Heart Pierced - Kayla Knowles (1)

XVII. I Meet An Empousai Who Has Second Thoughts (And Swears Me To Secrecy)

(A/N: Given that I have portrayed Kelli as someone who acts more loyal to the protagonists than to Gaea (see my Godzilla/PJO crossover fic "Godzilla: Of Halfbloods and Kajiu" for example), I honestly am going to do so here too, to be honest with you all.)

"Son of a bitch."

Colton felt like he was in Tartarus. He wasn't actually in Tartarus, but close enough. The labyrinth truly was something else.

He hadn't even known what to even expect honestly.. so down here, he was at the mercy of this place.. and he knew it.

That's why he was very.. very cautious to be honest.. as he made his way carefully through the corridors, looking for any monsters or signs of traps that could lurk in every straightaway and around every corner. To his surprise, it seemed like out of all the days this could happen, the labyrinth was giving him a free pass.

The traps sent his way hadn't been complex, lethal, or anything like that.. more of the regular simple variety, those that could be easily detected. So it was literally very easy to dodge and escape them.

Monster wise, he had run into a few, but never in any serious numbers. Every once in a while, he'd come across a lone monster in his path - he'd lost track of where he was minutes ago and was now just following his gut - which he quickly dispatched with a single bullet. It was literally the easiest going in a mission he ever had.. and that was saying much, given that up until now, he had never been outside of camp except for the one mission with Clarisse.

And here I am, whole body deep in the hell hole that's the labyrinth and having the fucking easiest damn time down here, he thought to himself. Fantastic. It's like fate for once is making things easy for me.

The minute he thought that, he felt stupid. The fates never made anything easy.

For them to do so now only meant something was coming. Because of that, he remained on edge, checking around each and every corner before moving across every intersection and around every corner.

For now, though, nothing seemed to come, which was confusing and unsettling in and of itself. Was it this was an elaborate trap in and of itself? Lure him into a false sense of security before setting every monster imaginable on him? It felt like a possibility to be honest, in his opinion. For a son of Ares that was incredibly smart, all the possibilities that he could think of ran through his head.

So what in the fuck was the labyrinth planning for him then? He thought to himself, as he cautiously made his way forward. Chiron hadn't thought of giving him a damn map, which would have helped, but then again, the labyrinth was always expanding, always evolving.. making mapping this damn area difficult if not nearly impossible. So he was essentially going in blind, trusting that with luck, he would get to Hephaestus' forge.

It was almost an hour when he came to a certain intersection that seemed different than the rest. Physically, it looked the same, but what made different was the voice in his head - he didn't know whose voice it was - that started calling out to him.

Come, child..

It was chilling, to say the least..

Come, child.. become the king you were meant to be.

He was confused. King? What the fuck? He thought to himself. As far as Colton knew, the only king around was Zeus, lord of Olympus. Of course, he could count Poseidon as king of the seas and Hades as king of the underworld, but as far as he knew, any other titles of kings had been handed down by the Gods to those they saw worthy, not by a random chilling voice in the middle of the death trap known as the labyrinth calling out for a kid to come to them to be crowned.