Red Skies at Morning | Clarisse La Rue x OC | Percy Jackson AU

Percy Plays The Maury Game

After a few days, the black and blue marks Clarisse gave me were beginning to fade and the excitement about Percy was beginning to calm down.

Mostly...

The senior kids were watching him like hawks and the rumors had exploded after it had gotten out that his mother was human, which some took to mean that he must be a Big Three kid. Everyone was now arguing about who his father was. Even some of the counselors were making bets. But there wasn't much to go on with pure speculation.

He wasn't gifted with the raw physical power of the Ares kids and he was kind of awful at archery, so Apollo was also out of the question. He didn't have any special touch with metalwork or technology and the grape vines in the fields wanted nothing to do with him, so Hephaestus and Dionysus were off the table too.

It was three days after Percy arrived that Cabin 11 was scheduled for sword fighting practice.

The arena we practiced in was an amphitheater that we used for duels and training. There was a line of straw dummies dressed in Greek armor with other miscellaneous training devices pushed to the edges.

We began our warm-up with simple slashes and stabs at the training dummies. Percy was having a hard time though, none of the swords we had seemed balanced for him and we couldn't find anything that fit him. It certainly wasn't doing him any favors for his strikes.

After our warm up we moved on to dueling. Wings took Percy as his sparring partner, prompting some kids to tease him a bit.

"Good luck," an undetermined guy named Ethan said with a smirk, "Luke's the best swordsman in the last three hundred years."

"Maybe he'll go easy on me," Percy responded .

The other kids laughed and I walked over with a sympathetic smile masking my smirk.

"Don't count on it," I warned, but it wasn't just teasing.

I knew from experience that Wings didn't believe in going easy on newbies. He claimed that the best way to learn was through pain and mistakes. And by that logic, Wings is a very good teacher.

Ethan calling Luke the best swordsman in three hundred years wasn't an exaggeration, either. Even Chiron, who'd been training heroes for thousands of years, was consistently impressed by his skill.

I partnered with a tall, older Hermes guy named Connor. He was usually paired with his brother, but every now and then they'd look for someone else to have diversity in their training.

I didn't mind the massive height difference too much since it was casual-sparing. And I considered it good practice to spar with taller opponents. Especially since I was still pretty short for my age.

After a while of sparing, Wings called break time and I noticed that when he threw his water over his head, Percy had copied him. What a couple of dorks.

Once the break was over Wings told us to gather around for a demonstration, but it was really just another hazing ritual. Wings always partnered with newbies.

The point was similar to Clarisse's toilet routine, but the difference was that Wings was more subtle about tormenting the newbies.

We gathered around Wings and Percy, most of us not even trying to hide our smiles knowing Wings was just going to show off while embarrassing the new kid.

I gotta admit, there was some purpose to this initiation. It was to keep new campers humble so they didn't get big heads after one day of training and go around challenging people to duels and getting themselves hurt...