‘But you will win a fabulous honour!’ Nike reached into a basket at her side and produced a wreath of thick green laurels. ‘This crown of leaves could be yours! You can wear it on your head! Think of the glory!’
‘Leo’s right,’ Frank said, though his eyes were fixed on the wreath. His expression was a little too greedy for Leo’s taste. ‘We don’t fight each other. We fight the giants. You should help us.’
‘Very well!’ The goddess raised the laurel wreath in one hand and her spear in the other.
Percy and Leo exchanged looks.
‘Uh … does that mean you’ll join us?’ Percy asked. ‘You’ll help us fight the giants?’
‘That will be part of the prize,’ Nike said. ‘Whoever wins, I will consider you an ally. We will fight the giants together, and I will bestow victory upon you. But there can only be one winner. The others must be defeated, killed, destroyed utterly. So what will it be, demigods? Will you succeed in your quest, or will you cling to your namby-pamby ideas of friendship and everybody wins participation awards?’
Percy uncapped his pen. Riptide grew into a Celestial bronze sword. Leo was worried he might turn it on them. Nike’s aura was that hard to resist.
Instead, Percy pointed his blade at Nike. ‘What if we fight you instead?’
‘Ha!’ Nike’s eyes gleamed. ‘If you refuse to fight each other, you shall be persuaded!’
Nike spread her golden wings. Four metal feathers fluttered down, two on either side of the chariot. The feathers twirled like gymnasts, growing larger, sprouting arms and legs, until they touched the ground as four metallic, human-sized replicas of the goddess, each armed with a golden spear and a Celestial bronze laurel wreath that looked suspiciously like a barbed-wire Frisbee.
‘To the stadium!’ the goddess cried. ‘You have five minutes to prepare. Then blood shall be spilled!’
Leo was about to say, What if we refuse to go to the stadium?
He got his answer before asking the question.
‘Run!’ Nike bellowed. ‘To the stadium with you, or my Nikai will kill you where you stand!’
The metal ladies unhinged their jaws and blasted out a sound like a Super Bowl crowd mixed with feedback. They shook their spears and charged the demigods.
It wasn’t Leo’s finest moment. Panic seized him, and he took off. His only comfort was that his friends did, too – and they weren’t the cowardly type.
The four metal women swept behind them in a loose semicircle, herding them to the northeast. All the tourists had vanished. Perhaps they’d fled to the air-conditioned comfort of the museum, or maybe Nike had somehow forced them to leave.
The demigods ran, tripping over stones, leaping over crumbled walls, dodging around columns and informational placards. Behind them, Nike’s chariot wheels rumbled and her horses whinnied.
Every time Leo thought about slowing down, the metal ladies screamed again – what had Nike called them? Nikai? Nikettes? – filling Leo with terror.
He hated being filled with terror. It was embarrassing.
‘There!’ Frank sprinted towards a kind of trench between two earthen walls with a stone archway above. It reminded Leo of those tunnels that football teams run through when they enter the field. ‘That’s the entrance to the old Olympic stadium. It’s called the crypt!’
‘Not a good name!’ Leo yelled.
‘Why are we going there?’ Percy gasped. ‘If that’s where she wants us –’
The Nikettes screamed again and all rational thought abandoned Leo. He ran for the tunnel.
When they reached the arch, Hazel yelled, ‘Hold it!’
They stumbled to a stop. Percy doubled over, wheezing. Leo had noticed that Percy seemed to get winded more easily these days – probably because of that nasty acid air he’d been forced to breathe in Tartarus.
Frank peered back the way they’d come. ‘I don’t see them any more. They disappeared.’
‘Did they give up?’ Percy asked hopefully.
Leo scanned the ruins. ‘Nah. They just herded us where they wanted us. What were those things, anyway? The Nikettes, I mean.’
‘Nikettes?’ Frank scratched his head. ‘I think it was Nikai, plural, like victories.’
‘Yes.’ Hazel looked deep in thought, running her hands along the stone archway. ‘In some legends, Nike had an army of little victories she could send all over the world to do her bidding.’
‘Like Santa’s elves,’ Percy said. ‘Except evil. And metal. And really loud.’
Hazel pressed her fingers against the arch, as if taking its pulse. Beyond the narrow tunnel, the earthen walls opened into a long field with gently rising slopes on either side, like seating for spectators.