He waited until the apartment was dark.
Sally had kissed his forehead and told him she was proud of him for the eleventh time. Paul had fallen asleep on the couch with a paper plate of blue cake balanced on his chest. Nancy and Matt had gone home arguing about tacos, and Rachel had left last, lingering in the doorway with her sketchbook pressed against her chest, looking at him like she wanted to ask something and didn't know the words yet.
Now Percy lay on his bed in his blue room and stared at the little notification hanging in the corner of his vision.
[The Tower: Floor 1 is now open.]
"Great Sage," he whispered. "What's the Tower?"
[The Tower is a training dimension constructed by the Creator for the Host's use.]
[Time ratio: 60:1. One hour inside the Tower is equal to one minute outside.]
[The Host's body will remain here, at rest. All growth achieved inside the Tower (levels, stats, skills, items) is retained by the Host's true body.]
[Each floor contains hostile entities, hidden areas, and a Floor Guardian. The Floor Guardian must be defeated to access the next floor.]
[Death inside the Tower is not permanent. On death, the Host returns to the floor's Waystation. Penalty: 24 Tower hours of lockout and loss of 10% of current EXP.]
[Note: Pain inside the Tower is real.]
"Sixty to one," Percy said slowly. "So if I'm in there for a whole night..."
[Eight hours of sleep equals 480 Tower hours. Twenty days.]
He did the math. Thirty-one nights until the Minotaur. Twenty days a night. Six hundred and twenty days. Almost two years.
Two years to go from a mortal kid who can't swim to someone who can stand next to demigods. He swallowed. That's not a lot of time.
[Faith Points cannot be earned inside the Tower. Faith is earned only through deeds performed in service of the gods in the Host's world.]
[Host's current Faith Points: -100.]
"Right," Percy muttered. "The debt. Thanks for the reminder."
[Reminders are a standard function.]
He closed his eyes.
"Okay," he said. "Let's go."
[Entering the Tower.]
[Floor 1: The Proving Grounds.]
He woke up standing.
That was the first strange thing. One second he was lying in bed, and the next he was on his feet on a hillside, barefoot, in the same T-shirt and sweatpants he'd gone to sleep in, with a cold wind pulling at his hair.
The sky was gray. Not cloudy. Just gray, flat and endless, like the inside of a seashell, with no sun in it and no stars. Light came from everywhere and nowhere. Below him, a valley rolled away for what looked like miles: dry yellow grass, clumps of gnarled olive trees, the white bones of a ruined village half-swallowed by brambles, a thin river glinting like a dropped knife. Beyond it, a forest so dark it was almost black. Beyond that, a range of cliffs.
And beyond everything, rising out of the horizon so high that it disappeared into the gray, a tower of black stone.
It was the size of a mountain. He could see light at the very bottom of it, a pinprick of orange, like a door left open.
[Floor Guardian location marked.]
[Recommended Level to challenge Floor Guardian: 8.]
"And I'm level..."
[STATUS]
Name: Perseus Jackson
Level: 1
EXP: 0/100
Race: Human (Mortal)
Lineage: Child of Zeus (Adopted)
HP: 100/100
MP: 40/40
STR: 6
AGI: 8
VIT: 6
INT: 14
PER: 11
DIV: 1
[SKILLS]
Swordsmanship (Memory) Lv. MAX [Restricted by body: Effective Lv. 2].
Aerokinesis Lv. 1.
Electrokinesis Lv. 1.
[EQUIPMENT]
None.
He stared at the numbers. STR 6. He didn't need anybody to tell him what that meant. It meant he was a skinny fourteen-year-old who had spent his whole second life doing homework and eating pancakes. Every single thing he remembered about fighting, every parry and feint and footwork drill Luke and Chiron had ever pounded into him, was still sitting inside his head. His body just couldn't do any of it.
[Correct. The Host's memories exceed the Host's physical capacity. Skill effectiveness is limited by STR, AGI, and VIT.]
"I didn't say that out loud."
[The Host's expression was sufficient.]
Behind him, built into the hillside, was a small round building of white stone with a fire burning in a bowl outside its door. A waystation, the System had called it. He'd come back here every time he died.
He looked at the valley again. At the ruined village, and the black forest, and the tower on the horizon.
Then he started walking downhill.
The first wolf found him before he reached the bottom.
He heard it before he saw it. A low, wet growl from the long grass to his left. He turned, and there it was, crouched low with its belly almost brushing the dirt. It was made of something like gray smoke stretched over the shape of a wolf, and its eyes were two coals, and when it opened its mouth, its teeth were very, very real.
[Hostile entity: Ashen Wolf. Level 2.]
"I don't have a weapon," Percy said.
[Correct.]
The wolf leaped.
He got his arms up. That was all. It hit him in the chest and they went down together into the grass, and its jaws closed on his forearm, and the pain was so huge and so immediate that it whited everything out. He punched it in the head with his free hand. It was like punching a sandbag. He tried to roll, the way he would have once, the way his memory screamed at him to, and his body simply didn't move fast enough.
The wolf let go of his arm and went for his throat.
He woke up standing in front of the waystation with the fire crackling beside him, gasping, clutching his neck.
[Host has died. Cause: Exsanguination.]
[Lockout: 24 Tower hours. EXP lost: 0 (Host had none).]
He sat down on the ground very suddenly. His hands were shaking. His arm didn't hurt anymore, but he could still feel the shape of the teeth in it. Pain inside the Tower is real. The System hadn't been exaggerating.
He stayed there for the whole lockout. He didn't have a choice; the waystation's door wouldn't let him leave, and when he tried to walk past the fire, his legs just stopped. So he sat by the fire and thought.
I tried to fight it like I used to. Like I was strong. I'm not strong. He flexed his fingers. So don't fight like you're strong. Fight like you're weak.
When the lockout ended, he didn't go straight back down the hill. He went to the olive trees on the slope and spent an hour breaking off a branch. It was a pathetic weapon, crooked and too light, but it was longer than his arm, and it had a sharp, splintered end.
The second wolf killed him too. But it took longer.
The third time, he didn't wait for it to leap. He heard the growl and he turned and jabbed his stick right into its open mouth as it came for him, and it gagged and twisted, and he shoved with his whole body weight, and the splintered end went into something soft at the back of its throat. The wolf thrashed. He held on. It took forever. When it finally went still and crumbled into gray ash, he fell back into the grass and lay there, panting, his stick snapped in half.
[Ashen Wolf defeated.]
[EXP +15.]
[Item dropped: Ashen Pelt (Common, Material).]
Fifteen. Out of a hundred. Percy laughed weakly at the sky.
Okay, he thought. Six more of those and I get to level two. Easy.
It was not easy.
It took him eleven Tower days to reach Level 2. He died six more times getting there.
The Ashen Wolves came in pairs once he got further from the waystation, and then in threes, and he learned to hate the sound of grass rustling. He learned that they always circled to the left before they attacked. He learned that they were afraid of the river, and that if he stood in the shallows they wouldn't come closer than the bank, and that if he threw rocks at them from the water they eventually got frustrated and charged in anyway, and the current slowed them down just enough for him to hit them.
He learned that he couldn't breathe underwater in this life, either, which he'd already known, but now he knew it more.
[Level up.]
[Level 2. Stat points available: 5.]
The System let him choose where to put them. He stared at the options for a long time. In his last life, he'd never had to think about it; he'd just been strong, the way the son of Poseidon was strong. Now every point felt like a decision about who he was going to be.
He put three into STR and two into VIT. A sword was useless if you couldn't swing it. A body was useless if it broke.
He felt it right away, a warmth spreading through his arms and chest, like stretching after sleeping too long. Not much. Barely anything. But he picked up a rock and threw it at a tree, and it hit harder than it should have, and he grinned.
The ruined village was where things started to change.
He'd been avoiding it. It sat in the middle of the valley like a skull, white stone walls with no roofs, empty doorways, a well in the middle of a square with a broken bronze bucket chained to it. Things moved in there at night, if there was night here. The gray light dimmed every eighteen hours or so and came back six hours later, and in the dim, he could hear clicking from the village. Lots of clicking.
But he'd killed enough wolves to reach Level 3, and the wolves didn't drop anything but pelts and the occasional fang, and he was tired of fighting with sticks.
He went in at full light, moving slowly, keeping to the walls.
The clicking was ants.
Not normal ants. Myrmekes, the size of German shepherds, with black armored shells and pincers that could snap a broom handle. He'd fought them once before, in his old life, in a different world, and it had not gone well then either. There was a nest under the village square. He could see the mound of dirt through a gap in a wall, and the ants going in and out of it, carrying chunks of things he didn't want to look at too closely.
[Hostile entity: Myrmeke Worker. Level 3. Note: Myrmekes travel in groups. Engagement with one will draw others.]
Great, Percy thought. Love that.
He almost turned around. Then he saw what was half-buried in the dirt at the edge of the nest: the hilt of a sword.
It took him two days to work out a plan. It was a very Percy plan. Annabeth would have hated it. He spent the first day collecting dry grass and olive branches and piling them up against the windward side of the square. He spent the second day sitting on the hill above the village with his eyes closed, trying to talk to the wind.
That was harder than any wolf.
Water had always been part of him, in his old life, like an extra arm he'd been born with. Air wasn't like that. Air was restless and fickle and slippery. He'd reach for it and it would slide away, curling around him and wandering off like a cat that couldn't be bothered. He sat there for hours. He felt like an idiot.
And then, late in the gray afternoon, he felt it. Not the wind, exactly. The shape of the wind. The way it came down off the cliffs and spilled across the valley and eddied around the village walls. Where it was strong, and where it was tired.
He didn't push it. He'd tried pushing. He nudged it instead, the way you'd nudge a sleepy dog to move over on a couch.
The grass at his feet stirred.
[Aerokinesis Lv. 1 → Lv. 2.]
He lit the fire with a spark from his fingertips. That part, at least, he could do; Electrokinesis Level 1 was good for exactly one thing so far, which was starting fires and giving himself small, humiliating shocks. The dry grass went up in a rush of orange. And Percy reached for the wind and nudged, and kept nudging, until the smoke rolled across the village square in a thick gray wall and poured straight down into the mouth of the nest.
The clicking became frantic. Ants came boiling up out of the ground, half-blind, choking, clacking their pincers at nothing. Percy was waiting at the edge of the smoke with a sharpened olive branch in his hand, and as they came out one at a time, confused and staggering, he went for the soft joint where their heads met their bodies.
It wasn't clean. Two of them got him. One nearly took off his hand. But when the smoke cleared, there were nine piles of black chitin scattered across the square, and Percy was sitting on the edge of the well, bleeding from a long cut on his leg and laughing so hard he could barely breathe.
[Myrmeke Worker defeated. x9.]
[EXP +180.]
[Level up. Level 4.]
[Items dropped: Myrmeke Chitin x6 (Common, Material). Myrmeke Acid Gland x2 (Uncommon, Material). Minor Healing Draught x1 (Common, Consumable).]
[Area cleared: The Hollow Square.]
He drank the Minor Healing Draught. It tasted like grape cough syrup. The cut on his leg closed up into a pink line.
Then he dug the sword out of the dirt.
It was a xiphos, short and leaf-bladed, the kind Greek hoplites had carried, and it was in terrible shape. The bronze was green with corrosion. The edge was nicked in a dozen places. The leather on the grip had rotted down to a few black strings.
He held it up to the gray light anyway, and something in his chest went tight.
[Item acquired: Rusted Xiphos (Common, Weapon).]
[ATK +4. Durability: 31/50.]
It was the first sword he'd held in fourteen years. It was the worst sword he'd ever held in his life.
He swung it once, through the air, and his wrist turned exactly the way it was supposed to. Exactly the way Luke had taught him, a lifetime ago, in the arena at Camp Half-Blood. Wrist loose. Watch the shoulders, not the blade.
Hello, he thought. I missed you.
The man at the well appeared on the twentieth day.
Percy had made the Hollow Square his base. It was closer to the forest than the waystation, and the ants had left behind a cellar under one of the ruined houses that was dry and easy to defend. He'd been sleeping there, cooking wolf meat over a fire, which was disgusting, and practicing with the xiphos in the square every morning until his arms burned.
He came up out of the cellar one gray morning and there was a man sitting on the edge of the well, sharpening a spear.
Percy had the xiphos up before he even thought about it.
[Entity identified: Echo of Kallias, Hoplite of Argos. Non-hostile. Tower Guide (Floor 1).]
The man looked up. He was translucent, slightly, like a reflection on a window, and he wore bronze armor dented in a hundred places and a horsehair helmet pushed back on his head. He had a broken nose and a short gray beard and the kind of face that had squinted at a lot of sunlight.
"Put that down, boy," he said. "You hold it like you've done it before, but you'd still lose."
Percy didn't put it down. "Who are you?"
"Kallias." The man went back to sharpening his spear. "I died at Thermopylae. Or near it. Some valley, anyway, a long time ago. And then someone took a piece of me and put it here, to watch the first floor of this place and help whoever came through." He snorted. "You're the first. Took you long enough to clear the ants. I was starting to think you'd die of old age in that cellar."
"I'm fourteen."
"You fight like a man of thirty with the arms of a boy of ten." Kallias set down his whetstone. "Which is a strange thing to see. So. Are you going to stand there, or do you want to learn how to actually win?"
Percy lowered the xiphos, slowly.
[Quest available: "The Hoplite's Trials."]
[Complete the tasks of the Echo of Kallias.]
[Rewards: Variable.]
[Accept?]
"Yeah," said Percy. "Okay. Teach me."
Kallias was a terrible teacher, in the sense that he was terrifying. He was a lot like Clarisse, if Clarisse had been forty and dead and had fought the Persian army.
The first thing he did was make Percy run. Up the hill to the waystation and back down, over and over, until Percy collapsed. Then he made him do it again with a rock in each hand. Then he made him stand in the river up to his waist and hold the xiphos out at arm's length until his shoulders screamed.
"You remember how to fight," Kallias said. "I can see it. Good. Memory is worth something. But memory doesn't hold a shield for four hours at the line while men try to kill you. Legs do. Lungs do." He poked Percy in the chest with the butt of his spear. "Build the body. The body is the foundation. The rest is decoration."
The tasks came one at a time.
Kill the alpha of the eastern wolf pack and bring me its fang. That one took four days and two deaths. The alpha was Level 6, twice Percy's size, and it fought with its whole pack around it. He finally got it by luring the pack across the river one at a time, using the wind to carry his scent to the wrong side, and fighting the alpha alone in the shallows where its weight dragged it down.
[Ashen Wolf Alpha defeated.]
[EXP +120.]
[Item dropped: Alpha's Fang (Uncommon, Material).
Ashen Wolf-Hide Bracers (Uncommon, Armor, DEF +3, AGI +1).]
Clear the bandit camp in the cliffs. The bandits were skeleton hoplites, raised from some ancient battlefield, with rotting shields and spears that never broke. They were Level 5 and they fought in formation, and the first time Percy ran at them, they put a spear through his stomach.
The second time, he didn't run at them. He'd watched them for a day. They moved in lockstep, a little wall of bronze and bone, and they never broke the line, and they never looked up.
So he went up. He climbed the cliff above their camp and spent two hours prying a boulder loose with his xiphos and his whole body weight and every ounce of the STR he'd built. When it went over the edge, it took most of the line with it.
The last three, he fought properly. Shield to shield. Kallias watched from the top of the cliff with his arms folded, and when Percy finally stood alone in the camp with bone shards scattered around his feet, the old hoplite nodded once.
"Better," he said. "Ugly. But better."
[Skeleton Hoplite defeated. x7.]
[EXP +210.]
[Level up. Level 5.]
[Items dropped: Hoplite's Bronze Aspis (Uncommon, Shield, DEF +8).
Bone Shard x14 (Common, Material).
Coin of Argos x3 (Rare, Currency: Tower Merchant).]
[Area cleared: The Cliff Camp.]
The shield was heavy, and round, and dented, and he loved it immediately.
Find what the river is hiding. That one was Percy's favorite. He spent a whole day walking the riverbank and found nothing, and then he remembered that he could feel the wind, and the wind went strange over one particular bend of the water, curling down and around instead of across. Something under the surface was pulling it.
He dove. It was ten feet down, at the bottom of a deep pool: a stone chest, locked with a bronze lock shaped like an owl. He had to come up for air six times. He opened it with a Myrmeke Acid Gland, which dissolved the lock in a stream of hissing bubbles.
[Hidden Chest discovered.]
[Item acquired: Skill Book: Storm Step (Rare).]
Learn now?]
He learned it. The book dissolved in his hands into a stream of glowing letters, and the letters went into his eyes, and for an instant, he understood something about air that he hadn't before: that it could be stood on. Not for long. Just for a heartbeat. Just long enough to change direction in mid-air, or take one step on nothing.
It took him another week to make it work. He fell off the cliffs eleven times practicing. He died twice. On the eighth day, he leaped off the waystation hill, took a step on nothing halfway down, and landed on his feet at the bottom, and screamed in triumph so loud that Kallias came running with his spear up.
[Skill acquired: Storm Step Lv. 1.]
By the sixtieth Tower day, he was Level 7.
He was taller. That wasn't just in the Tower. Every time he woke up in his bed in Manhattan, his body ached in new places, and his jeans were shorter, and Sally kept looking at him across the breakfast table with a puzzled little frown. He'd started eating like a horse. Paul joked that he was going to have to take a second job to keep the fridge full.
[STATUS]
Name: Perseus Jackson
Level: 7
EXP: 340/700
HP: 210/210 | MP: 85/85
STR: 19
AGI: 17
VIT: 16
INT: 15
PER: 14
DIV: 1
[SKILLS]
Swordsmanship (Memory) [Effective Lv. 4].
Aerokinesis Lv. 3.
Electrokinesis Lv. 2.
Storm Step Lv. 2.
Shield Discipline Lv. 2.
[EQUIPMENT]
Rusted Xiphos (Repaired, ATK +7).
Hoplite's Bronze Aspis.
Ashen Wolf-Hide Bracers.
It didn't look like much. It wasn't much. But it was his, every single point of it. He'd bled for every one.
On the sixty-first day, he sat by the fire in the Hollow Square with Kallias across from him, roasting the last of a wolf haunch, and looked up at the black tower on the horizon. The light at the bottom of it was still burning, small and orange, like an eye that never closed.
"What's in there?" he asked.
Kallias was quiet for a long time.
"Bronze," the old hoplite said finally. "A great deal of bronze. Made by a smith who wanted to build something that could never be killed." He poked the fire with his spear. "I went in once. Before you came. I wanted to see."
"What happened?"
Kallias looked at him. His translucent eyes were very old.
"I am an echo, boy," he said. "I cannot die. And I still have not gone back."
Percy looked at the tower for a long time. The fire crackled. Somewhere out in the dark valley, a wolf howled, and another answered it.
[Recommended Level to challenge Floor Guardian: 8.]
[Current Level: 7.]
One more level, he thought.
He stood up, picked up his shield, and went to go find some more wolves.