𝐅𝐋𝐀𝐑𝐄𝐒, ᴘᴇʀᴄʏ ᴊᴀᴄᴋꜱᴏɴ

005 ── the price of victory.

        Once they got out of camp, the Fifth Cohort formed two lines behind their centurions, Dakota and Gwen. They marched north, skirting the edge of the city, and headed to the Field of Mars—the largest, flattest part of the valley. The grass was cropped short by all the unicorns, bulls, and homeless fauns that grazed here. The earth was pitted with explosion craters and scarred with trenches from past games. At the north end of the field stood their target. The engineers had built a stone fortress with an iron portcullis, guard towers, scorpion ballistae, water cannons, and no doubt many other nasty surprises for the defenders to use.

        A gladius, sharpened and edged and salivating gold to sever skin, was held in Theia's palm, clutched tight until a dull thrumming ache nullified her hand. The metal ran cold and soothing, whether because of the scrape of danger at her fingertips or simply the douse of cold she rarely experienced being one so filled with seething rage. She hated it. Hated the vulnerability that tied to such a thing, a thread that unravelled her entire being. A tapestry of her, with plucked threads and loose ends and white, searing, innocent white, fading to the perilous red she had come to know so dearly.

        She didn't want people to see her. She didn't want them to see the lacerations of her soul. She had enough littering her skin in echoed callings, sirenic and sickly sweet until the memory raked its nails through her eyes until tears watered the ground. To think that more stained her soul, held her tongue, rose to the back of her throat and blocked her oxygen until she clawed for her life—nightmares crackled and burned in the lingering thought of her soul being torn and examined. She barely wanted to acknowledge it; others would die with their innocence at their feet.

        The cold kept her... grounded. The dagger cowered in her hand so it didn't make another do the same. It was a balance of her soul, a chord plucked harmoniously with tragedy. She swayed on it's addicting taunt. Swayed, and swayed, and swayed.

        "They did a good job today," Hazel noted. The fortress towered and became a shadow in her eyes as her head lifted to encapsulate it in its glory. "That's bad for us."

        "Wait," Percy said. Theia had almost forgotten his time at camp had been only short; his presence had a lingering effect, like the salt scattered like jewels along the sea surface. "You're telling me that fortress was built today?"

        Hazel grinned. "Legionnaires are trained to build. If we had to, we could break down the entire camp and rebuild it somewhere else. Take maybe three or four days, but we could do it."

        "Let's not," Percy said. "So you attack a different fort every night?"

        "Not every night," Frank said. "We have different training exercises. Sometimes death ball—um, which is like paint-ball, except with...you know, poison and acid and fire balls. Sometimes we do chariots and gladiator competitions, sometimes war games."

        Hazel pointed at the fort. "Somewhere inside, the First and Second Cohorts are keeping their banners. Our job is to get inside and capture them without getting slaughtered. We do that, we win."

        "Which we almost never do." Theia added dryly, and a jab to her ribs drew a hiss from her. Hazel only shrugged innocently when she set her gaze in the girl's direction, muttering a brief 'pessimist' beneath her breath. Frank had no real courage to do that to the redhead. Not with the fragility of his life hanging in the balance in ways none of the other three could truly know.

        Percy's eyes lit up. "Like capture-the-flag. I think I like capture-the-flag."

        Frank laughed. "Yeah, well...it's harder than it sounds. We have to get past those scorpions and water cannons on the walls, fight through the inside of the fortress, find the banners, and defeat the guards, all while protecting our own banners and troops from capture—" Overwhelm became the face of the son of Neptune, and Theia had to look to the ground, shaking her head with a grin. "—And our cohort is in competition with the other two attacking cohorts. We sort of work together, but not really. The cohort that captures the banners gets all the glory."