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DURING THE THIRD ATTACK, Hazel al how it could be so difficult to fly across one stupid e, when the ship’s alarm bells sounded

“Hard to port!” Nico yelled fro ship

Back at the helo II veered left, its aerial oars slashing through the clouds like rows of knives

Hazelover the rail A dark spherical shape hurtled toward her She thought: Why is the e rock passed so close overhead it blew her hair out of her face

CRACK!

The fore to the deck The boulder, roughly the size of a pickup truck, tu like it had important business elsewhere

“Nico!” Hazel scraht the ship level

“I’s

She helped him up, and they stumbled to the bow Hazel peeked over h to reveal the top of thefrood—one of the numina montanum, Jason had called them Or ourae, in Greek Whatever you called them, they were nasty

Like the others they had faced, this one wore a sih and dark as basalt He was about twenty feet tall and extrely hair, and a wild look in his eyes, like a crazy her Hazel didn’t understand, but it obviously wasn’t welco With his bare hands, he pried another chunk of rock fro it into a ball

The scene disappeared in the fog, but when the ain, other nuh the valleys

“Stupid rock gods!” Leo yelled from the helm “That’s the third tirow on trees?”

Nico frowned “Masts are from trees ”

“That’s not the point!” Leo snatched up one of his controls, rigged from a Nintendo Wii stick, and spun it in a circle A few feet away, a trapdoor opened in the deck A Celestial bronze cannon rose Hazel just had tied into the sky, spraying a dozen rew spikes in

A moment later, a series of explosions crackled across the ods

“Ha!” Leo yelled

Unfortunately, Hazel guessed, judging from their last two encounters, Leo’s neeapon had only annoyed the numina

Another boulder whistled through the air off to their starboard side

Nico yelled, “Get us out of here!”

Leocoines huht, and the ship tacked to port The Argo II picked up speed, retreating northwest, as they’d been doing for the past two days

Hazel didn’t relax until they were out of the ht illuolden fields not too different froine she was sailing home to Camp Jupiter

The thought weighed on her chest Camp Jupiter had only been her hoht her back from the Underworld But she missed it more than her birthplace of New Orleans, and definitely more than Alaska, where she’d died back in 1942

She missed her bunk in the Fifth Cohort barracks Sheplatters through the air and legionnaires joking about the war ga hands with Frank Zhang She wanted to experience just being a regular girl for once, with an actual sweet, caring boyfriend

Most of all, she wanted to feel safe She was tired of being scared and worried all the time

She stood on the quarterdeck as Nico picked mast splinters out of his arms and Leo punched buttons on the ship’s console

“Well, that was sucktastic,” Leo said “Should I wake the others?”

Hazel was teht shift and had earned their rest They were exhausted fro the ship Every few hours, it seeo II looked like a tasty treat

A feeeks ago, Hazel wouldn’t have believed that anyone could sleep through a nuined her friends were still snoring away belowdecks Whenever she got a chance to crash, she slept like a coma patient

“They need rest,” she said “We’ll have to figure out another way on our own ”

“Huh ” Leo scowled at his rease-splattered jeans, he looked like he’d just lost a wrestling match with a locomotive

Ever since their friends Percy and Annabeth had fallen into Tartarus, Leo had been working alrier and even more driven than usual