Forgotten prophecy

Chapter 63

The tone in the War Room could only be described as somber. At best. At worst it was bleak, depressed, and downright desolate. Following the departure of Tartarus's forces the heads of both camps and the major gods had assembled to discuss the problems they now faced. Thus far the only product of their convergence had been arguments on what to do. "No matter how you look at it we are outnumbered." Frank said, grinding his teeth. "We need to call in more reserves. We have at least a thousand other Romans who are honor-bound to help us."

"Yeah, but those thousand Romans are parents, grandparents, and people who are too old to fight!" Percy snapped back, slamming his hand onto the table and making the figurines fall over. "We can't ask them to abandon their families!"

"Going in battle is the best way to go!" Ares declared loudly, thumping on his breastplate. "Honorable! Fun even!"

"Shut it, Ares." Percy snarled, glowering at the god. "You immortals don't get a say."

"That is a bold thing to say." Venus observed from where she floated on her cloud above the map stretched out over the table. "Particularly since we will be a large help in this upcoming war."

"Only because you can't afford for Tartarus to wipe us out." Percy shot back, switching his glare to the goddess of love. "If you call in those reserves you are going to have a bunch of kids being raised without parents. At the very least, one. And that's if they are lucky."

"You are acting like we don't have a chance!" Hazel said, coming to Frank's aid. "Romans stand as one! That's the way it is! If you Greeks don't want to call in your own reserves-."

"What reserves?" Piper demanded. "You mean the nymphs, dryads, and the satyrs? Oh yes, we are calling them in. They are already on the way actually. BUT we made sure that the ones who had children or were old weren't included! Because we have something called a conscience."

"A whole lot of good a conscience does you if you are dead." Frank reminded them venomously.

"What's your deal man?" Leo asked cordially. "You aren't acting like yourself."

"What because I want to bring in the rest of the reserves?" Frank asked. When Leo nodded he barked out a laugh and shook his head. "You think that I like having to bring in all those people? I don't. Not even a little bit. But it is a whole lot better to have more numbers and actually stand a chance rather than just being overrun and slaughtered. Even if I call in the reserves, even if you get as many satyrs and that bunch as you think you will, even if Tartarus doesn't have as many monsters at his side as we think he does, we still have to deal with the Corrupted ones." The name had spread like wildfire through the camp mere minutes after the tense faceoff had ended and it stuck. Rather than referring to the demigods fighting alongside Tartarus as demigods it made it a whole lot easier to refer to them as something else.

Percy had no argument for that. It had been one of the many other issues that no solution had presented itself. Artemis's arrow had been stopped, with one hand no less, with contemptuous ease by Ryker. They had discussed the possibility that Ryker was stronger by the rest and thus had been chosen as the emissary, but they had thrown out that line of thinking. They couldn't assume that they all weren't equally as possible based on a mere hope. That would easily lead to their slaughter.

"It took Ryker losing it to beat Gina." Leo said softly, tinkering with something in his hands. "We can handle a couple of them, but they had a small army of em. And if they are all strong enough to take on a god's weapon and come out without a scratch, we got a problem. A big one."

"They can't be killed as far as we know." Hermes added, leaning on his staff. "We attempted several different ways of doing so on Gina, but nothing succeeded. At the very most they can be incapacitated if their vital organs are damaged enough."