Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

As promised, the first chapter of my magnum opus…again. Veterans of my fanbase may recall years ago when I tried to start the Chaos War for the first time, and it didn’t go very well. The general consensus was that the other stories needed to be finished first.

Well, all the stories have been finished, one way or the other.

There will be changes to this compared to the first time. For example, the continuity herein takes place in the timeline established in Piper’s Untold Story because it fits extremely well. If you haven’t read the Piper story, please go read it. If you don’t want to read it, you’ll make me sad.

You might also be slightly lost as to some of the characterization herein, as well.

Another way this story will be different is that the other Percy’s will not be getting huge expositional blurbs on their backstories. You’ve either read their stories, will go read their stories, or will just roll with the flow. Other than that, the premise is still the same. All the bad guys team up to defeat the good guys, Chaos brings in outside help, overarching themes of power and responsibility still abound, and the main characters face the consequences of their actions in ways that may be considered unfair.

In short, this story is still what I always intended it to be. My way of ending the story of Percy Jackson.

Obviously, this story is an AU post-TSATS, but the divergence starts post-ToA in ways beyond just Piper’s Untold Story.

Let us begin.

Disclaimer: I don’t own Percy Jackson and the Olympians

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Piper said to her old friends through the Iris Message.

It was a summer evening after Apollo teleported in on her and Shel having their moment on the roof, but before the end of summer when Nico and Will embarked on their quest down into Tartarus. In attendance of this Iris Message was Piper in her ancestral farmhouse in Tahlequah, Percy, Annabeth, Frank, and Hazel in the praetor’s barracks in Camp Jupiter, Leo and Calypso in Leo’s room in the Waystation, and Thalia and Reyna in their tent within the Hunter’s encampment.

Piper didn’t know how long she spoke for, but she covered mostly everything from how she fell out of love with Jason and eventually broke up with him, the rough patch they went through because of her emotional turmoil, his final moments against Caligula, her reception in Tahlequah, meeting Billy, the nightmares she started having of Jason, meeting Shel, meeting Jisdu, and everything else after. Piper revealed her new powers, piquing Frank’s interest with her animal shapeshifting, awing everybody with her Tlanuwa armor; she talked about how she and Shel became girlfriends, her battles with Incognito and the Asgina, and how her talks with Jisdu and Billy had led to her converting to Christianity and adopting the firm belief that she had a responsibility to use her powers for greater purposes—and they shared that same responsibility.

Finally, after so much talking and answering questions, there was silence as Piper concluded her story with her bold declaration.

Obviously, she kept some things to herself, such as how she was millionaire thanks to Billy’s will, that Jason was still alive, and the strange lawyer she met in Texas.

In truth, Piper didn’t know what she was expecting, or hoping for. Maybe for all of them to nod in agreement and join forces as another team of passionate, superpowered teenagers, and go off to fight the forces of evil men. Maybe for at least a few of them to agree with her. That being said, Piper was unsurprised when all of them just looked like kicked puppies.

But of course they did, and Piper didn’t blame them. They’d all been through so much already, seen so many horrible things already, why should they have to subject themselves to more? Force themselves to fight more? To have to travel more, instead of finally being able to settle down and enjoy the peaceful lives they’d earned? Well, at least in everyone’s cases except Thalia and Reyna, as they were constantly on the move anyway, being Hunters of Artemis.

But as Piper had already been told, and as she had already told them and come to firmly believe herself, none of them had that choice. Not in the sense that they needed to completely sacrifice their personal lives for the pursuit of justice, but they couldn’t just completely abstain from fighting the good fight, using their powers to go above and beyond just gods and monsters. Efforts needed to be made. There were people out there they could be helping with the powers they had, people that they needed to help because they could help.

Piper could see it on their faces, the cognitive dissonance that was tearing them all apart. Piper could see that they all felt that she was right, that they really did need to step up in world affairs and do what they could to make the world a better place after they’d all fought so hard to save it, but that selflessness was running smack into their innate selfishness, running head-on into the personal belief that they’d done enough, and that they’d earned their retirement, earned the right to leave the life behind and say, “I’m done. It’s someone else’s turn.”

Piper found it ironic that Thalia and Reyna would be having this quandary given that they were nomads, not bound by school or society, and were therefore in the perfect position to be jumping right on board Piper’s ideological train of using their powers to fight the bad guys, especially because the Hunters of Artemis were literally equipped to be the greatest vigilante team in the world, what with all the powers and skills the Hunters had developed and honed from their decades, centuries, and millennia of life, and a goddess that could teleport them across the continent in the blink of an eye. Perhaps, then, it wasn’t that Thalia and Reyna were on the fence about this, but that they were feeling guilty that they and the Hunters weren’t already doing that, using their powers to fight the forces of evil—cartels, gangs, sex traffickers, drug dealers, etc., something that should’ve been right up the Hunters’ alley given that most of the perpetrators of the crimes listed above were men—or were feeling nervous about trying to convince the Hunt of Piper’s ideas, and the rebuttal they would receive.

Whatever the case, Piper did her best to put an end to her friends’ mental and emotional suffering.

“Guys, relax. I didn’t tell you my story in order to convince you to come join me on my crusade against darkness or whatever. I told you my story so that all of you would know what happened between me and Jason, know what happened to me in Tahlequah, and know where I came from when I told you what I was going to do with my life. I’m not saying you have to join me, I’m not saying you have to sit there and just completely ignore everything that’s happening in our world. What I am saying is that after everything we went through, we have to be active in our communities, using our powers however we can to help whoever we can. We can’t just sit by and do nothing while we can be doing something.”

“Like what, Piper?” Percy asked quietly. “What are we supposed to do that either won’t make a bad situation worse, or bring a bunch of unwanted attention to us? We can only stretch the Mist so much, and none of us want the mutant treatment, where the government is hunting us down either to kill us, or capture us and take us to a secret base so they can experiment on us.”

“Aww, dude,” Leo sighed. “Now I’m going to be having nightmares about that exact situation for a week.”

Calypso grabbed his hand reassuringly.

“That’s what it’s up to us to figure out,” Piper answered Percy’s question. “There isn’t a clear, definitive answer I can give any of you on what the best course of action is. It’ll always vary depending on the exact situation. We’ll have to be smart about what we do, and how we do it.”

“And what if the best course of action is no action?” Frank asked. “What if the best thing we can do, in order to avoid making something go from bad to worse like Percy said, is to do nothing?”

“Then we do nothing,” Piper shrugged. “If that really is the best we can do for someone, then so be it. The whole point of this is to make things better, not worse.”

“I’ll talk with Lady Artemis and the other Hunters,” Thalia said. “This isn’t the first time a conversation like this has come up. Other Hunters have gone out to do what you’re talking about in the past. I’ll see what Artemis says.”

Piper nodded. “Thanks.” She cleared her throat. “Okay, enough doom and gloom. How are all of you guys doing? Reyna, I see you joined the Hunt—how’s that going?”

The mood lightened considerably as Piper moved the conversation away from the uncomfortable topic of power and responsibility.

Reyna brightened considerably. “It’s been great! A huge breath of fresh air being able to travel, see things, and explore who I am without the constant pressure of having to be the praetor. No offense, Frank and Hazel.”

The current praetors of Camp Jupiter laughed a tired laugh, but there was something wrong with it. It wasn’t tired as if they were fatigued and exhausted after a long day of work; it was tired as if they were emotionally beaten and worn down, ready to give up on something and admit defeat but refused to do so out of principle. What didn’t help the sudden mounting tension were the pensive expressions that appeared on Percy and Annabeth’s faces, and the angry shadows that darkened their eyes.

Piper, Leo, Calypso, Thalia, and Reyna were all instantly alert.

“What’s going on over there?” Reyna demanded, her back straight and her voice full of authority as she slipped into her old praetor mode.

“Nothing you need to worry about,” Frank dismissed. “We’ve got it handled.”

Annabeth smashed her fist upon the ground, startling everyone. She looked at Frank with so much anger in her eyes it was scary, especially because her eyes were growing red and watery. Annabeth glared at Frank, and when Percy put his hand on her shoulder, she glared at him, too.

“Anna-­”

“No!” she snapped at him. Her lower lip trembled as emotion threatened to overwhelm her, but she kept herself contained, if only barely.

Frank and Hazel looked away, and Percy stared at the boardgame of Life between the four of them.

Annabeth looked back at the Iris Message window. “There is a situation we got through. I’m sorry that we were heading into a good mood and about to tell fun stories, but this story is anything but fun. And all of you need to hear it, just like we all needed to hear Piper’s….”

Piper felt a cold cannonball of dread settle within her stomach. She could tell from Annabeth’s expression and tone of voice that what she was about to share was not going to be pleasant.

Sure enough, it wasn’t.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

On the warm night of April 8, the birthday of Lester Papadopoulos, the night that Caligula, Commodus, and Tarquin marched on New Rome, Percy and Annabeth were going on a pleasant date to the opera because Annabeth wanted to, and Percy, being the good boyfriend he was, did not offer any opposition.

Almost completely heedless of the impending slaughter on the other side of the continent, the power couple of the millennium eventually were able to take their seats. They weren’t at all in the expensive suites, but they weren’t in the nosebleed section, either. Frederick was more than capable of sending his daughter some money.

He kind of had to, really, because Annabeth’s boarding school wasn’t supplying her with anything, and the Blofis family wasn’t exactly drowning in cash, either, since Sally didn’t work and the sales from her book only brought in so much, and Paul was a high school teacher.

Anyway.

Percy and Annabeth were seated next to each other, the opera set to begin in a few minutes. Despite the occasion of the night, just the two of them, with nothing else to (hopefully) worry about, there was still a look on Annabeth’s face. A certain light in her grey eyes, one that Percy knew all too well.

“What’s going through that head of yours, Wise Girl?” Percy asked after leaning close to her ear.

Annabeth sighed. After so many years, she knew that deflecting or dodging was pointless.

“The same thing that’s been running through my head since we first helped Magnus: are doing the right thing? We know that there are at least three emperors currently waging war on demigods, with one of them right here in our city—or at least, there’s a building in the city with Triumvirate Holdings slapped on the side of it—but we’re not doing…well…anything about any of this. I’m not saying we need to grab our gear and try to cross the continent to get to New Rome, Hey, guys. Y’all okay? Need any help? No? Great! Well, we’ll be on our way now, but we haven’t done anything to so much as try to help.

“We—you, actually—haven’t spoken to Chiron, Mr. D, or Nico since robot incident, I haven’t spoken to them at all since the robot incident, so we’re not at all in the loop on whatever Camp Half-Blood is doing about the crisis going on, and we’re definitely not in the loop with anything New Rome is doing because of the communication jam—and that’s the big thing. We could be doing something about the jam. There’re several things we could’ve tried—could try.

“Magnus and his Valhalla ravens. Carter and Sadie with their Duat-travel. The Door of Orpheus in Central Park that goes straight to the Underworld. We could try to get a hold of Nico and see if he’s open to that idea. There’s also the fish idea, where you use your authority as the son of Poseidon to get an aquatic communication network of your own going between the fish and maybe some water spirits, like the naiads and nereids. Then there’s-”

Percy gripped Annabeth’s hand. “Stop.”

His tone was hard, pointed, and brokered no room for argument. It was his scary Now I am serious, and I am in command voice that he almost never used, but when he did use it, even the mouthy Annabeth Chase, famed for her hubris and “control” she had over her boyfriend, went quiet. However, despite how seemingly commanding Percy was when using this tone, the light in his eyes belayed something else:

A frantic desperation for Annabeth to stop making sense, and stop putting them on the spot for sitting out the crisis.

“We have done enough,” Percy said heavily. “We went to the Underworld and back to get the Lightning Bolt, therefore averting World War Three. We went into the Sea of Monsters and brought back the Golden Fleece, saving camp. You held up the sky, and I traveled across the country to also hold up the sky. We navigated the Labyrinth and fought in a battle in which we had to burn a bunch of dead kids. Then we saved the world from the Titans and burned a lot more dead kids, some of them dead by o-our own hand.”

Percy’s voice warbled ever so slightly as he mentioned the Battle of Manhattan, in which he’d been pitted against Titan-supporting demigods and the field of battle, and did what he had to do.

Annabeth’s mouth set into a thin line with that one. It was all but confirmed that Percy had killed demigods during the battle, demigods that were only his age or close to it. So, teenagers. Kids by anyone’s standards. Naturally, Percy refused to talk about it or confirm if he had killed anyone, like most veterans of war didn’t like talking about what they had to do to come home, and no one pressed him on it, not even Annabeth.

“That should have been more than enough for us,” Percy continued. There was a rising edge in his voice now, that commanding tone giving way to frustration, anger, and something almost akin to madness. “But no. We got dragged into the Giant War more or less against our wills. Me definitely, you…kind of but not really. Then there was everything involved in the Giant War, with you helping build the Argo II, me being in a coma then going on a quest, then the entire voyage to Old Rome, then…T-Tartarus-” Annabeth shivered along with her boyfriend at the mention of the pit and its corresponding dark god “-then the rest of the Giant War after that point, followed immediately by all of that recommendation letter bullshit. Annabeth, we have done enough.

“We’ve earned our ‘retirement,’ or whatever you want to call it. We’ve earned the right to finally sit on the sidelines and let someone else handle the situation. And it’s not like there isn’t anyone we can’t pass the torch to. Nico’s gotten a lot stronger, Leo’s back, Piper’s no slouch, and Frank and Hazel have earned their ranks. And Jason and Reyna are veterans like us. New Rome is fine. We don’t need to worry about them. Camp Half-Blood is also fine, because it’s been over two months since the robot attack, and Nero hasn’t done anything else. If he had, Chiron would’ve found a way to tell us.”

Percy gave Annabeth’s hand a comforting squeeze, and he smiled a reassuring smile.

“Okay? New Rome is fine. They’ve got plenty of strong leaders and strong demigods. Camp Half-Blood is in great hands, too. It’s not like we’re just abandoning our friends. We’re having faith and confidence in their abilities and powers to handle themselves while we finally relax and enjoy our lives. Besides, we can’t always be there to drop everything that we’re doing and go save the day at the drop of a hat. We have our own lives, too.”

“I guess,” Annabeth sighed. “It’s just…I feel like there could be some small thing we could—should—be doing. Like, the retirement thing makes tons of sense and I’m totally onboard with finally doing our own thing and not having to deal with any more major mythological meltdowns, but…but that we still have one last job in us, if that makes sense? Like, one last hurrah? One last helping hand to our friends to let them know we’ll always be ready and willing to give them a hand, no matter how small?”

“Trust me,” Percy said, smiling, “they know we would always help them, just like they know they can handle these emperor chumps, no problem. They’re all big boys and girls. They can tie their shoes, brush their teeth, and go potty all by themselves.”

Annabeth rolled her eyes. “I would hope so, given that they’re all teenagers.”

“Powerful teenagers,” Percy clarified. “So, they’re fine. They’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. Now would you please just relax and enjoy the opera? This was your idea in the first place to take our minds off things and just enjoy life for a night, so relax and enjoy life.”

Annabeth closed her eyes and took a deep breath, not to launch a counterargument to Percy’s stances, but to focus and center herself. Her boarding school offered free counseling, and she had actually been to see the counselor a few times due to the stress she’d been feeling between studying for exams, keeping up with her homework and internship, the future in general, and the thing she couldn’t talk about: the ongoing crisis with Apollo and the emperors. She’d been taught some meditative techniques on how to destress and let her worries go, and so she put a breathing and mental imagery exercise into play.

After a few seconds of doing this, and she felt better.

Annabeth squeezed Percy’s hand and looked at him. “Okay. I’m good.”

Just then, the lights of the theatre dimmed, and the volume of the audience fell into almost complete silence.

“Just in time,” Percy murmured with a grin as the curtains were lifted.

Tonight’s feature was an abridged telling of the Divine Comedy.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

It was all quiet through the Iris Message feed after Percy and Annabeth finished the first part of their own grand story, the explanation of what they were doing during the Imperial War, or rather, what they weren’t doing, and why they weren’t doing anything.

Piper saw that Frank, Hazel, Reyna, and Thalia all had hollow looks in their eyes, because they knew exactly what happened during the Battle of San Francisco Bay. Piper knew what happened, too, thanks to that mysterious lawyer on the day of Billy’s funeral back at the beginning of June, coming up on three months ago. The lawyer had told Piper about Annabeth and Percy’s shortcomings regarding the Imperial War, along with many other choice observations.

As for the three Romans, Piper could both see and feel the conflict in them regarding Percy and Annabeth. One part of them felt angry, bitter, resentful, prejudiced, and judgmental—like, Yeah, you’re both goddamn right you should’ve been doing something to help us, or at least help Camp Half-Blood, but you did nothing! You didn’t even do anything to protect Sally, Paul, and baby Estelle! You just up and left!—while the other part of them was understanding, accepting, and empathetic—like, We know you two were tired and just wanted to finally live your own lives, and that’s a right that the two of you earned. We can’t blame you for not participating in the Imperial War. We know that if you truly knew what was coming for us, you would’ve dropped everything to help us. It was a classic example of how the Roman principles of duty, honor, loyalty, camaraderie, discipline, and sacrifice—always putting the pack before yourself, always willing to die for the pack, and live for the pack—clashed with the personal connections of friends and family.

The Roman parts of Frank, Hazel, and Reyna all told them that Percy and Annabeth were at fault, but the human part of them said that Percy and Annabeth weren’t at all to blame for anything, and that blaming them wasn’t just wrong, but stupid.

As for Leo, he hesitantly raised his hand. “Er…so…what happened with the Caligula and Commodus? The most up-to-date info I have is that they, uh, killed Jason, and were sailing for New Rome.”

Reyna was the one that cleared her throat. “There was a big battle. The emperors attacked from the San Francisco Bay. Another undead Roman monarch, King Tarquin, launched his own assault from underneath the city. We survived thanks to Apollo correctly pulling off the Sibylline Summon and bringing in Lady Diana. She killed off Tarquin’s forces, and it was through Frank’s and Apollo’s efforts that Caligula and Commodus were destroyed. We won the battle, but the cost was steep. We once had 568 between the legion and New Rome, but after we counted the dead, there were only 87 still alive.”

Leo and Calypso blanched.

Percy and Annabeth looked even more haunted.

Piper spoke up. “It’s done and over with. There’s nothing we can do for the dead except honor their memories, and make sure that if another situation like this arises, we don’t make the same mistakes. I’m not free of blame, either. Even though I knew at least Caligula was powerful enough to kill someone as strong as Jason, and he had Commodus and a fleet with him sailing for New Rome, I still turned tail and ran away for Tahlequah.”

“Hey,” Leo was able to speak first as everyone opened their mouth to protest Piper’s statement, “that was a special circumstance. Jason, what happened to you and your dad-”

“Excuses,” Piper interrupted in the same flat, unamused tone that the lawyer had used on her back in early June. “I could’ve been angry, vengeful, on fire for a fight, and I could’ve accompanied Meg and Apollo to New Rome to protect Jason’s body, and then fight side by side with you guys. I could’ve convinced you to come with me,” she looked at Leo, “and we could’ve figured something out with my dad. In short, where there’s a will, there’s a way. The bottom line is that I actually did know what was heading for New Rome, and I still went the other way. Once could say I’m the most villainous of all, because I was Jason’s girlfriend. I was his girlfriend, but I couldn’t even watch over his body and attend his funeral.”

More silence.

Until Leo spoke, “Well, by that logic, I’m guilty too.”

Piper shook her head. “No. None of us are guilty. We all did what we felt was right for our reasons, and we’ll have to live with the consequences of our actions. The only thing we can do now is not make those same mistakes again. The next time some big threat emerges from the darkness, we’ll know we need to go out and stop it—and I’m talking about something divine. Not what I’m going to do with organized crime and stuff.”

Annabeth sighed. “We’re living with the consequences of our actions, alright.”

With that statement, she moved to the second part of hers and Percy’s story.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The original trio that started it all were steadily making their way through California traffic to get to the Caldecott Tunnel so they could take the secret exit to New Rome. Because they knew him so well, Percy and Annabeth both knew that Grover wasn’t just nervous, but that something truly awful was devouring him alive.

“Grover,” Percy said evenly, looking at Grover’s reflection in the rearview mirror. Annabeth even turned around in her seat to look at the satyr. “The closer we get to New Rome, the more you start to look like how you did when you were making dinner for Polyphemus: terrified for your life. You told us you’ve been out here in SoCal fighting the wildfires, and that Apollo, Piper, Meg, and you were able to free the oracle there and basically put Hyperion back to sleep. We figured there was an emperor out here since Camp Jupiter is out here, and Nero is out by Camp Half-Blood. So, you mind telling us what has you so freaked out right now?”

Grover was literally sweating with trepidation as Percy continued talking, and by the time he finished his question, Grover was pale as a sheet and shaking like a leaf.

But why wouldn’t he be? After all, for the duration of this entire trip, from Manhattan to Berkeley, he hadn’t told them about Piper breaking up with Jason, or Jason’s death, or about Piper’s destroyed financial situation because of the Triumvirate and how she was forced to move back to Tahlequah with her ruined dad, or about how when Grover had left SoCal, Caligula was happily taking his invasion fleet up to Camp Jupiter. In short, Grover had been lying to Percy and Annabeth this entire time.

That was only part of the reason for his being a nervous wreck right now, though. Harpocrates may have faded, and with him the communication jam, but it was still a slow-going process to get magic working again. Because of this, Grover truthfully did not know whether New Rome was even still standing right now. Was it a huge pile of rubble? Had it been overrun by the emperors? Grover did not know if he was leading his best friends either into ruins or into a death trap.

Take the fact that he knew he was lying by way of omission and combine it with the uncertainty of New Rome’s status, and you could understand why Grover was sweating bullets. What were Percy and Annabeth going to say now that they were basically on the doorstep of their destination?

It couldn’t be avoided any longer.

Grover swallowed and took a deep breath.

“Grover…?” Percy asked, seeing the signs of something very bad coming his way.

“The three of us…” Grover started, before he choked and tried again. “You know the three of us are best friends, right?”

“Grover…” Annabeth said, her eyes narrowing.

“And that we would never do anything to intentionally hurt each other, right?”

“G-Man, c’mon!” Percy said loudly. “What’s happened?”

Tears started welling up in Annabeth’s eyes as the sheer possibilities of what she was about to hear threatened to overwhelm her emotions.

Grover couldn’t bear to look at them as he answered.

“Commodus was the emperor in Indianapolis. The emperor here in the West was Caligula. Medea was with Caligula, and she used the Triumvirate’s resources to exact her revenge on Piper for what happened last year in Chicago. Medea went after Tristan’s finances and successfully got him convicted of tax fraud and tax evasion. The banks swooped in and took everything he owned, and every penny he had, and Tristan’s life and reputation as an actor have been destroyed.”

Percy and Annabeth both gasped.

“What about Piper and Jason-” Annabeth started.

“Piper broke up with Jason,” Grover said quietly. “I don’t know why.”

Percy slammed the break and laid on the horn as someone cut him off.

Annabeth’s hands flew to her mouth as her breath left her, her eyes going wide as plates.

After that episode, Percy rounded Grover. “What do you mean Piper broke up with Jason!? Piper was the one who wanted to be his girlfriend in the first place, and after everything they went through together during the Giant War-!”

“I said I don’t know!” Grover shouted back.

A horn sounded from behind them, prompting Percy to put his eyes back on the road, seeing that there were now at least four car lengths ahead due to how traffic had moved.

Annabeth was trying to hold back her sobs, and Percy was openly crying angry tears.

How could Piper do that to Jason?

It was impossible! At least, it seemed impossible to Percy.

“A-Are you sure that Piper actually broke up with Jason?” the son of Poseidon grasped at straws to ease his own rising emotions. “You said that Medea used the Triumvirate to mess with Tristan’s finances—could Medea have used magic or something to get inside of Piper’s head and-”

“I said I don’t know, Percy,” Grover answered tautly. “When I first met Piper, it was with Apollo and Meg. We were all shocked that Piper had broken up with Jason. I think she found the time to talk to Apollo about it, but she didn’t tell me anything, nor did Apollo. You’ll have to ask either of them when you next see them what happened.”

Percy was having to consciously measure his strength so he didn’t grip the steering wheel so hard that it imploded.

Annabeth tried to ask something, but her voice cracked on the first syllable.

Percy pulled onto the secret exit ramp that led to New Rome, his eyes bloodshot, twin tears running down his face. The drive down the tunnel was tense, the electric lights at some point turning into magic torches.

“Stop,” Grover said before they reached the exit. “It might be a trap.”

Percy slammed the break. “What do you mean it might be a trap? What the hell happened here!?”

Grover just jumped into it and didn’t stop.

“Piper broke up with Jason sometime around December or January. The Triumvirate destroyed Tristan’s career and reputation. Piper and Jason kept working together on small quests and kind of fighting the Triumvirate, but they never reached closure and really worked together. In March, Jason managed to navigate the Burning Maze until he found the Oracle, where she gave him the prophecy that if he and Piper continued pursuing the Triumvirate, one of them was going to die.

“Jason took that prophecy on himself. He didn’t tell Piper about it because she and her dad were about to leave Malibu for Tahlequah. Despite how she broke up with him, he still loved her enough to die for her. And…yeah. He, Piper, Apollo, and Meg found Caligula’s fleet, and they tried for a sneak attack, it failed, and the reason for the latter three still being alive is because Jason isn’t. He’s dead. Unless something happened to her, Piper should be in Tahlequah right now. As for Caligula’s fleet, they were due to attack New Rome on April 8. I don’t know if they succeeded in their attack or not, so I don’t know if we’re walking into a trap.”

Percy and Annabeth both stared at Grover with horrified, shocked, heartbroken, colorless expressions. There was total silence in the vehicle for a grand total of three seconds before the incomprehensible shouting started.

Grover shut his eyes and took the verbal abuse, letting the righteous fury of his best friends cascade upon him like torrential rain. He deserved it. He’d lied to them this whole trip, withholding crucial information from them about current events. All in the name of:

“I just wanted you to be happy!” Grover shouted at the absolute top of his lungs, bringing silence back to the car. He continued, “I just wanted you two to be happy. Everything you’ve already been through, all the bullshit you’ve put up with—I just wanted the two of you to finally be happy. I didn’t tell you about Jason and Piper and the attack because I knew you would hate yourselves for not doing anything more about the Imperial War, you wouldn’t want to leave Manhattan until you were certain Nero was defeated….I-I just…I just wanted the two of you to finally be happy, finally be able to live your own lives, not worry about anyone but yourselves for a change, and just be able to look forward to a better future…”

“A better future,” Percy echoed hollowly. “Jason died on some ancient Roman battleship-”

“Caligula’s fleet was actually made up of pleasure yachts,” Grover coughed. “50 of them.”

“50 pleasure yachts…” Percy said, staring a thousand yards into the distance. “Jason died on a pleasure yacht…on the water…on April 8^th?”

“No. Jason d-died the morning of April 1^st,” Grover confirmed in a shaky voice. “Their sneak attack was the night of March 31^st. April 8^th was the scheduled day for the attack on Camp Jupiter.”

“The night we were at the opera,” Annabeth choked back a sob. “The night we were enjoying ourselves, just the two of us, and Jason was already—he was already—he had-” Annabeth stopped to take a breath. “And Piper’s life had been turned upside down, and our friends here were under attack. And we were having that argument about whether we were doing the right thing or not.”

Percy slumped in his seat. “Fuck,” he muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, FUCK!”

Grover winced at the volume of the last explicative.

“Fucking figures!” Percy continued to lament. “The one time—the one fucking time that we actually have the choice on whether or not go rushing out there to save the day, and we choose not to do that, we choose to put ourselves before others—just this one time—and everything goes to hell! Jason’s dead, Piper’s life’s been destroyed, and we don’t know about Frank, Hazel, Reyna or Le-” Percy turned around in his seat, his crying, bloodshot eyes wide with panic. “What happened to Leo? Do you know what happened to Leo?”

Grover’s voice cracked. “L-Leo’s—ahem—Leo’s alive. After Indianapolis, he flew straight to New Rome to warn them of a vanguard we learned about from a prophecy we got. He was able to get there in time and minimalize the casualties of the initial assault before he flew south to Malibu. He got there just as we were all about to part ways, Meg and Apollo taking Jason to New Rome, Piper about to leave for Tahlequah. They told him what happened, and Leo left with Piper. That’s all I know from there.”

“Terrific,” Percy grumbled. “Piper and Leo survived the emperors, but on their way to Tahlequah, they got jumped either by monsters or mortals, and now they’re in Elysium too.”

Annabeth smacked his side. “Don’t say that! Don’t even think that!”

Percy didn’t say anything. He just kept staring into the distance, the odd tear running down his cheek. Annabeth fell into silence, and Grover dared not say anything. The whole cabin was thick with a typhoon of emotions, all three on a thin line between control and nuclear meltdown.

Eventually, Annabeth turned around to look at Grover. In as soft a voice as she could manage, she said, “Thank you for considering us, Grover. I appreciate it.”

“I feel like you’re about to say, But you should have told us about this when you got to Manhattan,” Grover said, which triggered Percy.

The son of Poseidon whipped around. “You’re goddamn right you should’ve-!”

Annabeth set her hand on his knee. In that moment, she demonstrated her true power, and what an awesome power it was: the power to calm the storm.

Percy noticeably simmered down at the mere touch of his beloved. “That was definitely something you should’ve told us. Now I’m internally freaking out over Mom and Paul and Estelle, who we left behind in Manhattan, having not told them at all about the emperors ironically for the same reason Grover didn’t tell us about Jason and Piper, that being so they didn’t worry about anything.”

Grover shifted in the backseat. “I, er, had a talk with the local nature spirits about that. They’re watching over your family, Percy. From a distance. I told them to be discreet.”

Percy looked at Grover from the rearview mirror, his eyes alight with a dozen different emotions. He shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and nodded stiffly, saying, “Thank you, Grover.”

Annabeth turned back around to face the satyr. She nodded gratefully, then she said, “I was going to say something about shoulda, woulda, and coulda. Not just you, but the two of us. We should have been more active in the Imperial War, we would have been more active if we knew what the emperors were really capable of—I mean, killing Jason, a whole fleet of yachts—and we could have been more active if…if…”

“If we weren’t burnt out and tired of being heroes and just wanted to live our own lives for once?” Percy supplied.

Annabeth didn’t lie or argue the sentiment. “Y-Yeah,” she let out a shaky breath, “that.”

Grover swallowed. “Guys, I’m so sor-”

“Shhh!” Percy cut him off, punctuating the syllable with a flail of his arm. “Do not say that word right now.” He put the car back in gear and started heading down the tunnel. “I really hope that the emperors didn’t capture New Rome. If they did, I’ll probably destroy the whole place myself.”

Grover gulped, appreciating the fact that he had basically pushed Percy so close to the edge that his best friend was seriously contemplating mass destruction.

Annabeth was reminded of when they were down in Tartarus, and Percy had broken the boundaries of his domain, presumably because they were so close to Primordial Chaos and things got weird around those parts of creation, and nearly killed a Primordial goddess with her own tears and poison. Percy had that kind of energy about him right now. He had that same detached, cold, murderous look in his eyes.

Annabeth couldn’t blame him. She couldn’t even say that if they got to New Rome and found it overtaken, that she would stop him from bringing about total annihilation of the whole valley.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

“Obviously, the emperors didn’t win,” Percy said, his eyes having gone a little red and watery from the recollection, same with Annabeth.

Piper’s own eyes had gone misty.

How she wished she could tell them all right now that Jason was alive and well, and that she strongly suspected he was now an einherjar in Odin’s Valhalla army—or something like that. Jason had shown her the nine-branched tree sigil on his shield the night she fought Incognito, and after a simple Google search when she had the time, the first thing that popped up was Yggdrasil. Piper put two and two together to equal Jason might’ve been scooped up by a Valkyrie because he died honorably while fighting, and then carried to Valhalla.

Whatever the case, Piper knew Jason was alive, but she was sworn to secrecy.

Back to the current situation, it was a classic Greek tragedy. The reluctant heroes, forced at almost every turn in their lives to be on the frontlines, fighting, fighting, fighting, watching their friends and allies die left and right, and then when they finally get to a point where they actually have the choice about whether to and fight some more, they choose not to fight, and everything gets fucked as a result. Of course, this all hinged on the idea that the presence of Percy and Annabeth would’ve completely changed the tide of battle, pun intended. After all, if Percy been there, either for Jason’s final battle or the Battle of San Francisco Bay, he could’ve sunk the whole fleet and saved everyone’s lives.

At least, in theory.

It was a two-fold tragedy in that the one time Percy and Annabeth said, “Naw,” to getting involved with a major mythological conflict, almost everyone died, and that they died during an assault in which water was a huge factor. Jason died at sea, and the emperors had to launch their ground forces from their yachts across the bay, hence that battle’s name.

But like Annabeth had said: shoulda, woulda, and coulda.

There was almost something like fear in Thalia’s voice when she asked, “Is that all that happened, then?”

A mirthless smirk crossed Frank’s face, accompanied by a derisive snort. “Nope. Percy got court-martialed.”

Everyone sat up a little straighter, with Reyna being the most alert.

“Court-martialed?” she demanded. “Why wasn’t I notified of this?”

“You aren’t the praetor anymore,” Hazel said.

“But I was his praetor when he joined the legion! By right-”

“Reyna,” Frank cut in firmly. “You know how it goes with praetors. Once you’re gone, you’re gone. Yes, people will still respect you, and you might still have some influence, but you aren’t the praetor anymore. You’d be given courtesy, but no special treatment. You’re a citizen now, not a legionary. And you’re technically not even a citizen. You’re a Hunter of Diana.”

Reyna almost pouted. “I still should’ve been there.”

Annabeth palmed her face. “For fuck’s sake,” she cursed, throwing almost everyone for a loop since it was her that was cursing, “this whole thing is boiling down to a whole bunch of should have, would have, could have statements, and it’s getting annoying at this point. I guess we all, in some form or fashion, from some point of view, epically screwed up with the Imperial War. Let’s please just move on. Frank, please make it fast.”

Frank nodded. “Grief was still running high enough in some that when Percy and Annabeth made it in, those people had some choice words to say about them not being there during our time of need. Things escalated, and the people in question went through the legal procedures to have Percy court-martialed on the grounds of being AWOL, and they also filed suit against you and me-” Frank looked at Reyna “-giving Percy and Annabeth permission to attend college at NRU and live in the city despite not having given their ten years of service, or even being Roman demigods.”

Reyna looked ready to blow a gasket, and even Piper and Leo were ready to get mad with that one.

Hazel picked up the story. “The trial didn’t really go anywhere. The people who had a bone to pick with Percy and Annabeth were a minority group. They got hit really hard during the battle and just wanted somewhere to take out their emotions. Anyway, Percy explained what he and Annabeth already said, and the tribunal ruled that Percy was a unique circumstance. He was acquitted of being AWOL on the grounds that he was a retired praetor and therefore had been honorably discharged from the legion, and the tribunal also ruled that Frank and Reyna were well within their rights as praetors to give special permission to Percy and Annabeth to stay in the city and attend college, on the grounds that it was a great showing of good faith, two camp leaders to the others. And also because of everything that Percy and Annabeth already went through during their careers as demigods, they had more than earned the right to stay in New Rome.”

Finally, some good news in this story.

However, Piper could tell, just like she could tell that everyone else could tell, that there was still something bad coming up.

“But,” Annabeth finished, a rueful smile on her face, “due to the heavy losses sustained during the battle, only 87 souls still alive between the legion and the citizenry, New Rome University will not be opening this schoolyear due to not having enough students or staff left alive. As such, Percy and I will be commuting to UC Berkeley for our freshman year.”

The bittersweetness of this hit everyone on the same level.

Percy and Annabeth finally got to stay in New Rome, but it was practically a ghost town. They finally got to go to college, but it wasn’t the college they were hoping for. They finally got the chance to choose what to do with themselves, and they were suffering the consequences of their actions in a way that wasn’t the worst imaginable, but it definitely wasn’t ideal.

“And Grover?” Thalia asked. “Is he okay?”

Percy nodded. “We made up. Went to dinner, big group hug, no hard feelings, and he went back to CHB to be with Juniper.”

“We also ran into Apollo the last week of June,” Annabeth said. “he came in to check in on us, but that was, er, after we’d processed our grief over Jason and were still excited for college but before the trial and we were told the college wouldn’t even be open.”

There was a round of everyone briefly recounting their own visit with Apollo after he regained godhood.

“Anyway,” Annabeth said, forcing herself to be chipper, “that’s enough about us, and we have Piper’s big story, so who’s next?”

“Well,” Thalia started, “we finally caught the Teumessian Fox. We’ve been chasing that damn thing since early February.”

“You caught the fox that can’t be caught?” Piper asked with an eager tone, excited for the story.

Thalia clapped Reyna on the shoulder. “We had the idea for a while of repeating history by getting Laelaps, the dog that always catches its prey, and sending her after the Fox, but it was Reyna that finally pulled it off. She and I went on a quest to return Laelaps to earth, and when we did and sent Laelaps after the Fox, they both turned to stone again.”

Reyna blushed. “It wasn’t that much of a quest.”

Thalia jostled her shoulder. “Ah, quit being modest.” The daughter of Zeus looked back at the Iris Messages, looking every bit the excited and supportive big sister that she technically was as Reyna’s senior in the Hunt. “So, here’s how it happened…”

As Thalia launched into the epic tale of how she and Reyna were able to free Laelaps, Piper’s mind started to wander.

She couldn’t help but feel that this was only the beginning. The misfortune Percy and Annabeth experienced, her own ordeal with Incognito, the Hunt’s prolonged nightmare chasing down the Teumessian Fox, and just the whole pattern that had been developing. First the Titans, then the Giants only a few months later, and then the first encounter with the emperors barely six months after the Giants. There was the lawyer’s dire warning about a dark future, reinforced by Jason’s own words of a coming calamity.

Piper had asked if it was going to be in her lifetime, and Jason said he didn’t know.

Now there was a growing little fear in Piper, the fear that they weren’t going to be ready, that, in the words of Bane, peace was going to cost them their strength, victory was going to defeat them. Maybe not so much for Reyna and Thalia, Hunters, but Leo, Annabeth, and Percy? Maybe even Frank and Hazel depending on how they decide to live?

Piper was broken from her foreboding thoughts when Leo called her out.

“Pipes, you okay? You have a look on your face.”

Piper thought about her words and how to step around what she knew she couldn’t talk about. “Just…worried about the pattern. You know? First it was the Titans, then the Giants popped up, and then the emperors popped up—so what’s next? Like, three months from now, are we once again going to be fighting for our lives against some major mythological threat? Maybe not even mythological, but World War Three actually starts and now we have to worry about nukes…” Piper shook her head.

“No, enough about that. I didn’t call you guys to talk about doom and gloom. This is a happy moment for us. All of us kind of together again to share stories and make some more good memories, and-” Piper’s ear twitched as she heard the telltale creek of the old gate to her gravel driveway. She sighed. “Dad’s home.”

There were nods and understanding hums from the heroes. They all knew that Tristan was one of those kinds of humans that couldn’t handle the world of gods and monsters, and so him walking in on Piper, asking who she was talking to, and seeing a bunch of Iris Messages, would not be good for his sanity. Granted, they all knew Piper could just say she was on the phone with friends, and if Tristan did pop his head into her room, maybe the Mist would make it look like she was on a Zoom meeting on her computer, but there was also a certain feeling of “done” to tonight’s meeting.

A certain feeling of, “We’ve talked about a lot of heavy stuff today, and we’ve got a lot to think about. We should call it now.”

“It was great talking to all of you again,” Piper said. “I have Fall break scheduled for the Thursday and Friday of the third week in October.”

Leo perked up. “Hey, that’s when my Fall break is! But I get the whole week, ha!”

Piper stuck her tongue out at him.

Frank and Hazel blushed. “The legion doesn’t get a Fall break…” Frank said dejectedly.

“We can change that, though,” Hazel said.

Percy nudged Annabeth with a grin. “Listen to all these babies talking about going to high school.”

Annabeth grinned back. “Maybe one day they’ll be big kids like us, and go to college.”

Thalia nudged Reyna with a grin of her own. “Listen to all these nerds talking about college and school.”

Reyna adopted the same grin. “I know. Maybe one day they’ll free themselves from the shackles of society like us.”

There was laughter and chuckles all around until Piper heard the honking of the jeep as her dad locked it.

“I love you guys. I can’t wait to see you all in person again. I’ll be in touch!”

They all bid their farewells, and Piper swiped through the messages, bringing an end to the conversation. She heard the front door open and shut, the footsteps of her father coming closer, and then a knock on her door.

“Come in!”

Tristan entered. He was definitely tired, but he looked satisfied.

Piper stood up and gave him a big hug. “Hey, Dad. Welcome home.”

“Good to be home, Pipes. Did you have a good evening?”

“I had a great evening.”

“Good, good. Well, I’m going to shower and head to bed.”

Piper giggled. “All right, Dad. Osda usvi. Gvgeyui.”

Tristan smiled. “Good night, Piper. I love you, too.”

They’d been practicing their Cherokee language together as they deepened their connections to their culture.

Tristan shut the door on his way out, and with nothing better to do, Piper crawled under her covers, shut her lamp off, and went to sleep.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Days later, as Nico, Will, Bob the Titan, Small Bob the Skeleton Sabretooth, and the host of cacodemons that Nyx produced, were all piled into a large enough rowboat on the River Acheron and gently sailing upstream on their way out of the pit of evil, they were completely and totally heedless and unaware of the gigantic iron boots standing upon a cliff above the river, and the dreadful menace that was wearing those boots.

The dark god Tartarus, in the humanoid form he had assumed over a year ago when he decided to squash Percy and Annabeth with his bear hands, stood alone, silently watching as the host left his domain by his will alone. It was an amusing thought to him that at any moment he so desired, he could vaporize the whole lot of them with nothing more than a thought. They were in his domain, after all, since this whole miniature continent was his body, and he could destroy them as easily as he destroyed Krios and Hyperion. He could’ve just as easily destroyed Iapetus and Damasen in like manner, but chose fisticuffs for the hell of it. Despite being thousands of years out of practice in terms of melee, Tartarus had gotten his groove back within seconds, and easily defeated his son and his nephew, both of whom were still fresh in the ways of combat.

A pillar of darkness grew behind Tartarus and solidified into the form of Nyx. The goddess of night looked no worse for wear than she did a few hours ago before her “battle.”

Stunning performance, Tartarus said in his disembodied voice.

Nyx scoffed, disgusted with herself. “Feigning all of that concern over a mere demigod infant, throwing a battle to my own ornery children, and then pretending that river had any affect on me, Night itself—this ruse had better be worth it.”

Have the cacodemons been accepted?

“Yes. The little fool actually believes they are the product of my efforts and his own worst memories. He has no inkling of an idea as to who their true father is.”

Nyx smirked, setting her hand upon her brother’s armored shoulder.

Tartarus hummed, the glowing lights in the depths of his helmet shining with satisfaction. Then the ruse is worth it. Our children will wait for my command, and then they will strike.

A third deity joined the pair. “A day I look forward to most eagerly.”

Akhlys, Tartarus greeted formally. Welcome.

The goddess of misery hissed. “When I get my hands on those two…”

“Patience, daughter,” Nyx said. “Eternity is eternal. We will kill Percy and Annabeth, and their immortal souls will be our playthings until we get bored or manage to produce some form of sympathy and toss them into our father over there.”

Nyx waved in the general direction of the nearest edge of the landscape where it dropped off into the void of Chaos.

Have you located the other two that I seek? Tartarus asked the goddess of misery.

“Setne is currently trapped within a snow globe upon the desk of Carter Kane in his office in the Brooklyn House, and the Aesir were truly stupid enough to place Loki’s new prison in our realm. Upon the North side of Mt. Everest, in fact.”

Tartarus made a sound akin to a derisive snort. How amusing.

Nyx practically shuddered with excitement, showing she was just as antsy as her daughter, but with a small degree of greater control over herself. “This will be glorious. All of us-”

This will be short and quick, Tartarus interrupted his sister. I have no interest in occasion, or important dates, or revenge, or any other silly concepts. It has happened that I now have enough iotas of care in me to make my own attempt at ‘world domination,’ and I will do it according to my vision. There will be no grand ceremony, or a sequence of rising events concluding in an epic climactic battle. There will be one, swift, coordinated, crushing attack at my order, making sure that the major powers that would oppose us are caught off-guard, and are summarily destroyed. Once our enemies have been defeated, then we may revel. But not a moment sooner.

Nyx nodded. “Understood, Brother.”

“Agreed,” Akhlys inclined her head.

We are immortal. There is no reason for us to get ahead of ourselves. Tartarus looked at Akhlys. Free Setne and Loki. But do it discreetly. I do not want there to be any inkling of evidence left behind. Right now, anonymity is our ally. The deeper our enemies are lulled into a state of peace and false sense of security, the easier they will be to annihilate.

His piece said to the primordial of poison, he looked at Night.

The same goes for you. Let your errant offspring believe in your defeat. Thousands of years of being what amounts to wild teenagers has made them crafty. Even if you were to somehow imprison them for their insolence, I have no doubt they would find a way to warn their siblings of our plans, and they may warn the Olympians, which could make an easy task much harder.

Tartarus looked out over his body.

As for me, I will continue to build our army. I will make tens of thousands of monsters, perhaps even hundreds. I will accelerate the regeneration of my children, and even make new ones if I feel like it. Once I am satisfied with the size of the army, and have determined that our enemies have become complacent and weak, then we will crush them.

The goddesses nodded.

The physical form of Tartarus dissolved into dark particles as the spirit resumed his work on industrializing monster regeneration.

Nyx teleported back to her mansion, mindful of keeping a weak and frail appearance on the odd chance one of her children decided to pop in for a visit.

Akhlys teleported herself right inside of Carter’s office in the Brooklyn House, her power as an ancient, eldritch Primordial deity allowing her to not only easily bypass the magic protecting the House, but also all the alarms within.

Misery stood above the snow globe upon the desk that housed the old magician, his tiny form looking up at her with true, genuine fear on his face, because he knew that there was no swindling the likes of her like he could swindle the Kane children, their father Julian/Osiris, or anyone else, really.

“Hello, Setne,” Akhlys said. “I have a proposition for you…”

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

“I have an interesting development to report,” Nyx said with a tinge of sarcasm in her voice.

Oh? Tartarus asked.

Obviously, they were down in the pit, the goddess of night having called her brother to her mansion because she didn’t feel like putting forth the miniscule effort of manifesting a physical presence elsewhere upon the landscape.

“Do you recall Triumvirate Holdings?”

The puny mortal monarchs that tried to take control of the oracles so they could manipulate Fate itself. I recall you were quite amused by their attempt at usurping your daughters.

“Yes, quite humorous, even a year later. Even more humorous is that the company they founded is still thriving despite their founders having been destroyed. Whomever would have thought that an ‘evil’ organization that existed for two millennia would have a chain of command in place, and successors lined up to take over in the event the emperors were defeated.”

Planning ahead? Perish the thought, Sister. I take it the new generation has reached out to you?

“Yes and no. There is only one true ruler, with the other two subservient to him. He beseeched me yesternight with a proposal that I admittedly find to be very amusing.”

So amusing that you have deigned to bring it to my attention. Very well. I am interested.

“He wanted to speak to me personally.”

The dark god paused. How presumptuous. Yet bold. Fine, then. Bring him here.

Nyx waved her hand, and she did something truly terrifying: from the depths of the evil pit, she teleported the current leader of Triumvirate Holdings from his Manhattan office to the throne room of the Mansion of Night to stand between her and her brother. Obviously, the implications of this were horrific.

The new emperor was a most unassuming man. 5’9, dark blonde hair, fair skin, skinny frame, clean-shaven, and bluish-grey eyes. He wore a simple black business suit with a white shirt and a purple tie. However, despite his average appearance, he quickly displayed that there was something very wrong with him. He looked at the 40-foot-tall form of Nyx on her throne, and then he turned around to look at the 40-foot-tall form of Tartarus.

“Are you expecting pleasantries, or do you want me to get to the point?”

Tartarus’s nonexistent lips quirked up. To the point.

“I would like your help for something I think would be hilarious.”

And that would be?

“The demise of the teenagers with attitude and their moronic parents. On both sides of the family. I’m already working on something of my own design, but I had an idea that involved your resources that would make things delectably sweeter.”

Really now? And what is your own design for the demigods?

The new emperor smiled like a snake.

“Triumvirate Holdings has been in business for two thousand years. With our wealth and powers, we have been a major unseen influence in most world affairs. I’ll skip the details, but I will say that we created the CIA, FBI, and NSA. In addition to having the most exhaustive mortal spy network on this planet, we also own the IRS, and have many skilled immortal demigods on our payroll that have had centuries to develop and hone their skills. In short, the demigods fought and died so valiantly to defend mankind, and I will use mankind to destroy them. I already have the mortal agencies watching all the demigods in the United States—Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase, Piper McLean, Leo Valdez, Clarisse La Rue, Travis and Connor Stoll, Katie and Miranda Gardiner, Billie Ng, all the adult Romans in the world, all the children who don’t even know they’re demigods, all the children who were only introduced to our world this summer, even the Egyptian children Carter and Sadie Kane, Walt Stone, Zia Rashid, and the rest of them. All of those that live amongst the mortals in some way are under 24/7 surveillance on the grounds of national security, suspected of domestic terrorism. With a phone call, I can have all the demigods arrested, and if they resist, executed on the on spot, and if they escape, hunted down and killed. And I can have their camps bombed to oblivion. The American military is practically under my control with how many generals and JAGs are on my payroll.”

“Certainly impressive for what it is,” Nyx said. “I do enjoy the irony of using the humans to destroy the demigods.”

Yes, quite delectable. What is it that you wanted of us?

“Hecate,” the emperor chirped.

The Primordials paused.

“Explain,” Nyx said.

“My predecessors were able to weaponize the god of silence Harpocrates by amplifying his powers in such a wat and to such a degree that they created a nationwide magic communication jam. In the same way, I can weaponize Hecate to warp the Mist on a planetary scale. The implications are practically infinite, but my immediate idea is simply global mind control. The emperors became gods because they got enough people to believe they were gods, and gods can fade because no one remembers them. In short, by harnessing the power of the human mind, we can give ourselves gigantic boosts in power by making the humans think something along the lines of Tartarus and Nyx are invincible, and we can also take power from the Olympians and other gods by the same principle by having the mortals think Zeus and his ilk are pathetically weak.”

Tartarus chuckled, a low, rumbling sound like the sound a boulder tumbling down the side of a mountain would make if the sound moved in slow motion. And then you can turn the mortals against us and make yourself the most powerful being in the universe.

The emperor chuckled too. “Oh, no. I have no desire to rule. I have no interest in empires. I am only in this game for my own personal amusement. That’s the only reason I even bothered with setting up the mortal organizations in the first place, and why I beseeched Nyx for her help. Why I plan is funny, but it could be funnier.”

Indeed. Now, what would you do if I said I have a plan of my own for the demigods?

“I would ask what it is, and either propose a blending of the plans, or retract mine entirely.”

I am building an army. A massive one. I am also accelerating the regeneration of my children the Giants, and arranging an alliance with Loki the Jotun and Setne the Egyptian magician. I intend not a war, but a single, overwhelming strike. My army, the forces of Ragnarök, and Isfet. I will destroy the demigods, the gods, and lay waste to this world. And then the spoils can be divvied among those who care, Tartarus finished dismissively.

The emperor looked positively delighted. “Beautiful….Might I still suggest my plan? I can use the humans to break the demigods, empower your forces, and depower the enemy, making your smashing victory all the easier.”

Tartarus looked at Nyx, and the goddess nodded.

You may have Hecate. Squeeze the demigods with the very people they saved. Have your fun with the Mist. The lights in Tartarus’s helmet glowed brighter as gravity increased in the Mansion of Night. And do not cross us.

“Like I said, I have no dreams of grandeur or aspirations of power. I’m just here to have a good time.”

We shall see.

Nyx sat up in her throne. “What is your name, immortal emperor?”

He bowed in a cordial manner. “My name is Gregorio Uberti. I am a human born during the Renaissance and made immortal by Nero in 1527.”

“The year that Rome was sacked,” Nyx observed.

Uberti smiled. “I opened the gate. My initiation into the Triumvirate.”

Nyx sat back, a small smirk on her face. “I see. I will send you Hecate when you have your contraption ready for her.”

“Thank you.”

Nyx waved her hand and sent the emperor back to his office.

A human after my own heart, Tartarus said, pleased. I, too, am only doing this because it amuses me. I will leave the rubble to whoever wants it after I’m done.

And that was truly what made Tartarus the most dangerous threat currently on record for the demigods.

Kronos seduced demigods with promises of revenge and justice, but his whole aim was power and his own revenge, with zero regard for those that followed him. Gaea and her Giants, once again, were motivated by revenge, the Giants desiring another shot at the gods, Gaea wanting to overthrow the gods that had stood there in complacency while her body was destroyed by the mortals. Apophis was the embodiment of hate and had a fervent desire to just destroy everything. Loki came within a hair’s breadth of victory, and may very well have won, if not for the bullshit power of friendship expressed during the flyting with Magnus. Finally, when it came to the Triumvirate, the reason they failed was simply because they sucked.

And also because these were children’s stories at the end of the day, and having the villains defeat the teenage heroes was taboo.

Tartarus was not committing to his own plan of world domination in the name of revenge against Percy and Annabeth because they escaped him, nor was he doing this in the name of his sister Gaea, nor was he disgruntled with how the Olympians had been handling their responsibilities. He didn’t hate all of creation and harbored a burning desire to destroy everything. He didn’t have a desire to cheat fate, nor did he have a desire to rule the world.

In one respect, Tartarus was only doing this for shits and giggles.

It was just that he was putting forth true effort into it.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Oh, yeah. It’s all falling apart.

At over 11k words, I feel this opening chapter is long enough. It would’ve been out sooner, but climbing 250-foot-tall, and higher, towers is very physically demanding work, and leaves one quite exhausted after the day is over.

But anyway.

I hope you enjoyed the set up of things to come. Picking up right where Piper’s Untold Story left off, with Piper telling the gang about her adventures and her new ideology, and then injecting some of my headcanons.

I firmly believe that at some point Percy and Annabeth had the quandary about whether they were exercising an appropriate amount of involvement during the Imperial War, and justifying their nonparticipation with the “they’ve done enough” argument. Further, in accordance with the dialogue on page 386 of Tower of Nero, Percy reveals “‘We found out [that Jason died and New Rome was nearly overrun] as soon as we arrived,’” and knowing that Grover was with them on their road trip, this inarguably means that Grover was lying to them the entire ride. Now, it is unclear when Grover left them as he does not feature in ToN, but as far as this story goes, he was with them all the way to the front door, and only finally told them about what they were driving into.

I hope the dialogue and the portrayals were believable and true to their characters.

Finally, one of my favorite headcanons, calling back to the first iteration of the Chaos War, very angry Romans. The situation herein was basically the same as it was the first time, which is why I didn’t go into detail with it. Angry, bitter, grieving Romans take Percy to court over not being there during the Battle of San Francisco Bay, the court rules in Percy’s favor, but it’s a hollow victory because NRU is still closed on account of there not being enough people left alive to even open the college. If you want to know what math I did to arrive at the number of survivors I did, it’s in my Essays and Other Drabbles on my Ao3, in my ToA essay.

Jumping into the villains, it’s still the classic “all the bad guys team up” scenario that’s since become cliché in the fandom when it comes to “Chaos fics,” but now it’s got my special twist on it. It’s also really fun for me to write the cacodemons as the children of Nyx and Tartarus instead of Nico, because the idea that the monsters are secret sleeper nightmares is so much more gripping and lore-accurate compared to the shit show that was TSatS, with Nyx saying that the cacodemons are hers and Nico’s created from his bad memories.

Finally, the New Triumvirate. Last time, I just brought back the old ones, but here I’m doing something different. Another of my favorite headcanons is that the Triumvirate is basically your standard long-running secret evil organization. You know, the kind that’s “manipulated global events from the shadows for centuries,” and “they control every government on the planet,” and “they rig all elections,” and “they have multiple monopolies on everything,” etc. Following this, especially because of magic, it makes perfect sense that the emperors would definitely have successors lined up, or at least there would be high-enough ranking members that would step up and take over in the event of their demises, and that they would definitely have a hand in most global affairs because of how old, wealthy, and powerful they are.

Hence Gregorio Uberti revealing how the Triumvirate created the worst alphabet organizations in the world, and how he can use them to hurt the demigods in ways no monster or a god could ever do. Well, technically speaking. It’s less that a monster or a god couldn’t have demigods publicly arrested for domestic terrorism, and more that they wouldn’t bother. They’d just kill the demigod and be done with it.

In the end, the build-up to the beginning of the Chaos War is still not over. Things will really ramp up next chapter, and it will most likely be a cliffhanger ending in their arrivals.

You already know who’s coming to the party.

In the meantime, please Fav, Follow, and Review the first chapter of the biggest, grandest, most epic fanfic I will most like ever write!

Chapter Text

Ah, the glory days are certainly behind us, my old friends. An opening weekend of four Reviews, fourteen Follows, and nine Favs. The nostalgia is getting to me as I recall the openings for the other stories after Leviathan, with Reviews climbing into the 20s and 30s, Favs and Follows going even higher than that sometimes.

Such is life, though.

Thank you to everyone that’s still here, and welcome to anyone that’s only just now getting here!

The rising action continues herein, though there’s more focus on the heroes this time as they get a wonderful taste of the world they saved. Well, more so Percy and Annabeth because they decided to live in the shithole known as California, and go to college at UC Berkeley.

Disclaimer: I don’t own PJO or any other crossover

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“Sorry. No white people allowed on Saturdays.”

Riordan saying that “Percy Jackson always takes place ‘now’” is really a cursed statement. It opens the door for current relevant pop culture references, like Frank deciding to do the “Wakanda thing” back in 2019 during the final battle in the Tyrant’s Tomb, referencing Avengers: Endgame, and gives Riordan grounds to bring up relevant social situations, such as his 2020 book Un Natale Mezzosangue, which is set during the COVID pandemic of 2020, and Percy and Nico are wearing masks as they travel around Florence to find Annabeth the perfect Christmas gift (and there’s an interesting statement in the book that demigods can’t actually get sick from the virus, but they can spread it, hence the masks, begging the interesting question as to how a demigod’s immune system actually works). On the flip side of things, the PJO timeline always being concurrent to “now” also means that everything that happens in our day to day lives up to the very day you are reading this happens in Percy’s “world,” which includes this very ironic and morbidly humorous stink from UC Berkeley back in April of 2024.

The Gill Tract Community Farm, an agriculture research site launched in 2013 by the university and the public, came under fire for text messages from a manager of the farm claiming that “Saturdays are exclusively BIPOC,” with BIPOC not actually being some kind of disease but an acronym for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Now, as to whether there were actually any instances of white people being banned from the farm, or if there were guards posted about ready to tell white people off, was actually a great question, but the drama of this present fictional situation is perfect for the main idea of this scene.

Holding hands at the main entrance to the farm, Percy and Annabeth both nearly came unglued as this group of black and brown people stood almost in a wall to prevent them from simply walking in and seeing the farm for themselves.

“Excuse me?” Annabeth demanded. “What do you mean no white people on Saturdays? You literally can’t do that!”

“Yes, we can. You white people are the main causes of violences and discrimination today, and so we can definitely set aside one day of the week for all of us BIPOC to be free from you.”

Annabeth actually stepped forward, ready to put that claim about white people and violence into action. This event was anachronistic to the last chapter, the ending scene of which with Uberti taking place a year after Piper’s IM party with the others. This current event was in the early Fall of Percabeth’s first college semester, as freshman, and so the sting of Jason’s death, the trial, NRU being closed, and their own emotional and psychological turmoil were all still very fresh, meaning Annabeth was operating on a very short fuse.

Her tolerance for bullshit was at an all-time low, and had just been exceeded.

However, before Annabeth could do something really dumb, like turning these racists into fertilizer with her bear hands, Percy pulled her back. He glowered at the racists with the same wolf stare that he once used on the street vermin he encountered with Hazel and Frank on their quest together, the same wolf stare that made even hardened gangbangers shy away in fear. It had the same effect today, with the racists breaking out into sweats as they all stepped backwards.

“We will be taking this up with the president,” Percy vowed in a voice barely above a guttural growl.

They left the farm without looking back. When they got back to the car, Annabeth finally released her enraged scream.

Percy wasn’t about to scream, but he was definitely fuming.

Annabeth eventually ran out of breath and started panting until her breathing evened back out. “Is that what Hazel felt like back in the 40s?”

“Probably not,” Percy said logically. “She was just a kid that didn’t know who she was. We do. We know that we could’ve slaughtered those assholes. We know that we put our lives on the line for everyone in this world at least twice, meaning we fought to save those assholes, meaning our friends died to save those assholes, and now here we are.”

Annabeth chuckled mirthlessly with a sardonic smile. “Then I guess this is how Jesus feels. Died for everyone so they could have eternal life, only for just about everyone to spit in his face and use his name as a curse phrase.” She looked at Percy with a borderline crazed look in her eye. “Maybe we should drop this whole college thing and go join Piper on her crusade against the forces of evil. Go kill the bad guys and make the world a safer place by spilling an ocean of blood and stacking a mountain of corpses.”

Percy grabbed her hand in both of his. “Annabeth,” he said soothingly.

She leaned onto his shoulder and started crying.

He set his chin upon her head and maneuvered his arm around her to start rubbing her back under her bra. “It’s okay,” he whispered, “we’re okay, we’re okay.”

Annabeth cried until Percy’s shirt was drenched with her tears before her cries became sniffles, and her sniffles became hiccups, and then she was finally calm enough to speak coherently again.

“I guess we shouldn’t be surprised,” she said. “Our entire lives have been one struggle after another. One more battle. One more foe. One more quest. I guess we were stupid to think we were finally going to get a break and things were going to get better once we reached college. Naiveté, I suppose.” Annabeth pinched the bridge of her nose as she let out a long, heavy sigh. “This is going to be the rest of our lives, isn’t it? Maybe the gods and the monsters will finally leave us alone, but now we face another horror: normal life. Now we get to live in the world we saved. Now we get to deal with all the racism, the inequality, the injustice, the politics, the taxes, the crime—and just the general unfairness that’s commonplace in the ‘real’ world. Maybe we really should take a page from Piper’s book, and start figuring out ways to make the world a better place.”

Percy was once again staring a thousand yards into the distance, not at all liking the implications of this debacle, or the implications of anything Annabeth had said regarding their potential future of struggle, strife, and hardship out here in the real world, the world away from all the quests, and gods, and monsters, nor did he like the implications of what “getting involved” would look like in regards to making the world a better place. Percy could only envision something like the Punisher, where they became brutal, bloody mercenaries that, like Annabeth only halfway joked, killed a lot of people, or they became like the Justice Lords from those episodes of Justice League, forcefully taking over the planet with their powers, and then using their powers to enforce order around the globe.

Percy couldn’t help but gulp at a sudden thought that popped into his head. “We’re about to become Luke.”

Annabeth looked at him. “Huh?”

“We’re about to become like Luke,” percy clarified. “Obsessed with revenge and justice, punishing the wicked and all that, and we’re going to lose ourselves. You know, become the very thing we swore to destroy, or live long enough to become the villains instead of dying as heroes.”

Annabeth’s mouth set into a thin line. “We need to keep in touch with Piper. If she’s really going to do that crusader stuff, we need to keep her grounded.”

“Yeah,” Percy agreed.

The two sat in silence for a few minutes, thinking, contemplating their life choices, before Percy looked at Annabeth. “Wanna go to the park?”

“I would love to go to the park.”

They went to the nearby Cesar Chavez Park located on a small peninsula. They parked, got out, went down the trail a little bit while holding hands, and then jumped into the water. Holding on to each other, warm and cozy and clean despite the bay’s temperature and general filthiness thanks to Percy’s powers, all their woes and worries melted away for a short while.

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Many months later, in the middle of March, coming up on the one-year anniversary of Jason’s death, Annabeth was in one of the many student lounges of the university, alone save for one other guy whose name she didn’t know. Percy was currently in a class, much to her endless chagrin. She hated being away from her boyfriend for any extended amount of time these days.

She especially hated it right now because she really needed a shoulder to cry on.

“But why?” she demanded rhetorically to the email on the laptop in front of her. Yet another rejection letter from a do-not-reply sender telling her that the company appreciated the time she took to apply, but they were moving on with other candidates. Followed but by an “encouraging” message to keep applying within the company, and to not be discouraged.

“Why what?” the stranger asked.

Annabeth looked over at him. He looked tall, but he was sitting down. Shaggy brown hair parted in the middle, stubble along his cheeks, chin, and under his nose, lanky, hairy arms, brown eyes, wearing khaki pants, a leather belt, dress shoes, and a school polo. He looked ready to go to the office.

“Sorry,” he said. “I heard you scream at the computer and curiosity got the better of me.”

Annabeth shook her head with a sigh. “No, it’s okay. Just—I’ve been applying for summer internships since November, and here it is the middle of March, and I’m still getting rejected from everywhere I apply to, but I don’t know why. No one is telling me why. I mean, I’ve got a 4.0 GPA, I have relevant intern experience from high school back in Manhattan, and I have recommendation letters from my old boss and my professors here—just what the heck am I missing!?”

“Well, I was going to say it’s an experience thing, that you’re just a freshman in college and these people are looking for juniors and seniors, but if you already internship experience…” he trailed off, glancing at Annabeth, gauging her, and then going back to his own computer.

“What?” she said. “What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know you enough to know how you’ll react, and I’d rather not get expelled because you went and told someone that I said a thing.”

“I’m an open mind.”

The young man shrugged. “M’kay….On your screening questions, the ones where they ask you your gender, race, and ethnic background, what are you putting?”

And just like that, Annabeth knew exactly where this was going, and she appreciated why this guy was hesitant to present his theory. In short, UC Berkeley was a largely liberal college, and Annabeth had to be extremely careful in who she talked to, and what she said in general. It wasn’t that she was a hard conservative and bled Republican red—she was actually what would be considered to be a political moderate, neither expressly liberal nor expressly conservative—it was that holding any kind of counter views could be a social death sentence.

A brief example of when Annabeth had to choose her words carefully was when reparations were brought up one day in class. It was the standard rhetoric: white people needed to give black people their money because of slavery and Jim Crow and racism, etc., and Annabeth had to stop her ADHD from blurting out the standard counterarguments: slavery was 150 years ago, most of you can’t even prove where, if anywhere, in your family tree there were slaves, everyone was slighted by someone in the course of history, so, by your logic, everyone should be giving everyone reparations, black people are responsible for killing the most black people, and black people commit the most violence against black people, and so on and so forth.

This was only one example of where Annabeth had to tread carefully. There were many other instances in which she had to keep a tight lid on her tongue, lest she turn a neutral situation into a hostile one. As for Percy, whenever he encountered these situations, he wisely walked away, his chief reason being Annabeth’s secondary reason, that being he personally knew a black girl from the 1940s and he personally knew a Native Cherokee.

When the demigods had their big reunion last Fall per Piper and Leo’s Fall Breaks, the conversation did get political as Piper pushed her agenda/plan/worldview/whatever you wanted to call it one more time, mostly just trying to pick Annabeth’s brain as she searched for guidance on the harder, more sensitive problems plaguing planet Earth. As in, dealing with the likes of the cartels, gangs, human traffickers, and pedophiles was easy, but what was the best way to handle touchy political topics like illegal immigration, taxes, centralized banking, gay and transgender rights, as just a few examples.

Of course, asking for opinions on politics always led to discussions on politics, and it was a testament to the friendship of the demigods that even after a discussion like that, that they were all still good friends. Though it did help that they were all on the same page, anyway.

As someone who wanted to let the past remain in the past, Hazel was quite appalled with the notion of reparations, and also offended by the notion that black people today were so apparently incapable of providing for themselves that they were demanding white people do it for them.

Piper was quite bemused by the idea of reparations, finding it ironic that such an argument was almost always centered around black people and slavery, and never around Native Americans and the literal genocides they faced at the hands of Americans. Not to downplay slavery, of course, but to up-play the heinous things that happened to Natives, which tied back to the standard counterargument about how everyone deserved reparations.

“Even in a world full of racial bias, there’s still racial bias,” Piper had said. “Every time something about racism comes up in the news, it’s always about black people. Sometimes it’s about Hispanics. When was the last time any of you ever saw something on the news about how the Natives are mistreated? Or even Asians, for that matter? It’s always about black people.”

“Squeaky wheel?” Leo suggested.

“And the idea that Native Americans ‘lost’ so therefore they don’t have the right to say anything about anything?” Calypso added, drawing upon what rudimentary knowledge she had of US history from her remedial lessons. “They just need to be quiet and stay in their reservations, thankful that they’re even allowed to live and have a reservation?”

Piper pointed at her with an affirmative nod. “There are people that legitimately think that way, yeah.”

“Just like there are people that argue that Native Americans get a ton of handouts in the form of scholarships and tax breaks, and so they need to stop complaining,” Annabeth said with a twisted smirk as she played a little bit of devil’s advocate.

Piper nodded at that notion, too. “In short, it’s a mess. Any suggestions on how to clean it up?”

Leo snorted, mouth working up into a mean smile. “Kill everyone and start over?”

Piper snorted too, lips curling into a smirk. “We’ll keep it on the table.”

After that, there was an uncomfortable silence as everyone started swaying to Piper’s mindset. The power and responsibility thing, the “we saved the world, now we have to make it a better place” idea, which smacked straight into the “I just want to live my life and be done with this hero stuff” mentality. It was a yucky feeling, the conflicting mindsets warring against each other.

And now, back in the present, in the student lounge with this guy she’d only ever interacted with today, Annabeth was once again finding herself embroiled with racial discrimination.

“You think companies are turning me down because I’m checking off ‘white’?”

The young man looked at her. “I created a fake profile with a fake resume as a black man with a worse GPA than I actually have, and the only job experience I put on there is Popeye’s Chicken.” Annabeth couldn’t stop the derisive rush of air that left her nose. “I performed a little social experiment by applying to the same companies I applied to with my main resume, and where my white profile got rejection letters, my fake black one got the acceptance letters. ‘Congratulations! After careful consideration, our hiring team would like to schedule a phone screening with you! What’s a good day and time?’”

Annabeth was utterly appalled. “You’re kidding.”

He moved his laptop to show her his emails. He switched the tab back and forth between his main email, and the fake one he had created. Sure enough, the same companies that rejected his main profile were sending interview request emails to his fake one.

“It’s been said that money cannot buy votes just like race has no effect on hiring…except that money can buy votes,” the young man said sardonically. “Companies have to reach those diversity quotas. HR did a demographic survey and found out the white percentage is too high, and so they made the decree to give greater consideration to non-white people.” He shrugged dispassionately. “Shit’s fucked.”

“Do you know this for a fact, or are you just speculating?”

“My uncle is a hiring manager. What I told you is literally what HR told him to do, and for the sake of his job, he does just that. However, he gets his revenge on that bullshit by standing there and watching as the diversity hires break stuff and cost the company millions every year.”

Annabeth stared at him, mouth slightly agape, and then she closed her eyes and chuckled mirthlessly. “Well, damn. Heh. So what are we supposed to do?”

“Leave this shithole state,” he said seriously. “I’m only here because of my uncle. He was able to pay for everything. After I graduate this May, I’m moving back to Louisiana.”

Annabeth’s mouth set into a thin line. “I can’t do something like that. My boyfriend and I…we wanted to move out here for a reason. We’re from Manhattan.”

“An equally disgusting place.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Sure. So long as you ignore the enormous cost of living, the squatters, the general crime rate, and the gigantic influx of illegals that’s going to cost the city twelve billion dollars to handle them all, it’s absolutely a great place to live.”

Annabeth swallowed heavily. It was something she and Percy didn’t like to think about, the wellbeing of Sally, Paul, and Estelle on the other side of the continent given the observable decline of the city.

“Anyway, I need to go.” The young man shut his laptop, packed up, and bid farewell. “Have a nice day.”

“Yeah. Thanks. You too.”

Annabeth sat back down, a fresh wave of despair threatening to send her into another crying fit. Jason was dead, New Rome was still almost a ghost town, NRU was still closed and was currently being projected to still be closed in the Fall and possibly even the Spring of next year, and now this. Now she and Percy wouldn’t even be able to make a living in this city because of their skin.

They fought tooth and nail to save the world, watched as their friends died to save the world, and this was the reward the world gave them: just more pain and suffering.

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Anyone that knew Leo knew that he just wasn’t cut out for the standardized education system. His ADHD made him too hyper for the classroom, and when he did try to take meds to curb it, his immune system completely demolished the chemicals. It wasn’t as if this was some kind of bad thing, however. It was just a fact of life that there were many kids that didn’t fit within the system, and there were plenty of alternatives to public school, anyway.

As such, when Leo turned eighteen, two years after the summer of the Imperial War in which he was sixteen, being fifteen during the summer of the Giant War, he dropped out in his senior year, was able to get his GED, and went straight to work as a local mechanic. Day One was all Leo needed to establish himself as a near-godlike machine expert—because he was. Once upon a time, he merely touched a helicopter, and the influx of mechanical knowledge enabled him to sufficiently operate the machine. Also once upon a time, he designed and built a Greek trireme outfitted with plenty of techno-sorcery, and secretly built a dragon into the frame.

As a fifteen-year-old.

Leo had only gotten better with time.

His ability to simply touch a vehicle and learn everything about made him unparalleled in his field. There was no speculation, no guessing, no inferencing—Leo knew exactly what was wrong with a vehicle, and knew exactly how to fix it.

His reputation as a top-notch mechanic quickly grew thanks to so many people on social media praising his skills, and thanks to that, more and more people started bringing their business to the shop Leo worked for. Business meant money, of course, and we all know, the love of money is the root of all evil. Leo’s boss was a good man until he started seeing dollar signs, and soon Leo found himself being put on the schedule for ten, sometimes even twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, and sometimes even seven days. In short, Leo was being overworked.

It was hardly as if that was a big deal, though. You didn’t spend two years living with a daughter of Hecate and not learn how to use the Mist. One day, Leo simply marched up to his greedy boss and snapped his fingers.

Schedule fixed.

And early retirement, too.

Leo sent the greedy man on his way, using the Mist to have him tender his resignation and leave Leo in charge of the shop. No one complained, because everyone loved Leo. He showed up on time, showed out, got along with everyone, knew how to do his job, and his girlfriend not only was great eye candy, but could make some mean tamales.

Now the owner of the shop, Leo got to experience the horrors of management. He suddenly had to be responsible for other people and their mishaps, and actually had to enforce discipline in the shop—making sure people showed up, they stayed their entire shift, they didn’t break anything, they didn’t take anything—and he had to make schedules, manage schedule conflicts, keep track of PTO, find coverage on the days that too many people wanted off and there weren’t enough people available for work, and even send people home on the weird days that there wasn’t enough business and the shop wasn’t making enough money to afford the hours.

He also had to manage the finances of the building. The building needed electricity, water, and gas to heat up the water, and so all of those were billed from the city. There was also the insurance that covered the building, and the insurance that covered the equipment inside the building. The paychecks to all the workers was another expense that needed to be maintained down to the second, though luckily there was a computer for that. Of course, there were also all the taxes that were tied to owning and operating a small business within the city limits.

Then all of these bills had to be weighed against how much profit the store was making from service.

Finally, on top of managing his employees, and managing finances, Leo also had to manage customers. Just like it was different with his coworkers now that he was the boss, it was different with the customers, too. The expectations were different, being that since Leo was now in charge, everyone was going to be able to perform like Leo, and it just wasn’t the case. The mistakes made by his employees now reflected on him, and the negative reviews left by disgruntled people quickly circulated around the internet, and Leo could track a noticeable drop in revenue during the course of his management.

A classic example of when a dream became reality, and reality wasn’t as kind as you had hoped.

Leo’s dream literally went up in flames when he had to fire somebody on the grounds of time theft, and they retaliated by breaking into the shop in the middle of the night, and starting a fire that burned the place down. It took Leo three months to become manager, and four months to lose the shop.

A poetic seven.

What prevented Leo from committing suicide out of despair was A) the love and support of Calypso, B) the love and support of his official adoptive mothers, Emmie and Jo, C) the love and support of the other denizens of the Waystation, D) the support of the people of Indianapolis, whom had come to see Leo as something of a hometown hero, E) the fat insurance check, and F) the fact that Leo couldn’t bear it to face Jason in Elysium (assuming Leo achieved Elysium on account of his heroic deeds being weighed against suicide) and upon being asked, “Why are you here so soon?”, the answer not being “I died in battle defending those I loved,” but instead, “Life hit me hard and I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

Of course, while Leo was surrounded by a spectacular support group, and he did receive an insurance check for the property, the check was only so much, and only for so much. The previous owner didn’t have what was called “business interruption” insurance, and Leo didn’t even know it existed, and what that meant was that Leo didn’t get any insurance money to cover income, meaning no money to cover the equivalent in the bills, property taxes, and payroll. He had to let everyone go, and the promise of “I’ll come back when you get the shop rebuilt” only meant so much.

Another dose of salt in the wound was that the arsonist, while charged with a level four arson felony, was only sentenced by the court to three years in prison and a fine of three thousand dollars due to the arsonist’s young age of 20 and his spectacular waterworks performance in court. This asshole burned down Leo’s dream job, and only got three years in prison for it, and a fine that was barely a slap to the wrist. Of course, the recurring “three” didn’t help Leo’s emotional state, given how important that number had been in his life.

Anyway, Leo took to freelance, self-employed mechanic work, using Festus as his means of transportation and his tool box, setting up a small website and a phone number, both of which were operated by Calypso. They used the insurance to money to start rebuilding the shop, and used the money they made from Leo’s self-employed job to start saving up while the construction crew cleared the debris and rebuilt everything.

It wasn’t much, but it was the beginning of their old hope to have their very own place with their own name on it.

Leo did not tell his friends about his ordeal, desiring not to bother them with his problems, and also desiring to handle it himself.

Unfortunately, Leo and Calypso would never get the chance to own and operate their own shop.

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At the two-year mark for everyone else after the Imperial War, where Leo was now self-employed, things were okay. Percy and Annabeth were gearing up for their junior year of college at UCB, Frank and Hazel were still praetors of the legion, the legion having grown back to full strength at 250 legionaries, but they were mostly young, only eleven, twelve, or thirteen, so nowhere the impressive showing of nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one-year-olds—some even older depending on when they started their service—that it was before the Battle of San Fransisco Bay. New Rome was completely rebuilt, though the college still remained closed on account of still not having enough staff and students to open.

Sad as it was, Percy and Annabeth would never get to attend NRU. They were forever stuck at UCB for their college career.

Thalia and Reyna had talked with Artemis about getting some Hunters together, and striking out into the world to fight the evils of mankind. Artemis agreed, but she gave them the dire warning that if they wanted to pursue that course, they were going to see the most horrible things their minds couldn’t didn’t even know were possible. Artemis warned them that there was a reason that the Hunt stuck to monsters and animals, instead of going after the bad guys, and that was because the Hunters that did either ended up losing their minds and getting corrupted by the psychological trauma of the things they saw, or they gave up on mankind entirely and just wished death upon the whole species.

Thalia and Reyna took that warning to heart, and struck out with a small band of older, far more experienced Hunters, ones that had tasted the horrors of the world, and jumped out before they became too damaged. All of them were handpicked by Artemis specifically for the task at hand, of course, for the sake of the youngest girls in the Hunt.

For six months, they were going strong. Using magic to see across time and space—specifically the technique of essence projection, wherein a demigod could take control of their dreams and send their conscious into the past and future, and see all over the world in the present—and teleportation magic, the girls were all over the place, fighting evil and saving the day in that ideal fashion you expected superheroes to operate. Or at least, superheroes that were willing to kill.

Oh, yes. The older Hunters made it expressly clear that they were not Batmen. They were Punishers and Red Hoods. Not that Reyna had problems with that. She’d killed enemy demigods during the Battle of Mt. Othrys, killed pirates aboard the Queen Anne’s Revenge because 300 years as a guinea pig left them starved for attention, shall we say, and they did not care that Reyna was only twelve, and Reyna had even been willing to execute legionaries when she was praetor, Bryce Lawrence being a prime example.

Reyna was no stranger to shedding blood.

Thalia, who had seen plenty of gore, needed a little bit of time to get used to killing, though it helped when the people she killed objectively deserved death. Rapists, pedophiles, and murderers being prime examples. You know, the standard filth.

It was just that the standard filth was everywhere, and did not end, and was spirit-crushingly stereotypical. The Hunters went after many sects of the cartels in the Southwest, and laid waste to probably hundreds of Hispanics. Taking on the gangs in the big cities meant putting a noticeable dent in the black population, something that was morbidly ironic given that one of the Hunters was a black girl rescued from a plantation back in 1713.

“I watched my people die in the name of freedom and equality for three centuries, and all they do with freedom today is kill each other, do drugs, start fights in schools, steal things from stores, and the men dodge responsibility by running out on the women they impregnate, and the women kill their babies before they’re even born, and they all point their finger at the white man and demand that he come and fix all their problems,” the Hunter practically snarled one night around a camp fire.

The older Hunters were unphased and nonplussed, while Thalia and Reyna were too uncomfortable to do anything but nod.

Together, they busted up drug running operations, destroyed stockpiles of guns and ammo used by cartels, gangs, and other ilk; they put an end to human trafficking operations, rescuing hundreds of women, girls, and boys, getting them to hospitals with Mist-warped memories to keep the Hunters anonymous; looking into the future, they prevented as many rapes as they could, as many school shootings as they could, and rescued as many abused kids as they could; and never, ever was it anywhere close to enough. There was always another cartel, another gang, another rape, another murder, another shooting, another supplier of guns—the never-ending war.

And that was just the violent crime stuff in the United States. Never mind the cartel activity in Mexico and further South. Never mind the upheaval in Ukraine and Israel as of the time of this story. Never mind the apparent Muslim invasion of Europe. Never mind politics and corporations and society as a whole. Never mind other injustices like the way the credit system worked, the systems of usury employed by the banks, insurance and absurd hospital bills, and the price of EpiPens.

For all the bloodshed, there was always more. A never-ending river of wasted life.

True to the word of Artemis, it weighed on Thalia and Reyna’s souls, seeing with their own eyes the depths of human depravity. The things the cartels did to people, the things rich people did to sex slaves, the things parents did to their own children—there were some nights where Thalia and Reyna really wished they had let Gaea win, because at least she would’ve wiped out all of this evil filth.

It came to pass, only ten months into their own crusade, that Thalia and Reyna had enough when they were too late to stop a madwoman from using a curling iron on her five-year-old son to melt his genitals off. Reyna literally tore the woman apart, ripping her arms and legs from their sockets with her demigod strength that was buffed from the blessing of Artemis, and then crushing the woman’s skull between her hands for good measure. The poor boy died from the injury, and Thalia didn’t so much as pray to her uncle so much as she bellowed at him from the overworld.

Hades personally arrived on the scene, rising from the twisting shadows in dramatic fashion. There was no sneer on his face, no glare nor glower at his niece shouting at him. Only pain. The face of a weary soul.

It was no wonder that Thalia was in hysterics over this particular child, given his blonde hair and lifeless blue eyes.

“I will take him to Elysium,” Hades said softly.

Thalia was so emotionally broken that she flung herself at her uncle, sobbing into his robes.

Reyna stood off to the side, her arms, chest, and face a bloody mess from her recent dismemberment operation. She looked at Hades. “Death comes for everyone regardless of everything, and death brings them all to you, and you’ve been doing this for over four-thousand years…” Reyna paused to swallow, her lower lip trembling as her eyes watered. “How-How m-many-”

“Too many,” Hades said with all the weight of a mountain range.

Reyna couldn’t take it anymore. She fell to her knees and wept, ten months of endless pain and suffering finally, officially, totally overwhelming her.

Hades extended a shadow and brought Reyna to him and Thalia, and the cold god of the Underworld just silently held them as their souls bled out, tortured and anguished by the atrocities they’d seen, atrocities that were only commonplace for the lord of the dead.

When the girls had calmed down enough to be coherent again, Hades said quietly, “I can erase your memories. Or alter them. That way you don’t have to carry them with you.”

Thalia wiped her eyes. “No. I-I need them. I-I can’t just…f-forget.”

Hades nodded and looked at Reyna.

She shook her head. “I need to keep them, too.”

Hades nodded again.

“How have you done it?” Thalia asked. “To have seen this shit for thousands of years, and still be…sane?”

“I have a wife,” Hades said. “A confidant, my shoulder to lean on, a person that I can bear my heart out to, someone who will always be there to listen—six months out of the year, anyway. And I take breaks. Small vacations from my work to get away and breathe for a moment.”

“Breaks,” Thalia mumbled. “I don’t want to ever go back and do this again.”

“I understand.”

“Does that make me a bad person? That I tried to do it, and after ten months, I don’t want to do it anymore, like, ever? I just want to spend the rest of my days being happy with the Hunters at this point.”

“Do not underestimate the good things you have done, niece,” Hades said sagely. “You have saved many lives, even if it doesn’t feel like it. You will yet save many more. Give it time, maybe a year or two, or two hundred, but do not give up.”

“O-Okay,” Thalia choked before clearing her throat. “Okay.”

Hades looked at Reyna. “Yes, sir,” she said.

The god gently picked up the mangled, naked corpse of the poor boy, but before he left, Thalia had another question for him.

“Why did you come up here? To us? Let us…you know…cry on you? You’re Hades. You don’t…do…that kind of stuff.”

“It’s late spring,” Hades answered. “Persephone is with her mother right now.”

Thalia and Reyna understood. His shoulder to lean on was gone from him. Today, he needed them as much as they needed him. Or rather, they just needed someone right then and there.

Following this incident, the girls were quick to reach out to Piper, at least to tell her that they tried, and what they did, and what it did to them, and then it became their desperate plea for Piper to give up on her crusade, or at least wait several more years and get some happy memories of life stored in her head. Piper only stared at them in silence for a time through the Iris Message, her eyes dark and sunken in, her expression neutral.

Thalia and Reyna both understood that in the ten months since their last conversation, Piper had already started. She had already seen some of the horrors of mankind through her controlled dreams, and had either fought them herself, or dispatched one of the Native American spirits that now followed her to take care of it.

“I know,” Piper said.

With those simple words, Thalia and Reyna both knew that she would not be swayed nor deterred. She already knew what she was getting into, and she was resolute, her resolve unshaken.

The two Hunters were both grieved by this.

“Just…” Reyna started, but stopped as she struggled to find the right words. “Just don’t lose yourself.”

“If you need us, call,” Thalia said. “We’ll help.”

Piper nodded. “Thank you.”

They ended the Iris Message.

Speaking of Piper, two years after the summer of the Imperial War, she was done with her senior year of high school. On her mind was what she was going to do with her life now that she was graduated, how she was going to manage that work-life balance of the crusade and friends and family. In those two years, in accordance with her words to Thalia and Reyna, she had already been quite active with her powers.

Using essence projection in the same way the Hunters did, Piper was able to look across the town, the state, and the country itself, the extent of her concern for now. With the majority of the Native spirits looking to her for leadership following her victory over Incognito, Piper had access to a veritable army of supernatural beings. For her, it was easy to see things in her dreams, and then coordinate with Jisdu to deploy the spirits across the states. Given the spirits’ negative disposition towards mankind in general, they had no problem with Piper sending them after criminal scum with lethal intent.

Of course, that meant that Piper was making herself bear witness to one horror after the other, and if it wasn’t for the support of Jisdu, her dad, her cousin Tsula, and Shel, Piper would be in the same boat as Thalia and Reyna: depressed, their hopes ruined and crushed, dabbling in misanthropy, with no hope for humanity and a desire to have nothing to do with the species. Just go off and do their own thing.

At this two-year mark, Piper hadn’t told her dad what she was doing, but Shel and Tsula knew, the former because Billy told her who Piper really was and Piper confirmed it, and the latter because Piper told her everything and Jisdu brought her into the fold during the height of the Incognito incident. Having two people in her life that knew what she was doing and had her back really helped keep her mental state in check.

Make no mistake: Piper, Thalia, and Reyna had seen some fucked up shit.

Piper’s two years in high school were a blur. Given who she was and what she did, she didn’t have the time to get involved in school stuff. No extracurriculars like cheerleading, basketball, softball, or volleyball, no after-school clubs, no school functions like plays or concerts, and the one time Piper and Shel were underneath the Friday night lights together, Piper had to go fight a rogue rattlesnake spirt that was long as a football field before it slithered onto the actual football field.

It made Piper sad, but that was the price of her chosen life. She didn’t get to experience the joys of high school that most everyone else did, like the glory of winning a state championship, or being picked for the leading role in the play, or achieving the distinction of being in the top ten percent of her class, nor did Piper do all the bad girl teenage stuff like skip school for the day, or skip in the middle of the day, or do drugs in the restroom.

Nope, Piper was basically a nobody. She mostly made B’s while pulling a few C’s and some A’s, and she kept her head down and out of the spotlight. Other than fighting rogue spirits and the odd monster that somehow found Piper in the sea of teenage hormones, the wildest thing Piper ever did in high school was make out with Shel in the library bathroom, which led to a fingering session, which luckily concluded with the final bell ringing, allowing them to legally leave campus and not have to spend the rest of the school day in wet panties.

That being said, Piper did experience at least one common joy in high school, that being losing her virginity. It was the summer of Piper’s eighteenth birthday, prior to her senior year, one year after dating Shel. Shel had asked Piper in advance if, after a year of dating and being on third base for six months by that point, she wanted to finally go all the way, with tongues and toys, and Piper had said yes. So, Shel and Piper went off camping, everyone with half a brain figuring what they were really going to do, something that took Tristan a moment to accept, the fact that his baby girl was an adult now, and could do adult things like have sex, and the sex in question being with another girl, and that was exactly what Shel and Piper did during their night out after getting their tent set up.

To put it in simple, vulgar terms: Shel railed Piper like a train with her strap.

Piper’s limp after her first time being penetrated all the way was short-lived, but her glow lasted all week.

Moving on, when graduation finally arrived, it was all but superficial for Piper. For just about everyone, graduation meant either a few months of a break before going to college, or the beginning of going full-time at whatever job they already have. There were outliers, of course, like those deadbeat kids that didn’t want to go to college nor did they have a job, and just wanted to spend their days sleeping in and playing video games, possibly smoking weed while they were at it. To that point, Piper was an outlier as well, because she hadn’t committed to college, nor did she have a job anymore.

She had quit working at the Cherokee giftshop some time ago in order to better manage her time between school, training, her girlfriend, family, and her hero work.

What Piper was facing was just how much commitment was “required” from her. She graduated. She was no longer bound by state and federal law to spend eight hours a day at school. She was free now. She could truly dedicate her life to the cause, striking out into the world to get her hands dirty instead of deploying the spirits to do it for her, or she could continue what she was doing, training, dreaming, and delegating, while going to college with Shel at Northeastern State University, pursuing a political science degree with her girlfriend to get into a career of politics.

Quite poetic, fighting for the rights of the people by day, killing to protect the people by night.

The danger Piper saw in such a career, though, was her own human nature.

“What, exactly, are the ethics of using my charmspeak against political opponents?” Piper asked Jisdu one summer night after graduation with a sideways smile.

The trickster rabbit returned that sideways smile, a gleam in his eye.

“I would say that depends exclusively on what they’re opposing you on, their reasoning for opposing you, and how much you care for the person opposing you. Now, if we want to get to the question you’re really asking, that being using your charmspeak on corrupt politicians to either make them actually do their job and uphold their oath of office, or confess their crimes and have them removed, then hell yeah, go for it. Because what’s the alternative? Stand by and let them abuse their power, getting rich on bribes and embezzlement, deliberately causing harm to the people they’re supposed to represent? Or try to acquire evidence of their crimes, and then go through the headache of due process, with lawyers, judges, juries, potential corruption and foul play, all with no guarantee of conviction in the first place, and then they still get reelected anyway, rendering all that effort null and void.”

Piper’s sideways smile got a little bigger as she appreciated the over convoluted and broken justice system currently at work in the United States. Also her personal experience with said system a few months ago when she tried to play anonymous informant for a local investigation into a triple homicide, only for the suspect—who did kill the kids, Piper confirmed that with an essence projection into the past, thus demonstrating the unstoppable detective power of essence projection—to get acquitted because the defense attorney convinced the judge that the evidence was illegally acquired and fake.

An anonymous tipper telling the police exactly where to go get all of the evidence they needed was considered questionable enough to throw the case.

So Piper went and killed the man herself. Tossed a brick through a window, flew inside his house as a bird, transformed back into a human, partially turned her hand into a bear’s claw, and obliterated the man’s lower jaw and throat with a single swipe, sending blood, chunks of skin and muscle, and teeth and bone fragments flying everywhere. Piper took her brick, put it back through the window, flew back out, then collected her brick and left. Absolutely baffled the police with that one, because where forced entry was obvious, the tool used was missing, and it was obvious no human had killed the murderer given the damage to his face.

Oh, well.

“So,” Jisdu chirped, bringing Piper back from memory lane, “my opinion on the morality and ethics behind using your charmspeak on those pesky corrupt politicians? Fuckin’ send it, girl. Be the divine force you halfway are, rendering judgement and bringing about justice.”

Piper snorted.

“Now, using charmspeak on someone just because they disagree with you politically is a bit petty, but no less funny,” Jisdu continued, getting serious. “I support the idea of using your powers on those who deserve it, those who deserve it being those who have committed acts of evil, acts of evil being the standard stuff, like senseless murder, rape, theft, infidelity, extortion, blackmail, not coming to a complete stop at the stop sign, and so on and so forth—doesn’t require that much thought, really—but I do not support the idea of using your powers against those who mildly irritate you…for the most part. Maybe like a small prank or something-”

“Jisdu.”

“Do not become the very thing we’ve sworn to destroy,” said the spirit in a grave voice despite quoting a meme.

“Do you think there’s any truth in that other movie quote? You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain.”

And in that moment, Jisdu wasn’t a trickster spirit that enjoyed pranks and jokes. He was an ancient being that had walked the face of this Earth for thousands of years, and seen a great, great many things. He looked at Piper with old eyes, heavy eyes, wise eyes.

“I’ll be with you every step of the way, my friend. I will give you counsel, advice, and anything you ask of me that is within reason. Between me and the Holy Spirit within you, you will never be without guidance.”

Piper stared at Jisdu, then she nodded. “Thank you. I think I know what I need to do now.”

“Then let’s get to it.”

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

“Dad, we need to have a talk.”

About two hours later, Tristan was left staring at the table. He sipped his cranberry juice. “It’s funny. I think…that some part of me always knew that something was up. Something was different about your mother, about you, about that Delphi Private School and that whole…backpacking across Europe thing that you did that year, and the way you’ve been behaving these past two years, like there’s always something on your mind that you feel like you can’t talk to me about….Now I know why.”

“Dad-”

“Does anyone else know?”

“I told Billy. That night he kicked me in the face and convinced me to accept Christ, I told him everything. Then he told Shel, and I confirmed it all with her. Tsula knows. She’s known the longest, actually. She was going to be Jisdu’s next recruit for the powers before he ran into me the day of the bear attack at One Fire Field. She’s got a little bit of spiritual attunement and was able to see the Asgina for what they were. She confronted me about it, and I decided to bring her in. She’s actually killed a few Asgina herself with some magic darts and her blowgun.”

Tristan nodded stiffly. “Anyone else?”

“No,” Piper said.

Tristan finished his cranberry juice. “You know how you used to say that you were in process?”

“Yeah.”

“Now I’m in process.”

“Dad-”

Tristan held up his hand. “Are you going to college, and I guess keep doing that double life thing where you go to school during the day, and fight evil during the night, and have to go running out of class because, er, monsters attack in the middle of the day?”

Piper shook her head. “No, I’m not going to do that.”

Tristan looked at his precious little one. “You’re going to go out there yourself.”

“Yeah.”

Tristan stared at her, eyes slightly wide. He went to drink some cranberry juice, but it was already all gone. He sighed. “I forbid you,” he said, though it wasn’t even close to half-hearted. Just defeated and resigned. He knew he couldn’t stop her. “You don’t have my blessing. Uh, you’re grounded for life. You don’t get to leave your room unless I say you can. Er, no cell phone, computer, video games-”

“Dad.”

Tristan stood up so fast he threw the chair backwards, and he fully engulfed Piper in his arms, holding onto her with unbridled and unrivaled intensity. Tears were spilling down his face as he shook and did his best to keep himself together.

Piper hugged him back tightly and with so much love it hurt.

Tristan’s shuddering breaths turned into chortles, and then laughs. “Oh-ho, man,” he breathed. “Oh, man.”

“What?” Piper asked, stepping away.

“Just…appreciating how wild it is being your dad. Just…the memories I have of you when you were little, the silly things, and just…here we are. My baby girl is all grown up, a superhero, a demigod, and she’s graduated high school, and she’s…she’s going out there! She’s gonna fight the bad guys! She’s gonna make the world a better place.”

Tristan released another long, shuddering breath.

“Just…wow.” He sat back down, his expression wistful, his eyes glimmering with memories. “I remember when you were three years old. You were still getting the hang of wiping by yourself. Before we left to go to the store, you sat on the potty—on that special little seat I put on the big toilet seat so you didn’t fall in.”

Piper didn’t blush in embarrassment. She remembered that little seat because it had Pocahontas on it. She remembered being beyond thrilled whenever she had to potty and got to sit on it, and hated using public toilets and the toilet at the daycare because she didn’t have her Pocahontas seat with her. She sat down at the table, listening intensely as her dad recalled those moments that were priceless to him.

“And you sat on it, and you pooped, and you insisted on wiping by yourself. You were a big girl now, and wore big girl undies, and you didn’t need Daddy’s help to wipe. So I let you, standing on the other side of the door because I wanted to start teaching you about privacy, and you used your little stool to reach the sink to wash your hands, and it was all good. Then we went to the store, and you started scratching your butt, complaining it was itchy.”

Now Piper blushed. “Oh, no.”

Tristan grinned, looking down at his clasped hands on the table. “So I took you to the family restroom and pulled your pants down, and was like, Yep, that would be why your butt’s itchy, because you had this gigantic poop mark in your underwear.”

“Dad~!” Piper whined, smiling. “Gross!”

“You’re gross!” Tristan laughed. “I asked you, So, did you wipe?, and you said, Yeah, and then I asked, How many times?, and you said, Once, and then I had to explain to you how you had to wipe multiple times until the potty paper was all clean after you wiped.”

Piper giggled. “The potty paper?”

“That’s what you used to call it, yeah. And you were just absolutely baffled by the concept that you had to wipe multiple times. And then you broke down in tears and cried into my shoulder, saying that wiping so many times was too hard and that you never wanted to poop again.”

Piper couldn’t help but laugh at her younger self. “Those were the days. The greatest difficulty in life being having to wipe after I pooped.”

Tristan snorted. “Anyway, I cleaned you up and had to change your underwear because I was not letting you wear that nasty pair anymore. Being three and still in that accident range, I always packed a bag with extra clothes just in case. Good thing on that day.”

“Well, big thanks for teaching me how to wipe my butt,” Piper said with a grin.

“A most horrific experience, to be sure.” Tristan’s eyes swam with another memory. “Then there was that day when you were seven, and went a full ten days without wetting your bed, and you came running into my room, jumping on my bed, standing over me with this huge grin on your face, lifting your nightgown up to me your pull-up. See, Daddy? I’m dry! You were officially no longer a bedwetter, and we had ice cream for breakfast.”

“I remember that day,” Piper said wistfully.

Oh, how simple times really used to be. Back when her greatest obstacle was wiping, and her biggest accomplishment was being a dry sleeper that finally didn’t need pull-ups at night anymore.

“And now here we are,” Tristan said, his smile gone and his tone heavy with finality. “My beautiful, irreplaceable daughter, the greatest thing that ever happened to me, the most precious and invaluable person in my life…my baby girl…all grown up…”

Once a toddler that needed help going potty, now a young woman ready to fight the army of darkness.

Tristan cleared his throat and stood up. “Do you need help packing? Do you even need to pack? Er, were you about to leave, like, right now, or were you going to stick around for a few days?”

“Right now,” Piper said evenly. “There’s a cartel I’ve got my eye on. I’m going to deal with them first.”

“Going to deal with a cartel,” Tristan said quietly. “Uh, well, okay, then. Uh, be careful. The door’s always open. Don’t ever think you can’t come back-”

Piper blinked. “Uh, what I was aiming for right now, just starting out or however you want to think about it, was just, like, weeklong expeditions, and then be back here for the weekend. You know, take breaks. Work-life balance and all that.”

Tristan blinked, his mood instantly brightening. “O-Oh! I thought—well, I thought this was goodbye for pretty much—well, I thought you were going to go out there, and then I wouldn’t see or hear from you for months at a time. Like this was going to be a big, 24/7 operation for you, with you traveling all over the country nonstop.”

“Gods, no!” Piper exclaimed. “I’ve kind of been doing this for two years already, and I have seen…things. I’m going out there to get my hands dirty, I’m going to need you. I’m going to need to come back to my Dad so I can rest, detox, unwind, get ready to go back out there again, and probably use you as a free therapist.”

Tristan swallowed. “I’ll always be there for you. You can stay as long as you need.”

Piper hugged him again. “I love you, Dad. I’ll let you know when I’m on my way back home. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go tell my girlfriend about how I’m going to handle my job. Come on, I want to show you something I can do.”

Piper led her dad outside. It was still nighttime, the stars out by the million, with some lightning bugs flying around here and there. In the porch light, Piper activated her Tlanuwa armor, encasing her body in the sleek, formfitting, magic metal with the feather motif and the falcon head with glowing pink eyes.

Tristan stumbled a little. “Woah!”

Piper dazzled him even further when she deployed her wings. With a flap, she took to the skies, moving so fast her eyes left streaks of light in her wake. With another flap, she was off to tell Shel goodbye for now, and then tell Tsula the same.

Given that they already knew what Piper was up to and what she was going to be doing, neither were surprised.

Shel sighed. “I figured. But you’re going to be home every weekend?”

“That’s the plan, yeah.”

“Saturday is guaranteed to be date night, then.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“And sex.”

Piper blushed. “Shel!”

“Aren’t we, though? If we don’t see each other for a week.”

“I mean…probably…” Truth be told, Piper would most likely need the relief.

Shel nodded. “I’ll have everything ready. Music, candles, and I’ll get Mom to get us some alcohol.”

Piper rolled her eyes. “Horndog.”

“Yeah, but you love it.” Shel hugged her girlfriend. “I’m just glad this isn’t us breaking up.”

Piper hugged her back. “Why would this be us breaking up?”

“Breaking up as in you were going off to save the world, and you wouldn’t have the time to ever be back here hardly ever again, and so you were breaking up with me to release us, or something sappy like that, so I could go find another girlfriend and not be alone.”

“What is it with everyone thinking that me going out to fight the forces of evil involves me not coming back home for huge lengths of time?”

“To be fair, the forces of evil are all over the place, so it’s reasonable to assume you would be so dedicated to the cause that you’d be gone practically forever.”

“Hell no. I’m going to need to come back here to rest, recharge, and get ready to go again.”

“And unless something happens, I’ll be right here at home. Ready and waiting for my beautiful girlfriend to come back.”

The girls touched their foreheads, looking deep into each other’s eyes, and then they kissed. Nothing vulgar was involved in this kiss, no tongue, no reaching below the belt to grab some ass, or reaching between the legs to start rubbing some crotch. Just a kiss. Loving, passionate, and the last one for a long time.

The best laid plans, after all.

Piper departed from her girlfriend, said her goodbyes to Tsula, and took flight for the South.

All of this took place under the ever-watchful gaze of Night.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

And at over 10k words, that’s the end of this chapter, aptly named Unfairness for what Percy, Annabeth, Leo, Thalia, and Reyna went through. Piper’s gonna be feeling it bigtime next chapter.

I did the thing with the Hunters! And threw in a heavy dosage of reality. That such an undertaking is gruesome, disgusting, heart-wrenching, and soul-crushing. Thalia and Reyna gave it an honest to God shot, and they couldn’t handle it. They were overwhelmed. But, hey: they gave it a shot, so there’s that.

Next chapter is the third chapter, and what a fitting number for this lengthy prologue to end upon, and the real story to finally begin.

Fair warning, it’s basically going to be the nightmare of every Percy Jackson fan, because I will be holding nothing (well, mostly nothing) back. There will be tears next chapter.

In the meantime, please Fav, Follow, and Review!

Oh, and my novel is still available for purchase on the Kindle Store. Please give it a read. It’d mean a lot to me if you did.

Chapter Text

And so it finally begins. The real story. One last dose of cold reality for our beloved heroes, and then the war begins.

The title of this chapter is not a made-up word. It actually has a rather fun story to it. I was watching Scrubs clips on YouTube recently, and one of them was a scene where the janitor was giving Dorian the evil eye. Ominous, dramatic music was playing over the scene, a single word being sung, which was the title. After some searching, the word is actually the name of a movie, and the word is the title of the movie’s main theme. The word comes from the Hopi language, meaning in various ways the same thing: crazy life, life in turmoil, life disintegrating, life out of balance, and a state of life that calls for another way of living.

You can find the soundtrack for yourself.

Given all these translations, and the tone of the music, I found it to be perfect for this chapter.

Let us begin.

Disclaimer: I don’t own PJO or any other crossovers featured herein

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

20-year-old Leo Valdez had let his beard grow out to the point where he wasn’t carded when ordering or buying alcohol. However, even if he didn’t have a beard and mustache, the tired, defeated look in his eyes, and the weariness of his face, and the way his shoulders slumped would’ve convinced anyone that he was easily old enough to drink, because he had all the aura of a beaten down man in his late 30s.

Two years since the shop burned down, and four years in total since the summer of the Imperial War, and Leo was nowhere near the amount of money he needed to repair the old shop, much less buy the property to build his own, much much less to buy the property, build upon it, fully equip it, and then staff it. The glaring, harsh reality staring Leo in the face was that he was never going to own his shop after all. That his dream was forever going to remain just that, a dream.

Sometimes he wondered if he was being punished for something. Like, he was meant to go follow in Piper’s footsteps and use his powers for the greater good, and because he wasn’t doing that, because he was trying to be a mechanic, currently spending his days as a traveling mechanic, fixing everything from weed eaters to recreational airplanes, that some divine agent was punishing him. Maybe the Fates, maybe God Almighty, or maybe this was some curse from some enemy Leo had made back in his questing days. However, even if Leo’s misery was the result of his negligence in being a superhero, it still wasn’t enough to convince him to try and find Piper, ask her if it wasn’t too late for him to help her.

Oh, Piper…

Leo hadn’t heard from her in a year. Not since she was a year into her crusade and personally came to him to plead her case to get him to help her, because, in her own desperate words, things were bad. At the time, Leo had denied her. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Piper had been hurt, betrayed, and even furious in a broken sort of way, but she had left him to his devices.

Leo hadn’t seen or heard from her since, but he could certainly track her progress. The news these days was almost rife with stories of slaughtered criminals—cartels, gangs, illegals, human traffickers, drug dealers, and more—and stories of politicians, corporate executives, and celebrities having evidence brought against them of heinous misdeeds, and then being found murdered in gruesome fashion. Piper was certainly on the move, and she was certainly getting results.

Crime was at the lowest it had ever been since the government started keeping records of criminal activity. Workers across the nation were reporting that they were being treated in the best, fairest ways they had ever been treated. The economy was setting record highs given that the government had basically been cleansed in a bloodbath, and the politicians that were in power were actually acting on behalf of the people they represented. Mostly out of fear of being torn apart by some malevolent force in the darkness, but hey.

Positive results were positive results.

Though, obviously, the world still wasn’t perfect, as Leo could personally attest.

The young man that once fought tooth and nail to save the shithole world he lived in downed another glass of vodka. He reached for the bottle on the table, and was quite unhappy to find that he had emptied it. Along with the other bottle he already bought. Leo pinched the bridge of his nose.

His demigod body gave him a great immune system, and also a great liver. He could get drunk, but it was really hard for that to happen given how fast his body could flush the alcohol through his system. A great example being right now.

Leo left the table, barely buzzed after two bottles of vodka, and made his way to the restroom. A remarkably clean place given the setting, to be fair. The son of Hephaestus got his pants and underwear out of the way enough to be able to aim without making a mess, and relaxed his sphincter.

The golden fluid caused a lightbulb to go off in Leo’s head.

Gold.

He had an old friend that was great with gold.

The next instant Leo had access to a rainbow, he tossed in a drachma and asked Iris for Hazel.

Luckily, she and Frank were on a stroll together, which, while somewhat not cool to interrupt their moment together, was a lot better than having caught Hazel in the shower, or on the toilet, or in the middle of making love. Four years after the Imperial, and the wholesome couple was looking fantastic. 20-year-old Frank was a mountain of cut, lean mass, his body having finally evened out, and 18-year-old Hazel was a beauty, puberty and her physical demanding lifestyle having worked well together to craft the ideal female physique.

This would be the first time the three of them had talked in almost a year.

Life had really done to the Seven what life does to everyone: slowly pull them apart.

“Uh, h-hey,” Leo stuttered, nerves frayed and emotions running high.

Frank and Hazel both jumped, drawing weapons, but they almost dropped them at seeing Leo.

“Leo!” Hazel shouted, excited then horrified to see how worn out Leo was.

“Dude,” Frank breathed.

“Y-Yep,” Leo tried for a smile. “Life’s, uh…life’s kicking me pretty hard right now. Still can’t get enough money raised for the shop, Calypso and I aren’t talking right now…we’re taking a break…and, uh…”

Leo struggled to make himself say it. His bright idea suddenly seemed horrible. His sense of pride had finally come back to him. How could he do this? How could he have sunk so low? Begging for money? Really? Asking Hazel if she could send him some gold and jewels now that her curse was lifted so he could use them for the shop? It wasn’t like Hazel was going to say no, she would definitely say yes, and Leo supposed that was the problem.

Taking advantage of his best friend’s generosity.

“Never mind,” Leo said. He waved his hand through the Iris Message, ignoring their cries of wait.

He sighed heavily, and then nearly pissed his pants when Hazel and Frank burst from the shadows of his bedroom in the Waystation.

“¡¿Qué diablos?!” Leo shrieked.

Hazel stared at him. “I’ve been practicing with magic. I was able to trace the magic signal through the IM, and I’ve gotten a lot better with shadow-travel.”

Leo swallowed. “I can see that.”

“What’s going on, Leo?” Frank asked. His voice had gotten a lot deeper.

Considering that they were just right here, the three of them actually together again—just the three of them, the two that Leo had trusted with his life so many years ago—Leo’s previous reservations, mere seconds old, evaporated. His emotional wall came tumbling down like Jericho, and he told his old friends everything that had happened since graduation.

After everything was said and done, Hazel already had gold nuggets and uncut gemstones in her hands.

Caught up in the hope and euphoria of the moment, the three of them completely lost their rational minds. Frank and Hazel shadow-traveled back to New Rome, and Leo took his newfound treasure to a jewelry store. Things spiraled out of control from there because the police showed up.

“Sir, can you please explain where you got your hands on all this stuff?”

“Er…”

Leo drew a complete blank, and so he snapped his fingers, warping the Mist with the skills he’d learned under Jo. One problem: the Mist didn’t warp.

The officers stared at Leo, their eyes narrowing. “What was that supposed to be?” the lead of the two asked.

Leo’s pulse skyrocketed. If the Mist was on the fritz, and he couldn’t magic his way out of this scot-free, then that meant—oh, gods, what did that mean? Why was the Mist broken? How was he supposed to explain this pile of riches and not go to jail for theft or something?

Leo didn’t know, but he did know that he had only ever had sour experiences with police, and though the better part of him said that not all police were scum, and that the media was prone to lying about the behavior of the police, it was the bad part of Leo that was speaking loudest. Bad Leo was saying run!

And so Leo bolted. In a grand display of what a fully realized demigod could do, Leo went from standing still to moving at over 30mph. He bowled through the officers, knocking them flat on their backs so hard they lost their wind, gasping like fish on the dock, and rammed the front doors in such a way that while they didn’t shatter on impact and flay him alive with all the broken glass, they did get torn off the hinges and explode on contact with the walls.

Leo was sprinting down the street, outpacing the evening traffic (yes, this whole episode had only taken place from afternoon to evening). With the click of a button to the watch on his wrist, Festus was soaring to his location. With a big boy jump, Leo was ascending well over a three-story building, and the bronze dragon scooped him up midair.

It would be three hours before Leo returned to the Waystation after flying outside the city, the sun gone from the sky, replaced with the moon, but it didn’t matter. His was face all over the Indianapolis evening news.

The real concern, however, was why the Mist wasn’t working.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

In New Rome, things were arguably even more depressing. Living in the city—city being used loosely to describe a community that once boasted a population of 318, but was now barely scraping 120—was not free. Taxes and bills were still a thing, and though Percy and Annabeth were able to live in their apartment for free given that they were college students—sadly, NRU never reopened during their collegiate career, and so they were stuck at UCB the whole time—graduating college with their bachelor’s degrees meant their special status was null and void.

They had to pay bills now, had to pay taxes, and had to endure the job hunt. A great mouthful of that normal life away from gods and monsters that they so desperately craved and had fought to earn. They could’ve just asked Hazel to spot them some money, but like all decent people, they weren’t about that life. Though, considering Annabeth got her degree in architecture and Percy got his degree in marine biology, enjoying a similar power to Leo with machines but with aquatic creatures, it should have been easy to find a job.

But this was California.

And the modern economy of Fall 2024 as of this chapter.

22-year-old Percy Jackson walked into the apartment, his shift over for the day, his high-viz long-sleeve shirt covered in dirt, his jeans equally dirty, his hair matted from his hardhat, and his face also covered in dirt. With his degree in marine biology, Percy ended up being a construction worker making $22 an hour. Not the worst job, and he had already established himself as indispensable, what with the fact that he was always at the job site early, was willing to stay late to get the job done, and with his greater strength and stamina due to being a seasoned demigod, he could work more and work harder than his coworkers and not get exhausted.

Water bottles also were a big help.

“Hey, Annabeth,” Percy greeted, not tired in the physical sense, but emotionally and mentally.

He hadn’t gone to college after fighting hundreds of monsters, achieved a degree in marine biology, just to end up working his ass off in construction. Call it the sin of pride, or maybe call it a sense of self-worth, but Percy felt cheated and slighted. He was worth more than mere construction, at the mercy of the clock. He was deserving of more. He had earned more.

Though, as disgruntled as Percy was with having to work a fulltime blue-collar job, he was nowhere near as almost clinically depressed as Annabeth was.

Annabeth looked up from her laptop, her eyes sunken and red. She’d been crying again.

“More rejections?” Percy asked solemnly.

Annabeth nodded. “I just…I don’t understand it. I graduated summa cum laude. I have relevant internship experience with an architecture firm. I have letters of recommendation from my old boss and all of my professors. I am officially certified in AutoCAD, ArchiCAD, Inventor, Revit, and SolidWorks. In my portfolio are the blueprints and 3D models I made of the gods’ temples on Olympus, all of which were highly praised by my professors for their detail, documentation, and complexity, and my resumé was reviewed by said professors and my old boss, so it was fine-tuned by several experienced professionals—why the fuck can’t I get a job in architecture!?”

Annabeth was breathing heavily, her rant turning into a shout, and then she kept going, letting it all flow out of her.

“It’s supposed to be easy now! All the quests, the wars, the death, school—everything we went through—it’s supposed to mean that everything falls into place! No more monsters hunting us, no more gods coming to bother us with menial tasks, no more quests—just-” she choked and tried again “-just the two of us, finally getting to live our lives…normal lives…like normal people…”

Annabeth released a mirthless chuckle. “I guess this is normal life. Normal human life, anyway. Getting cheated, screwed over, dealing with injustice, unfairness, and general bullshit day in and day out. Got college degrees, and they’re not doing a damn thing to get us hired and start careers in the things we went to college for…just…fuck.”

Annabeth looked at Percy, her eyes reflecting her broken soul. “Are we being punished? Like, is this a punishment? That we’re stuck in this depressing nightmare instead of living the good life we were expecting and hoping for, because we’re not out there helping Piper drastically reduce the world population? Is the Fates rendering judgement upon us for not adhering to that whole power and responsibility thing? Is this Zeus and/or Hera still messing with us? You know, I haven’t actually stepped in manure since we started college, but this is way worse. I-I mean…should we call Piper? Ask if she’s got, like, openings or something?”

Annabeth looked down. “I guess we were naïve fools. Hardly anything in our lives ever went right, so why would things start going right for us now? It only makes sense that things would forever continue going wrong for us. We’re just doomed to life of constant misery, aren’t we?”

Percy winced. His heart absolutely ached in his chest for his beloved, and he hated himself for not being able to do anything for her.

What made it so much worse were the words of Piper from a year ago.

“I’m begging you two! I’ve seen part of what’s going to happen, and if you don’t come with me now, the only thing that’s going to happen to you two is more pain and suffering. We’re not meant to ‘fade away into obscurity’ or whatever. We need to be doing more, and I need your help.”

“I’m sorry, Piper,” Annabeth said resolutely, “but no. Percy and I have been thinking and talking about it ourselves, and we…just don’t want to do that stuff. We just want to go to college, get jobs, eventually start our own family, and just live.”

Percy, standing next to Annabeth, nodded in agreement with everything she said.

Piper stepped away from the door, her eyes heavy, embittered, and angry. “I don’t mean this as your enemy, but I can promise you will regret this.”

Annabeth’s mouth set into a thin line. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “Good luck.”

Piper left, and that was the last time they’d heard or seen her.

Percy and Annabeth couldn’t say for certain that they’d be happier if they were running with Piper, but they knew for certain that they weren’t happy now.

The alarm on Annabeth’s phone went off, telling her she had an hour before she needed to be at work for her evening-into-closing shift. The simple chime brought fresh tears to her eyes, and Percy was bringing her into his arms as quick as he could.

“It’ll get better,” he tried to promise.

Annabeth nodded against his chest, and then disengaged to put on her uniform. She emerged a few minutes later, wearing black pants, a bright red polo with golden trim, and her curly blonde hair was pulled into a ponytail through her black ball cap, the center of which was emblazoned with one of the most iconic restaurant symbols of all time.

Annabeth looked absolutely miserable.

“Architect of the Gods,” she mumbled. “Veteran of the Titan and Giant Wars. Hero of Olympus.”

Percy hugged Annabeth, and it was clear from the way she hugged him back that she wanted nothing more than to never leave his side again. They had bills to pay, though, and at least this job provided a paycheck.

About an hour later, Annabeth was standing in front of her computer screen, talking into her headset, summoning every iota of willpower she had in order to sound peppy.

“Welcome to McDonald’s! I can take your order whenever you’re ready.”

The sun steadily dipped ever closer to the horizon, night rapidly approaching.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Not everyone was stuck in a situation as if they were being punished for the sin of standing on the sidelines while people were suffering.

As stated, Frank and Hazel were doing pretty well for themselves. They were still a couple, still praetors, having done a great job in the past four years of rebuilding the legion and getting the demigods trained, and were looking forward to one day retiring from the legion and starting their own family. They hadn’t done their ten years of service, still had six to go, and while it had happened many times in the history of New Rome’s existence that the praetors had married and had kids, history had proven that trying to be parents while also managing the legion was a massive hassle.

On the responsibility side of things, Hazel was pulling more weight than Frank was, but mostly because Frank’s specific skill set didn’t enable him to do much besides kill and spy on people. Hazel had become an expert at turning the gems and precious metals she could summon into spendable money, since there were actually some hoops to go through in turning uncut diamonds and raw gold nuggets into cash without getting in trouble with the law, as Leo found out the hard way because all three of them got stupid and didn’t think for a second.

As such, Hazel had been spending her wealth by way of anonymous donations to causes that she thoroughly researched and decided to support. She was basically the richest person on this planet, since she had developed her powers well enough to the point that she could summon diamonds straight out of volcanos on the other side of the planet. No, that was not a stretch of plausibility, because when Hazel was much younger, back when she was fresh from the Underworld, back when she and Nico were having one of their moments when he was still a mystery to her, her raw power had managed to yank a gold bar straight from Fort Knox in Kentucky.

That was a stretch of plausibility. Thirteen-year-old Hazel with no formal training managed to summon gold from a military fort over 2000 miles away.

Still, it was fact that she could it because she did it, and so, following this, was it really too hard to believe that a “fully realized” Hazel could summon to her hands the riches of the earth from anywhere in the earth?

As far as this story went, not at all.

Anyway, Frank and Hazel were doing good for themselves, and on the other side of the continent, so were Nico and Will.

Four years after the Imperial War, the young men were both nineteen years old. They had become co-directors of Camp Half-Blood with Chiron and Mr. D, deciding to dedicate their natural lives to the teaching and mentoring of demigods, though in this current day, Will was sparingly at camp on account of his pursuit of med school following his graduation from high school. Not like the distance really mattered, since Nico could shadow-travel to Will’s location regardless of where he was.

Nico had also grown extremely adept with his powers in four years.

Piper hadn’t come for them like she had come for the others on the grounds that Piper had the weakest connection to Nico. Sure, there were those couple of weeks Nico was on the Argo II following his rescue from the jar, but he was mostly with Hazel, typically in the infirmary, and had sparing contact with Piper. The late August after the Imperial War, when Nico had IM’d her just before she went out hiking with Shel the last week before high school started, sure they had that two-fold connection with Jason and both of them being gay, and Piper had told Nico to feel free to call her whenever he needed, but that hadn’t gone anywhere.

It was nothing personal. It was just the life thing where you told someone, “Yeah, just reach out to me,” and the person never did simply because they never did.

As such, Nico and Will were spared from Piper’s call to the crusade, but at least they were somewhat active and responsible. Nico was a permanent counselor and trainer of heroes, and Will was studying to be a doctor, technically cheating in his profession the same way Leo could with machines and Percy with sea life. But that didn’t mean that everything wasn’t about to come falling apart on them.

Tonight was a special night, the last night before Will returned to med school tomorrow, and as such, he and Nico were making it a memorable night. Without going into detail, their night involved putting the cacodemons in a special room in the Hades cabin for the sake of privacy, cleaning out their respective colons, and lube.  

After their evening of fun left them sweaty and tired, they took a groggy shower together, dried each other off, cuddled and watched some TV, then turned it off and went to sleep, the moon high in the night sky.

Not that they would have known about it even if they were awake, but the cacodemons, after four years of waiting, were finally given the order to deploy.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

In a place that was almost extradimensional to Earth, the place where Niflheim bordered Jotunheim on the plane of Midgard, the nail ship Naglfar was stilled moored. Hrym was still captain, and he still had his big axe slung over his shoulder.

Things were slow and boring these days, what with Loki being reimprisoned and Ragnarök once again being postponed. Still, Hrym made sure that his ship was kept in great shape.

Good thing for that, too.

“Greetings, Hrym!”

The Jotun spat out his mead after choking on it, turning to see none other than Loki walking across the gangway. The wights and other monsters all gathered along the railing to see the approaching god of mischief, and all were unnerved. Loki always had a gleam in his eyes, always had a smirk, but today, right now, he seemed especially…dangerous.

Hrym stood up from his chair and made his way down the companionway from the helm, eyeing the mischief god warily. “I did not expect you to be free so soon.”

“Neither did I, old friend, but I made some new friends, ones that share our goal of almost-total destruction. Do the names Tartarus, Nyx, and Akhlys ring any bells?”

The monsters muttered and Hrym stiffened. “The Greek Primordials?”

Loki stood in front of the Jotun, one step away from boarding Naglfar. “Yes, them. They’re giving world domination their own shot, we could say. Or rather, Tartarus is. He’s got a wonderful plan of attack of simply throwing everything at those pesky heroes that once bested us, including the kitchen sink. He’s asked me to bring Ragnarok to the table again, and he’s got Setne bringing back Apophis, the Egyptian chaos-”

“I know who Apophis is,” Hrym interrupted. He shifted his axe. “So…we are to join with them, then? Naglfar is to sail once more?”

“Indeed, but not quite.” Loki’s smile was decidedly venomous. “You see, Tartarus’s plan is simple: just attack. A single, overwhelming offensive on multiple fronts, taking the heroes totally by surprise, and hitting them so hard they can’t escape. No important dates like the 4^th of July, no grand ceremony with rituals and sacrifices and what not…no…flytings…and certainly not with the power of friendship, am I right, fellas?”

Loki started laughing, and the monsters started laughing uneasily. Hrym tried for a chuckle, but it came out as an uneasy grimace.

Loki laughed so hard he doubled over and had to rest his hand on Hrym’s shoulder in order to keep his balance, and though the Jotun tightened his grip on his axe, it didn’t do him any good.

Quicker than the snake that once poured its venom upon his face, Loki ripped the battleaxe from Hrym’s grasp and chopped the captain’s head off in one fluid motion. The monsters all shut up, Loki kicked the head and body into the frigid waters, and finally boarded the Ship of the Dead.

He addressed his new crew, smile gone, gleam gone, and boiling with impotent rage.

“Get this ship moving!”

And so the crew got Naglfar moving as Loki departed to free his son Fenrir, and wake his other son Jormungand.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Standing upon the shores of the Sea of Chaos, deep within the Duat, Setne stood with the Book of Thoth in his hand, and the Crown of Ptolemy upon his pompadour. The House of Life was presently on high alert considering the Crown had been locked inside of Amos’s vault, and it obviously took some considerable power to break in. Power like an ancient, primeval misery goddess would possess, for instance.

Brooklyn House had been informed, and Carter and Sadie were in a panic. They had been the ones to lose Setne four years ago, after all, and now it seemed he was making his move. Which he was, though this time he had benefactors whose only stipulation for their assistance was to go all out and hold nothing back. After the dust settled, he could fight over whatever he wanted with whomever wanted to stop him from having it, but he was not stupid enough to try for the domain of Tartarus. Setne possessed at least a tiny enough shred of honor to not bite the extremely generous hand that freed him and delivered his desires right into his hands, and he also wasn’t sure of his chances to begin with against the embodiment of the Greek hell.

“Oh, my dearest Carter and Sadie,” the malevolent ghost said to himself with a wild grin, “Thoth devised a spell to banish one’s sheut; did you not ever pause to think that he did not devise a spell to bring it back? Granted, it’s a rather hefty and demanding spell, but now that I’m a full-blown god thanks to the Crown, it’ll be no trouble.”

Setne began chanting from the Book of Thoth, and the Sea of Chaos began to writhe and bubble. Rising from the tumultuous waters was a gigantic obelisk, at first casting no shadow, but as Setne continued his chant, a tendril of black began to form at the base. The tendril grew longer, wider, more powerful, slithering towards Setne, taking on the form of a huge cobra.

“I return you from the void,” Setne intoned as he finished the incantation. “You are mine.”

An angry, scarlet energy erupted from the shadow, and the shadow upon the Sea of Chaos vanished into the energy as it flew around the Duat, taking the obelisk with it. The energy formed a huge cobra, and with a command, it came roaring down upon Setne. The new god screamed as his every atom screeched in pain, the bonds becoming so juiced they threatened to split, and they very well might have, Setne overestimating the sheer power of Apophis, but a nifty little thing happened….

The power reached steady-state, and Setne stopped glowing like a star. He was no longer lanky and borderline emaciated, but muscular and built, with the physique of a seasoned MMA fighter. His skin was a rich caramel color, his head now devoid of hair but not the Crown, and yes, there were a number of serpentine features that now adorned Setne given he had just absorbed the Chaos Serpent. On each of his fingernails protruded the fang of a cobra, and when he smiled, he revealed the mouth of a snake: pink flesh, a pair of fangs, the tubular glottis with the forked tongue right in front of it, and a number of smaller teeth on either side of the tongue. Setne opened his eyes, revealing them to be solid red with black slits.

“And the best part is,” Setne continued speaking to himself, “no pesky ba to contend with.”

Yes, the part of the soul that reflected the personality of the individual. Their thoughts, their feelings, their will, if you will. Setne had tweaked the reverse banishment spell in such a way that he brought back all the power of Apophis, but none of the serpent’s mind. That way he didn’t have to contend with Apophis trying to take over his body or break out of him entirely.

“Now for the army,” Setne chirped.

Not like there wasn’t a generous supply of minions already available, as he was presently in the Land of Demons.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

“Mother, please-!” Hecate tried to beg, only for Nyx to lazily move her finger in a small circle.

In that very instant, using the absurd power of a Primordial, Night created a thread that punctured through Hecate’s lips in a zigzag, sewing the goddess’s mouth shut. The thing about this thread, though, was that it wasn’t coming out anytime soon. Not unless Nyx gave it her express permission.

Nyx gave her frantic, terrified daughter the side-eye. “Did you really think you could raise your hand against me, little child? Did you really think you and your siblings could harm me?”

Speaking of Hypnos and Epiales, the nonbinary demon of nightmares from Sun and the Star, they were currently spending their immortality trapped in black marble. A most generous sentence compared to what Hecate was going through.

Mortal underlings of Gregorio Uberti, the current leader of the Triumvirate, were affixing all the necessary tubes and cables into the goddess’s body to power the machine they were hooking her into, the machine that was going to amplify her Mist powers on a global scale similar to how the Triumvirate’s previous machine had amplified Harpocrates’s silence power.

“No, child,” Nyx continued. “You played your part once in successfully planting Iapetus and the cacodemons, and now you will play your part once more.”

Hecate screamed and begged, but with her mouth sewn closed, all she could manage were disturbing moans and groans as tears spilled down her cheeks.

One of the underlings brought a helmet down upon the goddess’s face, completely enclosing her head. The helmet had no eyeholes, no earholes, no opening for the mouth or the nose—almost complete sensory deprivation. Only a black cable upon the top going into the back of the machine, just like all the other cables were doing.

“That’s the last one,” Uberti said. “All we need is to turn her on.”

Nyx nodded and communed with Tartarus across time and space. After speaking, she looked at the immortal. “Do it.”

Uberti flipped the switch himself, and Hecate’s body spasmed but remained in its bounds as the machine activated, humming and glowing. The antenna array at the top of the machine hummed the loudest, visible waves of heat radiating from the dishes as the energy mounted, mounted, mounted, and then Uberti flipped another switch, and the energy discharged.

The goddess, the immortal, and the few servants didn’t actually feel anything. No tingle, no heat, their hair didn’t even stand on end.

Uberti held up a tablet. The electronic kind. “She’s active. We can now manipulate the Mist—and the Duat to some extension-”

“Setne has the Duat under control,” Nyx dismissed.

“Of course. Anyway, I am ready when you are to alter reality.”

Nyx’s lips quirked up. “Permission granted.”

Uberti typed a simple command into the tablet, then pressed the “enter” button.

“Done.”

“Send in the humans,” Nyx instructed. “And seal this place up.”

“Of course.”

Uberti nodded to the underlings, and they rolled a heavy door to close the machine, sealing Hecate inside. And then the underlings were suddenly teleported back to the Triumvirate Holdings building, and Uberti and Nyx were teleported into the pit, along with Loki and Setne, surprisingly enough. Tartarus and Akhlys were also there, everyone standing upon a narrow butte somewhere in the pit.

“What is this?” Loki demanded.

Nothing I have done, Tartarus answered.

“It’s something I have done!” a cheery voice declared.

The beings all turned to see something that only looked human. A young man, clean-shaven, with short brown hair, fair skin on the paler side, wearing a black polo, black cargo shorts, black tube socks rolled down around his ankles, and black running shoes. His eyes, though…like looking at an image of space, with swirling lights that were galaxies.

“Who are you?” Nys glowered.

“Aw, baby girl. It hurts my heart to know you don’t recognize your own father…and the father of your daughter over there.”

Akhlys went rigid, as did everyone else. “F-Father? Father Chaos?”

“Bingo, kiddo!” Chaos crowed. “The one and only!”

Why are you here, Father? Tartarus asked wearily.

“To lay down the rules,” Chaos answered with a disturbingly quick switch to calmness from wild teasing.

“What rules?” Loki demanded.

“The rules of this game,” Chaos said. “I’ve been waiting for this day since before time began, and it does bring a smile to my face that it’s finally here. The day that everything finally gets interesting again.” Chaos clasped his hands behind his back and addressed the audience before they could start shouting questions.

“Congratulations, all of you have finally garnered my personal attention. As such, I’m adding some spice to things—getting involved, if you will. Making things more entertaining for myself. Don’t worry, you will have your fun, as will I, because this will be it. This is World War III, and it will truly be the War to End All Wars. Either you will win, or you will not. As such, there will be rules. First and foremost, there will be permadeath. If you die, if any of those monsters or Giants die, if any of those demigods and so forth die, there will no coming back. If you die in the game, you die in real life.”

Chaos smirked at them all.

“Secondly, I get to play referee. I will even the playing field for my own personal amusement. Since this is going to be the last war, it will be full of spectacles and lights. Thirdly, and finally, I want all of you to understand this: the only things that will happen during this war are what I allow to happen. At any time I so choose, I can, and will, step in and do a thing. Perks of being an actual omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being, unlike all of you.”

Chaos clapped his hands and rubbed them together, beaming.

“But don’t let any of that discourage you, kids! Now go out there and remember: the most important thing is to have fun! I know I will!”

And then Chaos was gone.

“What do we do?” Setne immediately asked. “Do we still proceed?”

Yes. Tartarus looked at Uberti. Send the humans after the demigods.

Uberti nodded, already working on the tablet to send the command to his contacts. Amazingly, he got great reception down in the pit of evil.

Tartarus looked at Loki. Ragnarök?

“Underway. Fenrir is freed and making his way to Midgard to reinforce the New Rome campaign, Jormungand is awake and heading for Camp Half-Blood, and once Naglfar is sailing, we will smash it straight into Hotel Valhalla.”

Tartarus looked at Setne.

“Ready,” said the new god.

“And it is night over America,” Nyx said.

And just like Tartarus said: there was no grand ceremony, no sacred date, nor was there an epic speech about revenge or glory or domination.

The dark god of the pit simply nodded.

Begin.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Somewhere in America, Piper McLean bolted upright, panting, covered in so much sweat that she had soaked the bed.

She stared at the dark wall of the room for two seconds before screaming at the top of her lungs. “Jisdu!”

The rabbit spirit couldn’t appear fast enough. “What’s happened!?”

“It’s begun!” Piper breathed with wide eyes.

Jisdu’s eyes went just as wide, terror gripping him, and then his eyes narrowed as shock turned to determination. “I’m on it!”

Jisdu departed, taking a page from Tarzan’s book as he tore across the country in a supernatural manner, alerting every single spirit on the continent of the catastrophe underway.

Piper herself flew to her bag, rifling through to it find a special transmitter. She hit the button as hard as she could, and all the way across dimensions, Jason Grace was alerted to the unfolding nightmare.

And what a catastrophic nightmare it was:

Just as the emperors were made gods through the power of belief, the gods were made powerless through belief. The Mist-warped minds of everyone on the planet collectively agreed that the Olympians and other important gods were simply weak and pathetic beings, and with eight billion people believing that, it became fact.

In Berkeley, police and SWAT swarmed the McDonald’s, storming the building to violently arrest Annabeth, handcuffing her and dragging her into a van. Other teams assaulted the Chase household, arresting Frederick, his wife, and their sons Matthew and Bobby in the middle of the night in their pajamas.

In Phoenix, Clarisse Rodriguez and her husband Chris had their door smashed in by more mortal forces, and a bloodbath ensued.

In Manhattan, police were swarming the apartment complex of the Blofis family, working their way through the building to their apartment.

In Boston, the Chase Space, the converted mansion that was bequeathed to Magnus through Randolf and used as a homeless shelter and rest stop for homeless kids just passing through, was firebombed with kids still inside, Magnus and Alex currently in Valhalla.

In Tahlequah, Tristan was sleeping soundly when his home was raided, and he was taken away in cuffs.

All across the country, demigods and their families were being arrested by law enforcement in the dark of the night.

As for the magical places, things were arguably worse.

The cacodemons attacked, two in New Rome, two in Camp Half-Blood, two in Indianapolis, two in Brooklyn, and the remaining seven were held in reserve as part of a new plan to combat whatever Chaos was going to throw in the way. The once cute and cuddly creatures grew into behemoth-like monsters—kaiju, essentially, and wreaked havoc.

The House of Life in Egypt was rocked when Setne ripped through the Duat with his demon army to lay waste to the magicians.

The Hunters of Artemis, fretting over their goddess who suddenly collapsed and became as if ill, were ambushed by a special forces team consisting of Orion, Lycaon, and Khione.

Across the planet, Tartarus opened portals into the world’s most populated cities, and monsters by the million poured from the pit to kill and destroy, led by the Giants. The humans had served their purpose, after all, their minds being used to depower the gods, and that was all they were needed for. Past that, they were expendable.

But hope remained.

Chaos was evening the playing field just like he promised.

They were beginning to arrive.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Oh, yeah.

It’s going down.

Fav, Follow, and Review please!

Chapter Text

The yapping is over. The story begins now.

I am a little surprised no one had anything to say about Annabeth working at McDonald’s. I was looking forward to that.

Disclaimer: I don’t own PJO or any other crossovers

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Naglfar was about to break the dimensional barrier and crash straight into Hote Valhalla’s outer wall because of the weird way dimensional barriers worked, but something crashed into Naglfar. From above.

A small object dropped right onto the deck almost at the nose, smashing through top two decks and landing upon the third with so much force that the nose dipped downward. Loki set his feet and was able to keep himself from stumbling, though most of the crew was not as fortunate.

“What the hell was that!?” the mischief god demanded.

He got his answer when the offending object’s head popped out of the hole it had made when it fell through the deck. It was a boy of the mid-teen years, with black hair and purple eyes. He crawled all the way out of the hole, a big, toothy grin on his face. He wore some old steel-toed boots that had seen better days, black jeans, no shirt, exposing his skinny, scar-littered torso, and a fur-lined, black, sleeveless denim jacket that went down to his knees, which exposed his skinny, scar-littered arms. There was a pendant hanging from his neck that depicted a triangle inscribed within a circle, and he had a ring on each thumb.

The absolute most disturbing feature of this young man was the scalpel currently plunged into the side of his neck. It appeared he had punctured an artery, based on how much blood was flowing down from the wound.

The boy grinned some more. “Well butter my ass and fuck me raw! Fresh sacrifices!”

Loki was a bit disconcerted with that one, and started freaking out when the boy yanked out the scalpel and mauled the monster closest to him.

“Get him! Get him!” Loki shouted.

One monster got in close and brought down its axe on the boy’s head, cleaving his skull open in a spray of blood.

“Ha! Got him!”

The boy casually reached up and pulled the axe out of his skull, exposing the inside of his head in gruesome fashion. The monster backed away in horror.

“That felt good.” The boy handed the axe back. “Do it again.”

The gaping wound glowed with scarlet energy, and when the energy faded, his head was completely healed.

Loki saw this from the helm, and felt his immortal blood chill in his veins. Even the playing field, Chaos had said.

This must’ve been it. Chaos’s first player.

Or at least, the player Loki had to contend with. As he hefted the huge battleaxe he took from Hrym and jumped, sailing through the air at the boy to fight him personally, Loki wondered what his comrades were facing.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Reyna growled as Orion’s huge finger, being ten feet tall and having the hand to match his size, tilted her chin up to raise her face.

“Couldn’t take me in a fair fight, and so you had to resort to an ambush with friends?”

“Oh, don’t worry,” Orion said. “We’ll have our rematch soon enough. After the dust settles, the whole Hunt will be mine to do with as I please.”

“And mine,” Lycaon stepped up.

“We’ll take turns,” Orion dismissed.

The Hunters were all down and bound. Khione had hit them with a freeze wave, and the werewolves had charged in, keeping the girls pinned while Khione had turned the Hunt into popsicles, only their heads left unfrozen per Orion’s request so he could see the fear and anger on their faces.

“And then there’s you,” Orion walked up to the weak and feeble Artemis.

“Don’t touch her!” Thalia shouted.

Lightning flashed overhead, and before anything else happened, there was a huge splash in the lake nearby, as if someone had dropped a tank in from low orbit. The Hunters had been camping on the bank, enjoying some fishing the previous day.

Everyone stared at the roiling water, illuminated by the starlight due to the cloudless sky. It was clear by the expressions on the Hunters’ faces that they didn’t know what was going on. The werewolves started shifting and growling, with Lycaon’s lips curling back into a snarl.

“Lycaon?” Khione asked.

“Something…is coming. Something that is very dangerous. Very primal. A rival.”

Khione looked at Orion, and the Giant had no idea. He pulled out his bow and knocked an arrow, aiming for the settling water, and the snow goddess readied her powers, raising her hands, snow swirling around her fingers. The Hunters also watched, their breath baited.

Sure enough, something did come walking out of the water. A translucent, almost invisible silhouette emerged, and with every step it took, arcs of electricity travelled across its body.

Reyna blinked and leaned over to Thalia. “This feels like that scene from Predator 2 when the Predator came for King Willie in the alley.”

“Uh…” Thalia’s face screwed up, wondering how Reyna was able to draw that connection at this time.

“What is that?” Khione asked Orion

“No idea. Let’s ask.”

Orion loosed the arrow, and it flew with speed comparable to a bullet, only to come to a complete, dead stop before the translucent being with a loud smack. With another flurry of arcs, the silhouette became solid as its cloaking device deactivated, revealing that she had caught Orion’s arrow by the shaft.

“What the Hades…?” Khione said to herself, but her thought was shared by everyone.

It was a girl, or perhaps young woman, really. She had no chest, but there was the distinct slit between her legs. She was tall and built like a sprinter, with lithe limbs and a slender body, a body that was an unnatural, solid black. A long, segmented, bladed tail protruded from her lower back above her glutes, and between her shoulder blades were two sets of dorsal spikes, six to a set, all angled outward. The sclera of her eyes was black, her pupils were vertical slits, and her irises were a bright, venomous green. Upon her brow was an ornate crest that went over the top crown of her head, appearing to be just that, a crown.

On her left wrist was a bracer that looked exactly like the one the Predators had, making Reyna and Thalia briefly look at each other.

The creature examined the arrow in her hand, looking at it with clear nostalgia on her face. Then her lips quirked upwards in a smirk, showing a sliver of her teeth—so pearly white they were almost see-through.

One of the werewolves couldn’t take it anymore and broke ranks, charging at the creature.

She responded by letting the arrow slide further down in her hand, and then she flung it. She flung it so hard and fast that it not only went straight through the charging werewolf with hardly any loss of speed and energy, but it also went through the stationary werewolf a hundred feet behind it, this time getting stuck and taking the beast on a flight.

Lycaon howled and led the charge himself, his pack coming with him. Orion and Khione were both disgruntled by this, as they didn’t necessarily want to wipe out the pack.

Not that the pack was going to survive anyway.

The creature intercepted Lycaon and ripped his spine from his body, his head still attached to the dripping vertebrae. Tossing both aside like they were garbage, she dove straight into the midst of the werewolves, using her claws, tail, teeth, and horrifying physical strength to tear the beasts apart in a grizzly display of combat prowess and gore.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

“How could the Mist not be working?” Calypso pondered.

In the main living room of the Waystation, she, Leo, Jo, and Emmie were gathered, the kids all having been sent to bed a long time ago.

“Something must have happened to my mother,” Jo said. “Something similar to this happened back during the witch trial days, when the witches were being persecuted. Granted, they weren’t doing themselves any favors back then, what with actually stealing babies, murdering children, spreading plagues, and so on, but anyway—when Hecate’s followers started being systematically eliminated, it affected her so badly the Mist went on the fritz.”

“But there aren’t any mass witch burnings going on today,” Leo blinked. “At least, I think there aren’t.”

Jo shook her head. “The witches got a lot better at staying hidden. If the Mist isn’t working now, then that means something really bad has happened to Hecate.”

A cold feeling settled in all their stomachs. The implications of the magic goddess potentially being targeted by some unknown enemy, and apparently having been incapacitated, were monstrously unwelcome.

Leo took a breath. “Okay. Say something has happened to Hecate. What are we supposed to do-?”

Something fell through the ceiling and crashed upon the table between the four, sending them all jumping backwards. Whatever it was stood up with an annoyed grunt.

It was a man, a big one. Tall, with the physique of a strongman. Just big, rolling muscles. He wore a black kilt made of some kind of hide—some kind of leather—with a wide, jewel-studded belt holding it in place with a huge buckle in the visage of a snarling dragon. Black boots covered his feet and legs above his ankles, dark gold grieves on his shins, and dark golden gauntlets were upon his arms, the segments upon his fingers and knuckles bearing small, serrated spikes. On his upper torso was an armor piece that Leo likened unto the piece that Bayek of Siwa wore in Assassin’s Creed—something like ancient shoulder pads that covered the upper chest and back, and of course the top of the shoulders. The armor was gold, of course, with more jewels, and attached to the back of the piece was a leather cape of the same hide as the kilt. The helmet the stranger wore was definitely the most interesting item in his ensemble, also being gold, the front being left open so his whole face was visible, with the top being fashioned in the likeness of the top half of a dragon’s maw, with glittering rubies in the eye sockets, the mouth extending slightly past his face somewhat like a baseball hat. The back of the dragon’s head flowed seamlessly into a pair of ivory tusks that curved forward, framing the stranger’s face on either side of the helmet.

Speaking of the stranger’s face, barring his mismatched eyes of left silver and right sea green, he was the spitting image of an older, stronger, manlier-

“P-Percy!?” Leo gaped.

Not-Percy looked over at Leo, and his expression curled into one of annoyance. “Ugh, it’s you. The annoying Mexican elf. Though you’re older now, which I suppose means-”

Not-Percy cut himself off, head jerking to a random direction. His expression then morphed into one of glee.

“Ahhhhh, yes. This. I was beginning to get bored, anyway.”

He stepped out of the small crater he had made when he crash landed, and started walking for the door.

Leo and Calypso scrambled to catch up to him, walking on either side of his muscular frame.

“Dude, what happened to you? What the heck are you wearing? When did you get so buff?”

Not-Percy smirked, but didn’t answer. He just kept walking at a brisk face for the door.

Calypso tried her luck. “What did you mean by this? Do you know what’s going on with the Mist?”

“Indeed.”

“What, then?”

Not-Percy opened the door to the Waystation revealing pandemonium. Two gigantic creatures, both solid black like the night sky above them but with glowing, scarlet eyes, one of them looking like a Spinosaurus but with three tails, two heads, and four huge arms, spewing flames from its mouths, and the other monster looking centaurion, but with a gorilla upper torso and a scorpion body instead of human and horse.

The monsters were wreaking untold havoc, death, and destruction, with emergency sirens blaring, the bad weather siren blaring, and the screams of tens of thousands of people splitting the night.

Leo and Calypso were beyond horrified, as were Jo and Emmie, finally having made their way over, while Not-Percy had the widest smile on his face.

“Behold,” he said, “the end of your world as you knew it. I hope it was enjoyable while it lasted.”

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

At the House of Life in Egypt, the First Nome, chaos abounded. The magicians had been caught completely flatfooted—not that it was at all their fault, as who among them could have possibly predicted that the new god Setne would just smash straight through the Duat with his demon army and invade the House?

Given that he was a literal god now, and packing thousands of years of magic experience on top of the added power of Apophis, Setne rendered the magicians effectively powerless, and dozens were effortlessly slaughtered by the demons.

Even the great Chief Lecter Amos Kane was no match for Setne, even when using the crook and flail of Ra. Setne defeated Amos personally, and it took him only a few seconds because he wanted to enjoy the moment.

Bound in magic chains, Amon could barely groan in pain from the beating he received, and the spells upon the chains setting his nerves on fire.

Setne held up the crook and flail. “Not that I really need these, but they are pretty neat. Now, just what to do with you…”

Just then, the House of Life was rocked, and it wasn’t by anything Setne or his forces did, nor was it anything Amos’s magicians managed.

“What in the-”

A wall was blasted to pieces, along with the towering columns behind it, with pieces of demons getting scattered all over amongst the rubble.

Stepping through the recent renovation to the throne room was a young man wearing an almost entirely black outfit. Black steel-toed boots, black jeans, and a black leather coat that was tight across his chest and arms, a number of buckles on the chest closing the coat, with the coat being split into two tails at the back of the waist. The coat came with a hood that was drawn up, and due to the flickering flames and the way he was holding his head, the top half of his face was shrouded in shadow.

On each of his forearms was an armored, gadget-adorned gauntlet, a belt was around his waist sporting two curved horns on either hip, and peeking over his right shoulder was the wooden stuck of an old rifle, looking 18^th century in make. In the man’s right hand was a slender straight sword with a cross guard made to vaguely resemble wings, and a pommel that resembled the abstract profile of an eagle. In his left hand was a bronze Greek sword that Setne and Amon both recognized as the legendary Riptide, sword of-

“Percy Jackson?” Setne blinked.

“Something like that,” the young man answered, which was confusing to Amon, but clued the new god into something.

Evening the playing field.

Setne decided to forgo questions, and merely attacked. With a thought, he cast a spell, causing a string of angry red hieroglyphs to go flying at Percy. The spell would’ve caused his molecules to erupt in flames, except Percy swung the eagle sword, and cut the hieroglyphs in twine, dispelling the magic.

Setne balked. “Excuse me!?”

“An Egyptian magician,” Percy mused. “It’s been quite some since I’ve run into one of you.”

Another thing that caught Amos and Setne’s attention. Setne had been there about five years ago the first time he had tried to become a god, and of course the Kane siblings had told their uncle about the incident, so they knew Percy had been involved, but the way he spoke, he sounded like a wistful old man recalling his high school adventures from several decades ago. Yet another thing that through the Egyptian’s for a loop was how casually Percy had destroyed Setne’s spell—Setne’s spell, the Setne that was a full-fledged god now, with all the power of Apophis to boot—and relegated Setne to just “an” Egyptian magician.

“Who are you?” Setne demanded. “You are not the Percy Jackson I fought on Governor’s Island.”

“Correct. I suppose you could say I’m Percy Jackson if things had been different than whatever happened in this world.”

“This world—you’re from a different dimension. A parallel Earth.”

“Correct. What that means specifically for you, right here, right now, is that you’re in a lot of trouble when it comes to fighting me.”

Setne readied the crook and flail. “And why would that be?”

Percy started advancing on the new god.

“Yae though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for You are with me...”

Setne paled. He was from Ancient Egypt, yes, but he was born in 1281 BC, while the Exodus happened in 1440 BC, meaning the days in which Yahweh came down and kicked Egypt’s ass were before Setne’s time. Still, even he knew the power of the Lord, and knew what happened to the magicians who had faced the Lord’s prophet so many centuries ago.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

In tandem with the arrivals, Piper’s spirit army was on the move. The demigods that found themselves under attack across the United States soon found themselves aided by creatures of shapes and sizes that brought with them a message, “I am an ally of Piper McLean. She sent me to help you.”

Annabeth was particularly beyond words when the spirits intercepted her convoy and told her that after getting her to safety.

“Now that we have that out of the way…what the fuck is going on!?” Annabeth couldn’t stop her terrified shout.

The spirit regarded her. “It’s the end of the world. Tartarus has unleashed his armies across the planet, and billions have already perished. The magician Setne has invaded the House of Life in Egypt, and the mischief god Loki is sailing Naglfar into the waters of this Midgard. The underlings of the Triumvirate have used their resources to kidnap Hecate and do to her what the original emperors did to Harpocrates: they used her as the centerpiece of a machine that amplified her powers on a global scale, and using this, the enemy caused a mass Mist warp, turning mankind into their slaves. You are not the only one under attack. However, Piper has foreseen this day coming for months, and she has mobilized us.”

Annabeth’s knees buckled, and she barely caught herself on her hands. “O-Oh….Wait, what about my parents? My dad-”

“Already handled.”

Annabeth’s eyes went wide and a new thought brought fresh terror. “What about New Rome!? If Tartarus-”

“It’s under attack right now. We must hurry.”

“P-Percy,” Annabeth whimpered.

She got to her feet and sprinted after the spirits. However, all of their vision was suddenly filled with bright light, and the next thing Annabeth knew, she was in the throne room of Olympus. Blinking in utter confusion, more and more people just popped in as she blinked.

Percy popped in, Frank and Hazel, Leo, Calypso, the other denizens of the Waystation, Clarisse, Chris, Connor, Travis, Katie, Miranda, Nyssa, Harley, Annabeth’s mortal family, Percy’s family, Tristan McLean—just about everyone from what Annabeth could see. All the demigods and their families.

But no gods.

Annabeth looked at the thrones, and saw they were empty.

Another thing she saw that was missing was the young woman that had saved her life.

Where was Piper?

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

She was clad in her Tlanuwa armor, the sleek, impenetrable metal feathers from the bird of the same name, flying through the air with her huge metal wings deployed at the breakneck speed of about Mach 3. Piper was moving. Her armored body was glowing reddish orange from the air friction, a shock cone having formed around her. Her destination was Olympus, having seen in her dreams that the floating mountain was going to be ground zero for the next invasion force.

She was making great time, until, for some reason, she got yanked straight to the ground as if gravity had suddenly increased tenfold. The sudden change of direction left Piper spiraling uncontrollably to the ground, unable to stop or right herself. She tried transforming her body, tried to turn into a cat or a mouse, but she couldn’t. It seemed that whatever had snared her midflight was also restricting her powers.

As such, Piper smashed into the dirt so hard she left a crater. The only reason the extent of her injuries was just a couple of bruises was because the Tlanuwa armor did not screw around. Piper crawled out of the crater, still armored, and was less than thrilled at what she saw.

“Medea,” Piper snarled, her voice distorted from the falcon-like helmet that was part of her armor.

Her old nemesis, the witch that had orchestrated Tristan’s financial ruin, and arguably Piper and Jason’s breakup, even if indirectly, was smirking psychotically, her hands surrounded by glowing circles of magic sigils.

“Piper, my dear, you’ve grown up. All independent in your big girl pants. No more shoplifting for you, eh?”

Piper attacked, lunging so fast there was a sonic boom. She smacked right into a wall of energy, Medea’s smug expression shifting into one of strain.

“You’re not the only one who learned some new tricks,” the sorceress grunted.

Struggling to move her arms as if trying to maneuver and awkward load, Medea managed to do something akin to wrapping Piper up like a mummy, though the bandages were invisible. Piper’s legs were bound together, and her arms and wings bound to her torso. She struggled, but couldn’t move.

However, Medea didn’t look like a spring chicken herself. Her hands were kept in grabbing motions, as if holding apples, and beads of sweat were forming above her brows. Whatever spell she was using against Piper, it was draining her quickly.

Medea canceled her spell, and Piper dropped to the ground. The thing was, she stumbled a little a fell to a knee. Her armor glowed and fell from her in a multitude of mauve-colored feathers, the lights flickering out one by one until all were gone.

Medea’s fingers twitched, and the magic circles around her hands solidified into glowing swords. She rushed forward, blades in front of her. Piper’s reflexes did not fail despite the sudden exhaustion she felt from struggling against the binding spell. She pitched forward to the ground and swiped her leg in a circle, tripping Medea.

The sorceress flipped forward, tucking her body and managing to land in a roll.

Piper got up, drawing Katoptris and her tomahawk from her belt.

The crunching of grass nearby caused the women to look over, and Piper’s breath hitched. “Y-You…”

It was the lawyer from the day of Billy’s funeral four years ago.

Medea turned to fully face him. He was certainly imposing, his black hair pushed back over his scalp in a multitude of small spikes, two actual horns growing upward from her hairline, his crimson eyes glowing ominously in the starlit night, and his outfit screamed regal. Black dress shoes and black slacks, as if he were going to the office, and a black, double-breasted coat that was open at the waist, the tails cut twice for a total of three that fell down to the back of his knees, exposing a vermillion interior that went perfect with the black outfit. Upon the left lapel of the coat was a stylized red cloud. In his right hand a sleek, black rod, and on his left ring finger was a golden band.

His eyes were locked onto Medea.

“Unless you want to die here at the very beginning, I highly recommend leaving.”

“And just who are you supposed to be?”

“I am Shin’en Yūrei, general of the army that has been summoned to oppose you.”

Medea’s grip tightened on her swords. “This is what Chaos was talking about, then…”

Piper looked at the lawyer, Shin’en, again.

“Indeed,” Shin’en intoned. “Now leave, or I will destroy you.”

Then, amazingly, Medea did just that. She opened a mortal of multicolored light and jumped through, the portal closing behind her.

Piper relaxed with a breath. She sheathed her weapons and walked up to Shin’en. She looked at him seriously.

“This is it, isn’t it? What you warned me about, what Jason warned me about—the apocalypse.”

“Yes,” Shin’en answered. “Most of my team is already here, and more will soon arrive. We will do what we can.”

Piper nodded. “I’m ready to help.”

Shin’en’s eyes narrowed slightly, and Piper met his gaze, her multicolored eyes almost completely black as she let some of her soul seep out. Writing itself on her face were her experiences these past two years. The horrific things she had seen, the hard decisions she had made, the multitude of lives she had personally ended, and more. Piper’s face became that of a hardened war veteran that had done what she had to do for the mission.

The face of a soldier.

The face of a killer.

Shin’en slightly inclined his head. “We shall see. Come, we have much to do.”

The slit on his forehead between his horns opened, revealing a third eye that was a dark emerald, green, sporting concentric rings with spinning tomoe. Piper was a little taken aback at the sight of the eye, but the next thing she knew, she was in the Olympian throne room.

As was just about everyone else.

Piper saw her old friends, Annabeth, Percy, Leo, Frank, Hazel, and Reyna bringing Thalia over from the Hunters, wincing as she saw Annabeth wearing a McDonald’s uniform, but she did not go to them. Instead, she kind of just hung out on the side, between the demigods and the lawyer.

He had friends of his own.

A tall, muscular man with golden armor and heterochromic eyes.

An unnaturally black woman with a bladed tail and other monstrous features, bringing with her what Piper was sure was Khione, only the snow goddess had something attached to her face. Was that a Facehugger from the Alien franchise?

A young man that looked exactly like Percy, only wiser and more battle-hardened, wearing a black leather coat and several weapons on his person.

Then an absolute psycho of a barely pubescent boy, dragging with him a golden bloody mess of a thing that might have been a god.

The five exchanged greetings of various enthusiasm, but Piper was broken from her observations when someone shouted her name.

“Piper!”

She looked and was relieved to see her dad running to her, tears in his eyes. She ran to him too, and they crashed in a hug.

“Oh, my God, you’re safe!” Tristan openly sobbed. “I haven’t heard anything from you in-”

“I know, I’m sorry,” Piper cried. “Just…things got busy.”

Before anything else happened, a car suddenly came speeding into the throne room from a hole in space/time, followed by a kid on a motorcycle with a gun who fired, shooting the driver through the rear windshield and headrest with a pistol. The dead driver laid on the wheel, the car whipping around to head for the five people that looked suspiciously like Percy now that Piper thought about it.

Not a single one of them moved despite the screams and cries of the demigods and other people.

When the car hit the closest one head-on, the black girl, it was as if the car smashed into a steel pole. The front end caved in completely, the door popping open, one man getting thrown out, and due to the woman’s height, flipped up and over her to go spinning end over end before landing on its top in an explosion of glass. She didn’t budge a single inch.

The motorcycle boy drove over and shot the man that had gotten thrown from the car, a man of Latin descent, and then drove over to the overturned car. Another man was trying to get out of the wreckage, and the boy shot him in the head.

“What an entrance,” the lawyer said dryly.

Motorcylce boy looked at him, then looked at the crowd as if only just now realizing they were there. His eyes widened, then they zeroed in on the space/time portal to another place, some ramshackle city, and he spun the motorcycle around and attempted to make a break for it. The portal closed, making the motorcycle boy groan in anger.

“Not this fucking shit again!”

“Unfortunately,” said the lawyer. “Now turn that off and come here.”

Kicking the stand, turning off the machine, and grumbling to himself, he did just that, carrying all the energy of a disgruntled boy being told by his father that he had to turn off the videogame and do chores.

“Hi~,” grinned the psycho boy.

Motorcycle boy leaned away and stood next to leather coat man.

“Tobi, behave,” admonished the lawyer.

“What about the triplets?” Muscle man asked.

“On their way,” said the lawyer.

“And our tech support?”

There was a loud banging at the front doors of the throne room, causing all heads to turn.

“Door’s open!” the lawyer called.

One of the doors swung open, and came rolling in a souped-up wheelchair was another young man with a clear case of psychopathy. He had big welding goggles on his eyes, short black hair, a wild grin, pale skin, and was wearing simple clothes. Black shorts that exposed the stumps of his legs, and a long-sleeved bright red shirt.

“One side people, move it!” he said as he rolled down the middle of everyone. He got to the other six and crowed, “Well, goddamn! It’s the end of the world as we know it all over again, ain’t it!”

“Something like that,” the lawyer said.

“Excuse me!”

Everyone looked, and Piper swallowed a little at seeing Annabeth go marching in front of everyone, her big mouth opening up.

Piper also saw that there were a number of raised eyebrows and slack jaws at seeing the mighty Annabeth Chase, Architect of the Gods, wearing a McDonald’s outfit, and Piper couldn’t blame them. When you thought of Annabeth, the last place you’d ever think to see her working was McDonald’s of all places. Not to bash anyone that does work at the fast-food joint, of course, but anyone that knew Annabeth knew that fast food was way beneath her skills and talents.

Piper looked at the six newcomers and saw they all had their own reactions as well.

The lawyer looked unperturbed.

The black woman and muscular man both looked disgusted to see Annabeth wearing such a uniform, as if the site was offensive.

Psycho boy and wheelchair boy both looked as if they were witnessing a comedy skit.

Motorcycle boy looked uncomfortable.

And leather coat man had a raised brow.

“Yes, Ms. Chase?” the lawyer asked calmly.

“Uh, h-hi-”

“Hello.”

Annabeth was clearly a bit taken aback by the lawyer’s calm demeanor. Piper figured Annabeth thought she was going to be lambasted for daring to come before whoever these individuals were.

“So, uh, I think I speak for everyone here when I say I would like to know what’s going on?”

“Armageddon,” the lawyer said shortly. “For the past four years, Tartarus has been amassing an army while also putting his sons and nephews back together. He also struck up an alliance with Loki-” psycho boy grinned and lightly kicked the bloody mess, making it groan, making Piper’s eyes go wide when she realized that said mess was Loki “-Setne, and the successors of the Triumvirate-”

“The Triumvirate!?” Annabeth balked, as did many others in the throne room.

Piper’s eyes narrowed.

“Yes, the Triumvirate,” the lawyer said patiently. “The organization that existed in the shadows for the better part of 2,000 years, amassing wealth and power and immortal soldiers and demigods, while having a hand in most major world events. Did you really think an organization like that would just crumble and collapse because its main leadership was defeated by teenagers?”

Annabeth gulped, and Piper could tell that a lot of people were feeling like the old “Overconfident Alcoholic” meme.

“Indeed,” continued the lawyer. “It is the end of your world. Tartarus has unleashed his army, and billions across the plant have already died. Setne almost destroyed the House of Life in Egypt but he was routed. I suspect that he is currently overtaking the Duat and subduing the gods therein. Loki made his move on Hotel Valhalla, but-”

“I fucked him up!” Psycho boy cheered.

“Quite,” agreed the lawyer. “In short, tragic terms, Ms. Chase, all of your efforts in saving the world and in retiring from demigod life in order to build a quieter, normal one, were all in vain. Evil has reared its head in a way almost unprecedented, and that’s why we’re here.”

Annabeth had tears in her eyes, her knees wobbling. Understandable, of course. Even Piper felt her heart aching in her chest, even though she knew this day was coming and had tried to do her best to prepare.

“Wh-What about the gods?” Annabeth asked.

“Useless. Nyx gave over her daughter Hecate to the current Triumvirate to use her in a manner similar to how the first Triumvirate used Harpocrates. Using Hecate, they caused a massive Mist warp that affected the entire planet. Using this warp, they manipulated the minds of all mankind to collectively think of the gods as week and worthless beings, while also thinking that Tartarus and his allies were nigh-invincible. The gods will be of no help to us.”

“Where are they, then?”

“I’d imagine they are captured. We will have to worry about them later. Right now, we have bigger concerns.”

Just then, Olympus was rocked. Light debris rained down from the ceiling, and many stumbled and staggered, with Piper having to hold onto her dad to keep him from falling.

“Ohp, here they come,” said wheelchair boy. “Time to get to work.”

He rolled forward towards the central hearth in the middle of the throne room, produced something like an ethernet cable from the arm of his wheelchair, and somehow plugged it into the ground.

Psycho boy laced his fingers together and thrust his arms forward, popping his knuckles. “I fucking love this part…!”

Annabeth looked around at all of them. “Who are you people?”

The lawyer produced a cigarette, lighting it with a spark of electricity from his finger. “I am Shin’en Yūrei. These are my associates, Asteria, Leviathan, Tobi, Virgil, Gunslinger, and Wheels. Kraken will join us soon, and I suspect that a number of others will as well. To answer your question more directly, Ms. Chase…we are the desperate measures.”

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

M’kay. This chapter is shorter than I wanted it to be, but things have happened that require my attention.

Firstly, it’s even funnier the second time! I am, of course, referring to the recent (as of this chapter) reveal of the Thalia Grace actor, Tamara Smart, who is not a white girl. Standard dissenting opinions apply: Brownwashing, erasing white representation, racist hypocrisy, double standards, how is it okay to replace white people, but a heinous crime to replace non-white people? How come people can’t criticize this without being labeled as racists who don’t support diversity, and told to shut up, but whenever the reverse happens, someone sound the alarms! How is it considered diversity when the only thing the studio did was remove a white person from the story and toss in a non-white person?

It is funny that they made sure to get a white boy to play Luke, the main villain, and they also got a white boy to play Tyson, the cyclopes that’s pretty much autistic, and I guarantee you that they will get a white boy to play Octavion. Now, will they also get a white boy to play Jason in order to more sharply contrast the different parentage of Jason and Thalia, or will they get another black boy and commit to more white erasure? If they do keep Jason white, what one earth is going to happen to the Kane story? Other than being Egyptian, the Kane’s big claim to fame is being mixed-race, but now that they could give that to Jason and Thalia, they would eliminating a great uniqueness to the Kane family story.

Even if you look at the show as a Percy Jackson fanfiction like most look at the movies as a Percy Jackson fanfiction, it’s still meh with all it’s “creative liberties.” If they’re not careful, they could literally kill the PJO franchise.

Anyway, secondly: I bought the new Senior Year book, the one with Hecate, and I will be going on a brief hiatus so I can binge read the whole thing to keep myself updated on current PJO events, and possibly include elements in this story. It also goes without saying that because this story is being written in an IRL standpoint before the Triple Goddess book was released, any new lore/information revealed therein will most likely not be considered for this story.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the Wrath of the Sun Deity is making a comeback! Years ago, he started writing a “Reading of” AC: T, then life happened, and now he’s picking it back up! Please keep an eye out for the rewrite. While you do that, you can also read his latest work currently posted on Watt Pad! I can’t paste the link here because of the way FFN works, but if you type the website name followed by dot-com, and this extension, /1477828937-hinterland-chapter-1-the-start, you should find the story. His name on WP is Mr_Goober and his pfp is a cartoon white dude with black hair.

Since it’ll be a while, please Fav, Follow, and Review!

Chapter Text

And we’re back! The war begins in earnest now, with Shin’en doling out the first assignments. Admittedly, these next few chapters may be considered boring as they will all be fights, with the Team whittling down Tartarus’s army, taking full advantage of Chaos’s new perma-death rule, though there will be some humor as Shin’en plays 20 Questions with all the demigods, particularly Annabeth.

Also, I have read the Hecate book, and my personal review is at the bottom of the chapter for anyone interested.

Disclaimer: I don’t own PJO or any other media herein

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Annabeth stared at Shin’en. “Um…okay? That…kind of…clears it up. You’re the desperate measures, this is a very desperate situation—so, er, what now?”

“Now we get to work,” Shin’en said. “Wheels, what’ve we got?”

“The easier-to-answer question is what do we not have?” Wheels smirked. With the press of a button on his wheelchair, a number of holographic displays came to life, showing live images of places across the planet, vitals of Shin’en and the rest of his present team, all of their hearts beating at different rates but still calm, spinning radar graphs corresponding to the locations, showing innumerable red blips with accurate counts of how many monsters were present in the given area. It was like the Batcomputer mixed with Tony Stark’s stuff. “We’ve got millions of monsters, the return of all the bad guys, mass genocide of the human race, magic, and more. The only thing we’re missing is a space army comprised of all the dead good guys.”

Shin’en exhaled some smoke. “Used to be a good storyline until it became overdone and cliché. How are we looking about Olympus?”

Wheels hit a button and a screen took the centerstage. “Monsters are pouring out from these locations. Palaces of various minor gods. Bet if I cross-reference the list here with a list of minor gods who supported the Titans because the Olympians were assholes, I’d find a lot of matches. Almost like making the Olympians swear an oath on the Styx to be more respectful was never going to work out, and now they’re once again taking their revenge.”

Wheels craned his neck and looked directly at Percy, his welding goggles catching the light, becoming big circles of white.

Percy’s mouth set into a thin line as his objective failure at the end of the Titan War was brought to bare before him. Yes, he had been naïve and foolish to think that making the Olympians swear a Styxian oath was going to change anything, given how he and Thalia (and also Jason, but they didn’t know about him at the time) existed despite a Styxian oath in the first place. Given the current situation, though, he really didn’t want to be reminded of his past failures.

“Focus,” Shin’en said.

“Right. On top of Olympus being flooded with monsters, we’ve also got activity in the seas below. Oceanus is bringing almost the entire human Navy to the Lower Bay. I’m tracking American vessels, British, German, French, Chinese, Russian, and a bunch of others. Say what you will about Tartarus, but he successfully unified humanity.”

“Indeed,” Shin’en intoned.

“Oh, and I’m also tracking Typhon to the West. At his current pace, he should be here in about an hour.”

Shin’en took another drag from his cigarette, exhaling another cloud of smoke from his nose. “Looks like it’s going to be a busy night.”

Annabeth stepped forward. “How can we help?”

Without even missing a beat, Shin’en turned to her and said with a straight face and a dead serious tone, “I’ll have a 20-piece McNugget with a large fry, buffalo sauce, and a large Dr. Pepper.”

Annabeth glowered at him.

Tobi raised his hand. “Can I get two Big Macs with everything on them, and a medium fry? And a Diet Coke?”

Wheel said without turning around from his holograms, “Five bacon double cheeseburgers, plain and dry, with Sprite-”

“Okay, that’s enough of this nonsense,” Leviathan cut in, visibly, genuinely irritated and angered by Annabeth basically being bullied.

Asteria didn’t look too pleased, either, really begging the question of just what Annabeth meant to them.

“Do try to disassociate,” Shin’en smirked.

“You try to disassociate,” Leviathan returned, jutting his chin at Piper.

Piper shifted, making Tristan hold her a little tighter. “Leave my daughter out of...whatever this is.”

“Of course,” Shin’en continued to smirk, before he schooled himself. “Let’s get started. Wheels, have you finished interfacing with the mountain?”

“95% of the way there. It’s a big mountain.”

Shin’en nodded. “Gunslinger, Virgil, you’re on Olympus. Get through the monsters and destroy the temples. Wheels will be able to provide backup shortly. Tobi, handle Typhon. Asteria, Leviathan, you’re in the ocean. According to that scan, Oceanus, Phorcys, Keto, and Polybotes are amongst the fleet. Don’t count on any help. I’ll reinforce each of you when resources are made available.”

“Can I have a bigger gun?” Gunslinger asked.

Shin’en nodded. “Wheels?”

The crippled young man hit a button, and from the back of his wheelchair popped out a rather big gun. An M249 LMG to be precise, with a red dot site and an underbarrel grenade launcher. Shin’en caught it and handed the weapon to the grinning boy.

“5.56mm Celestial bronze/lead alloy, capable of killing mortals and monsters. The gun is enchanted to prevent jamming and overheating, and the magazine is similarly enchanted, but also with infinite ammunition. Likewise, the grenade launcher has infinite shells. Don’t hurt yourself.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Gunslinger grinned.

Shin’en looked at Virgil.

“I’m fine,” said the Assassin.

Shin’en nodded at the throne room doors, and the partners made their way out into the field, jogging past the congregation of demigods and their families.

“Are we worried about collateral damage?” Tobi asked.

“No,” was Shin’en’s short answer.

“Yay!”

Tobi went running out into the field as well, presumably to go fight Typhon by himself.

Many people were appalled, and Annabeth was the first to voice it.

“You’re sending a kid to fight Typhon!?”

Shin’en looked at her, slightly miffed, slightly amused, while Wheels was cackling like a loon at her question.

“Tobi is not a kid, Ms. Chase, and he is more than capable of handling Typhon on his own. Look what he did to Loki.”

Annabeth and others looked down at the ravaged, mutilated mess that was the Norse god of mischief. They all shuddered at the sight of him.

“And he can do far worse,” Shin’en promised. “He will deal with Typhon.” Shin’en looked at Asteria and Leviathan, giving them the nod.

They nodded back, and then both dissolved into water.

“Woah, what was that?” Percy asked.

“Water-travel,” Shin’en answered. “The child-of-Poseidon equivalent of the Hades child’s shadow-travel.”

Percy looked perturbed. “We…I…can do that? I can’t do that.”

“Have you ever tried?”

“Well, no…”

“Did you ever try to make a hurricane?”

“No…but—hey, how do you know about that?”

“I know about everything,” Shin’en said simply, but there was a hidden weight in his words.

Percy swallowed.

“So, you never tried to make a hurricane, but you did, and you’ve never tried to travel through interconnected bodies of water like Nico with shadows, but you’re confident that you can’t do that? Percy Jackson, do you even know what your full potential is?”

“I…um…”

“I know you don’t. Ever since your life as a demigod started, you’ve let your ‘I never wanted to be a demigod’ mentality control you, and you have made great strides in not being a demigod. You have not ever tested your powers, nor have you ever pushed yourself to your limits. Percy, you have no idea what you can and cannot do.”

Percy glared at Shin’en. “And you do? You know what my full potential is?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, yeah? How? You don’t even know me.”

Shin’en laughed. “I know you far more intimately than you can possibly imagine.”

“How?” Percy demanded.

Shin’en once again adopted that sideways smirk.

Unsurprisingly, it was Annabeth who made the connection first. “There’s no way…”

Shin’en sideways smirk got a little bigger. “Oh, yes there is.”

“Wise Girl? What’s up? Who is this?”

Annabeth was staring slack-jawed at Shin’en. “You…all of you…you’re…you’re…”

“You’re Percy Jackson,” Piper finally answered, her eyes wide with realization. “From a different dimension. An alternate timeline. Multiverse theory.”

“Quite the bitch, multiverse theory,” Shin’en confirmed. “Yes, I am Percy Jackson from a world in which things were vastly different. The same is true for all of us.”

All who heard this revelation were floored.

The implications were running wild in all their minds.

Percy was pale as a sheet. “I-I’m…y-you’re…”

“And Asteria and Leviathan,” Annabeth started, struggling to get her brain on a track, “the reason they don’t like me—or at least, the reason they don’t like me…wearing this is because…because I’m still someone special to them in their own timelines?”

“In his timeline, you are Leviathan’s beloved wife, empress to his empire, and mother of his three children.”

Annabeth did not turn bright red at the mention of having birthed Percy’s children in another life, but was actually green with envy. She wanted to have kids with her own Percy, after all.

“For Asteria,” Shin’en continued, “you are her eldest daughter through adoption and genetic mutation.”

Annabeth’s feelings of baby fever evaporated. “Huh?”

“It’s an involved story,” Shin’en dismissed.

Percy shook his head. “Okay, back on track. We can talk about this…multiverse stuff…later. We have a war to win. What do you want us to do?”

“I need someone to clean up this corpse, and get that wrecked car out of here.”

The mess Gunslinger had made upon his entrance had yet to be removed.

And Loki’s mangled body was still present, as was the incapacitated Khione with the thing on her face.

Percy, Annabeth, and the closer demigods all stared at Shin’en.

“That’s…it?” Annabeth asked.

“Yes. They’ll start to stink before too much longer.”

“What about battle plans!?” Annabeth shouted. “Where do you want us? Who do we need to go fight? You said Tartarus had deployed a millions-strong army across the planet and is wiping out the human race and you’re here to stop him, so how can we help?”

“By staying out of the way,” Shin’en said, looking her dead in the eye. From his tone, he was not kidding. “You do not understand the full scope of this unfolding nightmare. If I were to deploy any of you as you currently are, you would be killed and eaten. Save only for one of you.” He looked directly at Piper. “Are you ready?”

Piper disengaged from her father. “I am.” Tristan grabbed her arm and tried to protest, but she looked at him and said one word. “Sleep.”

The charmspeak instantly took hold, and Tristan crumpled. Piper caught him and gently set him down. She stood back up and looked at Shin’en.

“He will be taken care of,” he confirmed.

Piper nodded. “What do you need me to do?”

“The Triumvirate Holdings HQ is beneath us. Scans show that one of the new emperors is present. Bring him to me. Alive. We need to find out where Hecate is being kept.”

“Yes, sir. I also have an army, if that helps.”

Shin’en nodded. “Will they only listen to you, or can command of them be given to someone else?”

“They’ll do what I tell them to do, even if that means taking orders from a different person.”

“Tell them to go into hiding. I will have need of them later.”

Piper’s brow slightly furrowed. “You don’t want to deploy them now? They could help us secure Olympus, and also take the fight to Tartarus.”

“Gunslinger and Virgil can secure Olympus by themselves, Asteria and Leviathan can secure the ocean, and Tobi can take down Typhon. Olympus will be secure in due time. No need to waste any of the spirits now.”

“But what about the rest of the world?” Piper asked, trying to keep her rising emotions in check. “They’re being slaughtered by Tartarus’s army—hundreds of millions have died, and they’re still dying.”

“Of that I am aware,” Shin’en continued in his calm and level voice. “I am also aware that Tartarus’s army far outnumbers your own by a very staggering ratio, and sending the spirits out there now would be suicide for all of them. The unfortunate fact of this matter is that mankind is, for the most part, lost to us. The only thing we can do for the species now is repel the enemy, regroup, and draw up our own plan of attack. Do not be mistaken about this situation, Ms. McLean—we are no longer fighting to save mankind. We are fighting for the future of those that yet remain. Now go. Bring me the emperor.”

Angry, sad, bitter, and with an aching, vengeful heart, Piper steeled herself and resolved to direct her fury at everything happening at this unknown emperor. She turned to leave, mounting her warpath, and her old friends moved to join her.

“No,” Piper said firmly.

“What do you mean ‘no’?” Annabeth demanded.

“No, you can’t come with me-”

“Oh, don’t even start with us,” Percy glowered. “We are not getting into this You’re too weak, I don’t want to keep having to go out of my way to keep you safe shtick.”

“It’s been a while, Beauty Queen,” Leo said, “but I think we can all still keep up with each other.”

“Doubtful,” Piper said dully.

“Hey, are you okay?” Frank asked. “I get the idea of not wanting us to be in warzone, but this doesn’t feel like you just want to keep us safe. This feels like you’re actively blowing us off and want nothing to do with us.”

And then Piper dropped a bombshell on them all. “That’s absolutely correct, Frank. I do want nothing to do with any of you.” She glared at them all, her multicolored eyes seeping into a faint red as her anger spiked. “I don’t have time to get into it right now because I have more important things to do, but I’ve got a lot to say later. Assuming we survive this night, anyway.”

Her piece said, she wasted no more time. She went running out the throne room doors, her body becoming covered in her Tlanuwa armor, throwing most that saw her for a huge loop—since when was Piper able to do that?—and she was gone. Soaring over Olympus, she dove off the edge of the mountain and descended to the skyscrapers below, her beak pointed right for the Triumvirate Holdings building.

Back in the throne room, it was just Wheels and Shin’en left of the multitude of alternate Percy’s.

It was Reyna that marched up to Shin’en, who had turned his back to everyone so he could focus on the holographic monitors. “What was that?” she demanded.

“Correct your tone and then I will speak with you,” Shin’en said without looking at her. He stood with his back straight, his shoulders square, and his hands clasped behind his back. He exuded all the energy of a general conducting battle: intent, focused, pointed, and in command.

Not at all unlike Reyna herself back when she was praetor during the Giant and Imperial Wars.

Appreciating the fact that Asteria, the one that had effortlessly slaughtered Lycaon and his werewolves, and then neutralized Khione and made Orion flee, was clearly subservient to Shin’en, Reyna did, in fact, correct her tone as she realized that there was probably a very good reason as to why Asteria obeyed Shin’en, and it most like was not mutual respect. Reyna cleared her throat and tried again. “The way Piper spoke, the way she looked at us, it’s like she hated us for something.”

“I will not go into details about Piper’s emotions,” Shin’en said. “Her personal thoughts regarding you are hers divulge when she wants to.”

Reyna frowned. “But…you know why was like that?”

“Of course I do. I will not tell you what’s going through her head, but I will point this out to you: she has spent the last two years fighting the forces of darkness. You were gallivanting through the woods with the Hunters.”

And just like that, with the insight that she had, Reyna understood exactly where Piper was coming from. “She’s jealous,” the ex-praetor said. “She was putting herself through hell, exposing herself to all of that evil, while we were sitting out and enjoying life.”

Shin’en didn’t say anything one way or another. There was no micro-reaction on his face. Nothing to indicate that Reyna’s inference was correct or not.

“But…” Reyna protested more against the universe than anyone specific, “she chose that life. No one forced her into it. She didn’t have to do that. That’s all on her.”

“You can bring this topic of conversation up with her at her convenience,” Shin’en said. His tone was dismissive, and Reyna got the hint.

This conversation was now over.

Reyna’s was, anyway, but Annabeth came back up. “You said that we didn’t understand the full scope of what was happening. So, what is happening?”

“I already told you: Tartarus has unleashed a massive army of monsters and other significant beings, including, but not limited to, many of the Giants and a number of Titans. They are also boosted in power by the current Triumvirate using Hecate in the same way the previous used Harpocrates. By harnessing human belief through the Mist, they have what remains of mankind believing that the Olympians are weak beings, and that Tartarus and his allies are nigh-unbeatable. Additionally, as it is night on this hemisphere, the enemy is currently enjoying yet another boost in power from Nyx. Also, Tartarus does not act alone. Joining forces with his are Setne, who has overtaken the Duat by using the Crown of Ptolemy and has imbued himself with the power of Apophis, and formerly Loki, who is here with us now. Finally, and most importantly, Ms. Chase…you are despairingly out of practice. Most of you are, and the ones that are yet in-shape, as it were, lack the power necessary to stand on even footing with the enemy.”

Annabeth swallowed hard. Percy, Leo, and a number of other demigods looked uncomfortable, while demigods like Hazel, Frank, Thalia, and Reyna looked miffed.

It hurt because it was true.

It had been a while since Annabeth had trained for combat, what with college life, the job hunt, and working at McDonald’s taking up her time, combined with the false feeling of freedom from the life of a demigod creating a sense of laziness in her—the idea of “I’m an adult now, which means monsters won’t be attacking me as much, which means I don’t have to keep up with my training anymore.” It showed, too, since Annabeth’s tummy was just a little bigger than it used to be, her arms and legs a little less muscular than before.

Even Percy was just barely on the pudgier side as well, since his construction job provided some physical exercise, but not a lot of true weight resistance compared to his demigod strength.

As for the ones who were on top of their training still, like Thalia and Reyna, seasoned Hunters, and Frank and Hazel, praetors of several years now, being told they weren’t strong enough to keep up in this new conflict was certainly a blow to their pride. That being said, they had seen the enemy. Thalia and Reyna were there when they were easily overrun and subdued by Lycaon, Khione, and Orion. Frank and Hazel were there when those huge, hulking monsters and the army of normal monsters demolished Camp Jupiter, and had no trouble swarming into New Rome.

That thought in particular had Hazel speaking up. “Hey, do you know what those huge monsters are?”

“The cacodemons,” Shin’en answered.

That had Nico and Will’s attention. “Excuse me, what?” the son of Hades demanded. “Those things are not my Cocoa Puffs.”

“They are,” Shin’en confirmed. “You were foolish and naïve to think Nyx was telling the truth when she told you that she created the cacodemons from her power and your memories. In truth, they are a new generation of beings. They are the children of Nyx and Tartarus, who infiltrated and assimilated in your life. In your defense, they were sleeper agents who were only recently activated by their parents.”

Nico looked like his entire worldview was shattered. He had to lean into his boyfriend for support.

Will’s eyes widened as something occurred to him. “What about Bob?”

Shin’en pressed a few buttons on the hologram keyboard. One of the screens grew larger, showing what was apparently an energy signature—well, a cluster of signatures, actually—and amongst these were names like Atlas, Prometheus, Koios, and despairingly enough, Iapetus.

“Another sleeper agent,” Shin’en said. “Nyx and Tartarus both worked on him while he was in the Pit, and they broke him, remade him, sent him off, and have turned him loose.”

Nico and Will and Percy and Annabeth all went pale and rigid.

“We have to save him,” Annabeth said.

“The chances of mounting a rescue operation are slim, but not zero.”

“Then let me handle it!” Annabeth insisted. “We can’t just let him be used as a tool! He’s our friend-!”

“A fact that means nothing to me,” Shin’en turned to stare her down. “Ms. Chase, this situation is not like the Titan War, Giant War, Imperial War, or any quest you’ve been on. This isn’t a children’s story full of sunshine and rainbows with an occasional gloomy cloud. This is serious. The enemy has been training. They are more powerful than they were in previous conflicts, while you have been slacking off. If the resources are made available to me to at least consider trying to rescue Bob, then I will, but as of right now, I have far more pressing matters that require my attention. If you insist on trying to provide me with aid, then please clean up this mess. The bodies are starting to smell.”

Annabeth glared at the man who was Percy from another life, and then she glared at the corpse left by Gunslinger, and then at the overturned car with another body inside it. She looked at Thalia and Reyna. “Either of you have one of those magic tent things?”

Reyna handed her a spare magic collapsable tent. Annabeth used it to pack away the bodies and the wrecked car, and then she tossed the tent into the flickering embers of the hearth. Thus, she cleaned up the mess.

“What about, er, them?” she hesitated in asking, referring to the bloody lump of meat that was Loki, and the incapacitated form the was Khione.

“Leave them,” Shin’en said. “They’re fine where they’re at.”

“Okay…now what?”

Shin’en hit a few buttons on the holo-keyboard, and the entire back half of the throne became a lounge area. Dozens of couches, sofas, and recliners spawned in, along with gaming systems, television setups, a miniature library, several coolers that were filled with ice and various beverages, numerous tables, many of which were stacked with pizza boxes filled with the standard three flavors of cheese, pepperoni, and hamburger, and others that were sporting boardgames galore.

“Make yourself comfortable and keep yourself occupied,” Shin’en instructed.

Annabeth stared at him. “The world is coming to an end…and you want us to have a party like it’s someone’s birthday?”

“Yes,” was Shin’en’s simple, yet pointed, answer. “I have explained at length as to why deploying you and your friends is not necessary and also suicide. There is no need for any of you to die today.”

“I’m at 99% integration with Olympus,” Wheels said.

Shin’en nodded.

“But we want to help!” Annabeth finally shouted.

Shin’en looked at her, his eyes piercing. “You want to…help?” he asked in a neutral voice.

Annabeth’s mouth set into a thin line. Her feet started moving, carrying her back over to her friends where there was strength and safety in numbers. Shin’en’s eyes followed her the whole time, his whole body eventually having to turn so he could stare at her.

“Now you want to help?” Shin’en said.

And with that statement, combined with his previous regarding his knowing of “everything,” Annabeth now understood what Shin’en was getting at. Her mouth set into an even thinner line, her subconsciously coming up to grab her opposite bicep.

“Ms. Chase, you refused to help four years ago when another war started. Even in your own words to Magnus at your lunch, you revealed there was a crisis going on. You knew the situation per Rachel’s investigation, you knew about Triumvirate Holdings, how Nero was one of the emperors, and it was even speculated that if Nero was here in the East, so close to Camp Half-Blood, then it was highly likely that one of the other emperors was based in the West, close to Camp Jupiter. Now, I will throw you a bone and say that saddling up to travel all the way to the West Coast from Manhattan would have been a tall order, but there were still several other things you could have done here at home. For example, establishing a communication system that bypassed the emperors’ jamming signal—you can’t look me in the eye and tell me that you, of all people, would have been incapable of determining a solution.

“No, ma’am, you simply did not want to. Very concerning, given the nuance behind the crisis. Communications down, no way to contact Reyna, Frank, and Hazel in New Rome, no way to send a warning to them, your friends—family, even, in your own words, Mr. Jackson—no way to make sure that the place you wanted to spend the rest of your life at would be informed of the new threat, and therefore able to prepare. Now, I can understand the jaded, cynical feelings that would arise if this had been a situation like the previous two wars, in that the Olympians were somehow to blame and you were being dragged in to clean up their mess, but the Imperial War was unique. The emperors had no interest in the gods, only the Oracles, and the one specific god that pertained to was actually on the job-”

“Where even is Apollo?” Thalia blurted.

“Most like captured with the rest of them sans Artemis over there.”

The moon goddess had been with her Hunters when they were ambushed, and therefore rescued by Asteria when she arrived. However, Artemis looked like hammered fecal material, given that she was small, thin, frail, pale, and shivering, her eyes glazed and unfocused. The effects of the Mist warp and all of collective human thought being directed to the idea that she was a weak and pathetic being, not a dignified deity.

Annabeth took this opportunity to plead her case. “But-”

And Shin’en wasn’t going to tolerate it. “But nothing, Ms. Chase. I don’t care about such sentiments as what we went through or we were tired and burned out or we earned the right to a normal life or any of that other bullshit. Your friends were in danger. Evil had once again reared its head, a new war had started, lives were on the line, and you came up with excuses to justify your nonparticipation. You didn’t even try. You completely and totally washed your hands of the situation, and to this day you are living with the guilt of your failure.”

Annabeth and Percy both flinched because Shin’en hit them both right between the eyes with that one.

“In truth, Ms. Chase, Mr. Jackson,” Shin’en continued, “I will not deploy the two of you because you aren’t really wanting to help. You are seeking redemption. You are desiring to prove yourselves and atone for what you did four years ago, and I have no need of that. I have no need of knights in shining armor, gallant warriors descending from on high to save the weak. I need soldiers. Killers. People that will follow orders. And I don’t see that in any of you.”

Percy clenched his fists. “I can’t believe that you’re supposed to be from a different world.”

Shin’en chuckled mirthlessly. “Believe me, young man, compared to other versions of you, I am actually a very nice person.”

“So, that’s it,” Annabeth said. “You’re just not going to let us help save our world.”

“Piper tried to get you to help her save your world a long time ago. You refused her then, and I refuse you now. If a situation should ever arise that I need additional help, I may consider you, but as of right now, to me, all of you are civilians to be kept off the battlefield. Now, I have a war to wage, and will no longer tolerate interruptions. Enjoy the amenities and stay out my way.”

Shin’en turned away from them, the conversation now over.

But Percy wasn’t satisfied with that. “Hey-!”

Shin’en whipped back around. “Is for livestock, young man. I have entertained all of you long enough, and now I must get to work. Do not test my patience anymore than you already have.”

“Or what?” Percy challenged, displaying clearly that all these years later since his first quest, he still had his moments where his emotions got the better of him. Though he was only 22. Not exactly the pinnacle of maturity and self-control. “You’re going to put us in timeout?”

Shin’en hit a button on the holo-keyboard, and a huge playpen comprised of towering multicolored panels materialized around Percy, Annabeth, Hazel, Frank, Leo, Calypso, Nico, Will, Thalia, and Reyna, effectively putting them all in timeout.

Leo touched one of the panels and recoiled when it shocked him.

Thalia then gave it a shot, only to be shocked as well. “What the Hades!?”

“Hey!” Nico barked.

Thalia blushed. “Sorry—but what the heck is this?”

“Timeout,” Shin’en said, his dark emerald eyes glittering with amusement. “No powers in the playpen. I’ve also got highchairs if you still want to roughhouse.”

“Dude, what the fu-” Percy tried to say, only for a bar of soap to pop into his mouth, his expression going cross-eyed both as he tried to look down at it, and at the sour taste.

“No filthy language, either,” Shin’en smirked.

Percy spat out the soap and wiped his mouth.

Frank’s hand clamped down on his shoulder. “Shut up before you make this worse for us—don’t ask how this could get worse, because I don’t want to find out. It’s bad enough that you got us placed in literal timeout.”

Percy scowled at the ground.

For the rest of the demigods and their families, they did their best to absorb themselves into something else.

“100%,” Wheels said.

Shin’en nodded. He turned around and put the heroes out of his mind. “Proceed.”

Wheels hit a button, and a mechanized female voice sounded off.

“Initiating Olympus reconfiguration.”

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

And the reason why this chapter was pure talking and no action is because it’s been two weeks since the last update, and based on how my work schedule goes, it would possibly be another two weeks before the chapter was out. Climbing multiple several-hundred-foot-tall towers in a day is very taxing on the body.

I promise there shall be carnage and action next chapter, along with the arrival of Kraken.

For those interested in my review of the Hecate book, it now follows:

Yeah, it sucks. The very opening chapter features Percy pooping in his pants—no that is not a joke, because it is written “I felt my gut dissolve into my jeans,” followed by “I needed to change my underpants”—because Hecate was ‘scary’ to him. Really? This takes place after the Giant War, meaning this is the Percy who’s a veteran of two wars, and a survivor of the pit of evil, even personally encountering the dark god himself. Then, Percy only dropped his sword, but when encountered with Hecate, he poops his pants like a preschooler?

And that’s pretty much the energy for the rest of the book.

Percy, Annabeth, and Grover make mistakes they shouldn’t be making, and get themselves into situations they should easily be able to get out of given the amount of power and experience they have at this point in their lives. Essentially, Rick writes them as if they’re still kids, but they’re not.

Given everything they’ve been through, they’re adults. Experienced, mature, capable, competent adults that should be functioning like well-seasoned special forces operatives.

Now, I will say that based on the nature of these books, that they’re just shameless cash-grabs with the backdrop of being Percabeth fluff, that they don’t need to be serious, gripping books, especially because we already know that Percy succeeds in getting into college in the first place. That being said, just because these books have the leeway of being campy, silly, funny, and whimsical, they are being too campy, silly, funny, and whimsical.

No, this trilogy does not need to feature Percy and Annabeth as jaded, cynical soldiers suffering from PTSD, jumping at their own shadows, too scared to sleep with the lights off, and stuck with separation anxiety so severe that if they’re apart from each other for more than ten seconds they start having a panic attack thinking a monster got the other, but I do say that there needs to be respect shown for everything that Percy and Annabeth have gone through up to this post-GW point in the canon.

Anyway. Thanks for reading the chapter! While we’re here, is anyone still interested in revamping Dragon Princess? Like, would anyone want another chapter of Chaos War first, or would anyone like the first chapter of the revamped Dragon Princess?

Please let me know with a Review after you’ve Followed and Fav’d!

Chapter Text

The carnage continues! Or rather, it begins.

I finally bought Hogwarts Legacy, and I have spent the past month playing it. Fun game, but you can definitely tell that most of the focus went into gameplay and setting. Your character is bland and boring with no history or personality to them at all, and the story itself is basic and passable, with the main villain being a generic bad guy with standard goals of world domination.

That being said, I can’t help but think of a PJO videogame in the same style. As in, it takes place in the past, therefore eliminating the presence of the modern MCs except for the likes of Chiron. Now, as for which time period in the past, I think the Civil War would be awesome, because that’s when the Confederate Romans and the Union Greeks really went at it.

You could have a modified musket that’s enchanted to never reload with a Celestial Bronze bayonet, or an Imperial Gold one if you decide to play as a Roman.

I’ve also thought of a Backup Plan AU in which child Shin’en goes back home with Persephone instead of staying in the Shinobi World, and it so happens that Persephone goes to Hogwarts as a foreign exchange student due to being a demigod, along with other demigods, and the story explores Shin’en getting help and therapy for his trauma, and integrating as a kid instead of a soldier/assassin. Shin’en would also be a tad OOC in this continuity, being quieter, reserved, more prone to crying due to greater emotional instability, more jittery, stronger abandonment issues to the point where he would start to get anxious if Persephone was in the bathroom for too long—basically suffering from severe PTSD to the point that he’s basically got the mind of a small child that is in desperate need for lots of hugs.

Probably never going to happen, but it’s a fun thought bunny.

Obviously, I continued with this story instead of revamping Dragon Princess. I promise that story is still on the table, but that’s not saying much considering how many other stories are still on the table. Oh, well.

Life is full of disappointments.

Disclaimer: I don’t own PJO or any other media herein

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

“Initiating Olympus reconfiguration.”

The mountain shuddered and shook as it did just that. In a showing similar to Cybertron transforming into Primus, streets were opened, certain buildings dropped into the mountain itself, platforms rose from the rock, and Olympus did indeed reconfigure from a floating mountain into a gigantic gun platform. Massive turrets and cannons, rocket launchers, missile bays, antennas, and more.

In short, Wheels’ living program just turned Mt. Olympus into something more powerful and deadly than Mongul’s War World. Even better was how there was a hologram of Olympus showing the mountain’s entire reconfiguration in real time, eventually ending on its new form: a golden city situated amongst a floating, spherical battlecruiser.

“And now for the pièce de resistance,” Wheels said with a perfect accent.

Pushing another button on the keyboard, the very thrones of the gods started to sink into the floor, sinking into new alcoves like control rods. As each throne vanished from site, getting plugged into the mountain, a feminine, computerized voice sounded off:

Program Dionysus: Online.

Program Hermes: Online.

Program Hephaestus: Online.

Program Aphrodite: Online.

Program Artemis: Online.

And so on until finally:

Program Zeus: Online.

Wheels nodded at Shin’en. “We are locked and loaded.”

“Get her fired up,” Shin’en said.

With another nod, Wheels started calling out commands. “Program Athena: Aegis Shield. Spherical shape around the mountain. Program Artemis: Lunar Charge. Direct energy to main power cells. Program Ares: Invigorate. Direct energy to main power cells. Program Dionysus: Madness Wave. Standby. Program Aphrodite: Love Wave. Standby. Program Apollo: Longshot. Monitor the skies for any airborne hostiles and eliminate them. Program Demeter: Revitalize. Remain on standby to render healing. Program Hermes: Speedster. Overlock all active programs at my signal. Program Hephaestus: System Maintenance. Constantly monitor all active programs and systema across the mountain, repair as possible, and provide constant feedback on all performance. Set Programs Zeus, Poseidon, and Hera on idle. I will assign them as needed later.”

With every command, the huge battle station obeyed.

The hologram showed a translucent sphere spreading around Olympus, huge banks of solar panels rising to catch the light of the full moon on this clear, hellish night, two omni-directional antennas lowering from the bottom of the mountain, turrets and guns gaining a slight golden sheen to them as they started moving up, down, left, and right, scanning the skies in a all directions from every point on the battle station. Snaking up around Wheels’ chair from the floor was a tube with a needle at the end, and when the tube got to his arm, the needle punctured his vein at the crook of his elbow like an IV. True enough, a lively green liquid began filling the tube from the floor up, pausing at the insertion point. Finally, another holographic screen popped up, showing performance data on all other programs.

Wheels looked at Shin’en. “All systems nominal.”

Shin’en nodded. “Bring up the monitors.”

Wheels hit a button and five more screens appeared, showing third-person live footage of Asteria, Leviathan, Virgil, Gunslinger, Tobi, and Piper, along with displaying the standard patient monitor vital data typically seen in a patient room in a hospital. In short, the displays were showing a war.

Asteria and Leviathan were engaged with Polybotes, Oceanus, Keto, and Phorcys, battling beneath the waves.

Tobi was standing suspended in the forehead of a gigantic chakra avatar—Itachi’s Perfect Susano’o—facing off against an even more gigantic tornado with a pair of massive, glowing eyes close to the top where the spinning column met the black clouds, with those eyes being situated much higher than the Susano’o.

On Olympus, Virgil and Gunslinger were fighting their way through the hordes, bullets and blasts of energy flying in all directions as the duo fought to get to the temples of the rebelling gods.

For those that knew Piper, they were all quite scared to see her with Katoptris in one hand, and a tomahawk in the other, chopping and cutting mortal men down left and right as she fought her own way to the nearby new emperor of Triumvirate Holdings.

“We’ve got incoming,” Wheels said, pointing at a radar. Indeed, a number of large red blips were periodically appearing as the pulse spun around. “It’s the cacodemons. They’re in the city.”

Yet another holographic screen popped up, this one divided into several squares, showing the cacodemons that had been razing the camps and other important locations, along with the other cacodemons that had previously been held in reserve. More unholy hybrids, of course, all of them big as the buildings they were either knocking down or squeezing past as they stomped down the streets of Manhattan on their way to the Empire State Building.

Wheels tilted his head. “How are they planning to get up here?”

“Let’s not give them the opportunity to show us,” Shin’en said. “Fire at will.”

“Firing at will!” Wheels grinned.

Grabbing hold of joysticks that popped up on the arms of his wheelchair, Wheels took control of the weapon systems of his converted mounted. He proceeded to unleash the ordinance.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Earlier

Asteria and Leviathan appeared in the skies far above the ocean before they started plummeting to the waters below. The wind howled in their ears as they fell, and they were able to bear witness to the greatest navel sight in history, because beneath them was the entire world’s navy. Though it was still pitch-black, their eyes could see the hundreds of vessels from all the countries that had them, including the submarines in the waters beneath.

There were aircraft carriers, battleships, destroyers, cruisers, the aforementioned subs, and more. All the ships of the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, North Korea, Algeria, Iran, Pakistan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, even South Africa, and many more. Given all the divine players at work, it was clear that they literally teleported every naval vessel on the planet into the great cluster of steel below for the mightiest showing of Earth’s naval power imaginable, because it was literally all of Earth’s naval power.

It was sad, really.

Objectively speaking, Tartarus and his allies had successfully brought about world peace. All it took was a massive warping of the Mist to effectively enslave the minds of mankind.

That was why it was sad. It took the robbing of free will to finally achieve unity amongst men.

But anyway.

Asteria and Leviathan angled their bodies so they were diving headfirst. A number of ships actually turned their guns at them and opened fire, splitting the seas with terrific booms from the main batteries and smaller cannons. All of the ordinance missed, of course, not that any of it would have had any major effect on the alternate Percy’s. Still, it made for an epic show, Asteria and Leviathan plummeting to the ocean with explosions all around them.

They smashed into the roiling waves, but instead of the tsunami they had been aiming for to annihilate Earth’s armada, they instead barely splashed. If they had to guess, the four water deities had been manipulating the water in an attempt to actually make it solid in a sense, and nullify Asteria and Leviathan’s own hydrokinesis so that instead of harmlessly diving into the sea, they would’ve splattered like normal people. As that was the case, then it was a great testament to the power of their bodies that they still barely felt the impact of splashdown.

They didn’t even drop ten feet before they were attacked.

Asteria caught the center prong of Oceanus’s trident and was taken on a swim across the ocean.

Polybotes flung his huge net at Leviathan, and the Lord of the Abyss ripped right through it with his bear hands. Phorcys attacked, and he got smacked upside the head for his efforts, only to bounce right back into the fray as if someone had struck him with a plastic straw. Leviathan caught the diminutive old sea god by the throat and squeezed, intending to crush his neck, only for Phorcys to laugh.

“I’m not so easy this time!”

Referring to how canon Percy had managed to overpower his authority over water years ago in Atlanta.

Phorcys had no weapons, but that didn’t stop him from being able to stab his fingernails up to the first joint in hands into Leviathan’s forearm, through his dragon bone vambrace. Purple blood flowed from the wounds into the ocean.

Leviathan flung Phorcys away, but the old sea god righted himself and floated there, grinning. Polybotes swam up next to him, making their size difference extra apparent.

“You strike me as the type that doesn’t see his own blood often,” said the Bane of Poseidon.

“That is true,” said Leviathan, the punctures in his arm healing in seconds. “However, being able to harm me does not work in your favor the way you think it does. If someone like Phorcys was able to break through not just my armor, but also my skin, then perhaps this campaign will be worth my time after all.”

A very wide smile broke across the First Number One’s face, and his mismatched eyes both turned bright gold as his pupils became vertical slits. The sea suddenly thrummed with intense energy—Yoki aura—and both Phorcys and Polybotes felt their confidence waning.

“Ten percent,” said the smiling Leviathan. “Let’s see how that big human belief buff both of you have fares against ten percent of my power.”

With a roar that echoed across the oceans, Leviathan surged forward with so much speed that a shock cone frothing with bubbles formed around him.

Over with Asteria, she tossed the trident out of her face and stabbed at Oceanus with her tail. It would have been a lethal strike as she was aiming for his throat, only the Titan pulled a trick that was completely within the realm of possibility, but still uncool: he liquefied his body, and Asteria’s tail passed right through him just like it passed through the rest of the water.

The mother of four couldn’t help but feel a tad annoyed with that trick. Yeah, she could do it too, as could her children as they were all legacies of Poseidon, as could Shin’en—something he found endlessly amusing whenever they spared—but it was so annoying when used against her. Still, given how much experience she had in dealing with that ability, it wasn’t like she was completely helpless.

Oceanus swam past her, carried by his momentum. He used it to turn himself around and go shooting at Asteria. She went shooting up, straight for the underbelly of an aircraft carrier that was passing overhead as this battle was taking place in the middle of a huge armada, Oceanus chasing after her. She smashed into 90,000 tons of displacement so hard and with so much power that the whole ship shuddered and bounced as if it had struck a speed bump.

Oceanus came in less than a second later, and Asteria pushed off the ship with no time to spare. The Titan went rocketing through the ship, his trident going straight through the hull, and he had been carrying so much speed behind him that he went flying straight through the flight deck. Asteria would have gone tearing right up after him, except that Keto decided to grab a submarine and use it as a baseball bat.

Made for an amusing sight and good demonstration of what a sea deity could do while in the sea, but the sailors inside definitely were not happy.

As for Asteria, she clung to the hull and went racing along the length. She crossed the circumference on the backside of the sub, getting behind Keto, but as stated: a sea deity in the sea. Keto knew very well that Asteria had been coming for her, and was not at all taken by surprise. That didn’t mean she easily fended Asteria off, however, as she was put on the ropes due to the stellar combination of the Xenomorph Goddess’s usage of claws and tail.

Oceanus splashed back down and went charging back into the fray, swimming right in the midst of Asteria and Keto, forcing Asteria on the defensive as she fought against them both.

She could definitely feel how much more powerful they were compared to how they were in her own world, and how they used to be in this one. The power of human belief was nothing to scoff at, as where Asteria would have been able to easily handle Keto and Oceanus by herself, now she was having difficulty getting the upper hand.

And this was even with her being boosted by being in saltwater.

Granted, they were all in saltwater, so they were all empowered, so it kind of nullified itself, but still.

However, Asteria was only having difficulty because she was limiting herself to purely physical force. She had many more tricks up her proverbial sleeve, such as drawing on the powers of her many other children and descendants, even if they were in another dimension. Perks of being the Xenomorph Goddess with a ten billion-strong hive comprised of children born from gods across her planet.

One particularly special child having been born from Asteria’s Facehugger and the sun god Ra.

Subject 3 started to glow as she began channeling the power of the sun.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

“You got any verses of scripture that apply to a situation like this!?” Gunslinger shouted over the sounds of violence.

Gunfire, howling, shrieking monsters, grenade explosions, collapsing buildings, energy beams, body parts getting blasted off numerous creatures, and also the rumbling of Olympus as Wheels reconfigured the mountain into a battle station.

Virgil swung the Sword of Destiny, discharging an arc of golden energy that ripped through no less than three dozen monsters, their severed corpses being left strewn across the ground as opposed to dissolving into golden dust. “Yae, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.”

Gunslinger fired off a grenade and blew up a group of monsters. “Well, amen!”

He squeezed the trigger on his machine gun, the barrel erupting with fire as it sprayed dozens of bullets that mowed down the horde.

The two continued to fight their way forward, yard after yard, leaving blood, entrails, and bodies in their wake as they marched to the first temple on their list, the Temple of Hypnos. One of the many that had been damaged by Kronos during his assault almost six years ago, then redesigned by Annabeth and rebuilt by several cyclopes.

Now it was being used as a portal to flood Olympus with the enemy.

Gunslinger and Virgil eventually bottlenecked the portal as they pushed the monsters back.

“Hey. What gives!?” shouted a wild centaur that was still in the pit as the line started going backwards.

“Aren’t we supposed to be overrunning Olympus right now!?” shouted an empousa.

The sounds of battle eventually became louder than the cacophony of monsters, bringing the cacophony to a quiet as they tried to figure out was going on. Then the backwards stampede started as the ones in the front started trying to get away.

“Think we could march in there and destroy the whole pit?” Gunslinger asked, firing a grenade through the wide-open doors blowing up a huge group of monsters.

“All things are possible through Him who strengthens me,” Virgil said with a shrug.

“So God could destroy the whole pit?”

“Yep.”

“Have you asked Him?”

“I asked Him to be with us during this fight, and here we are.”

“But you didn’t ask Him to blow up Tartarus so we can go home?”

“Oh, I did.”

“And He said no?”

“We’re still here, aren’t we?”

Gunslinger sighed. “I guess this is one of those times in which God works in mysterious ways?”

“Oh, very mysterious ways,” Virgil said.

He raised the Sword of Destiny aloft, the blade glowing and thrumming, and when he brought it down, a beam like the wrath of God Himself came down from above and blasted the Temple of Hypnos to pieces, destroying the portal to Tartarus.

Gunslinger blinked. “Is that, like, based on a range?”

“It works better when I can see what I’m trying to blow up.”

“Oh.”

“That being said…”

Virgil grabbed Gunslinger, making the boy yelp in surprise, and the two of them vanished in a burst of golden light, reconstituting not far from the next temple, this one being dedicated to Nemesis.

When Gunslinger’s eyes stopped spinning, he glowered at Virgil, who was smirking slightly under his hood.

“You could do that this whole time, couldn’t you?”

“Yep.”

“Then why-!?”

“Needed to get the blood pumping.”

“The blood-!? Dude!”

“Have you not been enjoying getting to fire a huge, magic gun?”

Gunslinger puffed his cheeks out. “Maybe…”

“Well, there we go. I’ve been facilitating your enjoyment of this operation.”

“Whatever.”

Gunslinger opened full auto on the hordes below, blowing body parts off left and right while Virgil brought down the Power of God on the pagan temple.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Clad in her hawk-like Tlanuwa Armor, Piper alit on the roof of the Triumvirate Holdings building, not smashing into the place in some epic grand entrance because A) she had no idea what was even in the building, and B) didn’t know where the emperor inside even was, or what he looked like. Thus, just blasting into the enemy fortress would have been very stupid.

Instead, Piper closed her eyes, the glowing pink lights in the helmet of her armor narrowing into thin slits. With little effort, she detached her spirit from her body—essence projection—and combed the halls of the tower, taking note of personnel, defenses, armaments, and with a small application of will, she found the emperor in the throne room of the tower.

He didn’t look like much, skinny, short, heavily balding, though his left eye was missing and his right eye was covered by a large monocle. He wore an ugly purple suit with purple alligator hide shoes, and strapped to his waist was an officer’s saber.

Though Piper had stopped time for her out-of-body experience, that didn’t stop the emperor from showing some moxie.

He turned to look at her and spoke with a French accent. “Ms. Piper McLean, it is an honor. I am Emperor Lafreniere. We have been following your exploits these past two years—very impressive…very heartbreaking. For what it is worth, I am sorry for what you’ve been through. Now, I know that this is not a social call, but you are here on business. End of the world and all that. Unfortunately, I will not be coming quietly. If you desire to bring me before Chaos’s associate, or kill me yourself, you will have to work for it. You know where to find me.”

Piper ended the dream, returned to her body without a second of real time having passed, and she proceeded to smash through the roof of the skyscraper, and then smashed through floor after floor until she crashed down into the throne room.

Lafreniere drew his saber.

Piper shot straight at him.

The French emperor did that thing the Twins did from Matrix Reloaded, in that he turned himself into an intangible, discolored specter. Piper went right through him, and then time slowed. The Cherokee warrior barely made it all the way through Lafreniere when he spun and solidified himself, bringing down his saber. Piper halted and pivoted on the ball of her foot, swinging her arm around. There was a mighty clang as the emperor’s sword connected with Piper’s armored forearm, and the sword went flying while Piper winced.

Even through her impenetrable armor, that had actually hurt. She was definitely going to have a bruise from that one, impressively enough.

Of course, while the emperor had gotten knocked back due to the transfer of forces, Piper’s arm was still going for his face. He turned back into a ghost and flew off to his sword.

Piper noted two things from this: the saber became intangible whenever Lafreniere became intangible, and the fact that he had to go get it indicated that he couldn’t just summon it to him.

Lafreniere caught his sword and settled back on the ground, demonstrating another thing: gravity resumed its normal function whenever he was solid.

“An excellent opening bout,” said the emperor. “Your reflexes and bodily control are impeccable.”

Piper didn’t say anything. Instead, she screamed. It was literally loud enough that OSHA regulations would demand hearing protection for it, and the pitch was great enough that the glass around the throne room shattered. The guards—Germani and pandai—all fell to the ground, the Germani desperately clutching their ears, while the pandai actually straight-up died, their sensitive hearing working against them, idly making Piper wonder how differently that night four years ago would have gone if someone had brought a dog whistle with them.

Kind of an irrelevant thought, since Jason was alive and well (technically speaking), and everything had kind of turned out all right…

Present circumstance notwithstanding.

Nor Billy’s death.

Nor the unholy horrors Piper had been exposed to during her crusade.

Anyway.

Her sonic attack was something she had discovered during her training with Jisdu before she set out on her own. The Tlanuwa spirit, the source of Piper’s armor, could scream extremely loudly, as it turned out, and so could Piper.

Lafreniere had collapsed with his guard detail, not at all having expected the sonic scream. Piper gave him no time to recover as she was on him before the soundwaves had been fully absorbed by the walls. She socked him across the jaw with her armored fist, and he crumpled into a heap.

The doors to the throne room were blasted off their hinges as a huge group of Germani came barreling in.

Piper popped her talons and dove into the middle of them.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Tobi eyeballed the massive tornado a few miles away. “Fucking A~,” he crowed.

His purple eyes turned red, a three-bladed black pinwheel encircling his now-red pupil. Itachi’s Mangekyou Sharingan, gained when Tobi consumed the soul of Tyler, the son of Susano’o, back during the events of his original timeline in Chapter 12. With the powers of the son of Susano’o and Itachi’s Mangekyou, Tobi produced around himself an inferno of scarlet chakra that shortly took shape as a massive Tengu warrior. Itachi’s Perfect Susano’o.

Standing at a monolithic 150 meters, Tobi’s Susano’o was 30 meters taller than Monsterverse Godzilla, who stood at about 120 meters, or 394 feet. Still, despite how big Tobi was, Typhon dwarfed him by several factors.

Coming straight from the pages of the Last Olympian, Percy’s description of Typhon’s size was that he was big enough to “use the Chrysler Building as a baseball bat.” Taking this in the most literal sense possible, the standard MLB bat is 34 inches (86.36 centimeters), and the average baseball player height according to 2023 data is 6’ 1.79 inches (187.44 centimeters). Ratioing that out, bat size to player size, and the ratio was about 2.16. Applying this to the Chrysler Building and Typhon, with the Chrysler Building standing at 319 meters, then Typhon stood at an approximate 689 meters.

Of course, this number changed based on how many decimals you wanted to use in the ration, and whether you wanted to use metric or Imperial, but the bottom line was that Typhon was hovering at 700 meters tall, or 2296.59 feet, or 765.53 yards, based on Percy’s statement that the Storm Giant was big enough to use the Chrysler Building as a baseball bat.

Thus, at 700 meters, Typhon was towering above every city in the United States by over 100 meters, with the One World Trade Center being the tallest building in the US at 541 meters. Typhon was easily dwarfing the Perfect Susano’o, and the Storm Giant could have easily turned Godzilla into a belt, Kong into a rug, and Ghidorah into a handbag just from superior size alone. The 500mph winds generating the biggest storm not seen since Typhon’s first rampage six years ago during the Second Titan War, bringing rain, dozens of smaller tornadoes, and enough voltage the power the Western Hemisphere for a hundred years definitely would have made things a cakewalk.

And also the fact that Typhon was a literal divine being in a sense, being the son of Gaea and Tartarus, and was canonically capable of walking across the continental United States while the majority of the Olympians tried to slow him down to no avail.

So, yeah.

Typhon had more than earned his ranking up there with the likes of Kronos, Gaea, Tartarus, and Apophis as one of the most powerful threats in the Riordanverse.

Tobi giggled. “I’m gonna kick your giant ass!”

The Susano’o took flight with a flap of its gigantic wings, and with another flap, charged forward into the storm. Typhon’s blazing scarlet eyes glowed brighter, and a pulse of energy was released. Tobi got absolutely blasted by the pulse, his Susano’o not only getting knocked all the way back down to the ground, but also getting cracked from the pulse’s initial impact with its face.

Typhon kept walking without having broken stride, his footfalls shaking the landscape from his massive size.

Tobi got back up, his head ringing a little bit, the cracks in his Susano’o slowly vanishing as it “healed.”

“Huh,” said the Son of Jashin. “So that’s a thing. How about this!”

This didn’t work either, as Typhon effortlessly swatted the Perfect Susano’o from the sky once again. Granted, this wasn’t base-level Typhon, either. This was the Typhon that was empowered by Nyx as it was currently nighttime, on top of being empowered by remains of the human race being brainwashed into thinking beings like Typhon were unbeatable.

The power of human belief was no joke.

Tobi lay within the forehead of the humanoid chakra construct, which in turn lay in a huge, humanoid crater, staring at the roiling black sky.

“Okay…Plan C.”

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

“Things could be going better,” Wheels grunted.

“They could also be going much worse,” Shin’en observed.

Just then, another portal opened, and dropping in with a startled yelp was yet another Percy Jackson, a younger one, about Gunslinger’s age of thirteen or fourteen. Other than clothes—the armor of a New Roman legionary, with black jeans and the purple t-shirt, though the lorica segmentata armor had been modified into an almost obscene crop top of sorts, with enough segments missing to expose the new Percy’s midriff and the small of his back—nothing about this Percy seemed anywhere near as outlandish as the others.

“Welcome,” Shin’en said simply.

The new Percy got to his feet. “What gives?”

“End of the world. Asteria, Leviathan, Virgil, Gunslinger, and Tobi are already deployed.”

“So I’m the last to show up?” New Percy whined.

“Yes,” was Shin’en’s short answer. “I will need your siblings. Kraken needs to reinforce Asteria and Leviathan in the oceans, Persia and you need to take on the armada.”

“There’s an armada!?” New Percy’s eyes lit up.

“Indeed. Now, the other two.”

Everyone that was watching then became horrified at the absolutely grotesque sight of two other people crawling out of New Percy’s midsection. It was almost like Sakon and Ukon from Naruto, but worse. It wasn’t over fast enough, but when it was over, there were two other new Percy’s, naked, clearly showing that one was a boy and the other was a girl, something that was of much consternation to many of the onlookers.

“Fresh air,” Persia breathed.

“We need to figure out how to fuse and defuse with our clothes still on,” Kraken grumbled.

Shin’en tossed the two a couple of simple, sturdy outfits, including underwear. “Get to work and don’t die.”

The triplets nodded and vanished in swirls of water vapor, making the OG Percy groan.

“Can everyone do that except me?”

Shin’en looked at him. “How do you even know you can’t do that if you’ve never tried?”

Percy decided to give it a shot, only for nothing to happen. He was about to say something when he noticed Shin’en smirking at him. Percy frowned.

“No powers in the playpen, remember?” Shin’en said.

He turned back to the holograms, now showing the vitals of the “triplets,” and how the one called Kraken dropped into the ocean to engage with Asteria and Leviathan, and how the other two, Persia and…the other Percy, dropped onto the deck of an aircraft carrier.

No one knew what these kids could do, but they got their answer when the triplets’ eyes turned black with green veins spreading from their irises to the surrounding skin, and how a multitude of slender, green and black, whip-like tentacles burst from the smalls of their back, showing why Other Percy’s armor had been altered so.

Someone in the back shouted, “They’re Ghouls!”

Many heads turned to look at the speaker, a girl with a couple of pimples.

She blushed. “Er, from Tokyo Ghoul?”

The heads turned back to the holograms.

Somewhat funnily, all of the amenities Shin’en had provided were wholly ignored in favor of what wasn’t necessarily entertainment, but rather the end of their world.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

I’m trying to work something akin to a power scale here. There wouldn’t be much story if Shin’en’s team just steamrolled everyone. As such, I’m giving everyone a boost so that there are some stakes in this conflict.

More fun to come in the coming chapters!

Fav and Follow so you don’t miss out, and let me know what you think of the story so far with a Review!

Chapter Text

Wooooow.

I pitch the idea of Percy Jackson game set during the Civil War in which you get to pick between a Greek or Roman character, and no one has anything to say about that. I also pitch the idea of a Backup Plan AU with Shin’en leaving the Naruto World to go back home with Persephone, and they attend Hogwarts together, and no one says anything about that?

Do any of you even read my author’s notes?!

Anyway, the story continues with the culmination of the Night Ops arc in this chapter. This will officially conclude the introduction of this story.

Disclaimer: I don’t own PJO or any of the other material herein

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Obviously, fighting water elementals in water was stupid. They either became one with the water and therefore basically untouchable, or they received such a grand power boost that they were nigh unbeatable. Thus, the question was raised as to how you fought a water elemental when in the water, and the answer was simple: remove them from the water.

Or in Asteria’s case, you removed the water.

Kraken dropped into the ocean and blanched at what he saw. ‘Bad time?’ he mentally thought at the glowing Asteria.

‘Extremely. Clear out.’

‘Hai.’

Kraken went flying out of the water, landing atop the aircraft carrier that his siblings were doing their best to demolish, tearing up the runway and fighting off the human soldiers.

“Asteria’s going nuclear!” he shouted.

Persia and Percy needed no further words. The triplets water-traveled away just in time for the ocean to flash boil.

No, that was not an exaggeration. Asteria’s didn’t channel the sun through her child from Ra as in she became a really powerful flashlight; she glowed because she became something tantamount to a star. The heat she generated from out of her aura became light because that was how luminosity and heat were related.

As such, Asteria generated so much heat, star-like heat, that the ocean did, indeed, instantly reach its boiling point for miles around. Of course, so much heat also affected the ships and submarines for miles around, many of which were either nuclear powered or carrying nuclear weapons. While they did explode, because they weren’t properly armed, the resulting explosion, while massive, was not as massive as it could have been.

Still, that didn’t mean it was at all gentle.

Asteria destroyed hundreds of ships in the blink of an eye, killing thousands of sailors from all countries. The massive crater left in the ocean from so much water basically instantly disappearing was quickly filled as the rest of the ocean poured back in, creating a reverse tsunami of sorts that caused even more destruction to the armada. Of course, with the destruction of the nuclear reactors and the premature detonation of so many nuclear missiles, much radiation was unleashed upon the waves and whatever vessels remained.

In a grand show of irony, Asteria, the daughter of Poseidon, more or less just destroyed the enemy armada with the power of fire.

As for Polybotes, Oceanus, Phorcys, and Keto, they were gone. Not as in destroyed, unfortunately, but teleported away as soon as Asteria evaporated the ocean.

Leviathan swam up to her, his skin slightly red but quickly returning to normal tan. “Be honest with me: would you have done that if this was your world, or did you do that only because we’re in a different one and we don’t care about collateral?”

‘This world, my world, a different one altogether—I would have done that in any situation. I don’t care about collateral in any circumstance.’

“Not even if your children were in the way?”

‘They would have been fine. They’re my children.’

“Of course.”

Just then, Shin’en buzzed in their ears. “Impressive lightshow. I need the two of you in Manhattan. The cacodemons are making their move. I’ve got the triplets back here on the mountain, reinforcing Gunslinger and Virgil.”

Asteria and Leviathan just nodded and teleported through the water, reconstituting atop one of the city’s many skyscrapers to survey the battlefield.

Leviathan grinned way too widely. “You know? It really is a good thing we don’t care about collateral, or else this would be a much more difficult endeavor.”

Asteria’s own smile showed perhaps too many teeth. ‘Indeed. It is relieving to be able to cut loose and not hold back.’

They both picked one of the hulking, kaiju-esque cacodemons, and attacked.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

In the throne room, with its many holographic screens showing the ongoing battles, no one missed Asteria blowing up the ocean in a dazzling display of light, nor did they miss the blips on the map that represented the enemy water deities vanishing from that section, and reappearing somewhere else. They obviously didn’t miss the computerized voice chiming in with a tone of urgency.

“Catastrophic solar energy detected. Massive nuclear activity detected. Kill tracker update: Asteria leads by over 1.7 million.”

For a few seconds, no one could think. That was the combined naval might of planet Earth. Every warship from ever country that had them had been concentrated in that general area of ocean when Asteria somehow went “solar,” which resulted in the chain reaction of all the nuclear vessels experiencing meltdown and/or explosion. From miles of ocean instantly being flash boiled, the nuclear activity, the heat, the radiation, the blinding light, and the ocean rushing back in to fill out the humongous “bowl” Asteria created, and all the damage that caused to what ships escaped the initial blast, the female alternate Percy Jackson had just racked up a body count greater than some countries.

There were people who were impressed, people who thought this was all an elaborate prank of some kind like they were being filmed for their reactions, people who were beyond horrified, and people who didn’t know what to think or feel about anything that was going on.

And of course, people who weren’t at all bothered or concerned about the situation at hand, but were dedicating their mental energies to figuring out what exactly Asteria did to where she glowed so brilliantly and the computer chimed in about solar activity. Asteria was the daughter of Poseidon from another world, so how could she have solar powers? Legacy of Apollo, perhaps?

Wheels and Shin’en knew, of course, that was why Shin’en hadn’t wasted any time in reassigning them to Manhattan to repel the cacodemons.

“Try not to hit them, hm?” Shin’en said to Wheels, who was still raining fire on the city as he unleashed cannons, missiles, and lasers at the kaiju.

“Puh-lease,” Wheels rolled his eyes behind his goggles. “The cacodemons are pretty tanky, so I’m pretty sure those two can shrug off the stuff I’m using. Now, the antimatter weapons that break molecules apart? Eh, maybe, but we’re not that desperate yet.”

Shin’en hummed.

There was a beep from Gunslinger, prompting Shin’en to hit a button to open the comm while also directing his eyes to the screen showing the gun-toting demigod currently going through hell.

“Yes, Gunslinger, what is it?”

“We’re encountering heavy resistance, had to dig in, and we’re being overrun! We need reinforcements-!”

A monster climbed into view, and Gunslinger took notice. He whipped around and opened fire, obliterating it. Another crawled up behind him, and spun around, slamming the butt of his machine gun into its head, knocking it to the ground. He jammed the barrel into his chest and fired.

Yet another monster came into view from behind, Gunslinger whipping around, flinging the machine gun into face on instinct. He pulled a pistol from his armpit holster, firing a few rounds into the monster’s face. Then numerous monsters came into view, with Gunslinger picking his machine gun up from the ground, holding it under one arm, letting loose a massive spray of bullets from both guns. Blood and body parts went flying everywhere as Gunslinger mowed down the enemy forces from left to right in a hail of blessed metal.

Wheels had his head cocked to the side, a screwed-up expression on his face. “He needs reinforcements?”

Shin’en ignored him. “The Ghouls triplets are on their way. They should be there in the next few seconds.”

Not even, as not even a full second later, the screen showing the movement of the triplets lined up with the screen showing Gunslinger.

Shin’en called up Virgil with a sideways smirk.

“Yeah?”

“Have fun wrangling the kids.”

“Oh, that won’t be a problem. There’s plenty of things here to keep them busy with.”

Virgil brought down another beam of light, destroying another temple, further increasing the bottleneck of entry points the monsters had available to storm Olympus from.

“Since Asteria eliminated the Atlantic Theater, and she and Leviathan are taking on the cacodemons, I can direct my attention to home defense,” Wheels said.

Shin’en nodded. “Approved.”

With a nod of his own, Wheels grabbed the joysticks and got to work on directing the weapon systems towards environmental controls instead of repelling the invasion below, giving Virgil and the “kids” more support.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Funnily enough, all Tobi needed to bring down Typhon was a single drop of the giant’s ichor. With that, Tobi could do his Jashin ritual, mutilate himself, and by what was basically hoodoo magic, mutilate Typhon. Obviously, the hard part was getting at least one drop of Typhon’s blood.

The 500mph winds surrounding the Father of Monsters provided a fantastic shield.

Tobi tried fireballs which predictably didn’t work. He tried launching his bones into the tornado, which also predictably didn’t work. Brute forcing his way into the tornado with the Perfect Susano’o had already failed. Trying to psionically inflict pain on Typhon with his mind also didn’t work because Typhon had a very big, old, powerful mind, and he was able to rebuff Tobi’s mental attacks without effort.

Tobi tried tearing up the terrain to create humongous gouges and outcroppings in the ground, doing something akin to spreading sharp glass or Legos everywhere to try and shred Typhon’s feet, but the 500mph winds spinning from head to toe around the storm giant served as a fantastic sandblaster, and Typhon merely walked on smooth ground wherever he went.

Tobi tried an altered version of the terrain idea in that he tore up the earth in order to make gigantic chasms and fissures…only for Typhon to evidently just step right over them.

See, the thing was, Tobi could not actually tell how big Typhon really was. The huge tornado blocked him from view, and though his massive eyes did glow brightly even through the raging winds, Tobi was not adept enough at math to estimate how high up those lights were in order to estimate how tall Typhon was, and therefore how big his stride was. He had a rough upbringing, you could say.

Tobi couldn’t even try to use Typhon’s footprints left in his wake because, again, raging, cyclonic winds smoothed out the dirt and erased said footprints.

Tobi even tried to use the Bracken Dance technique he got from his Dead Bone Pulse kekkei genkai from his father Jashin, which was the same thing Kimimaro had, and the technique in question was the one where Kimimaro turned the battlefield into a small forest of thousands of bone spikes, first seen when he fought Gaara and Rock Lee.

And then died.

But anyway.

Tobi tried timing his Bracken Dance to cause the bones to sprout within the tornado so that they wouldn’t be sheered smooth by the winds, and he actually succeeded in this endeavor by some miracle, it was just that it turned out that Typhon had some very durable feet, and the bones harmlessly snapped against his soles.

When that happened, Tobi actually experienced a toddler-esque meltdown. He flopped onto the dirt and rolled this way and that, kicking and screaming, shredding his body as bones uncontrollably went shooting in all directions. It was all just too much for the lil’ guy. Everything he tried, and none of it worked.

It was embarrassing!

Shin’en was going to be so disappointed in him.

Yeah, sure, Tobi could probably use his Oko Katachi and force his way into the tornado, but if his Perfect Susano’o couldn’t pull it off, why would his Rampant Form? Same thing for opening his Eight Gates. Being immortal and with billions of souls to burn though in his collection to just pass on all the physical damage he sustained, Tobi could open his Eight Gates and experience far more power than Might Guy ever did, given that Might Guy was just a normal human and Tobi was a Shinto demigod.

But Tobi tried to keep the Eight Gates in his pocket for if he just really wanted something not only dead, but utterly destroyed. Like, he had to be really mad at something to open the Eight Gates. He wasn’t that mad at Typhon.

Yet.

He was getting there, though.

“Fucking stupid fucking dirt,” Tobi cursed, though he could barely hear himself over the howling winds.

And then a random stop sign came flying around in the spiraling winds to almost decapitate the unhinged boy, in that the sharp side went slicing through his head from his temples to the back of his skull. Blood squirted everywhere, but in spite of the grizzly wound, Tobi’s face lit up.

“I’ve got it!”

Sacrificing a soul, which had the effect of healing his head in a pulse of red light, Tobi proceeded to start digging into the dirt like a mole. He didn’t have Earth chakra to do the thing Kakashi did when he swam through solid rock like a fish, but he did have insane amounts of brute strength.

Tobi burrowed his way all the to Typhon’s foot, digging under the tornado. Because magic, being inside the tornado with the storm giant was like being in the eye of a hurricane: it was completely calm, aside from the earthquake-inducing footfalls.

Tobi looked up at Typhon. The Father of Monsters was humanoid, not possessing snakes for feet, or a hundred heads, or huge wings, but the form of man. He was muscular, with blackish-green skin like a crocodile with melanism, huge, pointed toe and fingernails, a featureless head with flat ears, a flat nose like Voldemort, a flat patch where his lips were supposed to be, no hair, and his eyes had no lids and his eye sockets were slanted in such a way that his luminous orbs were also slanted, making them naturally menacing.

Tobi also giggled at the sight of Typhon’s unbelievably huge cock and balls swaying back forth as the giant took step after step.

Choosing to reserve the dick jokes for later, Tobi ran up to Typhon’s foot and stabbed it with his scalpel. No reaction, though that was because at 700 meters tall, Typhon had a very thick epidermis, and Tobi’s scalpel was comparatively small, so of course the little blade didn’t come anywhere near piercing Typhon’s foot deep enough to draw blood.

So the palm of Tobi’s hand exploded in a spray of blood when his radius bone suddenly grew to be ten feet long. Tobi thrust his bone spear into Typhon’s foot, and this time it went all the way in up to the palm of his hand.

Typhon roared so loud that Tobi literally went deaf, the decibels of the winds combined with Typhon’s vocalization being enough to shatter the boy’s eardrums. Not that Tobi really cared; tinnitus sounded cool after a while. Besides, he got what he wanted.

Typhon flung his huge leg so hard that Tobi got launched from the giant’s foot and into the tornado proper, got stuck in the cyclone, spun around the giant’s body several times before getting yeeted a mile away, where he landed in such a way that he broke his neck and went flopping across the dirt a couple of times before finally stopping.

Tobi sat up with a stupid grin, his flopping to the side in a very disturbing way. His extended radius had gotten snapped off at some point, with six inches of sharp bone protruding from his palm. That was okay, though, because he had what he needed.

Tobi brought his hand to his mouth, and he licked the golden fluid from his skin. His body turned pitch black, white markings like his skeleton showing through appearing on his face, arms, torso, pelvis, and legs, though everything from the belt down was hidden by his pants.

“Let the ritual begin…” Tobi tried to say ominously, but it came out sounding more like, “Ler eh er-oo-al eh-in,” because his neck was broken and it was impeding his oratory.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Piper only briefly wondered where Jason was at during this time of crisis. Four years ago, he had warned her that there was something huge on the way, and Shin’en, as the lawyer, had said the same thing, and now here it was. Why wasn’t Jason here, then? Why hadn’t he brought some huge army of knights in shining armor, descending from Valhalla to wage war with the forces of evil?

Well, the answer was Shin’en.

Piper only briefly wondered about Jason’s whereabouts because she figured that with the presence of the alternate Percy’s—not as mindboggling to her as one might think—Jason’s wasn’t required. Or some higher power was holding him and the einherjar of Valhalla back for some grand happening later.

Whatever the case, Piper tore through the mortal mercenaries and Germani like they were made of paper. She was too fast and too strong, and whenever the odd bullet did make contact, it harmlessly ricocheted off her Tlanuwa armor and into someone else’s face.

Long story short for Piper’s campaign, she had the easiest time with minimal difficulty.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

After the seventh cacodemon went down, four to Leviathan, three for Asteria, though she was working on her fourth, Tartarus began to simmer down.

As in he had been overflowing with rage before, and was starting to mellow back out.

Fine, then, intoned the dark lord. All units return here.

With the power of a Primordial god, he spoke directly into the minds of the monsters around the world, his Giant children and Titan nieces and nephews, and his new children the remaining cacodemons. Incredibly, there was no argument. When the portals opened back to the pit, all the forces of evil went through them without question. The forces on Olympus all did an about face and went back through the portals, and the cacodemons also went back through when the portals opened for them.

When Wheels saw that, though, he didn’t let the cacodemons go without unleashing hell into hell. Dozens of missiles and rockets, innumerous shells, and plenty of sidewinding lasers. Two more of the cacodemons went down, actually, and hundreds of thousands of monsters were blown up due to the fact that Tartarus had opened the portals in such a way that they all led to a central gathering point, which in turn led to the deaths of a number of Titans and Giants.

And also the minor wounding of Tartarus himself because Wheels’ ordinance struck his physical body that was the pit.

The dark god couldn’t close the portals fast enough.

“Why did you end the assault?” Nyx asked tersely, failing to keep her annoyance out of her voice.

Because our enemy was proving to be more skilled and powerful than originally anticipated, with a plethora of abilities not yet shown, and their leader hadn’t even joined the battle yet. Yes, I could have redirected the rest of the army to Olympus, and they would have either overwhelmed the enemy, or the enemy would have shown us powers we didn’t know that had, and wiped out the army. I have decided to err on the side of caution instead of risking more losses. Besides, we have the Duat and the Olympians, and have wiped out almost all of mankind. While I was hoping for a swift, sweeping victory, this day proved to be an excellent start to the war.

Nyx grunted. “If you say so.”

“I can say I’m entertained,” Chaos said as he decided to just pop in, causing Nyx and Tartarus to flinch and assume battle stances, only to relax upon seeing that it was their father. “And what’s a war without some objectives? Tarty, I want you to organize your forces. You are to defend Camp Half-Blood, New Rome, the Waystation, and the Brooklyn House access to the Duat, and also build prisons around the world to hold the Olympians. Your objectives will be to keep these places and the Olympians from being liberated by Shin’en’s forces, and also to plan, invade, and capture Hotel Valhalla. Shin’en’s objectives will obviously be the opposite. The winner of this war will be whoever is left standing, and I, of course, will be spicing the game up as I see fit. Ta.”

And with that, Chaos left, his son silently fuming at being called Tarty.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

“Wow, they really just gave up, didn’t they?” Wheels asked rhetorically. “And all the prep that I put into this, too.”

“Truly a travesty,” Shin’en said. He opened the comms. “Everyone rendezvous in the throne room. That battle is over for tonight.”

In mere seconds, everyone did just that. The Ghoul triplets, Gunslinger, Virgil, Tobi, Leviathan, and Asteria.

Expectant looks were directed at Shin’en, and he said, “We are waiting on one more.”

And soon enough, Piper returned, New Emperor Lafreniere slung over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. The remaining Seven and the others that knew Piper had clear looks of reservation on their faces, for they had not missed the feed from the hologram showing Piper’s activities, how she had slaughtered the emperor’s forces. It wasn’t necessarily the act of killing itself, but how brutal, ruthless, and merciless Piper had been. She hadn’t ever shown that level of ferocity, not from her first battle during the Hera quest all the way through to her final confrontation with Medea in the Burning Maze.

Piper stood amongst the loose semi-circle around Shin’en.

“Well done, team,” he said. “We repelled the enemy tonight, and took a sizeable chunk from their forces. This night was not without a heavy toll, however. Wheels did a scan of the planet, and it is confirmed: where the human population of this planet used to be in excess of eight billion, it now barely totals above five million, with approximately 97% of those belonging to various militaries. We have not won this war, and I can only imagine that the road ahead will be long and difficult. In the meantime…”

Shin’en produced a tray of shot glasses that were filled clear spring water. He passed the tray around, starting with Wheels and going all the way back to himself, with Piper hesitantly taking a glass when the tray was passed to her.

Shin’en raised his glass. “Here’s to the dead.”

Everyone else raised their glass. “And to the next man to die.”

They looked expectantly at Piper, and that was when she well and truly appreciated that she was part of this now, a member of this team. She raised her glass a little higher.

“And to the next man to die.”

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Whew. Got it out just in time for Thanksgiving of ’24.

Sorry that this was short and the ending rushed, but for some weird reason, I’m actually feeling a motivation block for this story. Like, I can perfectly see how the rest of this goes with the various campaigns and coming conversations, all the way to the ending, but when I was writing this chapter it felt a beating to get through each scene.

As such, I think I’ll be putting this one the shelf for a while. Direct my energies elsewhere. Perhaps back to that demigod novel I was writing a few months ago which is basically a retelling of Percy Jackson but it’d for young adults instead of kids. Or maybe I’ll start revamping Dragon Princess in accordance with additional lore introduced in the DLC.

Speaking of novels, please check out my own original novel that is currently published on the Kindle Store under the name “Controversiae Tamen Liber: Ligulae Monitum.”

And speaking of additional, it has apparently been confirmed that Rick is teaming up with Mark Oshiro again to write a direct sequel to Sun and Star. I thought the first one sucked, but it at least gave me the cacodemons to work with. It also goes without saying that this story disregards any new canon information that will be revealed in the third Senior Year book and this new Sun and Star book, and while I do not hold any high hopes for good stories in either book, I do hope there is more info released on the current events of our favorite demigods in the new Sun and Star book.

Maybe an official story as to how Piper ended up with Shel, not that it would be anywhere near as awesome as my own iteration, of course. Maybe the beginning of the potential triple crossover that Rick teased four years ago in Tower of Nero with Chiron revealing that he was having a meeting with Mimir and Bast.

Anyway.

Happy Thanksgiving, friends! I’m thankful for the support you’ve given me these past eight years!

Chapter Text

I guess I had a rush of Inspiration. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, and thank you to all those that went back to reread my AN, and weighed in on the Civil War Percy game.

One day, I’ll work at Disney and make it happen, lol.

This chapter will mainly be talking, with everyone getting settled into Hotel Valhalla, and Piper sitting down with her former friends to finally get some stuff off her chest. And since this story takes place in the continuity of Piper’s Untold Story, which has the unfortunate acronym of PUS, that means Jason will be making his grand entrance.

Let’s begin!

Disclaimer: I don’t own PJO or any author crossover material herein

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Shin’en barely finished collecting the shot glasses from the toast he just led when Chaos appeared with a small pop.

“Great job out there tonight, sport!”

“Thank you.”

“Here’s your objectives for the war. Complete them, and you win.” Chaos handed Shin’en a piece of paper with words on it.

Shin’en looked the paper up and down. It had a very simple layout.

OBJECTIVES:

• Capture Camp Half-Blood, Camp Jupiter/New Rome, Brooklyn House, and the Waystation
• Find and liberate the remaining Olympians
• Rescue Hecate
• Defend Hotel Valhalla
• Kill the all the bad guys and establish world peace

*This list is subject to change however I feel like

Followed by the “cool” emoji with the sunglasses.

“Have fun, kids!” Chaos chirped before vanishing with another pop.

“How bad is it?” Leviathan asked, pointing at the paper.

“Short, simple, easy to follow,” Shin’en said. “Along with a lot of pain and suffering. Wheels, pull up New Rome, Camp Half-Blood, the Waystation, and Brooklyn House.”

Wheels hit some buttons, and live overhead images of the four locations came up. Just as they did, the computerized voice chimed, “Space-time activity detected. Many portals are opening. Massive movement of monster energy detected.”

Everyone watched as millions of monsters poured into the areas on the screens, effortlessly securing and occupying them given that there was no one there to defend them in the first place.

“Divine energy signatures detected. At New Rome: Porphyrion, Otis, Ephialtes, and Clytius. At Camp Half-Blood: Polybotes, Periboia, Enceladus, and Mimas. At Brooklyn House: Thoon, Erysichthon, and Harpolykos. At the Waystation: Orion, Damasen, and Hippolytus. More signatures detected on Mt. Tamalpais: Iapetus, Koios, Krios, Hyperion, Atlas, Perses, Prometheus, and a weaker unknown energy signature that bears similarities to Kronos that is steadily getting stronger. Conclusion: Kronos is returning.”

“Of course, he is,” Shin’en said flatly.

“I suppose we’re going to have to retake these places?” Leviathan said.

“Correct.”

“What about the Duat?” Virgil asked. “Setne retreated before I could destroy him.”

“While not on the list of objectives, the Duat is certain to be a concern in the near future.”

Piper spoke up. “What about the rest of the Olympians?”

“Part of the objectives,” Shin’en answered her without missing a beat, as opposed to doing something like giving her a weird look for opening her mouth as the new girl.

To Piper, it demonstrated how he thought of her as a full member of the team, able to answer questions and put forth ideas. A showing of respect, if you will, which Piper appreciated. She had been through way too much shit in the past two years to have to deal with being treated as the rookie.

“How are we going to do that?” Piper asked.

“Currently unknown. The exact words here are Find and liberate the remaining Olympians. Obviously, we will have to look for them, and once we find them, assess the situation, and then proceed accordingly.”

Piper nodded.

Gunslinger raised his hand. “Who’re Harpolykos and Erysichthon?”

“The banes of Hera and Demeter, respectively,” Virgil answered.

“Oh, thanks.”

“When do we get started?” Kraken asked.

“In due time,” Shin’en said. “This has been a long night, and I think we have earned a moment’s rest. Besides, we need to relocate and begin planning. This location compromised, and a campaign like this requires numbers. Luckily, I know a place.”

Shin’en’s eyes briefly settled on Annabeth, and she got the message. “You don’t mean-”

“Yes.” Then Shin’en directed a look just as meaningful at Piper. “There are old friends waiting to see us.”

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

One might’ve thought that Shin’en breaching the dimensional boundary and bringing the fortress of Olympus into the general airspace of where Hotel Valhalla was located on Yggdrasil would have been hard, but no. With nothing more than an application of his Rinne-Sharingan’s Ame-no-Minaka, and the entire mountain was…right there. Of course, considering the throne room was closed, very people actually knew they were in a different dimension.

The funny thing was, barely a few seconds passed since Shin’en’s cryptic statement and the teleport. There wasn’t any reason to hang around atop the ruins of Manhattan, and the hotel itself did have admittedly wonderful amenities. Also, getting to the hotel meant Shin’en could wash his hands of all the nonessentials and instead focus on the campaign instead of dealing with a million questions.

He just had to get through a few minor obstacles first.

He stood up and looked at Virgil. “Hold down the fort while I make arrangements?”

“Always.”

Shin’en nodded, and out of the goodness of his heart, hit a button that made the ridiculous playpen surrounding the main heroes vanish, thus releasing them from their timeout, and then he looked at Wheels and Tobi. “You had both better play nice with the other kids.”

Wheels and Tobi held up their right hands with resolute expressions, while their left hands had crossed fingers behind their backs.

Shin’en’s eyes slid over to Virgil. The Assassin nodded, saying I’ve got them.

Shin’en nodded again, and then took his leave, vanishing in a swirl of water, leaving behind his team, the ruined body of Loki, the unconscious Emperor Lafreniere, and the incapacitated Khione who still had the Facehugger attached to her head.

When Shin’en was gone, Annabeth made a beeline for Piper, to finally get some answers to things, but Piper’s expression became tight, she took a step back, and Virgil was moving in front of her, angling his head in such a way that his hood hid the top half of his face.

Arguably just as imposing as Shin’en, being of similar height and physique, thought boasting many more visible weapons on his person, and the black coat with the black hood certainly created the image of a person not to be messed with, if only perhaps because of how edgy/emo he looked.

Of course, though, the large Bible currently holstered at his side was very unnerving.

“Not here,” Virgil said. “Not now.”

“Then when?” Annabeth demanded. “When can I talk to my friend?”

“Later,” Piper answered. “When I’m ready to talk to you and get some things off my chest.”

Tobi held up his scalpel with a helpful smile. “I can help you get those things off your chest!”

“Tobi!” Virgil snapped. “No.”

“Awwwww! I thought it was funny.”

Virgil shook his head and then turned to Piper. “I’m sorry about him. He had a very bad upbringing-”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Leviathan muttered.

“-and he is quite touched in the head,” Virgil finished.

Tobi nodded enthusiastically.

Piper looked upon Tobi with an expression one might wear when they were driving down the road and happened across a ran over dog that had a collar. Sadness and sympathy that was quickly replaced with a dismissive Darn, that sucks. Sorry, that happened.

Piper had seen a lot of things in the past two years during her crusade. Piper looked at Virgil. “So…do we have any kind of relationship where you’re from? Like, what’s your Piper to you…if that makes any kind of sense.”

“Technically speaking, you are my adopted grandson.”

Piper short-circuited. “Huh?”

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Being possessed of manners and professional courtesy, Shin’en knocked on the front doors instead of just reconstituting himself inside the hotel. Seconds later, the doors were opened by the manager of the hotel, Helgi, dressed in his green pinstriped suit, his beard and hair still monstrously unkempt. He looked more than a little scared to be in the presence of Shin’en Yūrei.

“M-Mr. Yūrei,” Helgi stammered. “It is an honor to meet you, sir. The Norns visited us today and informed us of your imminent arrival.”

“Excellent,” Shin’en said professionally. “Then you are aware of the situation at hand?”

“Ragnarök.”

“In a manner of speaking. Are you aware of current events?”

“Setne has taken the Duat, Loki’s assault was repelled, most of mankind has been wiped out, the remaining humans are mostly military personnel, the Olympians have been captured following the Mist warp caused by the New Triumvirate, you just routed Tartarus’s assault, and now that you are here, I am assuming you are seeking asylum for the humans and demigods you were able to rescue, along with, er, a parking spot for Olympus?”

“Along with making Hotel Valhalla my extradimensional base of operations,” Shin’en concluded.

Helgi made an ah face. “I’ll have a special room prepared for just that reason, sir.”

“No need for a special room. The Feast Hall will be fine.”

Helgi paused. “The…Feast Hall…sir?”

“Yes. A wide-open area in which many can stay and watch. I will have constant access to minds and muscles that I may deploy at my leisure. The coming campaigns will require numbers, and I am sure that the einherjar are quite eager to finally go to battle, along with the special forces division. This is what they were robbed of a peaceful afterlife for, after all. Besides, as this campaign involves everyone that’s left, everyone has a right to be informed of current events.”

“I-I…yes, sir. I understand. I’ll get to work on making arrangements in the Feast Hall.”

“That will be unnecessary. I will handle the arrangements. How many rooms have you made available?”

“As of now, 300.”

“Poetic,” Shin’en observed. “I will need 291 more rooms, however.”

“Almost 600 total between the demigods and their families,” Helgi noted.

“Yes.”

Helgi nodded. “It will be done, sir.”

Shin’en nodded as well. “How fare your gods?”

“They fare well. The Mist in Midgard has less of an affect here, and here, there are exactly 424,200 einherjar that all collectively believe the Aesir to be alive, well, and ready for battle.”

“Thank you. I imagine the einherjar are frothing at the mouth to march into battle?”

“Oh, yes, sir. Very much so. Odin himself had to bring peace to the hotel as many of the older warriors attempted to force their way into Midgard. They’ve been here so long, you see, and are ready to fight.”

Shin’en nodded. “Tell them their patience is soon to be rewarded. The enemy is numerous, and I will need numbers to most effectively combat them. Please notify me when you have the required rooms available. I intend to put the humans into a slumber so that they are not troubled by these events, and combine the Greco-Roman forces with those of Valhalla. Has anyone from the House of Life made it here?”

“Many members, yes, including the Kane family and other notable magicians.”

“Very good. Thank you for your help in these matters, Mr. Helgi. I will hold court when the rooms are ready and then address all personnel at once. Please have them gathered in the Feast Hall when you are ready. Including the special forces. I know the reason for their secrecy, but that reason is now null and void.”

Helgi nodded. “Yes, sir. Is there a specific way to contact you…?”

Shin’en pulled from his pocket a solid black smartphone. He opened it and pulled up his contacts page, hitting the “+” button. “Here.”

“…oh.” Helgi took the phone and started putting in his contact information.

“Surprised that I have a phone?” Shin’en asked, eyes glinting with amusement.

“A little, yes.” Helgi handed the phone back.

Shin’en took it and sent a quick text to Helgi’s number, causing Helgi’s own phone to buzz in his pocket. He pulled it out and looked at it. “Thank you, sir.”

“You’re welcome. Oh, and Helgi?”

“Yes?”

“I’m going to need the power of the einherjar applied to all demigods, and the respawn feature of the einherjar in the hotel to be applied to all incoming denizens of the hotel. Given the circumstances, I do predict that some situations will be best handled by simply killing somebody instead of putting up with a headache.”

Helgi understood the assignment. “I understand, sir.”

“If Odin has any problems with this, tell him to call me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Until next time, then.”

Shin’en vanished in a swirl of water, and Helgi shut the doors, spinning on his heal while shouting for Hunding to get to work on preparing 291 more rooms.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

When Shin’en appeared back in the Olympian throne room, everything was as exactly as he had predicted: calm, peaceful, and orderly. The benefits of putting Virgil in charge.

It was by no means a slight against Asteria and Leviathan, as if they couldn’t handle this crowd. It was just that they, objectively, were not leaders. They were bosses. Asteria commanded a ten billion-strong hive of beings that never questioned her, and Leviathan led an army of beings that were either completely subservient to him, or so stupid that they died rather soon. Asteria and Leviathan weren’t the type to connect with people on the emotional level in order to get them to follow; they were the type where if they told you to jump, they expected you to ask how high.

Also, Shin’en wasn’t about to burden them with being in charge of this daycare, anyway.

As for why Virgil after those two, it was pretty obvious. Shin’en wasn’t going to put Tobi in charge of anything sans turning someone into a pile of meat; Kraken was still coming into his own as a leader, and this wasn’t the time or place for him to get practice; Gunslinger wasn’t the leader type at all, and it would be hard to get anyone to take him seriously given how he was strafing the line of being a crossdresser, what with the way his shorts, shirt, and hair were cut; and that only left Piper, who, while having four years of experience under her belt of working with the Native spirits, was too emotionally charged right now to be placed in a position of leadership over this specific congregation.

She was too volatile. Shin’en could tell her emotional dam was cracking and crumbling, and she was maybe only an hour or so from breaking down completely and laying it all out there on her friends.

Shin’en didn’t know exactly what Piper had been through in her two years as a solo, but he knew all that she had been through. The price of the crusade.

Shin’en noted that the Ghoul triplets were salivating over the body of Loki, the mischief god now slowly repairing himself after being subject to Tobi’s ritual. Shin’en also noted that Khione had given birth at some point, the Facehugger lying curled up and dried out next to her face, her chest cavity having been exploded from the inside, and the pure white Chestburster was currently wrapped around Asteria’s neck like a macabre scarf, gently nuzzling its mother’s cheek.

Asteria looked every bit the proud and loving mother at having a new baby.

And the new emperor was also still unconscious.

As for the congregation, they had broken off into groups. The main heroes and their living family members had formed a big circle, other demigods and their families had formed circles of varying sizes, and of course, his team was their own circle. Well, not really.

Asteria and Leviathan were together, Virgil was in discussion with Piper, his Bible out and open, the two of them no doubt discussing scripture, and based on the tired, haunted expression on Piper’s face, she desperately needed the power of the Word. The Ghoul triplets were being held at bay from ravaging Loki’s corpse by Tobi, obviously a territory dispute on the grounds that Loki was Tobi’s sacrifice, and Gunslinger and Wheels were making customized guns.

From the perspective of this being a military operation with little room for nonsense, it made Shin’en happy that Wheels hadn’t displayed humongous LGBT flags with the red cross-out all over the throne room just to antagonize Nico and the rest of the gays. He’d let Wheels have his fun later. They were due to make their home in Hotel Valhalla soon enough.

Shin’en’s appearance went largely unnoticed as most were focused on their devices, but Asteria and Leviathan saw him.

He came to stand by them. “Anything fun happen?”

Levithan pointed to the sentient scarf currently around Asteria’s neck.

“And who’s this adorable cutie?” Shin’en said stoically, drawing a snort from Leviathan and an eyeroll from Asteria.

The Xenomorph goddess stepped closer to her brother, and the Chestburster uncoiled enough to lean forward, gurgling and cooing, its jaw open in such a way that it appeared to be happily smiling, giving the impression of a puppy excited to meet new people. Shin’en reached out and started tickling the horrifying creature under its chin.

It started making happy noises.

“What’s the plan?” Leviathan asked.

“Helgi is getting Hunding to set up enough rooms for everyone here. Once he has accomplished that, I’m putting the humans to sleep and teleporting them to their rooms so they stay out of the way. I’ve arranged for the demigods to be given the same blessings as the einherjar. If they are to fight in this war, they will need the additional power. As for us, once the enemy has finished setting up their board, I will give assignments. Given the nature of this conflict, hopefully we will not have to be here anymore than a week.”

‘Will we require reinforcements?’ Asteria asked.

Shin’en looked at her, pausing in his attendance to his newest niece. “Hopefully not, but since this is a Chaos War, it can not be ruled out that additional support will be required.”

‘My children need the exercise.’

“Mine could also do with a good workout,” Leviathan said.

Shin’en eyed them both, grimly. “Do not forget what happens to any of us that would die here. Our survival, and theirs, is not a guarantee, especially with Chaos directly involved.”

“I am confident that my children would preform admirably in this war,” Leviathan said with a chin slightly upturned and a chest slightly puffed out.

“I hope we will not have to bear witness to their abilities,” Shin’en said.

Piper and Virgil came over.

“This is Valhalla, isn’t it?” Piper asked.

“It is,” Shin’en answered. “Jason is inside. The two of you will be reunited within the hour.”

Piper breathed. “Good.” She looked over at her old friends, then back at Shin’en with a small smirk. “What do you think they’re going to say when they see Jason again?”

“They will be angry at you for knowing he was alive this whole time and keeping that from them-”

“But I-”

“I know,” Shin’en said calmly. “You are a member of this team now, and they will have to get through me if they have any choice words.”

Piper shifted, obviously not having adjusted to these circumstances yet. “Er, thank you?”

“You’re welcome. That being said, though, I will need you to be of a clear mind for the coming campaigns. That means I need you to sit down with them and get everything off your chest that you need to. Sooner, much rather than later, please.”

“Yes, sir,” Piper said.

Virgil placed his hand on her shoulder in a reassuring manner. “We can be there if you need us to.”

Piper reached up to squeeze his hand, showing than in the scant few minutes Shin’en had been gone and the two of them had been conversing, they had already reached an emotional level of attachment.

“Thanks. I think…I’m going to need someone there. I don’t think I can connect with them like I used to.”

“You won’t,” Leviathan said simply. “You and them are now worlds away from each other. They will only barely be able to grasp who you are now.”

“Is that what happened to you in your world?” Piper asked. “Whatever happened to make you like this happened, and then when you met them again, you were a complete stranger?”

“Yes.”

Piper’s mouth set into a thin line. “How did you handle that?”

Leviathan shrugged. “I was courteous and professional for the most part, but it was clear that we were no longer friends, but colleagues working on a project together.”

Piper hummed. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s what we really were—me and the other Seven, I mean. Were we really all best friends with bonds beyond words or something sappy like that, or were we just colleagues? Friends that were only friends because we were put into a team by the teacher and had to work on the project together, and that was it.”

Asteria touched Piper’s mind. ‘You tell us.’

Piper winced a little. “That feels weird.”

‘You’ll get used to it.’

Piper gained a look of concentration as she tried to speak telepathically. ‘Testing, testing, one, two, three?’

Asteria’s lips quirked up. ‘Loud and clear.’

‘Oh, cool. So…is this just, like, an open channel for mind-to-mind talking, or can you actually read my whole mind?’

‘Just an open channel.’

‘Have you read my whole mind?’

‘Not yet, but I will if I ever feel like it.’

Piper bristled slightly. ‘Hey-’

Asteria turned to fully face her, the amusement gone from her eyes and expression. The Chestburster around her neck lowered its head, angling its face in such a way that it was a clear snarl. Asteria didn’t say anything; she didn’t have to. The look in her eyes was telling enough.

She was not a friend. She did not see Piper as an ally or a teammate. Piper was just another person to her, and Asteria didn’t care about people, their boundaries, their privacy, or anything about them. If Asteria wanted to dig through Piper’s mind and see her memories, everything from her very first clear one from when she was a toddler and tried to stuff the TV remote into the back of her diaper only for her dad to come around the corner at just the right time to catch her, to this very conversation right now.

Nothing in Piper’s mind would be hidden from Asteria if she decided to go poking through it.

Now, that wasn’t to say that Asteria would simply be able to just go about that without interruption, of course.

Virgil moved to stand slightly in front of Piper, head inclined so that his hood covered his upper face. “You will respect her privacy, Asteria, or we will have words.”

In what was a clear contradiction to how this situation would typically play out in our modern media, Piper did not get heated and get onto Virgil about how she didn’t need his protection and could stand up for herself just fine. Instead, she was quite grateful to have a friend in this new “team” she was on that was already willing to take a stand for her, especially when he was standing up to the cosmic space monster with freaky mind powers and a tendency to technically rape everyone and everything.

Yes, by all technical counts, Asteria was a serial rapist, as she forcefully inserted her genetic material into unwilling participants via the proboscis of her Facehuggers.

Asteria stared impassively at Virgil, showing neither fear of his threat, nor dismissal, but she did back down.

Piper swallowed, having to wonder just how powerful Virgil had to be in order for Asteria to concede to him. Or was it that Asteria felt it beneath her to brawl with him? Or perhaps that if it did come to blows, that Shin’en would be quick and fierce to put an end to it. Piper looked at the leader, and she saw how he was glowering at Asteria, who was pointedly ignoring him now in favor of cuddling her new baby.

Leviathan looked amused by the whole ordeal.

A faint buzzing was heard, and Shin’en pulled his phone from his pocket. “The hotel is ready for us.”

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

This chapter was originally going to include Shin’en’s speech to the einherjar and also Piper’s big talk with her old friends, but I’m not sure I was going to have enough time tomorrow (this chapter being posted on 12/23/2024) to finish all of that and have the chapter out either by Christmas, or on Christmas, and so I have decided to play it safe and call it here.

So, Merry Christmas to all those readers here, new and old!

I hope this chapter was enjoyable enough to read, and that the next one is as well. The action is soon to come, as is the grit and the death. I want everyone to pay special attention to what Shin’en told Asteria and Leviathan about what would happen to them, or anyone they brought in to this current world, if they died. It’s going to be really important later.

In other news, I’m going to be building my first PC with my old college buddies in a few weeks when I get all my parts in! No, I am not technically joining the PC master race. I am only getting involved with this because I want to try out some NG+ mods for Cyberpunk 2077, and also try out the Elden Ring Convergence mod, along with some other mods, like pre-nerfed Impenetrable Thorns and Perfume Bottles.

More on my progress with that in the days to come.

In the meantime, please Fav, Follow, and Review!

And if you want to get me an extra special Christmas present, you can buy my original novel on the Kindle store. This year marks three years since it was first published!