The taxi let them out at the end of the Santa Monica Pier a little after four in the afternoon. The driver was blinking like a man waking up from a nap. He drove off without asking for a tip.
The beach was crowded. It was June in California, and the sand was covered in towels and umbrellas and sunburned tourists, and the air smelled like sunscreen and fried food and salt. The Ferris wheel on the pier turned slowly against a sky so blue it hurt to look at. Seagulls screamed. Somebody's radio was playing the Beach Boys.
Ezra stood at the top of the sand and didn't move.
He was staring at the ocean. Not the beach, not the people. The ocean. The long blue swells rolling in, curling white, breaking on the sand with a sound like breathing.
"He's not going to be here," he said. His voice was flat. "Ares was messing with me. Gods don't just... show up. Not for kids like me."
Percy didn't say anything. He just stood next to him, with the Shield of Ares on his back and Lupe asleep in his jacket, and waited.
Annabeth looked at Grover. Grover looked at Annabeth. Neither of them said anything either.
After a long minute, Ezra kicked off his sneakers.
"Whatever," he muttered. "I'm just going to put my feet in. That's all. It's hot."
He walked down to the water. The others followed a little way behind, and stopped where the sand turned dark and wet. Ezra kept going. The surf washed over his ankles. His shins. His knees. He stopped there, up to his knees in the Pacific, with his hands shoved deep in his pockets and his shoulders hunched up around his ears.
The waves around him went still.
It was subtle. Nobody else on the beach noticed. But in a ring around Ezra, about ten feet wide, the water stopped moving. It went flat and clear as glass, while everywhere else the surf kept breaking and foaming and rolling in.
And there was a man sitting on the sand.
Percy hadn't seen him arrive. Nobody had. He was just there, a few yards up the beach from the water, sitting in a cheap folding chair with a fishing rod propped up beside him. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt covered in palm trees and flamingos, and a battered fishing hat with lures stuck all over it. He had a tan, weathered face and a black beard going gray, and laugh lines around his eyes.
His eyes were sea-green.
Percy's heart did something complicated.
He'd known this face his whole first life. He'd seen it in dreams. He'd seen it across the throne room of Olympus. He'd seen it, once, on the deck of a ship in the middle of a war, looking at him with a quiet, enormous pride that he'd carried with him into the dark for years and years.
That look wasn't for him anymore. It couldn't be.
The man in the fishing hat didn't even glance at Percy. He was looking at Ezra.
"The water's warm today," he called. "Isn't it?"
Ezra spun around so fast he nearly fell over.
Percy didn't hear most of what they said.
He didn't try to. He took Annabeth and Grover a little further up the beach, and sat down in the sand with his back to the water, and let them have it. It wasn't his. It had never been his, in this world. And he found, a little to his surprise, that he didn't mind.
But he heard some of it. The wind carried it. He couldn't help that.
He heard Ezra say, his voice cracking: "Where were you?"
He heard the long, long silence after it.
He heard the god of the sea say, very quietly, "I'm not allowed to be there. That's the rule. It's an old rule, and a bad one, and I've hated it every single day of your life."
He heard Ezra say something angry, too low to make out. And the god answered, and Ezra said something else, and his voice broke in the middle of it.
And then nothing, for a while, except the waves.
When Percy finally glanced back, Ezra was sitting in the sand next to the folding chair. His knees were pulled up to his chest. The god of the sea had his big weathered hand on the back of his son's neck, the way a father does without thinking about it. They were both looking out at the water, not talking. Ezra's shoulders were shaking a little.
Percy looked away again, quickly.
"That's good," Grover whispered, next to him. His eyes were wet. "That's really good. Isn't it?"
"Yeah," Percy said. "It is."
Annabeth was watching him instead of them. Her gray eyes were sharp.
"You're not jealous," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Should I be?"
"Most people would. Your dad's the king of the gods, and he's never come down to sit on a beach with you."
Percy thought about that. About thunder in a swamp. About a voice through a statue at night, saying my son, like it was learning the words.
"He's trying," he said. "In his way. That's more than a lot of people get."
Annabeth looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked down at her hands in the sand.
"Yeah," she said quietly. "It is."
After maybe twenty minutes, Ezra came walking back up the beach toward them.
His eyes were red. He'd obviously been crying, and he obviously didn't want to talk about it, and nobody made him. He held out his hand, palm up. Three small, perfect pearls sat in it, shining faintly green.
"He gave me these," he said hoarsely. "For the Underworld. You crush one under your foot and think of where you want to go, and it takes you there. Out of the Underworld. Back to the surface." He swallowed. "There's only three."
Grover counted the four of them on his fingers. His face fell.
"That's okay," Percy said. "I'll figure something out."
"That's what I said." Ezra looked at him strangely. "And he said..." He hesitated. "He wants to talk to you."
Percy blinked. "Me?"
"You." Ezra jerked his head back toward the folding chair. "Alone. He said, Send me my brother's boy."
The god of the sea watched him come.
Up close, he was bigger than he'd looked from a distance. Not taller, exactly. Just more. Like there was a whole ocean folded up inside the Hawaiian shirt, pressing at the seams. The air around him smelled of salt and storms and deep, cold water. Percy's Storm Sense prickled all over, the way it did before lightning.
[Divine presence detected: POSEIDON, Lord of the Seas, Earthshaker, Father of Horses.]
[Threat assessment: Incalculable.]
[Great Sage advises respect.]
Yeah. I got that.
"Lord Poseidon," Percy said, and bowed. Not too low. Not too shallow. The way he'd learned, a long time ago, in another life, when this god had been his father.
Poseidon studied him for a long time. His sea-green eyes moved over Percy's face, slow and careful, like he was reading a tide chart.
"Sit," he said at last.
A second folding chair was suddenly standing in the sand next to his. Percy hadn't seen it appear. He sat.
For a while, neither of them said anything. The surf rolled in. Somewhere down the beach, a kid was shrieking with laughter as a wave knocked him over.
"My son tells me," Poseidon said eventually, "that you saved his life."
"We saved each other, sir."
"He says otherwise. He says a Fury came for him at the museum in New York, and you stood in front of her. He says a hellhound held him under the water in St. Louis, and you came down out of the sky." The god's voice was mild. "He says you've been walking in front of him the whole way, like a shield. And he doesn't understand why."
Percy didn't answer.
"I don't either," Poseidon said. "I'll be honest with you, son of Zeus. My brother's children have never been kind to mine. Not once, in three thousand years. They've drowned each other and murdered each other and cursed each other's names on battlefields across the whole of history." He turned his head and looked at Percy directly, and the full weight of the sea was in that look. "So I want to know why. Why Zeus's son walks in front of mine. And I want the truth."
Percy looked out at the water.
He thought about lying. He thought about it very seriously. He was good at it now, after two lives.
But the god of the sea had asked him for the truth, and once upon a time this god had been his dad. And Percy found he couldn't do it.
"Because somebody has to," he said quietly. "Ezra's going to matter, sir. A lot. More than anybody knows yet. And he's not ready. He's angry and scared and he thinks the world owes him something, because nobody's ever given him anything. If somebody doesn't walk in front of him for a while, he's going to break before he gets the chance to be who he could be." He swallowed. "I know what that's like. I don't want it to happen to him."
Poseidon was silent.
"And because I like him," Percy added. "I didn't expect to. He's a pain. But I do."
The god of the sea looked at him for a very long time.
Then, slowly, he laughed. It wasn't loud. It was a deep, rolling, surprised sound, like a big wave breaking a long way off.
"A pain," he said. "Yes. He gets that from me."
He was quiet again. When he spoke, his voice was different. Lower.
"There's something about you," he said. "I can't see it clearly. It's like looking at the bottom of a deep harbor through choppy water. But it's there. Something old. Something that smells of salt." His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "You don't smell like my brother's child, boy. Not entirely. You smell like the sea."
Percy's breath caught.
[Warning: The System's rewrite is being examined by a primordial-tier will.]
[Great Sage is reinforcing the weave.]
Poseidon blinked, like a man who'd lost his train of thought. He frowned faintly. Then he shook his head.
"Never mind," he said. "Too much sun."
Percy let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding.
The god reached into the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt and took something out. It was a conch shell, small enough to fit in Percy's palm, pink and white and spiraled, with a faint blue glow deep inside it.
"I don't give gifts to Zeus's children," Poseidon said. "As a rule." He held it out anyway. "But I don't take debts lightly either. You kept my son alive. This is me, keeping track."
Percy took it. The shell was cool and smooth, and when he held it, he heard the ocean. Not the faint whisper you hear in an ordinary seashell. The real thing. Deep and vast and alive.
[ITEM ACQUIRED: CONCH OF THE EARTHSHAKER (Divine, Single Use)]
[Blow it once, anywhere in the world, and the sea will answer.]
[DIVINE FAVOR: Poseidon regards the Host with cautious gratitude.]
"Thank you, sir," Percy said.
Poseidon picked up his fishing rod, cast it out into the surf, and settled back in his folding chair.
"Keep walking in front of him," he said, without looking at Percy. "For a little while longer. Until he's ready." A pause. "And son of Zeus?"
"Yes, sir?"
"There are three pearls, and four of you." The sea-green eyes slid sideways. "I wonder what you'll do about that."
Percy stood up. When he looked back from halfway up the beach, the folding chairs were gone. There was nothing on the sand but a fishing lure, shaped like a little silver trident, glinting in the sun.
Ezra walked down and picked it up, and put it in his pocket, and didn't say a word.
They got a motel room a few blocks off the beach. It was a cheap, sagging place called the Sea Breeze Inn, with a flickering neon sign and a pool full of leaves. The clerk took Percy's LotusCash card without a second look. Then he gave them the room key and a bag of free cookies that Percy took off Grover and threw in the trash, on principle.
They ate tacos from a truck down the street, sitting on the curb with the sun going down orange and gold over the Pacific. Nobody talked much. Ezra kept touching the lure in his pocket. Grover kept sniffing the air, nervous, like he could already smell the Underworld on the wind. Annabeth had pulled a map of Los Angeles from somewhere, and was marking routes to West Hollywood in pencil, three different ways, in case one of them was blocked.
"DOA Recording Studios," she said. "Tomorrow morning. We go in, we find Charon, we get across the Styx. We find Hades. We get the bolt back, or we find out where it is." She looked up. "That's two days to the solstice. We can't waste any more time."
"We won't," Percy said.
She looked at him. At the dark circles under his eyes. At the way his hand had been shaking when he held his taco.
"You need to sleep," she said. "Like, actually sleep. Whatever's wrong with you, you look like you're about to fall over."
"I know," Percy said. "I'm going to."
That was almost true.
The room had two lumpy double beds. Grover and Ezra took one, head to foot, and were snoring within minutes. Annabeth took the other, with her knife under her pillow and her Yankees cap on the nightstand. Percy took the floor by the window, with a blanket and a flat motel pillow and the Shield of Ares propped against the wall beside him. Lupe was curled into a ball on his chest.
He lay there in the dark and stared at the ceiling, and listened to the others breathe.
Great Sage.
[Great Sage is here.]
How long until Thread-Worn wears off?
[THREAD-WORN (Compounded): Remaining: 7 hours, 12 minutes.]
And if I go in tonight? Eight hours. Eight days.
A pause. Longer than usual.
[Entering the Loom while Thread-Worn will compound the condition a third time.]
[Projected status upon exit:]
[THREAD-WORN (Severe): -30% INT and WIS for 48 real hours.]
[The Host will descend into the Underworld, face the Lord of the Dead, and possibly fight the god of war while impaired.]
[Great Sage advises against this.]
Percy closed his eyes.
I know.
But Great Sage... think about it. Floor 10's a Gate Floor. Camelot. The Excalibur Fragment's up there. And the blueprint. The bolt blueprint. It needs me to touch a real sky-weapon. Where's the only real sky-weapon on Earth right now?
[...]
In two days I'm going to be close enough to touch it. And if I don't have the Fragment by then, I don't have a weapon that can hold what the blueprint makes. I'll have to wait months. Maybe years. Zeus isn't going to just hand it to me again.
And Ares is going to come for me. You know he is. He said he always finishes what he starts. He's Level who-knows-what, and I'm Level 50 with a bronze training sword. If I don't go up tonight, I'm going into that fight weaker than I could be.
The silence went on a long time.
[Reasoning logged.]
[Great Sage cannot fault the Host's logic. Great Sage notes that it is still a bad idea.]
Most of my ideas are.
[Great Sage has observed this.]
Percy smiled in the dark.
He looked over at the beds. At Grover with one hoof sticking out from under the blanket. At Ezra curled up on his side with his fist closed tight around a silver fishing lure. At Annabeth, who'd fallen asleep with one hand still on the knife under her pillow, her face finally smooth and young.
Eight hours, he thought. I'll be back before they wake up.
He put his hand on Lupe's warm back, and closed his eyes, and reached for the gold thread.
[ENTERING THE LOOM.]
[Current Floor: 8.]
[Real-world body has entered sleep.]
The cold hit him like a fist.
Percy came through the Gate onto his hands and knees on a sheet of blue-white ice. The breath was punched out of him in a cloud. The wind screamed. Snow came sideways, hard and fine as sand, and stung every inch of skin it touched. In every direction, as far as he could see, there was nothing but ice. Ice fields, cracked and heaving. Ice ridges, sharp as broken glass. And far away on the horizon, half hidden in the blizzard, a frozen waterfall a thousand feet high, hanging off a cliff like a pale curtain.
[FLOOR 8: THE FROZEN ABYSS]
[Rank: E]
[Enemies: Lv 40–50]
[Boss: Lv 55]
[MAIN QUEST: Slay the Cryo Dragon.]
[SIDE QUEST: Thaw. Free the frozen giant's thrall.]
[HIDDEN QUEST: ???]
[Status: THREAD-WORN (Compounded). INT and WIS reduced by 25%.]
[Debuff: FREEZING. Movement speed -15%. Stamina regeneration -20%.]
Great, he thought, through chattering teeth. Perfect. Love it.
He stood up. His sneakers skidded. He went right back down on his tailbone, hard.
It was not a good start.
The first day was the worst.
The ice fields went on forever, slick as glass under a thin crust of snow, and every step was a fight. He fell more times than he could count. His hands went numb inside the first hour, and his feet soon after, and the freezing debuff crept up his body like frost up a window until even his thoughts felt slow and stiff. Slower than the Thread-Worn fog had already made them.
The Ice Spirits came first. They were pale, flickering things, like snowflakes that had learned to hate, and they came in swarms out of the blizzard. They burned where they touched. He cut through them with the training xiphos until his arms ached. Then he found out that a crackle of static along the blade made them burst like soap bubbles, and things got easier.
The Frost Giants were another story.
The first one came lumbering out of the snow around midday. It was twenty feet tall, with skin like blue granite and a beard full of icicles, and a club made from a whole frozen pine tree. It was Level 46. Percy was Level 50. On paper, it shouldn't have been hard.
It nearly killed him.
It wasn't the giant. It was the ice. Every time he dashed in, his feet went out from under him. Every time he tried to dodge, he slid. And the giant didn't slide at all. It had been born on this ice. It brought the pine-tree club down on the spot where he'd fallen, and the whole ice field cracked, and Percy rolled away by inches with his heart in his throat.
[HP: 1,180 → 744]
Think, he told himself. Think, think, think. Through the fog. Come on.
The ice. The ice was the problem.
So make the ice his problem too.
The giant raised its club again. Percy slammed his palm flat on the ice field and pushed lightning down into it. Not a bolt. Heat. Raw, crackling, white-hot current, poured straight down into the frozen surface under the giant's feet.
The ice flashed to water.
The giant dropped straight through it, up to its chest, roaring, flailing, its club spinning off across the field. And the freezing air did the rest. In about four seconds, the water froze solid again around it, locking it in place like a fly in amber.
Percy got up. He walked over, very carefully. He stood in front of the trapped giant, which was snarling and straining and spitting ice.
"Sorry," he said. And he put the xiphos through its eye.
[Frost Giant (Lv 46) defeated.]
[+4,800 EXP]
[Technique learned through practice: FLASH THAW. Convert electrical energy into localized heat. MP cost: 20.]
Okay, Percy thought, breathing hard. Okay. That works. That works.
He killed six more giants before he found shelter that night. All the same way.
He found the thrall on the second day, in the ice caves under the frozen waterfall.
The caves were a maze of blue light and dripping icicles, and in the deepest parts, the blizzard zones, the wind howled through the tunnels so hard it froze his eyelashes together. Blizzard Wraiths hunted in the storm: tall, ragged shapes of wind and snow, with faces like screaming skulls. He brought Asterion and Fang out of his shadow to fight them, because there were too many to fight alone. The Minotaur's shadow-axe tore through the wraiths like they were paper. Fang, his first shadow hound, ran howling through the storm and dragged them down one by one.
At the center of the caves was a great frozen chamber, and in the middle of the chamber was a block of ice the size of a car.
There was a girl inside it.
She was maybe seventeen. Tall and broad-shouldered, with braided blond hair and a round wooden shield strapped to her arm, and an axe frozen halfway out of its sheath. Her eyes were open. They were blue, and fierce, and very, very tired.
Around her neck was an iron collar, carved with frost-giant runes.
[SIDE QUEST: THAW]
[Eira Shieldbreaker, a shieldmaiden of the north, was taken as a thrall by the Frost Giant King and frozen in punishment for her defiance. She has been waiting for one hundred and twelve years.]
[Free her without killing her.]
Percy put his hand on the ice.
Without killing her. That was the hard part. Flash Thaw was a blunt tool. He'd been using it to melt ice under giants. If he used it here, he'd boil her alive inside her block.
He needed to be careful. Slow. Precise. And he was Thread-Worn, and freezing, and so tired he could barely see straight.
He took a deep breath.
He sat down on the cave floor, cross-legged, in front of the block, the way Monk Focus had taught him. He put both palms against the ice. And he let the lightning out, a tiny bit at a time. Not a flood. A trickle. A thread. Just enough warmth to melt the ice one layer at a time, and no more.
It took six hours.
It was the hardest thing he'd ever done with his powers. Harder than calling down the sky in the swamp. Harder than the Tunnel of Love. Every second, he had to hold the current at exactly the right strength. Too much and he'd burn her. Too little and the ice would refreeze faster than he melted it. Twice his concentration slipped, and the water went steaming and he jerked his hands back, terrified. Once he fell asleep sitting up and woke to find the ice had grown back over an hour's work.
He started over.
When the last layer finally cracked and slid away, Eira Shieldbreaker fell forward out of the ice. Percy caught her. She was cold as stone, and heavy, and shaking. She stared up at him with those fierce blue eyes. Then she grabbed the front of his shirt with one frozen hand.
"How long," she rasped.
Percy didn't want to tell her. He told her anyway.
She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the tiredness in them had turned into something harder.
"Then he has had a hundred years too many," she said. "Where is the dragon?"
[SIDE QUEST COMPLETE: THAW]
[Eira Shieldbreaker (Lv 52) will fight beside the Host until this floor is cleared.]
[+9,000 EXP]
[LEVEL UP! Level 50 → Level 51]
[Skill improved: Focus (Monk). Precision control of elemental output +15%.]
The dragon's cathedral was at the top of the frozen waterfall.
It was beautiful. That was the worst part. The whole thing was made of ice. Towering pillars and soaring arches and great stained-glass windows of frozen color, all glowing faintly blue in the eternal twilight of the floor. It was like a church built for a god of winter.
And in the middle of the nave, curled around a heap of frozen treasure, was the Cryo Dragon.
It was asleep.
It was huge. Long and serpentine and pale as moonlight, with scales like overlapping plates of blue glass and wings folded along its back like sails. Each breath it let out in its sleep made frost bloom across the floor in great feathery patterns. Its head alone was the size of a car.
[CRYO DRAGON]
[Level: 55]
[Status: Dormant.]
[HIDDEN QUEST UNLOCKED: DRAGON'S TITHE. Take a scale from the Cryo Dragon while it sleeps.]
Eira, crouched beside him behind a pillar, read the screen over his shoulder. Thread-folk could see them, apparently. She looked at Percy like he was insane.
"No," she whispered.
"Yes," Percy whispered back.
"It will wake. It will wake, and it will freeze us where we stand, and we will become statues in its hall forever."
"Then I'll be quiet."
He called Thing One and Thing Two out of his shadow. They were his two oldest shadows, the pair of hobgoblin warlords from his first days in the tower, quick and silent in shadow-form and good for exactly one thing. He sent them skittering up into the rafters of the cathedral, to the far end of the hall.
Then he melted into the dark.
[Shadow Step.]
He came out of the shadow of a pillar three feet from the dragon's flank.
Up close, the cold coming off it was unbelievable. His eyelashes froze instantly. His breath crystallized in front of his face. The dragon's side rose and fell, slow and enormous, like the tide. Every breath brought a wave of frost washing over him.
He reached out.
The scale he picked was a small one, low on the dragon's flank, where the plates overlapped. He worked the xiphos's edge in under it. Slowly. Slowly. Gently, like picking a lock.
The dragon's eyelid twitched.
Percy stopped breathing.
On the far side of the hall, Thing One knocked an icicle off a rafter. It shattered on the floor with a sound like breaking bells. The dragon's head swung slowly toward the sound in its sleep, and snorted. Frost bloomed, and it settled again.
The scale came loose in Percy's hand.
He was back behind the pillar before he let himself breathe.
[HIDDEN QUEST COMPLETE: DRAGON'S TITHE]
[Item acquired: Scale of the Cryo Dragon (Rare crafting material). Wearer is immune to the Freezing debuff.]
[+12,000 EXP]
[LEVEL UP! Level 51 → Level 52]
Eira stared at him. Then she laughed. It was a short, silent, astonished laugh, with her hand over her mouth.
"You are mad," she whispered. "You are completely mad, little skald."
"I get that a lot," Percy said, and tucked the scale inside his shirt against his chest.
The freezing debuff vanished.
He could feel his fingers again. His toes. His thoughts came a little clearer. He rolled his shoulders, and drew his sword, and looked at the sleeping dragon.
"Okay," he said. "Now we wake it up."
The fight with the Cryo Dragon lasted most of a day.
It woke up angry. It came off its treasure heap in a great surge of wings and glass-blue scales and screaming wind, and the first thing it did was breathe. A torrent of frost so cold it was white. It flash-froze half the cathedral floor solid and turned three of the ice pillars into frozen spikes.
Percy rolled under it. Eira took the edge of it on her shield, and the wood went white with frost, and she grunted and held.
Then the dragon took to the air.
That was the real problem. It flew. It circled under the high arched ceiling of the cathedral where Percy couldn't reach it, and dove, and breathed, and climbed again. Every time it breathed, the floor froze a little more. The ice spread up from the floor in creeping waves, reaching for their feet, trying to lock them in place the way Percy had locked the giants.
[Warning: Floor icing. Movement restricted.]
[HP: 1,240 → 802]
He Flash Thawed the floor. It refroze. He Flash Thawed it again. It refroze faster. The dragon was better at ice than he was at heat, and it had more of it.
It's not about the floor, he thought, dodging another torrent. Stop playing its game.
Wings.
The wings were thin. Membranes of pale ice-blue skin stretched across long bones, not plated with scales like the rest of it. And they were wet. Every time the dragon breathed, a fine mist of frost settled on them.
Wet things conduct.
"Eira!" he yelled. "Make it come down low!"
The shieldmaiden didn't ask why. She just ran out into the middle of the frozen nave, banged her axe against her shield, and roared a war cry at the dragon in a language Percy didn't know.
The dragon folded its wings and dove at her.
Percy was waiting.
He'd called Asterion out of the shadows, and the Minotaur's shadow caught him by the back of the shirt and threw him. Straight up, twenty feet, into the dragon's path. And at the top of the arc, with the dragon's open mouth rushing toward him and Eira's shield raised against the frost below, Percy grabbed the leading edge of its left wing with both hands.
And let go of everything.
[LIGHTNING CALL! (Point-blank)]
The wing lit up from the inside like a paper lantern. The lightning ran through every wet bone and vein of it, branching and crackling, and the membrane blew apart in a shower of steam and ice.
The Cryo Dragon screamed and fell out of the sky.
It hit the floor of its own cathedral so hard the whole building shook. Ice pillars cracked. A stained-glass window shattered in a rain of frozen color. And before it could get up, Eira was on its head with her axe, and Asterion was on its neck, and Fang was hanging off its tail, and Percy was running across the cathedral floor with his xiphos burning white with static.
The dragon breathed one last time.
Percy took it on the dragon's own scale. He held his shirt open with the scale against his chest, and the frost broke around him like water around a rock.
Then he was close enough, and he drove the sword in under its jaw, up and in, all the way to the hilt.
The Cryo Dragon shuddered. It let out a long, rattling, frosty sigh, and went still. The cold went out of the cathedral all at once, like a window closing.
[BOSS DEFEATED: CRYO DRAGON (Lv 55)]
[FLOOR 8 CLEARED.]
[+38,000 EXP]
[LEVEL UP! Level 52 → Level 55]
[Loot acquired:]
[Frost Crystals x12]
[Ice Armor (Slow resistance +40%)]
[Dragon Heart (Ability: Cold Aura)]
[Skill acquired: Icebending (Lv 2)]
[Shadow Extraction available. Target: Cryo Dragon.]
Percy stood over the dragon's body, panting, and looked at that last line for a long time.
My shadows are eight out of eight. I'm full.
[Hidden Quest reward applied: DRAGON'S TITHE. The stolen scale may bind one shadow beyond the Host's capacity. Bound Slot: 1.]
He held out his hand.
"Arise," he said.
The darkness came up out of the dragon's corpse like smoke. It coiled up into the vaulted ceiling of the cathedral, vast and winged and serpentine. And when it came down again, it was a dragon made of shadow and frost, with eyes like two cold blue stars. It lowered its great head until its nose was nearly touching Percy's chest.
[Shadow Extraction successful.]
[New Shadow: CRYO DRAGON (Elite). Name your shadow.]
"Rime," Percy said softly.
[Shadow Army: 9 / 9 (8 + 1 Bound Slot). Capacity full. Increase Vessel Rank to expand.]
Eira was beginning to fade.
He saw it happening. The edges of her were going thin and gold, unraveling like thread pulled off a spool. She looked down at her own hands, at the gold light coming off them, and then up at Percy. She didn't look afraid. She looked peaceful.
"I am going home," she said. "Aren't I."
"I think so," Percy said. "I'm sorry I don't know for sure."
She smiled. She reached out and gripped his forearm, warrior to warrior, the way he'd seen Romans do it in another life.
"A hundred years in the ice," she said, "and a mad little skald with lightning in his hands came and sat with me for six hours, so I would not burn." Her grip tightened. "I will tell them about you. In the hall. Wherever I go."
And then she was gone. Just a drift of golden thread on the wind, and the smell of snow.
[FAITH: A thread of the Loom remembers the Host.]
[Note: Faith cannot be earned within the Loom. This has been recorded regardless.]
Percy stood alone in the ruined cathedral for a while. Then he walked up the stairs behind the dragon's treasure heap, toward the gold thread of the next Gate.
Floor 9 was dark.
Not night-dark. Something else. The walls were black glass, smooth and cold and perfectly reflective. When Percy walked through the Gate, he saw himself in them: a hundred Percys, a thousand, stretching away into the dark in every direction. Tired, filthy, frost-burned, with a bronze sword in his hand.
[FLOOR 9: THE SHADOW LABYRINTH]
[Rank: E]
[Enemies: Lv 45–55]
[Boss: Lv 60]
[MAIN QUEST: Defeat the Shadow Doppelganger.]
[SIDE QUEST: Real or Not. Find the true exit among twelve illusions.]
[HIDDEN QUEST: ???]
[Note: The Labyrinth remembers everything the Host does here.]
Percy read that last line twice.
Remembers everything I do here.
He knew this kind of floor. Not this exact one, but this kind. In his first life, he'd fought things that learned. Things that watched you fight and got better at fighting you. A floor that remembered everything he did, with a boss at the end called the Shadow Doppelganger.
It's going to copy me.
[Great Sage concurs. Probability: 94%.]
Then I need to be careful about what I show it.
He stood in the black glass corridor for a long minute and thought it through. As much as he could, through the Thread-Worn fog. Then he put the xiphos away, and he lifted his hand, and let lightning crackle around his fingers.
Lightning, he thought. And shadows. That's what I'll use. Only those. Let it copy those. Let it think that's all I am.
And I'll keep the rest.
The Labyrinth took two days.
It was a maze of black glass and lies. Corridors that looked straight bent back on themselves. Doors opened onto walls. Floors that looked solid were illusions laid over pits. Shadow Assassins hunted him through the dark, silent and invisible until the moment they struck. Dark Beasts prowled the long halls, things like wolves made of smoke with too many eyes. Illusionists hid behind the glass and threw phantoms at him: copies of Annabeth, of Grover, of his mother, calling for help from the far side of walls that weren't there.
That was the worst part. The phantoms.
Once, deep in the second day, he turned a corner and saw his mother. Sally. Standing at the end of the corridor in her candy-store uniform, with her hands out to him, smiling.
"Percy," she said. "Baby. Come home. Come on. It's okay."
He knew it wasn't real. He knew. He stood there for a long time anyway, with lightning crackling uselessly around his fist, unable to make himself throw it.
In the end, he sent Fang. He couldn't do it himself.
He sat down in the corridor afterward, with his back against the black glass, and put his face in his hands for a while.
[Great Sage notes the Host's heart rate is elevated.]
I'm fine.
[Great Sage notes the Host is not fine.]
...Yeah. Okay. I'm not fine. He breathed out. But I'm going to keep going anyway.
[Great Sage will remain here.]
He found the twelve exits at the end of the second day. Twelve identical doors of black glass in a great circular hall, each one glowing with gold thread. Each one exactly the same.
Eleven of them were lies.
He didn't use Mist-Sight. He was afraid of showing the Labyrinth too much. Instead, he stood in the middle of the hall and thought about it, slowly, the way Annabeth would have. Through the fog, one step at a time.
The Labyrinth was a maze of reflections. Everything in it was a reflection of something else. Every illusion was a copy.
So he took off one of his sneakers and threw it at the nearest door.
In eleven of the doors, the sneaker's reflection flew to meet it. Perfect mirror images.
In the twelfth door, there was no reflection at all. Just gold thread, and dark.
The real door was the only one that wasn't a mirror.
[SIDE QUEST COMPLETE: REAL OR NOT]
[+11,000 EXP]
[LEVEL UP! Level 55 → Level 57]
[WIS +2 (Insight).]
He went and got his sneaker back. Then he walked through the real door, into the Hall of Mirrors.
The Hall of Mirrors was round, and vast, and made entirely of black glass. A thousand Percys looked back at him from the walls, the floor, the ceiling.
Then one of them stepped out.
It was him.
Exactly him. Same height. Same messy, static-charged hair. Same tired eyes, same frost-burned cheeks, same filthy jacket. It was holding a bronze xiphos exactly like his. The only difference was the eyes. Its eyes were black. Completely black, from edge to edge, like holes in the world.
[BOSS: THE SHADOW DOPPELGANGER]
[Level: 60]
[Abilities copied from the Host's actions on this floor:]
[Lightning Call]
[Static Discharge]
[Shadow Step]
[Shadow Summon (copies: Fang, Asterion)]
[HIDDEN QUEST UNLOCKED: THE FACE BENEATH. Defeat the Doppelganger without using any System skill.]
Percy looked at that last line, and almost laughed.
Of course.
The Doppelganger smiled at him with his own face.
"Hi, Percy," it said. It had his voice too. That was the worst part. "You look tired."
"I am," Percy said.
"I know. I know everything about you." It tilted its head. "I know you're scared. I know you think you're going to fail them, like you failed everybody last time. Bianca. Beckendorf. Silena. Your mom." The black eyes glittered. "You let him kill your mother, Percy. And Paul. You were at college, and you didn't come home in time, and he killed them."
Percy's grip tightened on his sword.
"It's okay," the Doppelganger said softly. "I'm not judging. I'm you. I just want you to know that I know. And one day, a long way up this tower, I'm going to be waiting for you at the top. Wearing your real face. And on that day, you won't be able to lie to me about any of it."
[Great Sage notes: This entity's statements exceed its floor parameters. Great Sage is logging it.]
Then it raised its hand, and lightning crackled around its fingers. His lightning. And the shadows on the floor around it rose up into the shape of a Minotaur and a hound.
Percy put his sword up.
And for the first time on this floor, he didn't use the sky. He didn't use the shadows. He didn't use anything the System had ever given him. He just fought.
It was the hardest fight of his second life.
The Doppelganger had everything he'd shown it. It threw lightning at him across the Hall of Mirrors, and he had to dodge, and dodge, and dodge, rolling across the black glass with his skin prickling and his hair standing on end. It stepped through the shadows and came out behind him. Its shadow-Minotaur swung a shadow-axe at his head, and its shadow-hound went for his ankles. And he had nothing to fight back with but a bronze training sword and a body that was so tired it hurt to breathe.
[HP: 1,310 → 922]
[HP: 922 → 540]
[HP: 540 → 311]
But he had something else, too.
He had seven years of swordsmanship that the System had never taught him. He had a summer in a sword arena with a son of Hermes, learning to fight. He had a war. He had the Battle of Manhattan, and the Labyrinth, and the Sea of Monsters. He had a thousand duels with a thousand monsters, in a world that didn't exist anymore.
And the Doppelganger hadn't seen any of it.
It only knew what he'd shown it on this floor. And on this floor, he'd shown it lightning and shadows.
So when it came at him at last, sword to sword, he did something it didn't expect.
He let it hit him.
He let it bind his blade. He let it push him back against the black glass wall, its black eyes inches from his. And then he twisted his wrist, and hooked the guard of his xiphos under its crossguard, and turned. A small, tight, vicious motion, exactly the way Luke Castellan had shown him on a hot afternoon in the arena a lifetime ago. Exactly the way he'd practiced it ten thousand times since.
The disarming move.
The Doppelganger's sword flew out of its hand and spun away across the Hall of Mirrors and shattered against the glass.
For one second, the thing with his face just stared at him. Its black eyes went wide. And Percy saw something in them he'd never expected to see.
Surprise.
Then he put his sword through its chest.
The Doppelganger didn't scream. It just looked down at the bronze blade in its heart. Then it looked up at him and smiled, slow and strange, with his own mouth.
"There," it whispered. "See? That's the part of you I couldn't copy." It started to come apart, like smoke. Like black glass shattering in slow motion. "I'll learn it. Eventually. I'll be waiting."
And it was gone.
[BOSS DEFEATED: THE SHADOW DOPPELGANGER (Lv 60)]
[HIDDEN QUEST COMPLETE: THE FACE BENEATH]
[The Host defeated his reflection using only what he truly is.]
[FLOOR 9 CLEARED.]
[+46,000 EXP]
[LEVEL UP! Level 57 → Level 60]
[Loot acquired:]
[Shadow Cloak (Stealth +35%)]
[Illusion Core (Crafting material)]
[Mirror Blade (Briefly copies one enemy skill)]
[Hidden Reward: Title: UNMIRRORED. (Immunity to mimicry and copy effects of equal or lower rank.)]
[LEVEL 60 MILESTONE REACHED.]
[THIRD CLASS SLOT UNLOCKED.]
[Eligible classes: Sorcerer · Wizard.]
Sorcerer, Percy thought, without hesitation.
[Class slotted: SORCERER (Lv 1).]
[Bloodline: Sky (Zeus). Sorcerous Origin: Storm-Born.]
[Bloodline magic growth accelerated. Metamagic unlocked.]
[MP: 260 → 420.]
He sat down in the middle of the Hall of Mirrors, among the broken black glass, and pulled up his status. Mostly just to see it. Mostly to remember how far he'd come.
Name: Perseus Jackson
Vessel Rank: E (Faith toward Rank D: 1,986 / 2,000)
Level: 60
Classes: Fighter (Lv 60) · Monk (Lv 34) · Sorcerer (Lv 1)
Title: Unmirrored
HP: 311 / 1,460
MP: 420 / 420
STR: 66
AGI: 71
VIT: 64
INT: 31 (Thread-Worn: 23)
WIS: 40 (Thread-Worn: 30)
CHA: 46
Shadow Army (9 / 9): Asterion · Gorrath · Fang · Chi-Chi · Lazarus · Gloop · Thing One · Thing Two · Rime
Fourteen Faith short of Rank D.
He looked at that number, and laughed, a little hysterically, alone in the dark. Then he stopped laughing, because it hurt his ribs.
[Tower time elapsed: 5 days.]
[Real time remaining before waking: 3 hours.]
Three days.
He got to his feet. Every muscle in his body screamed. Across the Hall of Mirrors, where the Doppelganger had been standing, a door was opening in the black glass. And this one wasn't gold thread.
It was a portcullis. Old iron, rusted and enormous, rising slowly on clanking chains. Through it he could see green grass, and blue sky, and white walls in the distance with banners snapping from their towers. Red and gold. A dragon on every one.
And somewhere, faint and far away, a trumpet was blowing.
[FLOOR 10: GATE FLOOR.]
[THE CAMELOT TRIAL.]
[Once entered, there is no retreat.]
Percy took a deep breath. He picked up his training sword. It was nicked and scratched from two floors of fighting, and still just a cheap bronze xiphos.
Not for much longer, he thought.
He walked toward the gate.