plague bringer - a heroes of olympus insert

𝗑𝗑𝗑𝗂𝗏. 𝗐𝖾 𝖿𝗂𝗀𝗁𝗍 𝖺𝗇𝗈𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗋 𝗀𝗂𝖺𝗇𝗍

A storm spirit charged at Aria. She stepped back and swung her sword and apparently hit the sweet spot as it disintegrated into dust. Aria continued to fight off the wolves that were charging toward her and Leo.

Through the chaos, Aria caught glimpses of her friends. Piper was surrounded by Earthborn, but she seemed to be holding her own. She was so impressive-looking as she fought, almost glowing with beauty, that the Earthborn stared at her in awe, forgetting that they were supposed to kill her. They'd lower their clubs and watch dumbfounded as she smiled and charged them. They'd smile back—until she sliced them apart with her dagger, and they melted into mounds of mud.

Jason was storming around on the storm spirit horse he seemed to have tamed and was taking out other spirits and the occasional wolf left and right. He looked a little goofy with his giant plank of wood, but hey! If it works it works.

Leo had taken on Khione herself. While fighting a goddess should've been suicide, Leo was the right man for the job. She kept summoning ice daggers to throw at him, blasts of winter air, tornadoes of snow. Leo burned through all of it. His whole body flickered with red tongues of flame like he'd been doused with gasoline. He advanced on the goddess, using two silver-tipped ball-peen hammers to smash any monsters that got in his way.

Aria realized that Leo was the only reason they were still alive. His fiery aura was heating up the whole courtyard, countering Khione's winter magic. Without him, they would've been frozen like the Hunters long ago. Wherever Leo went, ice melted off the stones. Even Thalia started to defrost a little when Leo stepped near her. Khione slowly backed away. Her expression went from enraged to shocked to slightly panicked as Leo got closer.

Aria was running out of enemies. Wolves lay in dazed heaps. Some slunk away into the ruins, yelping from their wounds. Piper stabbed the last Earthborn, who toppled to the ground in a pile of sludge. Jason rode Tempest through the last ventus, breaking it into vapor. Then he wheeled around and saw Leo bearing down on the goddess of snow.

"You're too late," Khione snarled. "He's awake! And don't think you've won anything here, demigods. Hera's plan will never work. You'll be at each other's throats before you can ever stop us."

Leo set his hammers ablaze and threw them at the goddess, but she turned into snow—a white powdery image of herself. Leo's hammers slammed into the snow woman, breaking it into a steaming mound of mush.

Piper was breathing hard, but she smiled up at Jason. "Nice horse."

Tempest reared on his hind legs, arcing electricity across his hooves. A complete show-off.

Then Aria heard a cracking sound behind her. The melting ice on Hera's cage sloughed off in a curtain of slush, and the goddess called, "Oh, don't mind me! Just the queen of the heavens, dying over here!"

Jason dismounted and told Tempest to stay put. The four demigods jumped into the pool and ran to the spire.

Leo frowned. "Uh, Tía Callida, are you getting shorter?"

"No, you dolt! The earth is claiming me. Hurry!"

As much as Aria disliked Hera, what she saw inside the cage alarmed her. Not only was Hera sinking, the ground was rising around her like water in a tank. Liquid rock had already covered her shins. "The giant wakes!" Hera warned. "You only have seconds!"

"On it," Leo said. "Piper, I need your help. Talk to the cage."

"What?" she said.

"Talk to it. Use everything you've got. Convince Gaea to sleep. Lull her into a daze. Just slow her down, try to get the tendrils to loosen while I—"