”Let the Trials begin!”
At the moment Natasha completed her speech, the five contestants darted from their starting places and into the maze before them. It was like someone had flipped a switch on all of them at once. The burst of speed and adrenaline was simultaneous. Despite that fact that the Trials weren’t necessarily a race, each felt compelled to run as if their life depended on it; however, while the others kept sprinting toward inevitable danger, Andreas and Adriana seemed to have the same idea—they paused. Although rushing headlong into danger was thrilling, it wasn’t exactly wise or sensible when the keys to their victory had to be earned. Like every training exercise and sparring match, the centurion would start by developing a best guess as to what she was facing.
She halted within several yards of the opening, looking backwards to watch as it sealed and silence fell. Odd, it was—like a magic barrier had been wrapped around the maze to prevent any sort of communication between the candidates and the crowd, which made sense. Any outside guidance would likely be considered cheating. It would be one way to disqualify unworthy candidates, but masking the exterior sound evened the odds and made individual performance a necessity. Inside the course, they were well and truly alone.
Smooth stone walls stood at Adriana’s back and sides. They were three times her height, at least, impossible to climb without some sort of ledge to grasp. For now, there was no way of glimpsing a potential path to the doors. She would have to discover a route on her own. But, before she went recklessly charging down the corridor, the daughter of Mars reached for her quiver, snatching her bow and an arrow. She loaded the arrow to the weapon and drew the bowstring, releasing the projectile into the uncharted space before her. Seconds passed. Her arms temporarily relaxed and lowered, her bow hanging loosely in a single hand. The shot had been a test. If there were any easily triggered dangers, Adriana wanted to know of them prior to her advance.
Her patience was met with a low whistling sound. From somewhere directly in front of her, a spear came tearing through the air. She dodged to her left, causing the mysterious weapon to crash into the sealed entrance. The wooden shaft snapped by the force of impact. If she’d been running in the spear’s path when it was released, the call would have been much closer and assuredly harmful. Thank the gods her career as a centurion had taught her that what looked harmless rarely was. She had to expect the unexpected. It was the only way for people like them—demigods, demi-titans, legacies—to survive out in the world.
So, the Trials were laden with booby traps. Adriana was glad she’d checked. Though it wasn’t her weapon of choice, she kept her bow at hand. Chances were she’d need it going forward. She crept along lightly, her senses tuned to detect any abnormalities in the walls that might signal a trap. After reaching the end of the first corridor, she was assured the spear-firing setup had retired its use, so she increased her pace.
Proceeding at a slight jog wasn’t as reckless as sprinting, but it wasn’t without its troubles, either. Turn after turn, corridor after corridor were loaded with all manner of tricks and obstacles. To the competitor, it felt like hours had passed, when really only minutes had gone by. It didn’t matter whether she went left or right or tried to map the layout of the maze in her head; it was constantly changing (or so she thought). She’d already suffered cuts, burns, and bruises from a few close calls too many. Projectile weapons, spewing fire, compacting walls, pitfalls—you name it, the Trials had it. Luckily, she had yet to encounter any monsters or any of the other contestants, but she knew that luxury wouldn’t last. One of them would have to fall behind, and even if it wasn’t in this stage, she was bound to confront one of her opponents eventually.
Okay. Another right. Another left. Walking, walking, aaaand… a dead end. Not the first she’d encountered and surely not the last. With a sigh, the warrior spun on her heels, prepared to stroll back the opposite way, when she froze. The opening of the dead-ended stretch she had entered had become a solid wall. She was trapped and she could sense it, the oncoming threat. It was like the calm before a storm or the tightness of reality just before gravity induced a fall. Her reflexes kicked in automatically. An arrow was nocked and drawn taut on her bow before she could blink. Surrounded by bare stone walls, she didn’t know what was coming, but it certainly didn’t feel as simple a trap as the others.
Similar to the trap with the spear, this new trap activated from the front, aimed to batter the candidate stuck in its stone cage. A volley of arrows, some combination of mechanics and magic, fired at Adriana from the surface she faced. Instinctively, she dropped down and rolled to the wall at her right. She’d taken a scratch or two in her evasive maneuver, marked with a fresh red line on her cheek and arms. Pressed flat against the side of the chamber, the arrows couldn’t reach her, but their barrage did not cease. Rather than crashing into the back wall like they should have, the projectiles passed through the surface like water and continued to stream from the origin of their attack. It was a ploy designed to corner anyone who wandered into its grasp. Without proper training, its victim would have been torn to shreds.
Fortunately, Adriana was very well trained. She’d managed to avoid any serious injuries, however trapped she was against the relentless onslaught of what she typically perceived to be a weaker weapon. Setting aside the immediate concern of becoming swiss cheese, the centurion decided to fire an arrow of her own. She shot for the wall that appeared to be functioning as some sort of magic portal, hopeful that the magic would apply to objects beyond those of the trap itself. Alas, only the enchanted weapons seemed capable of passing through. Merda.
How was she going to get herself out of this mess? There was no way of climbing the walls or digging under them. She saw no levers or switches that might shut off the bombardment. At this rate, she was gonna be stuck there all goddamn day! Miraculously, the small peak in her frustration coincided with her lucky break. Quite suddenly, the offensive ruse glitched. The centurion surmised it had temporarily run out of magic power because, for that brief time, everything felt still. As if coaxing her forward, a short opening in the back of the chamber emerged from sliding stone. Not knowing when the barrage would start up again, Adriana took her chance. She dashed toward the low exit and lunged through it, escaping into a foreign corridor.
Of course, when she’d finally reached a space she had anticipated was momentarily safe and was met with yet another fucking arrow that she narrowly dodged on reflex, the daughter of Mars snapped a cord. She sprung at her offender, her gaze and judgment clouded by crimson as she tackled the other to the ground, straddling their abdomen and threatening to suffocate them under the applied pressure of her bow. A strangled sound of protest chirped from the victim’s throat, followed by a flurry of apologies and introductions. The poor thing was clearly frightened rather than fighting.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!! Adriana! It’s me! It’s M-Monica! I swear, I thought you w-were a monster or something!! I was coming a-around the corner and I j-just saw movement a-and I—”
Gradually, the familiar voice eased the centurion’s force and cleared her senses until she stopped seeing red and stared down at the legionnaire in surprise. “Monica?” Though no longer entirely threatening the girl, Adriana held her position, just in case she was playing innocent for an advantage. Honestly, she doubted it. Monica Dijon was a soldier in the Fourth Cohort, Adriana’s cohort. She was a reputably skilled archer, but she didn’t possess many other outstanding traits and had yet to best her centurion in combat. How and why she’d entered the Trials, the daughter of Mars could only wonder. “Relax. You’re fine. I’m not going to hurt you. For now, anyway.” At last, she removed herself from the archer and stood, offering a hand to help her up. A quick once-over of the girl, who looked quite frenzied and beaten up, prompted her to ask, “What happened to you? You look awful.”
“Gee, thanks.” Monica rolled her eyes but gratefully accepted Adriana’s help in standing. She continued with a sigh, “Oh, booby traps, weird magic, a couple of monsters—the expected. Just… a little more intense than I’d like.” Her subtle smirk regarded her centurion’s appearance. “You don’t look all that different. The Trials suit you.”
It was Adriana’s turn to smirk. “I’ll take that as a compliment. I’d likely be dead or gravely injured if they didn’t. So, any luck proving yourself ‘worthy’ yet?”
“Sadly, no. I’ve been more pathetic than worthy of late, to be honest. When I signed up for the Trials, I wasn’t expecting…”
“—this?” Adriana nodded. “Yeah, I get it. I don’t know what I was really anticipating either, but a stage like this was not like anything I had in mind. Looks like we’re both a little lost, then.”
Thinking upon her words, Adriana elected to suggest some cooperation. If neither of them had earned a key, there was surely no harm in them teaming up for a short while, was there? It wasn’t like they had to fight one another, after all. Together, they’d probably have a better chance at finding the doors or, at least, some answers. She glanced to their left, eyeing another unexplored path. “Why don’t we team up, watch one another’s backs? If we work together, we should find the doors faster. Besides, we’re both respectable warriors of the Fourth Cohort. I say we show these other candidates what Camp Jupiter’s wolves are made of.”
Once the suggestion was voiced, both girls were grinning. Monica nodded in agreement, flipping her bow in hand. “I like the way you think. Lead on, Centurion.”
Adriana and Monica were no doubt an efficient team. They had the advantage of being familiar with each other’s fighting styles, so watching each other’s backs was easy. Better, the majority of the traps they encountered as they pushed through the maze were duplicates of others they had already encountered and conquered. They seemed to be making good time, but with no clues to tell if they’d neared the doors, neither could be sure. They could just as well have been wandering around aimlessly for the past several minutes. Only the spectators would know.
As they were striding through yet another corridor, the daughter of Mars halted and turned on her companion, sighing, “Monica, I hate to say this, but I don’t think we’re getting anywhere this way. We should have found something by now. Maybe we should split up again, cover more ground.”
Monica frowned, unfortunately concurring, “You might be right. If we keep up like this, I bet we’re just going to be wandering new paths for an eternity. Whatever magic they used to build this place seems to be working against us.”
“I’m afraid that’s true,” Adriana grimaced. “It’s supposed to test our limits. I don’t imagine it’s in favor of cooperation. We should—”
“—wait!” Monica interjected, forcing a silence between them.
Adriana quirked an eyebrow at her when nothing out of the ordinary occurred. “Wait for what?”
“I thought I heard something, just… just give it a second. I want to be su—”
And that’s when they heard it—a distant but much too near cacophony of squawking and screeching. Looking out above them, they saw a flock of hard-to-make-out somethings closing in on their position. Fast. Adriana had a sick sensation that she knew exactly what they were. In an environment of narrow stone channels, they would be easy prey for any flying predator, but these in particular were a lot more troublesome than most.
“Harpies,” she growled, cursing under her breath. Without any further hesitation, she pressed a hand to Monica’s back and pushed her forward, ordering the girl to move. “Monica, run. Now!”
The two girls took off at full speed, sprinting back the way they had come. Their backtracking brought them closer to the harpies, but tearing through new areas of the course was too dangerous. They would be charging into undiscovered traps. Retracing their steps, they knew what to watch out for. However, running wouldn’t matter if the flying terrors caught up to them, which was inevitable, really. The ground was riddled in turns and tricks while the sky was left untouched. It quickly became apparent that fleeing wasn’t going to work. If they wanted to survive, they’d have to fight.
“Monica, listen to me,” Adriana glanced briefly at the legionnaire beside her, her tone ringing with the same authority it had the last time they’d been at war. “We can’t outrun them. Eventually, they will reach us and we will have to fight.” The centurion’s side prickled with phantom pain. She’d fought harpies before and she knew just how nasty they could get. She had the scars to prove it. “I want you to find a hidden spot. You’re the better archer of the two of us. I’ll distract them and lure them close enough to your position so you can start taking them out. After that, it’s every girl for herself. We’re outnumbered. There’s at least a dozen of them. Battling from the ground, we don’t have much of a chance, but we can damn well try.”
“Okay, I can do that,” the daughter of Janus replied, “but where am I supposed to hide? It’s not like there’s that much variety in the structure of this place.”
“I know.” Adriana sighed. “But you just have to. Sneak around a corner maybe? Try to be inconspicuous? If we can take a few of them out by surprise, it may give us an edge, however small. We’ll need it.”
Monica shook her head doubtfully but didn’t deny her superior’s point. “Alright, I’ll try.” She offered a slight, fleeting smile. “You’re not half bad, Adriana. Ya know that?”
The daughter of Mars smirked in reply, “Neither are you, Monica. If we make it out of this, remind me to take a few archery pointers from you. Gods know, I could use ‘em.”
“Yeah, you could.” Monica jested, bearing a grin as they charged on down another stone strait. The area was recognizable with the exception of the new opening that broke the wall on their left. With no time to stop, Adriana planned to ignore it, conscious that it likely possessed more traps, but Monica paid no mind to the potential threat and charged abruptly through the space, exclaiming with a glimmer of curious hope, “Wait—this way!”
Adriana spun on her heels, staring down the mystery corridor in confusion. Monica had no reason to bolt into unfamiliar territory unless— “Monica! Stop!!” —unless, it was a trap. Sure enough, there was a perfect albeit unusually convenient ledge sticking out from one side of the channel that the archer could shoot from. In her gut, Adriana sensed it was not put there to aid them.
Monica did pause, but too late. As Adriana lurched through the opening, the trap sparked to life, snaring the archer in an electrified net. Her scream jarred the centurion in ways that she could not explain, nor that she would ever want to recall. She stood there for a moment, staring at Monica while the Trials executed their torture. A part of her considered leaving the agonized girl as prey for the harpies. It was cruel and awful, but she was no longer in any condition to fight, so what other purpose could she serve? A distraction for the monsters would give Adriana an edge in this competition—however, she wasn’t that heartless. Practical as her darker theory was, she would have to save it for an enemy. She wouldn’t even deserve a key if she claimed her success by sacrificing a friend.
After recovering from her brief pause of moral strife, reached out to yank the net off of her companion. It zapped her fingers, reminding her that there was a current running through it, she cursed, and then she resolved the situation by snatching her whip and using the weapon with its nicely shock-resistant grip to drag the snare away from its victim. Kneeling down, she checked for a pulse, as Monica had drifted from consciousness, and finding one, she sighed in relief. In normal circumstances, she would have carried her to safety, but the harpies were closing in, perhaps seconds away. She stashed Monica under the ledge she’d been aiming for, sending up a silent prayer that the harpies would chase turn their attention to her once she was on the run again.
This was where things got tricky. Without one of the Legion’s best archer’s as backup, Adriana would be facing over a dozen harpies on her own. She’d never be able to fend them off by hand alone; she needed a strategy. Or maybe, what she needed was a trap of her own. The maze was filled with them. If she could use her knowledge of the Trials’ dangers against her enemies, she might even be able to eliminate them. It was a stretch, but her only hope.
Returning to the previous corridor, the warrior waited with a loaded bow, her amber gaze trained on the horizon for the first sight of feathered flesh. When she saw it, she made her shot, sending one of the creatures, as a corpse, to the ground. Stunned and infuriated, the flock instantly locked their attention on the fierce-eyed soldier. “Come and get some, bird brains,” she grinned wickedly and turned around, darting a third time over the paths she and Monica had crossed earlier. The harpies hounded her with slashing talons and a frenzy of awful squawking. She shot a few more down with her bow, but most of the damage her pursuers sustained was caused by the traps she activated along the way. Some were impaled by spears, others burned, more tangled in nets of all sorts; however, the booby traps weren’t making nearly the dent she anticipated they would. At this rate, she’d have to step up her game to avoid suffering the wrath of the ravenous flock.
She thought then of how nice it would have been to have Storm or Rockie at her side. Their powers could have blasted or blown her opponents out of the sky without hardly lifting a finger. Storm had so much faith in her skill, yet she hardly had an ability capable of wiping out a dozen or so harpies. She reflected on their first meeting, when they’d spoken to one another about their powers. She had insisted that his godly abilities heavily outweighed her own, and yet he’d admitted in response: “I get the feeling though that cursing someone’s weapon might be quite helpful when you have an arrow hurtling towards your face.” He wasn’t wrong; it was a comforting advantage to possess, but—Di immortales! Arrows!! Storm was right. Her power was helpful, possibly even life saving.
With renewed vigor, Adriana sprinted through the web of corridors and corners, blazing her way toward the trap that had nearly incapacitated her earlier. Her plan was mad, but there was no one to judge. She figured, if she could use her cursing ability to shield just herself from the arrows in the magically powered death trap, the surrounding projectiles would take out the harpies as they closed in on her. Hopefully the freaks were clouded by rage or merely dumb enough to fall for it.
When the entryway came into view, she slowed, allowing her followers to catch up. It didn’t take long. In seconds, they were practically on her. She riskily slipped underneath a few slashes to somersault into the center of the trap. As her gut tensed to warn of the impending magical barrage of arrows, she held her ground, locking eyes with the harpies to coax their anger. The closer they came to tearing her to shreds, the more likely her plan was to work. Sure enough, they launched at her, blinded by anger and the deception that they’d finally trapped their prey. As she was about to become the victim of a vicious shredding, Adriana crouched down and blocked her face with her forearms. Her bracers, chest plate, and greaves were her only additional defense if her trick went south.
The centurion’s dedicated focus paid off. She placed her trust in her power, commanding a curse that turned every weapon on a path to harm her to useless paper, but anything else in the arrows’ wake was swiftly buffeted by wave upon wave of pointed projectiles. The few monsters that escaped complete annihilation had flown away in fear. The rest lay dead, fading to dust around her.
She held her position until the trap deactivated; however, this time, it didn’t stop as a result of low magic power. It just… stopped. Suspicious, she moved her arms aside and peeked around the area. The chamber had closed her off to all but one exit through which a door could be seen. At her feet was a small golden key, glowing a bit with some sort of residual magic. She should have been entirely amazed, but she honestly wasn’t. The Trials so far had been hellish enough to drain the joy out of moving forward. The most it provided was a vague sense of relief. She knew, as soon as she passed through the door, things would only get harder.
Despite the risks, Adriana did what she was expected to do—she picked up the key, got to her feet, and kept going. She slipped the key into the door’s lock, pausing before she turned it. “No going back, right?” A halfhearted smirk tweaked the corner of her lips as the door clicked, opening for her.
One down, three to go.
