The tragedy of magic. PJO/HOO

THE WAR GAMES

Once, Percy, Frank and Hazel got out of camp the Fifth Cohort formed two lines behind their centurions, Dakota and Gwen. They marched north, skirting the edge of the city, and headed to the Field of Mars—the largest, flattest part of the valley. The grass was cropped short by all the unicorns, bulls, and homeless fauns that grazed here. The earth was pitted with explosion craters and scarred with trenches from past games. At the north end of the field stood their target. The engineers had built a stone fortress with an iron portcullis, guard towers, scorpion ballistae, water cannons, and no doubt many other nasty surprises for the defenders to use.

"They did a good job today," Hazel noted. "That's bad for us."

"Wait," Percy said astonished. "You're telling me that fortress was built today?"

"Of course they did," a familiar voice said from behind them, "Legionnaires are trained to build. If we had to, we could break down the entire camp and rebuild it somewhere else. Take maybe three or four days, but we could do it." They all turned around to find the source of the voice was Castillo, standing there with a smirk on his face and a hand on his hip. However, everyone's attention was now on Castillo's shoes, a pair of laced, charcoal black heels, with golden sole's that were about six inches in height and he was walking in them like he was in socks.

They were all were shocked how he practically strutting over the many different pebbles, rocks and cracks in the mud without breaking his ankle. Hazel looked someone slapped her in the face with a fish and said they killed her dog at the sight of the heels, Frank looked a bit uncomfortable at the sight of the shoes as well, whilst Percy looked shocked and impressed that he could even stand let alone walk.

Seeing everyone's stares Castillo's smirk just grew wider, "you like them?" He asked as he gave a little display as he showed of the shoes, "got them at one of the shops in New Rome, they were on sale" this seemed to snap everyone out of their thoughts and Hazel cleared her throat returning to the previous conversation tying to ignore the fact that Castillo was wearing heels.

"Castillo is right, Legionnaires are practically born with a hammer and nails in their hands, we can set up base anywhere we want in the world in a matter of days" She said, still a little shocked at Castillo. After all the highest heel someone wore in the 1920s were at most three inches and were only worn by flappers, so to see Castillo in such, shocked her to say the least.

"Let's not," Percy said. "So you attack a different fort every night?"

"Not every night," Frank said. "We have different training exercises. Sometimes death ball—um, which is like paint-ball, except with...you know, poison and acid and fire balls. Sometimes we do chariots and gladiator competitions, sometimes war games."
Hazel pointed at the fort. "Somewhere inside, the First and Second Cohorts are keeping their banners. Our job is to get inside and capture them without getting slaughtered. We do that, we win."

Percy's eyes lit up like little fireworks, "like capture the flag," he said in a bit of awe, "I think I like capture the flag". He said it wit such a bright smile that it was hard for Castillo and the others not to smile as well, even if they had no idea what he was talking about. Well Castillo for sure hadn't he had only heard of capture the flag, he'd never been allowed to actually play it, his father would rather be burnt to death then for Castillo to play with others or go outside. 'Huh the irony' Castillo thought.

Frank laughed. "Yeah, well...it's harder than it sounds. We have to get past those scorpions and water cannons on the walls, fight through the inside of the fortress, find the banners, and defeat the guards, all while protecting our own banners and troops from capture. And our cohort is in competition with the other two attacking cohorts. We sort of work together, but not really. The cohort that captures the banners gets all the glory." He said with a bit of disappointment.