¹Royal Cries, p. jackson

009.

ROYAL CRIES
━━ chapter nine

━━ MIDTOWN HAD BECOME a warzone. There were little skirmishes everywhere. A giant was ripping up trees in Bryant Park while dryads pelted him with nuts. Outside the Waldorf Astoria, a bronze statue of Benjamin Franklin was whacking a hellhound with a rolled-up newspaper. A trio of Hephaestus campers fought a squad of dracaenae in the middle of Rockefeller Center.

As she ran through, Elisa caught sight of everything going on. The Hunters had set up a defensive line on Thirty-seventh, just three blocks north of Olympus. To the east on Park Avenue, Jake Mason and some other Hephaestus campers were leading an army of statues against the enemy. To the west, the Demeter Cabin and Grover's nature spirits had turned Sixth Avenue into a jungle that was hampering a squadron of Kronos's demigods. The south was clear, although Elisa wasn't sure for how long, but the flanks of the enemy army were swinging around. A few more minutes, and they'd be totally surrounded.

Elisa was stuck in the southeast corner of the fight—Thirty-third at the Park Avenue tunnel. She, Annabeth, and a couple of Annabeth's siblings were trying to hold off a Hyperborean giant. Overhead, she heard the sound of giant wings flapping and looked up just in time to see a dark horse flying above them.

Percy yelled something as he jumped off of Blackjack's back and landed on the giant's head. When the giant looked up, the boy slid off his face, shield-bashing his nose on the way down.

The giant let out a wail of pain and staggered backward, blue blood trickling from his nostrils.

Percy hit the pavement running. The Hyperborean breathed a cloud of white mist and the temperature dropped. The spot where the son of Poseidon landed was now coated with ice, and he was covered in frost like a sugar doughnut.

"Hey, Ugly!" yelled Annabeth at the giant.

The Hyperborean bellowed and turned toward her, exposing the unprotected back of his legs. Percy charged and stabbed him behind the knee.

The Hyperborean buckled and he froze. He literally turned to solid ice. From the point where Percy had stabbed him, cracks appeared in his body. They got larger and wider until the giant crumbled into a mountain of blue shards.

"Thanks," Annabeth said, breathlessly. "The pig?"

"Pork chops," Percy said.

"That's good," Elisa spoke up, looking around at the small battles raging around them. She flexed her injured shoulder, rolling her eyes when she spotted her friends' nervous expression. "I'm fine."

Annabeth sighed, like this had been the hundredth time they had this exact conversation. She took a couple of deep breaths before saying, "Come on. We got plenty of enemies left."

The daughter of Athena was right. They killed as many monsters as they came across for the next hour; Elisa killed legions of dracaenea, and dozens of telkhines, and destroyed tens of empousai ( often times when killing empousai, she heard them hissing something about "retribution for Maurelle" ). But with every monster killed, more took its place.

She, Percy, and Annabeth raced from block to block, trying to shore up their defenses. Too many of their allies were lying wounded in the street. Too many were missing.

They were being cornered foot by foot as the night wore on. Elisa bumped into Grover at one point, who was hitting snake-women over the head, cursing them out for ruining the nature around them with their venom, but something past the satyr caught Elisa's attention. It was two figures battling some enemy demigods, and the two were hopelessly outnumbered.