𝐅𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒 - jason grace

03. WAR GAMES, FUN!

𝐌𝐀𝐈𝐀 𝐇𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐖𝐀𝐑 𝐆𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐒. The amount of times she'd seen her life flash before her eyes was a lot more than she'd liked to admit. It's not that she was a bad fighter, she was good, really good. Reyna and Jason had trained her well. She was one of the few campers who was skilled at dual wielding weapons, and she'd always made sure to put in time every day to ensure she'd never falter. Her problem came from two things – one, she usually did not care about the games, so there was that, and two, recently, she'd been far too worried about Jason Grace to pay close attention to her surroundings.

But today, she felt determined. She wanted to show the camp that the Fifth was so much more than they made them out to be, and with their newest arrival, Maia was sure she'd be able to do just that.

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. 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.

"They did a good job today," Hazel noted. "That's bad for us."

"Wait," Percy said. "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 deathball – um, which is like paintball, except with ... you know, poison and acid and fire balls. Sometimes we do chariots and gladiator competitions, sometimes war games."

Maia 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."

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. 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."

Percy stumbled, trying to keep time with the left-right marching rhythm. Maia sympathized, having frequently messed up, and if she didn't, she had managed to cause someone else to mess up, not on purpose, but, nobody really cared. They just blamed her anyway. If she really had "bad luck powers", like she knew some of the campers accused her of having, she hoped she'd learn to control them soon. Her siblings could transfer bouts of good luck to others, and, without even trying, constantly radiated good luck. Maia wished she could do something like that. She figured she could sort of radiate luck, just not the good kind.

"So why are we practicing this, anyway?" Percy asked.

"Do you guys spend a lot of time laying siege to fortified cities?"

"Teamwork," Hazel said. "Quick thinking. Tactics. Battle skills. You'd be surprised what you can learn in the war games."

"Like who will stab you in the back," Frank said.