flew out of the Necromancer's hands and spun through the air. Percy caught it.
The lightning in the cage of bones went still. Then it went bright, white-hot, so bright the whole library lit up like noon, and every crackling skeleton in the room stopped in its tracks and fell apart.
The Necromancer screamed. Without the stolen storm, his dead were just bones. And he was just an old man in a dusty robe, facing a boy holding his own staff.
Percy dropped the staff and put the xiphos through his heart.
[FLOOR BOSS DEFEATED: THE NECROMANCER.]
[FLOOR 3 CLEARED. Thread tied off.]
[+7,200 EXP]
[LEVEL UP! Level 22 → Level 23]
[LEVEL UP! Level 23 → Level 24]
[Loot: Bone Fragments x40. Dark Mana Crystals x6. Necromancer's Staff (Rare) [Wizard] — Locked Inventory.]
[RARE LOOT: RUNE OF LIGHTNING (Fragment) (Legendary)]
[A shard of storm-magic stolen long ago from a sky that was not yours, in a world that was not this one. It cannot be used as it is. It is waiting to be reforged.]
Percy picked it up off the library floor. It was a sliver of something like blue glass, as long as his thumb, and lightning moved inside it in slow lazy coils. When he held it, the flicker in his chest stirred again.
Reforged, he thought. How do you reforge lightning?
[Unknown. Insufficient data. Great Sage notes that Floor 7 is titled THE INFERNAL FORGE.]
Huh.
He put it in his inventory, very carefully. Then the last line of the loot notice appeared, and he forgot all about it.
[MYTHIC LOOT: SOUL EXTRACTION]
[The Host may extract the shadow of a being he has personally defeated, and bind it to his service as a Shadow Soldier.]
[Extraction must be attempted within 60 seconds of the target's defeat. Success depends on the strength of the target's will, the Host's Level, and the Host's CHA. Up to 3 attempts.]
[Shadows dwell within the Host's shadow, may be summoned at will, and grow as the Host grows. They may leave The Loom with the Host.]
[Ranks: Normal → Elite → Knight → Elite Knight → Commander → Marshal → ???]
[Shadow Capacity: 5. Capacity rises with Vessel Rank.]
[Extraction window: 38 seconds.]
Percy stared at the words.
Shadows, he thought. Like Nico.
Nico, standing at the top of the amphitheater with his face wet. Nico, being dragged back by his father while he howled.
He'd tell me I was stealing his whole aesthetic.
The Necromancer's body was already crumbling into gray dust on the library floor.
[Extraction window: 21 seconds.]
Percy held out his hand over the dust.
"Arise," he said.
He didn't know why that word. It just came to him, the way the sword had come back to his hand. Like it had always been waiting.
The shadows under his feet moved.
They flowed out from under him like spilled ink, black and liquid, and pooled where the Necromancer had fallen. They rose. A tall thin shape in black robes, with a staff of shadow in its hand and two burning violet points where its eyes should be. It looked at Percy for a long moment.
Then it bowed.
[EXTRACTION SUCCESSFUL!]
[Shadow Soldier acquired: The Necromancer — Rank: ELITE]
[Shadow ability retained: Raise Dead (Lesser) — may raise up to 6 skeletal soldiers from available bones.]
[Would you like to name this Shadow?]
Percy looked at the tall dark figure that had tried to hollow him out ten minutes ago.
"Lazarus," he said. "Since you're so into bringing people back."
[Shadow Named: LAZARUS.]
The shadow inclined its head, very slightly, with what might have been dry amusement. Then it sank back down into Percy's shadow and was gone. For the first time in either life, Percy Jackson's shadow felt heavier than it should.
[Shadow Army: 1 / 5]
Four empty slots. Percy sat on the floor of the Necromancer's library and looked at them for a long time.
He could fill them with anything. Skeletons from the corridors. Wraiths. Zombies. They'd come cheap and easy.
But he thought about the road to Half-Blood Hill. About the storm, and the car in the ditch, and what was going to come running up the road behind it in a few days' time. And he thought about a lesson he'd learned the hard way in a burning goblin camp: an army isn't how many soldiers you have. It's what they can do together.
He didn't want a crowd. He wanted a team.
[Great Sage notes: Cleared floors reset 24 tower-hours after the Host leaves. Floor Bosses respawn at 50% loot. The Host may revisit Floor 1 and Floor 2 through their Waypoints.]
Yeah, Percy thought, getting to his feet. I know exactly who I want.
The Slime King came back on the first reset. With the floor's Thread already tied off, it didn't need a thousand kills this time. It just rose up out of the pit, minivan-sized and furious, crown bobbing.
The fight took eleven minutes. He knew where the crown was now.
"Arise."
[EXTRACTION FAILED. The target's will resisted.]
"Arise."
[EXTRACTION FAILED.]
Percy frowned at the puddle of green goo slowly going still on the cave floor. Strength of the target's will. What did a slime even want?
He thought about it. Every slime on this floor wanted exactly one thing. To eat. To grow. To get bigger. The King was just the one who'd gotten there first.
"Hey," he said, kneeling by the puddle. "I know a place with a lot more to eat than this cave. Whole roads full of monsters. Come with me and you'll never be hungry again."
"Arise."
[EXTRACTION SUCCESSFUL!]
[Shadow Soldier acquired: The Slime King — Rank: ELITE]
[Shadow ability retained: Absorb, Royal Split.]
It came up out of the dark as a great wobbling dome of black jelly, faintly translucent, with two violet eyes floating in it and a tiny crown of shadow bobbing on top. It wiggled. Percy was almost sure it was happy.
"Gloop," he said. "Your name is Gloop."
Gloop wiggled harder.
Varka Ironjaw was waiting at the Floor 2 Waypoint, exactly where she'd said she'd be, sitting on a boulder with her axe across her knees.
She stood when the Gate opened. Her yellow eyes found his face, and something in her iron jaw clicked. It might have been a smile.
"Pit-champion. You came back."
"I said I would."
"Many say that." She fell into step beside him as he walked down toward the camp. "What do you hunt today?"
Percy told her. All of it. The shadows, the extraction, the Necromancer rising out of his own dust and bowing. He told her about the two Hobgoblins and the King.
Varka didn't say anything for a long time.
"You would take my King into your shadow," she said at last.
"Only if he'd want it. I won't force him." Percy hesitated. "I don't know if that's how it works. I don't know if he'd even be him anymore. But I'd ask."
Varka stopped walking. She looked down the hill at the war camp, at the drums and the smoke and the pit with its ring of torches, the same as it had been ten thousand times.
"His name is Gorrath," she said. "Nobody in this camp has said it in a thousand years. They only say King." Her jaw clicked again. "He has fought in that pit for as long as I have. Lost to no one but you. If you offer him a way out of this story, pit-champion, he will take it. And he will be grateful."
Percy took the Hobgoblins first. He and Varka together, the first time anyone had fought beside him since the Fates came to his kitchen, and it was good. She was a wall with an axe. He was speed and a sword and a shield behind her. When the flail Hobgoblin went for her blind side, he was already there.
[Hobgoblin Warlord defeated. x2]
"Arise."
[EXTRACTION SUCCESSFUL! Shadow Soldier acquired: Hobgoblin Warlord (Flail) — Rank: NORMAL]
"Arise."
[EXTRACTION SUCCESSFUL! Shadow Soldier acquired: Hobgoblin Warlord (Shield) — Rank: NORMAL]
They rose side by side, two big shadow-hobgoblins with violet eyes, one with a shadow flail and one behind a shadow tower shield, and looked at each other, and then at him.
"Thing One," Percy said, pointing. "Thing Two."
Varka looked at him.
"It's a book," he said. "From my world. You'd like it."
Then he walked down into the pit.
The Orc King was waiting. This time, Percy fought him with a sword and shield, under the torches, while the camp drummed. It was a real fight and a hard one, and in the middle of it the King looked down at him over the edge of his great cleaver, and Percy saw something in his small fierce eyes that hadn't been there the first time. Recognition.
When it was over, Gorrath lay on his back in the dirt of his own pit, breathing hard, not yet dissolving.
Percy knelt beside him.
"Varka told me your name," he said quietly. "Gorrath. I've got a place for you, if you want it. Out of this story. Out of this pit. Somewhere new, where nothing's already written."
The Orc King looked past him, at his champion standing at the edge of the torchlight. Varka nodded, once.
Gorrath closed his eyes. And smiled, around his gold-capped tusks, for the first time in a thousand years.
He dissolved.
"Arise."
[EXTRACTION SUCCESSFUL!]
[Shadow Soldier acquired: Gorrath, the Orc King — Rank: KNIGHT]
[This Shadow chose to serve.]
He rose nine feet tall out of the dark of the pit, a king of shadow with a shadow cleaver, and violet eyes, and a cloak of shadow wolf pelts. He looked at Percy. Then he turned and looked at Varka.
Varka Ironjaw, who had fought in that pit for ten thousand nights, went down on one knee before the shadow of her king, and bowed her head.
Gorrath laid one huge shadow hand on her shoulder. Then he turned back to Percy, and dropped to one knee too.
[Shadow Army: 5 / 5]
[Lazarus (Elite) — Gloop (Elite) — Gorrath (Knight) — Thing One (Normal) — Thing Two (Normal)]
Percy stood in the pit with five shadows kneeling around him and an orc champion beside him, and the drums of the war camp went quiet, one by one, until there was nothing but the crackle of the torches.
It wasn't an army. Not yet.
But when he looked at them, he felt something he hadn't felt in a very long time.
He felt like he wasn't alone.
[DING!]
[Faith Points: 180.]
[The Faith Gacha is available. Standard pull: 100 Faith. Pull? YES / NO]
He'd been saving it. He didn't know why. Something about it felt different from the tower loot. The tower was training. The Faith was earned, out there, in the real world, in front of the gods.
Yes.
A capsule appeared in the air in front of him, red-gold and warm, glowing like an ember on a cold night. It cracked open, and the light that came out of it smelled like woodsmoke and baking bread.
[PATRON BLESSING ACQUIRED!]
[BLESSING OF HESTIA, Goddess of the Hearth]
[Hestia remembers granting you this blessing. She does not question why. She only remembers that she wished you to come home.]
[Passive: HEARTHKEEPER — While near any flame, the Host regenerates HP, Stamina and Focus at 3x the normal rate.]
[Active: SANCTUARY (Lv 1) — Designate a place as Home. Within 50 meters of it, the Host and his allies are shielded from scrying, and hostile intent toward them is revealed. One active Sanctuary at a time.]
Percy sat on his bedroom floor and read it three times.
Hestia. Who had left her fire and walked across the throne room of the gods and stood beside him in his chains, with her hand resting on his head the way his mother's used to, while his father abstained.
In this world she'd never met him. But somewhere on Olympus right now, a small, quiet goddess by the central hearth would suddenly remember blessing a boy she had never seen, and she would smile, and not know why.
Thank you, Percy thought, toward the ceiling. Both times.
He could have sworn the candle on his desk flickered a little brighter.
The first place he made a Sanctuary was the apartment on East 104th Street. Then he lay awake until dawn, listening to his mother breathe through the wall, and for the first time in two weeks, he wasn't afraid of anything finding her.
[STATUS]
Name: Perseus Jackson
Age: 14
Race: Human (Mortal)
Vessel Rank: F (Faith toward Rank E: 80 / 500)
Level: 26
Classes: Fighter (Lv 26) · Monk (Lv 7)
Divine Parentage: Zeus (Bloodline: Dormant — Stirring)
Patron Blessings: Hestia
Titles: Adopted Son of the Sky
HP: 520 / 520
Stamina: 290 / 290
Focus: 60 / 60
STR: 29
AGI: 28
VIT: 26
INT: 15
WIS: 21
CHA: 19
Free Stat Points: 0
Skills: Weapon Mastery — Sword (Lv 12), Shield (Lv 9) · Second Wind · Action Surge · Combat Maneuvers (Trip, Disarm, Riposte, Precision) · Unarmed Strike (Lv 6) · Evasion (Lv 4) · Soul Extraction (Mythic) · Hearthkeeper · Sanctuary (Lv 1) · Sky's Favor (Lesser)
Equipment: Bronze-Edged Training Xiphos · Round Shield (new) · Hand Wrappings · Slime Ring · Wraith-Ward Charm
Key Items: Rune of Lightning (Fragment)
Locked Inventory: Necromancer's Grimoire [Wizard] · Necromancer's Staff [Wizard]
Class Eligibility: Monk (slotted) · Wizard (eligible)
Shadow Army (5 / 5): Gorrath (Knight) · Lazarus (Elite) · Gloop (Elite) · Thing One (Normal) · Thing Two (Normal)
Companions: Varka Ironjaw (waiting at Floor 2 Waypoint)
Waypoints: Floor 1 · Floor 2 · Floor 3
[MAIN QUEST UPDATE: The Boy Who Would Be Hero]
[Ezra Coleman has left Yancy Academy. He is traveling toward Montauk with his mother and a satyr escort.]
[A great storm is gathering over Long Island.]
[Estimated time until the Minotaur intercepts: 36 hours.]
School had let out that afternoon. Percy read the screen sitting on his bed with his bag already packed, and then he went to keep a promise.
He told Nancy first.
He'd said he would, in the hallway, with her hand on his burned arm. So he walked to her building after dinner and sat with her on the stoop, the same stoop where she'd told him about her mom's boyfriend when they were ten, and he told her everything.
Not the first life. Not yet. That one was too big, too heavy to put on anyone. But the rest. The gods. The monsters. The System. The tower in his closet. The camp on Long Island, and the boy he had to protect, and the things he'd fought in the dark while she slept.
Nancy listened to the whole thing without saying a word.
When he was done, she was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "Prove it."
Percy looked around the empty street. Then he looked down at his own shadow, stretched long across the stoop in the streetlight.
"Gloop," he said softly. "Just a little."
A small dome of black jelly, about the size of a cat, rose up out of his shadow on the step between them. It had two violet eyes and a tiny shadow crown. It looked at Nancy. It wiggled.
Nancy Bobofit stared at it for ten full seconds.
Then she reached out, very slowly, and poked it.
Gloop wiggled harder.
"Oh my god," Nancy whispered. "It's cute. Percy. It's so cute. Why is it cute? Is it supposed to be cute?"
"I don't think so, no."
She laughed. It came out of her cracked and wet, half a sob. She put her hands over her face.
"I thought," she said, through her fingers. "The burn, and the bruises. I thought somebody was— I thought it was happening to you. Like me. I've been so scared. I've been lying awake."
"I know," Percy said. "I'm sorry, Nance. I'm so sorry."
She dropped her hands. Her eyes were red and furious and relieved all at once. "You're going," she said. "Tomorrow. To this camp. To fight monsters."
"Yeah."
"You come back," she said fiercely. "You hear me, Jackson? You come back, or I'm coming to get you. I'll find your stupid camp and I'll drag you home by your ear."
"I believe you," Percy said, and meant it.
She punched him. Then she hugged him, hard, the way she never did, and Gloop got squashed between them and didn't seem to mind at all.
His mom was harder.
He couldn't tell her everything. Not yet. He thought about it for hours. He thought about sitting her and Paul down at the kitchen table and saying there are gods, and monsters, and I'm one of the only people who can stop them, and I have to go. He thought about how she'd look at him. Whether she'd be terrified. Or whether, worse, she'd believe him and let him go anyway, because that was who she was.
So he told her the part of the truth he could.
"There's a camp on Long Island," he said at dinner. "For kids who are... different. The director came and found me after the museum thing." The Mist had covered the museum. As far as the news knew, there'd been a gas leak and a fire and a very brave kid who'd helped some students get out. "They want me to come for the summer. Maybe longer. Training."
Sally looked at him across the table. He saw her see it, whatever it was. The thing she'd seen on the beach at Montauk when he was four. The thing she'd seen on his ribs a week ago.
"This is what you've been training for," she said quietly. "Isn't it."
"Yeah, Mom."
"And you're going to go no matter what we say."
"I'll call," he said. "Every week. Every day, if I can. And when I can tell you everything, I will. I promise I'll come home."
Sally Jackson got up from the table and came around it and took his face in her hands, the way she had a thousand times. Her eyes were wet. She didn't let the tears fall.
"Be careful," she said.
This time, he didn't laugh.
"I will," he said. "I'll be so careful, Mom."
Paul walked him to the door afterward and stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
"Whatever it is," Paul said quietly, "you don't have to be the only one who's brave in this family. You know that, right? If it gets too big. You call. I'll come. Wherever it is."
Percy looked at the man who'd stood between the door and his mother, in another world, at the end.
"I know," he said, and his voice cracked. "I know you would, Paul."
Matt took it like Matt took everything, with a sneer and a joke and his arms crossed so nobody could see his hands shaking. "Great. Perfect. Abandon us for some weird nerd camp. See if I care." Then he hugged Percy so hard his ribs creaked, and walked away fast without looking back.
Rachel didn't say anything at all.
She walked with him to the bus station the next morning, just the two of them, through the gray early streets. She didn't talk the whole way. She just held his hand, and every so often she squeezed it.
At the station, while the Long Island bus idled at the curb, she finally turned and looked at him. Her green eyes were very strange. Very old.
"I've been having these dreams," she said. "For years. About a boy with green eyes, and the sea, and a big hill with a pine tree on top. And lately..." She swallowed. "Lately, about a throne room. And you, in chains. And me walking out into the middle of the room to stand next to you, even though I was so scared I could barely breathe."
Percy couldn't say anything.
"That happened," Rachel said. "Didn't it? Somewhere. Somehow. That really happened."
"Yeah," he whispered. "It did."
She nodded slowly, like it was the answer she'd been afraid of.
"I'm coming," she said. "Not now. I know I can't come now. But I'm coming. Me and Nancy and Matt. We'll figure it out. You don't get to do this alone again, Percy Jackson. Not this time."
He looked at her paint-spattered jeans and her wild red hair and her fierce, frightened, absolutely certain face.
"Okay," he said. "Okay, Rach. I'll be waiting."
She hugged him. She smelled like paint and coffee and the city. Then she pushed him toward the bus.
He sat by the window and watched her on the curb with her hand raised, getting smaller and smaller as the bus pulled out into traffic.
[NEW SIDE QUEST ISSUED]
[Quest: Those Who Stood Beside You]
[Rachel Elizabeth Dare, Nancy Bobofit, and Matt Sloan have chosen to follow you into the world of gods and monsters.]
[Objective: Prepare a place for them.]
[Reward: ???]
[Time Limit: None.]
Percy read it twice. Then he leaned his head against the cool glass of the window, and watched Manhattan slide away behind him, and let himself, just for a minute, cry.
Then he wiped his eyes, pulled up his Shadow Army, and started planning.
In his shadow, under the bus seat, five pairs of violet eyes opened in the dark.