[St. Louis, Missouri — The Gateway Arch...]
The Arch rose before them like a blade of silver, its curve cutting clean into a sky stained with rain. Annabeth's face lit in that way it did when geometry and history aligned — proud, reverent, hungry. She tugged at Percy's sleeve and pointed, all thrill and scholar's hunger. Percy only harshly remove Annabeth's hand from his sleeve, dusting off the part where he touched her. Grover tried to look impressed and only succeeded in looking nervous. Adamas walked behind them, her blood red hair dulling the storm-glow to a steel whisper; she moved like someone who had already read the footnotes of fate and found them wanting.
The museum under the arch smelled faintly of old metal and peat, exhibits laid out in rows: models of barges, glass cases full of maps with foxed edges, a display about river engineering that should have bored Percy to sleep. What it actually did was press on something in him — the river's slow heartbeat under the city, the dark line of water that fed cities and swallowed histories. He could feel the Mississippi like an animal under skin.
Annabeth insisted on the tour. She wanted the top of the arch; it was, she said, "an elegant expression of human will." Percy let her have the moment — as he sensed something wrong inside the building. The smell of a monster. Grover fussed about the elevator crowding; people in a capsule felt safe, for the most part, and the safety relaxed them in a way the dead did not. Adamas lingered in the elevator queue with him, expression unreadable, whole posture an alert calm.
The elevator he missed was full. The one he took after was not.
Percy walked in while holding Adamas' hand with his—compact metal, tourists with their cameras and their wide, uncomprehending smiles—and then he realized one of the smiles was wrong. The woman across from him regarded him like a specimen, and when she smiled it did not reach her eyes. There was a weight about her that the other passengers did not carry, an old gravity that bent the capsule walls by presence and not metal. A tangle of bangles flashed at her wrists; the skin at her throat had a sheen like scale in the wrong light.
She did not belong.
Both Percy and Adamas immediately recognize that the woman is a monster.
Her voice slid through the metal like ice. "You stand on a monument to hubris," she crooned. "Mortals build high, so I may bring them low."
Percy's hand went to his side instinctively. He secretly conjured his trident which was not visible to anybody else, but he felt the weight of his familiar weapon. The elevator smelled suddenly like iron and salt and something older.
Her body shimmered. What had been a woman folded into coils that pushed against steel; where there had been a skirt there became a length of living, scaled tail. Her face sharpened into something predatory and perfect.
The Mother of Monsters. Echidna.
And at her heel, first hidden as a small yapping dog that lengthened and widened inside the capsule, the Chimera revealed itself: three heads, lion mouth blowing hot fumes, goat head snarling, serpent tail whipping with poison. The confined space vomited its panic; gasps, screams, a small child dropping her camera. The elevator lurched as the Chimera slammed its weight against the walls.
Someone hit a panic button. The mechanical hum went wrong — an alarm shrieked, tinny and ridiculous against the weight of the thing in the elevator.
Echidna's voice purred. "Little Poseidon spawn. So fresh, so brash. And an unusual demigod child, on top of that. Let them be the course of my hunger."
Up top, Annabeth bit her lip and squeezed Grover's shoulder as their capsule stopped and the doors opened. Percy and Adamas' elevator did not reach them. The crowd in the other car gathered and stared at the doors of the stalled shaft with muttered excuses and mechanical curses. People became very small and ordinary in the face of something monstrous.
Down below, in that metal coffin between sky and river, chaos happened fast.
Percy did not call to anyone. He did not plead. He did not bargain. He moved. The trident appeared in a flash of bursting sky-blue light and presence; he was not a child with a weapon but a blunt piece of the ocean's will, in a human frame.
The Chimera attacked first, a mouth of flame and teeth bursting toward him. Percy met it exactly where it moved.
SHIIIIIK!!!
THUUK!!!
He took the beast's head into that first strike—not a long, poetic duel, but a clean, surgical removal. The lion head folded back under a drive of water and steel. The capsule filled with the sharp scent of singed fur and the sound of something enormous hitting steel.
Metal bent and groaned. Passengers who could see over their alarms and terror stared, but Adamas had already begun to work.
She didn't throw herself in front of the monster to fight it. She didn't need to. Her hands moved in a rhythm barely visible: a thread of red light flaring, shifting the elevator's perception. She also conjured an invisible shield to protect the humans from the brunt of their attacks. Panic became confusion, fire became steam in the eyes of the mortals, the noise blurred into the odd ringing of a mechanical fault. She shrouded the travelers from the true violence like a veil; the chaos became something they could walk away from and later attribute to an awful accident. Her mouth was a thin line, and her voice — when she gave it — was economy.
"Ignore the humans, Poseidonas," she said. "I'll deal with them myself. Focus on your fight."
Percy ignored the tourists' shrieks; he ignored the sick, panicked press of bodies. His strikes were not showy. They were efficient and absolute. Where Amphitrite lived as a motion in his muscles — a blur, a circular pattern of thrusts — here, within metal and smoke, it sharpened into relentless precision. He drove, he pierced, he emptied the Chimera of function: a clean slice where a limb used to be, the goat-head torn free at the base, the serpent tail severed until the thing was a pile of heat and venomous spasms.
He could have kept dancing the trident a long time—left nothing whole—but practical matters intruded: the elevator could not hold the pressure, the metal would thin and fail, the space too small to fully stretch his arms and fight and fully extend the reach of his trident. He made a decision for speed and consequence.
He smashed open an emergency panel with the trident's haft and forced the doors apart with brute strength alone. Cold air punched their faces. He pierced the Chimera, lift his trident, and launched them both out into the open, off the side of the Arch. For a heartbeat the world inverted — metal, sky, the black seam of the river waiting far below. The Chimera screamed, more an animal sound than a monstrous one now. Fire licked at his sleeve. Percy fell and pulled the trident with the creature with him.
Percy merely sneered in contempt at the poison that was inflicted on his body. This weak human body of mine. It is still not yet perfect and immune to poisons.
He had always known how to meet the river.
Water rose to meet him like a living thing. It did not crash on him in a tidal wall; it rose with intelligence, ready to receive and to heal. It wrapped around them as they fell, drinking flame and steam. The Chimera's poison tugged at Percy's skin — a sting like acid — but the river took that poison from him as well, cleansing. He hit the Mississippi and came up with the trident in his hand and the beast in his wake.
While in the river, Percy also used his divine aura to cleanse the river from filthy human wastes.
The shallows made no sanctuary. The Chimera flailed and tried to rise, but Percy moved with a calm authority that did not belong to an untrained demigod child. He spun, trident a blur; Amphitrite manifested there as a storm of thrusts — a circular, relentless barrage of javelin-like strikes, each movement a concentrated spear of water and intent. He hacked off limbs with the same nonchalance a farmer had when pruning dead branches. Limbs tumbled into the current; the Chimera's roar slashed the air and then gave out into lesser, ragged sounds.
Annabeth, who had finally fumbled free of the other elevator and sprinted to the riverbank with Grover, could not pull in all that she saw. She could only catch slices of it: the flash of the trident, the way the water moved at Percy's will, the animal's fall. Grover pressed his face into his hooves and chanted prayers that sounded like breath held forever.
Adamas stepped forward onto the bank, and this was where she became the companion Percy needed. She did not fight his fight. She knew that he did not want others interfering his fight, just as how she also did not want others to steal her kills. She steadied the field. With motions like a sculptor, she used her scythe-like sword imbued with her own divine aura as well as she cut through the river, weaving the river's aftermath into a controlled scene: currents cut through like diced tofu and evaporated away from swimmers, the churn of water softened so that human screams were not shredded into a thousand echoes, falling debris also been cut through and turned into fine powers.
Her power did not erase Percy's brutality, merely contained it, gave it margins.
She narrated, because there are moments when truth steadies the terrified. Her voice was low and clear to Annabeth and Grover; she spoke as if explaining a specimen to a student in a lab — distant, clinical.
"Watch," she said. "He does not hesitate because hesitation is a liability. See how he isolates his targets — limb, head, flank. He's decisive. That is necessary when monsters are bred to survive mercy."
Annabeth's hand flew to her mouth. "He—he butchered it—" She could not finish the thought. There was childish horror in it that did not fit her usual analytic tone.
Percy did not look vindictive. He looked coldly business-like. After the last spear thrust, the Chimera disintegrated into ashes. He then turned his attention to the coil of scales at the water's edge: Echidna. She had dragged herself to the bank, chest heaving, beauty trembling into something grotesque. Where the Chimera had been a rabid animal, Echidna still had the old arrogance of a goddess who had expected to be a lesson and not a funeral.
Percy let the river decide his weapons for him. He lifted his hands and called the water into a rain of long, needle-sharp javelins. They screamed down out of the clouded air like a hail of frozen light, striking her in a dozen places, stanching movement. The javelins reformed at his command, converging, and then — cold and terrible — they circled and spun and locked into a perfect sphere of water around her body. He clenched his hand as that sphere tightened, the pressure rising, the edges of it grinding against scale and bone.
Adamas narrated the motion, voice even but with a note of something like amusement. Even after billions of years, she still sees Percy's form of fighting as well as how he manipulates the waters like a form of art. "He forms it like a vice—javelins for the initial binding, then a sphere to compress. She finds no leverage; the water exacts no mercy. Watch closely."
Echidna's face, once a mask of disdain, contorted in surprise and then in a silence that spread like frost. Percy's fingers tightened; the sphere did not need to be a theater of noise. The pressure increased, the sound a distant, wet crunch as creature met force, and then—silence. The body slumped inward. The water bled away, carrying what it carried into the deep river. Echidna's last expression was an ugly, incomprehensible blink of being bested by something she had never considered subordinate.
Annabeth's knees shook. Grover whispered something prayer-like and wholly untranslatable in panic. Adamas' red eyes glinted, then cooled. She had told them the lesson: this fight left no room for sentimental half-measures.
Percy stepped from the shallows dripping and whole, the river having sewn him up as if it had expected him home. His body and clothes instantly dried up as he elegantly walks out of the river. He brushed off the filth from his sleeves with the impatience of someone who had better things to do than pose for a grieving choir. He did not even look at Annabeth's wide-eyed stare and said, flat and level, "Why fear what's already dead?"
Her voice was small. "You — you're brutal." Not a confession but a discovery. Percy merely ignored her own words and walk towards Adamas.
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[City-county of Denver...]
The neon buzz of the diner cut through the damp Denver night. Steam rose from the asphalt as the group approached, the smell of coffee and fried food blending with the lingering cold of the Mississippi on their skin. The world felt ordinary here—but Percy's instincts flared, electric and restless, the river's heartbeat still thrumming faintly under him.
Inside, Ares lounged at a corner booth, one leg casually draped over the seat, a half-empty mug of black coffee in his hand. The biker jacket he wore shone faintly in the dim fluorescent light, and the faint scent of brimstone and metal clung to him. His eyes gleamed with amusement—and something sharper, predatory.
"Well, well, well," Ares said, voice smooth and dangerous, slicing through the diner's chatter. "The spawn of Poseidon walks into my little corner of the world. I hear the Mother of Monsters barely survived your... attentions. Impressive for a child."
Percy's trident manifested instantly in his hands, its azure glow reflecting off the diner's stainless steel. The Mississippi pulsed in response, a silent, coiling beast around him, ready to strike. "I'm not a child, you imperfect filth," Percy said flatly, voice hard, cold. "And don't flatter yourself."
Ares ignored the insult thrown at him and tilted his head, a grin spreading across his sharp features. "Flattery? No. Just observation. I'm just offering an opportunity. Fetch something for me—my shield—and you might survive Olympus' little games. Fail, and... well." He drew a thumb across his throat with a flourish.
From beneath the table, he tossed a worn leather backpack. It landed heavily on the wet pavement outside the diner, damp from the mist and rain that clung to their boots. Both Percy and Adamas immediately sensed this world's Zeus' divine essence coming from inside the bag. Percy manipulated the water from his own glass and used it to picked up the bag, prying open the clasps with an impatient flick.
Inside, coiled with an almost sentient tension, lay Zeus' lightning bolt. The air shimmered faintly around it, humming with the raw, dangerous pulse of divinity. Percy's jaw clenched. The river around him throbbed in sympathy, a living sentinel reflecting his anger and resolve.
"You actually expect me to play your games?" he spat. His voice cut through the diner like the strike of a blade.
Ares shrugged, unbothered. "It's a test. You survive. You retrieve. Maybe your mother stays unscathed. Maybe Olympus looks elsewhere. Or maybe you fail. Consequences... pedagogical."
Adamas stepped forward, blood-red hair gleaming in the harsh lights. Her eyes, the same shade as her hair, glimmered with a quiet, deadly precision. She didn't confront Ares—she didn't need to—but a subtle ripple of her power spread through the diner, stabilizing the space, keeping civilians untouched by the current of violence and divine presence.
Her voice, low and precise, cut only to Percy: "Poseidonas, it's not for him. It's meant for Hades. The bolt, this game... it will lead to something we need. Keep your focus. I'll be here with you."
Adamas closed over the strap of the backpack, feeling its humming weight. She slung it over her shoulder, knowing that Percy's currently not in the right state of mind to even keep the item intact. If anything, he might even try to destroy it out of anger for forcing them to go in this foolish quest.
"I'll be holding on to this," Adamas told Ares, who only shrugged in agreement.
"Fine," Percy said, tone flat, every syllable a razor. "Not for you, parasite. Both for Adamas and me."
Ares' grin faltered for the briefest moment before he revved his motorcycle, the engine screaming, flames licking the tires as he skidded back into the night. "We'll see how long that arrogance lasts," he said over his shoulder, voice fading with the roar.
Unbeknownst to the group but Adamas and Percy, Ares broke out with a cold sweat as he recall how Percy looked at him. No. He did not actually looked at him but at how he present himself and how he communicated with him. The divine aura he leaked slightly a while ago reminded him of his uncle, Lord Poseidon. But his own arrogance was that akin to a god far more ancient than any of them.
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Outside, the night settled back into a tense calm. Percy, Adamas, Annabeth, and Grover moved on, the Mississippi whispering beneath them like a companion and a warning. Ahead lay the dark stretch toward Los Angeles, and beyond that, the gates of the Underworld.
Adamas met Percy's eyes as they walked, the last light of sunset glinting off her hair. "Remember this, Poseidonas," she said softly, measured, "You need not do this alone. I am here. We'll finish this dumb quest and rescue Aunt Sally."
Percy's jaw tightened, his hand clenched around Adamas. "I care not for their childish games. I care about getting mother back, returning the bolt, and confronting the one who put us into this mess."
Adamas leaned her head on Percy's shoulder, clenching his hand in return. "Indeed. We'll do this together. Us against those trash gods."
The Mississippi hummed behind them, a river newly attuned to a will it had only just begun to recognize. Ahead lay shadow, cold gates, and the reckoning waiting beyond.
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[Unknown time, unknown location within the Underworld...]
The silver-haired woman merely smiled in amusement as she observed the scene.
Right in front of her is a glowing blue hologram that featured Percy's fight with the Chimera and Echidna and the group's confrontation with Ares, the god of war. Her right hand busy writing in mid-air with the words glowed and hovered above her book.
"T■ p■t ■ g■t■g m■ i■■■■g. I ■ h■l■g ■u ■ y■r f■s ■ c■■e t■s q■t, Percy. T■ F■s ■ n■t■g a■st ■. O■■y I h■ ■ a■■■y ■ o■p■e t■m ■ r■w■e y■r f■."