Always The Prey (PART 3)

Chapter 12: Cuz Planning Is The Way To Go

Nico Di Angelo's POV

"The SHIELD officers will all come in on Thursday, that means we have three days to think of a plan to save Hecate and stop Tartarus," the red headed lady said, in the same monotone voice that she always uses.

That was my thing.

"We won't be able to do much because of, well," Percy started to say, cutting off by lifting up his arms to show the clunky cuffs surrounding his wrists.

"Don't worry about that," Clint, the archer and Will's idol, said. "We got the monsters under control. We'll fight them with your help. Tony designed earpieces for you guys and you'll be there telling us what to do and we'll just fight. We need to borrow some of your fancy bronze weapons though."

"That's a good idea Tony," Annabeth said, her calculating gray eyes searching around as if trying to find a physical clue or answer somewhere.

"If there's anything that I learned," Percy started to say. "Is that Tartarus is, if anything, prideful. He can be baited out. We can draw out the army to a safe location for us and try to restrict the fighting there to minimize civilian casualties."

Civilian casualties.

People.

Not soldiers.

I'm Nico Di Angelo, technically 16 years old and I am a soldier.

I wasn't spared with fate.

I am a soldier.

"Let's be practical about this though," Clarisse, our war expert, started to say. "We have 5 demigods and a bunch of weirdos in spandex. I get it at, y'all are super powered and stuff, but demigod shit is stuff you haven't ever dealt with. We can draw out the pit primordial, but how are we going to fight them on our own? Our other demigods are locked up and sold somewhere. We're spread out all throughout the country now. We don't have the support we need. This is, practically, not a war we can win."

Everyone was silent, letting her words sink in. She was right, but that was just a truth we were trying to ignore all this time.

"We could try to find out what he wants," I suggested. "Being a son of Hades, when I was down there, I saw the pit exactly as it was. There were always voices or sounds or something just floating around, messing with my head. Tartarus wants something from us demigods and we need to find out what it is. Or else, why would he go through such a deliberate plan?"

"Do you think it's possible for SHIELD to be infiltrated?" Tony questioned. "Fury is a crazy guy and he always goes to insane measures, but I feel like the world somehow found out about Greek mythology and, all of a sudden, everyone believed it and SHIELD acted awfully quickly. Maybe one of the bad guys is tweaking with something higher up in SHIELD?"

"That's a really good point," Will said. "I've seen Fury a few times and, from what I'm able to analyze, he jumps to solutions quickly. But everything happened all too fast. Maybe there was some influence."

"I've seen it happen before too!" Annabeth exclaimed. "During our third quest, the one where we both held the sky, Atlas had humans working for him. He made himself the General and basically paid mortals to be on his side."

Everyone was silently trying to just absorb what Annabeth had just said when Clint just had to break the silence.

"Oh my gods guys, was there anything that you DIDN'T do?? You carried the damn sky? How do you even do that??"

Everyone burst out laughing, glad to have a reason to break the tension.

"Anything is possible in our world," I told him, my cheeks dusted red from laughing.

We ended up sitting together in the living room couch area thing for the next couple of hours. Tony secretly smuggled in pizza, but he failed to steal four of the slices before we attacked all of the boxes.

Pizza is so much better than whatever slop we were eating before.

Anyway. We thought of a solid plan as to how to get this ready. The Avengers will actually work to reason out with Fury. Apparently, even though he's uptight and follows orders, he also knows how to be sneaky if he wants to and if he believes in the right cause. The Avengers just need to convince him. Then, we'll draw out Tartarus using Percy and Annabeth (because, well, I don't even know, literally any mythological thing has a grudge and wants revenge against them) and fight him and his monster-minions in an isolated place so they don't hurt normal people.

Foolproof plan, am I right?

What could go wrong?

(anything, with the demigod's luck with fate).