The Son of Neptune (The Heroes of Olympus #2)(59)

She, Frank, and Percy crouched against the rock. They watched in disbelief as several dozen large, hairy humanoids passed by, dressed in tattered bits of armor and animal fur. The creatures had six arms each, three sprouting on either side, so they looked like cavemen evolved from insects.

“Gegenes,” Hazel whispered. “The Earthborn.”

“You’ve fought them before?” Percy asked.

She shook her head. “Just heard about them in monster class at camp.” She’d never liked monster class—reading Pliny the Elder and those other musty authors who described legendary monsters from the edges of the Roman Empire. Hazel believed in monsters, but some of the descriptions were so wild, she had thought they must be just ridiculous rumors.

Only now, a whole army of those rumors was marching by.

“The Earthborn fought the Argonauts,” she murmured. “And those things behind them—”

“Centaurs,” Percy said. “But…that’s not right. Centaurs are good guys.”

Frank made a choking sound. “That’s not what we were taught at camp. Centaurs are crazy, always getting drunk and killing heroes.”

Hazel watched as the horse-men cantered past. They were human from the waist up, palomino from the waist down. They were dressed in barbarian armor of hide and bronze, armed with spears and slings. At first, Hazel thought they were wearing Viking helmets. Then she realized they had actual horns jutting from their shaggy hair.

“Are they supposed to have bull’s horns?” she asked.

“Maybe they’re a special breed,” Frank said. “Let’s not ask them, okay?”

Percy gazed farther down the road and his face went slack. “My gods ... Cyclopes.”

Sure enough, lumbering after the centaurs was a battalion of one-eyed ogres, both male and female, each about ten feet tall, wearing armor cobbled out of junkyard metal. Six of the monsters were yoked like oxen, pulling a two-story-tall siege tower fitted with a giant scorpion ballista.

Percy pressed the sides of his head. “Cyclopes. Centaurs. This is wrong. All wrong.”

The monster army was enough to make anyone despair, but Hazel realized that something else was going on with Percy. He looked pale and sickly in the moonlight, as if his memories were trying to come back, scrambling his mind in the process.

She glanced at Frank. “We need to get him back to the boat. The sea will make him feel better.”

“No argument,” Frank said. “There are too many of them. The camp…we have to warn the camp.”

“They know,” Percy groaned. “Reyna knows.”

A lump formed in Hazel’s throat. There was no way the legion could fight so many. If they were only a few hundred miles north of Camp Jupiter, their quest was already doomed. They could never make it to Alaska and back in time.

“Come on,” she urged. “Let’s…”

Then she saw the giant.

When he appeared over the ridge, Hazel couldn’t quite believe her eyes. He was taller than the siege tower—thirty feet, at least—with scaly reptilian legs like a Komodo dragon from the waist down and green-blue armor from the waist up. His breastplate was shaped like rows of hungry monstrous faces, their mouths open as if demanding food. His face was human, but his hair was wild and green, like a mop of seaweed. As he turned his head from side to side, snakes dropped from his dreadlocks. Viper dandruff—gross.

He was armed with a massive trident and a weighted net.

Just the sight of those weapons made Hazel’s stomach clench. She’d faced that type of fighter in gladiator training many times. It was the trickiest, sneakiest, most evil combat style she knew. This giant was a supersize retiarius.

“Who is he?” Frank’s voice quivered. “That’s not—”

“Not Alcyoneus,” Hazel said weakly. “One of his brothers, I think. The one Terminus mentioned. The grain spirit mentioned him, too. That’s Polybotes.”

She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she could feel the giant’s aura of power even from here. She remembered that feeling from the Heart of the Earth as she had raised Alcyoneus—as if she were standing near a powerful magnet, and all the iron in her blood was being drawn toward it. This giant was another child of Gaea—a creature of the earth so malevolent and powerful, he radiated his own gravitational field.

Hazel knew they should leave. Their hiding place on top of the rock would be in plain sight to a creature that tall if he chose to look in their direction. But she sensed something important was about to happen. She and her friends crept a little farther down the schist and kept watching.

As the giant got close, a Cyclops woman broke ranks and ran back to speak with him. She was enormous, fat, and horribly ugly, wearing a chain-mail dress like a muumuu—but next to the giant she looked like a child.

She pointed to the closed-up convenience store on top of the nearest hill and muttered something about food. The giant snapped back an answer, as if he was annoyed. The female Cyclopes barked an order to her kindred, and three of them followed her up the hill.

When they were halfway to the store, a searing light turned night into day. Hazel was blinded. Below her, the enemy army dissolved into chaos, monsters screaming in pain and outrage. Hazel squinted. She felt like she’d just stepped out of a dark theater into a sunny afternoon.