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The telekhines trembled as the newly forged scythe rose into the air.
Finally, I found my nerve.
I lunged.
Riptide drove straight at Kronos’s chest, all my weight behind the strike, but the blade never pierced skin. It hit him with a metallic clang that rattled my arms to the shoulders. Kronos barely moved. He looked down at the sword pressed against his chestplate with mild amusement, like I’d thrown a toothpick at him.
Then he flicked his hand.
The world disappeared sideways.
I slammed into a black marble pillar hard enough to crack it. Pain exploded across my back. My vision doubled for a second, stars blinking across my eyes, but somehow I forced myself upright.
Kronos had already claimed the scythe.
“Ah…much better,” he said, turning the weapon slowly in his hands.
The voice coming from Luke’s body made my stomach twist. It sounded deeper now. Older. Like somebody speaking from the bottom of a canyon.
“What did you do to Luke?” I managed.
Kronos smiled.
“He serves me with his whole being, as I require. The difference is, he feared you, Percy Jackson.” His golden eyes burned brighter. “I do not.”
Run, my mind told me.
But then I heard something else.
Someone like Kronos should fear someone like you.
Calypso’s voice flashed through my head so suddenly it almost hurt.
Not just the words.
Her.
Her standing beside the lake on Ogygia, sunlight catching in her hair. The way she’d looked at me like she actually believed I could survive this war. Like I was stronger than I thought I was.
Something inside my chest twisted hard.
No.
I wasn’t running.
Not from him.
Not when I still had someone waiting for me.
Kronos lifted the scythe.
I charged him again.
“Percy—” Annabeth’s voice echoed faintly somewhere behind me, but I was already moving.
Kronos swung.
I barely got Riptide up in time.
The impact sounded like a mountain breaking.
Pain detonated through my entire body as the scythe slammed against my blade. The force blasted me backward across the hall.
But I stayed standing.
Kronos’s expression shifted.
Not fear.
Surprise.
Then the air thickened around me.
Time slowed.
The world dragged to a crawl like reality itself was turning to liquid. My muscles locked up. Every movement suddenly weighed a thousand pounds.
Kronos approached slowly. “Persistent,” he observed.
I tried to force myself forward anyway.
My legs shook violently with the effort.
Another memory hit me: Calypso’s arms wrapped around me, holding me like she could keep the whole war from reaching me if she just refused to let go. Her voice was soft against my shoulder, certain in a way I had never known how to be about myself.
They could never be what you are, Percy.
Something in me detonated.
My eyes started pounding. I knew that feeling. They were starting to glow.
Pressure built behind them so hard it felt like my skull was cracking apart.
The floor trembled beneath my feet.
Kronos stopped.
A deep roar echoed somewhere beneath the fortress.
Water.
Cracks ripped across the black marble floor.
Kronos frowned.
“What have you—”
The mountain exploded.
A deafening BOOM tore through the fortress as the floor behind Kronos detonated upward in a violent eruption of seawater and shattered stone. Black marble columns burst apart. Titan statues snapped in half. Ocean water blasted through the mountain itself in a raging wall of white foam and destruction.
Without thinking, I called to the Pacific below. Turned out, it answered.
For the first time since I’d seen him reborn, Kronos looked genuinely caught off guard.
The wave hit him like a freight train.
The telekhines vanished instantly.
Kronos drove the scythe into the floor, trying to hold his ground, but the torrent ripped him backward anyway, swallowing him beneath churning seawater and collapsing fortress debris.
The pressure around my body vanished.
Time snapped back to normal.
And then the wave hit me too.
The force knocked me off my feet and hurled me down the hallway. Breathing wasn’t the problem—I could breathe underwater just fine. The problem was the fortress collapsing around me in the current while the ocean used me like a pinball.
The current dragged me through the collapsing fortress at terrifying speed, but some buried Poseidon-kid instinct snapped into place. I could feel the water’s path before I saw it—every bend, every pull, every deadly pocket where the current wanted to slam me into stone.
I twisted with the flood instead of fighting it, kicking off a wall, ducking beneath a broken column, letting the current fling me sideways just as black marble debris rocketed through the space where I’d been. A Titan statue’s head crashed past inches from my face. The current whipped around a corner, and I angled my body with it, narrowly missing a jagged chunk of stone that would’ve taken my shoulder off.
Another slab of ceiling collapsed right in front of me.
I dove under it before I had time to think. The debris smashed through the water above me, close enough that the shockwave punched against my back.
The flood carried me onward, and I moved with it now—not controlling it exactly, but reading it. Surviving it.
The fortress around me groaned like the whole mountain was coming apart.
I surfaced just long enough to catch a glimpse of daylight ahead.
Through the collapsing spray, I caught a flash of Annabeth sprinting downslope toward the Labyrinth entrance, with Rachel and Nico close behind her.
The exit.
The torrent blasted me out of the fortress and down the mountainside in a roaring surge of seawater and rubble.
I rode the current, navigating it on instinct around broken columns, shattered marble, and chunks of fortress as the flood tore toward the Labyrinth entrance below.
Then I saw them.
Rachel. Nico. Annabeth.
All three of them staring up the mountain in horror.
“PERCY!” Annabeth yelled.
I shot ahead of the main surge and hit solid ground hard enough to skid across wet stone.
“RUN!” I shouted.
They didn’t argue.
We sprinted for the Labyrinth entrance as the mountain shook behind us. The roar of seawater thundered through the fortress above.
We dove back into the tunnels.
We got ahead of the surge long enough for everything to go quiet except for our breathing.
“What in Hades was THAT?” Nico demanded.
“I—I don’t know,” I said honestly.
The tunnel rumbled.
All of us froze.
A second later the walls cracked open.
Water exploded through the stone.
“MOVE!” I yelled.
The entire tunnel behind us burst apart as seawater poured into the Labyrinth in violent torrents. The flood roared toward us through the passageway, swallowing rocks, debris, and broken chunks of fortress.
“Oh, gods,” Rachel breathed.
We ran.
The water gained fast.
Way too fast.
I risked one glance backward and instantly regretted it. The tunnel behind us had become a solid wall of raging seawater.
And somehow I knew exactly why.
I’d pulled up more ocean than I meant to.
Much more.
The mountain hadn’t stopped breaking.
“Percy!” Annabeth shouted.
“I know!”
The tunnel shook violently. The wave thundered closer.
I skidded to a stop and turned.
“Keep going!” I yelled.
“What?” Annabeth looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
“Just do it!”
I planted my feet and thrust both hands forward.
The flood hit.
The impact almost ripped my arms out of their sockets.
Water pressure screamed against me from every direction. The tunnel trembled violently as the wave crashed to a halt only a few feet away, suspended in front of us in a swirling wall of white foam.
For one impossible second, I actually held it.
The effort nearly killed me.
My arms shook uncontrollably. The amount of seawater pressing against me felt enormous, like trying to stop the entire Pacific Ocean with my bare hands.
“GO!” I shouted through gritted teeth. “I CAN’T HOLD IT MUCH LONGER!”
The others backed away fast.
The wave surged forward another foot.
Stone cracked beneath my shoes and my footing started to give way. I shoved harder. The entire tunnel groaned.
Then the pressure broke. The wall of water exploded toward me.
“Oh, COME ON!”
I turned and ran.
The flood chased us through the Labyrinth like a living thing.
The roar behind us became deafening.
The water was only feet away when Nico spun around.
“Stop!” he shouted.
He slammed his hands together. The ground erupted. Jagged black rock exploded upward from the floor, forming a massive wall across the tunnel just as the flood crashed into it.
The impact shook the entire mountain. Water detonated against the black stone in a violent explosion of spray and foam. At first I thought it would punch straight through.
Cracks spread across Nico’s barrier like lightning.
Nico gritted his teeth and threw both hands forward. The ground answered him. More black rock erupted from the floor, locking into the first wall in jagged layers, sealing the cracks as fast as the water made them.
The flood slammed into the barrier again.
This time, the rock held.
The roar dulled all at once, trapped behind Nico’s wall. Seawater hissed through a few thin cracks, spraying mist across the tunnel. The flooding stopped.
We all stood there catching our breath.
Nico stood with both hands raised, breathing hard, his face pale and furious. The black rock kept grinding upward, bracing itself against the tunnel ceiling like it had roots.
Annabeth stared at the wall, then at me. “Percy…”
“What?” I asked.
“Your eyes.”
Everyone went still.
Annabeth’s expression had gone careful. Nico stared at me like I’d just sprouted another head. Rachel’s mouth opened a little, like she was trying to decide whether saying anything would make the situation worse.
I blinked. The pressure behind my eyes hadn’t faded yet, which meant their glow hadn’t either.
“Oh.” I wiped seawater off my face. “Okay, yes, my eyes glow now. Kind of not the time, guys!”
Rachel swallowed and looked at the Nico-wall. “Is it going to hold?”
“It should,” said Nico.
“Come on,” I said. “We should keep moving.”
I didn’t wait to see if it changed its mind.
Somewhere far behind the barrier, the ocean groaned against the stone.
“It’ll hold,” he said, though he sounded like he really hoped he was right.
Nico lowered one shaking hand, then the other. The rock didn’t move.
No one argued.
We continued deeper into the Labyrinth, leaving the muffled thunder of seawater sealed behind Nico’s wall.