The Last Olympian

“Thanks a lot.”
    I kept my eyes on Annabeth.
    She nodded reluctantly. “All right. Get moving.”
    Before I could lose my courage, I said, “Don’t I get a kiss for luck? It’s kind of a tradition, right?”
    I figured she would punch me. Instead, she drew her knife and stared at the army marching toward us. “Come back alive, Seaweed Brain. Then we’ll see.”
    I figured it was the best offer I would get, so I stepped out from behind the school bus. I walked up the bridge in plain sight, straight toward the enemy.
    When the Minotaur saw me, his eyes burned with hate. He bellowed—a sound that was somewhere between a yell, a moo, and a really loud belch.
    “Hey, Beef Boy,” I shouted back. “Didn’t I kill you already?”
    He pounded his fist into the hood of a Lexus and it crumpled like aluminum foil.
    A few dracaenae threw flaming javelins at me. I knocked them aside. A hellhound lunged and I sidestepped. I could have stabbed it, but I hesitated.
    This is not Mrs. O’Leary , I reminded myself. This is an untamed monster. It will kill me and all my friends .
    It pounced again. This time I brought Riptide up in a deadly arc. The hellhound disintegrated into dust and fur.
    More monsters surged forward—snakes and giants and telkhines—but the Minotaur roared at them, and they backed off.
    “One on one?” I called. “Just like old times?”
    The Minotaur’s nostrils quivered. He seriously needed to keep a pack of Aloe Vera Kleenex in his armor pocket, because that nose was wet and red and pretty gross. He unstrapped his axe and swung it around.
    It was beautiful in a harsh I’m-going-to-gut-you-like-a-fish kind of way. Each of its twin blades was shaped like an omega: Ω—the last letter of the Greek alphabet. Maybe that was because the axe would be the last thing his victims ever saw. The shaft was about the same height as the Minotaur, bronze wrapped in leather. Tied around the base of each blade were lots of bead necklaces. I realized they were Camp Half-Blood beads—necklaces taken from defeated demigods.
    I was so mad I imagined my eyes glowing just like the Minotaur’s. I raised my sword. The monster army cheered for the Minotaur, but the sound died when I dodged his first swing and sliced his axe in half, right between the hand-holds.
    “Moo?” he grunted.
    “HAAA!” I spun and kicked him in the snout. He staggered backward, trying to regain his footing, then lowered his head to charge.
    He never got the chance. My sword flashed—slicing off one horn, then the other. He tried to grab me. I rolled away, picking up half of his broken axe. The other monsters backed up in stunned silence, making a circle around us. The Minotaur bellowed in rage. He was never very smart to begin with, but now his anger made him reckless. He charged me, and I ran for the edge of the bridge, breaking through a line of dracaenae .
    The Minotaur must’ve smelled victory. He thought I was trying to get away. His minions cheered. At the edge of the bridge, I turned and braced the axe against the railing to receive his charge. The Minotaur didn’t even slow down.
    CRUNCH.
    He looked down in surprise at the axe handle sprouting from his breastplate.
    “Thanks for playing,” I told him.
    I lifted him by his legs and tossed him over the side of the bridge. Even as he fell, he was disintegrating, turning back into dust, his essence returning to Tartarus.
    I turned toward his army. It was now roughly one hundred and ninety-nine to one. I did the natural thing. I charged them.
    You’re going to ask how the “invincible” thing worked: if I magically dodged every weapon, or if the weapons hit me and just didn’t harm me. Honestly, I don’t remember. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to let these monsters invade my hometown.
    I sliced through armor like it was made of paper. Snake women exploded. Hellhounds melted to shadow. I slashed and stabbed and whirled, and I might have even laughed once or twice—a crazy laugh that scared me as much as it did my enemies. I was aware of the Apollo campers behind me shooting arrows, disrupting every attempt by the enemy to rally. Finally, the monsters turned and fled—about twenty left alive out of two hundred.
    I followed with the Apollo campers at my heels.
    “Yes!” yelled Michael Yew. “That’s what I’m talking about!”
    We drove them back toward the Brooklyn side of the bridge. The sky was growing pale in the east. I could see the toll stations