Jace Irons: The Shard of Chaos

Chapter Twenty-Four: Home Sweet Home

I breathed out a sigh of relief. I pulled off my helmet and inspected my suit. It had performed perfectly, just as designed. The bronze metal glistened in the sunlight, not a scratch on it. Something still nagged at me, though.

I looked up and gazed at the carnage around me. The woods were strewn with weapons, flames, and bodies. Campers laid all over the battlefield, some of them writhing and crying out for help, and some of them not moving at all. I prayed to the gods that none of them were campers I knew.

I was shaken from my thoughts as David clapped me on the shoulder.

"Helluva suit, dude." he said, breathing hard. "How many monsters you merc with that thing?"

"More than a few," I panted.

I heard some shuffling come from behind me. It was Terrence, the former bully from the Ares cabin. He was walking slowly, holding his sword loosely in one hand. His face was pale and he didn't look so good.

"Hey man you okay?" I asked.

"Hey. Yeah, I'm..." he rasped weakly.

He walked closer to David and I. He opened his mouth to respond, then suddenly collapsed onto my shoulder. "Woah," I said, holding him up.

I peered over his shoulder to see a broken-off spear shaft sticking out of his back, blood seeping out of the wound. "Let's go," I said to David.

David helped me more or less drag Terrence's unconscious body over to the medical tent where the Apollo campers were hard at work tending to the wounded. We laid him on a cot and an Apollo camper came over and started working on him right away. We stepped back out and surveyed the rest of the scene. There were quite a few more wounded campers that needed help. David and I helped get the rest of the wounded to the medical tents, and the dead to the amphitheater.

We spent the next several hours cleaning up the carnage, and everyone was thoroughly exhausted by the end. After that, all the campers gathered in the amphitheater, where the dead were wrapped in burial shrouds and burned on a funeral pyre. Six campers died in total, and we all watched in silence as the smoke carried up towards the sky. I was sad when that happened. The Dionysus kid that I had seen get killed had a twin brother who survived the battle. I watched him gulp and blink back tears as he lit his brother's funeral pyre. I was sad that I couldn't help him in time, and angry at the Titan Army at the same time. I wanted to make them pay. There was no way they were going to take Olympus, or Camp Half-Blood. Not if I had anything to say about it.

After that, we all ate dinner in relative silence. I sat with my cabinmates, and fortunately, we had all made it through, minus a few cuts and bruises. Everyone was in good spirits because we had won the battle, but the deaths of those campers hit everyone hard. They were peoples' friends, their siblings, their family. One thing was for sure: we were at war now, and it was not a war I was going to lose. I was shaken from my thoughts as Beckendorf nudged me.

"Hey, man. You alright?"

"Yeah, I'm fine." I said. "Just shaken that those campers died, I guess."

Beckendorf looked to the sky. "Yeah, that's war." he said somberly. "Best thing we can do now is try to make sure that no one else dies, too." He looked back at me. "Don't worry, Jace. There's no way they're gonna win. You with me?" He held up his hand. I clapped it.

"All day," I said. Beckendorf was a good leader, and a good friend. With him leading the Hephaestus cabin, we would win the war for sure.

"That exosuit of yours looked pretty cool. You wrecked that Lastrigonian like he was made of paper."