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A HORN BLEW AT THE END OF THE HALL. The officers at the praetor's table got to their feet—even Dakota, his mouth vampire-red from Kool-Aid.
"The games begin!" Jason announced, a grin on his face. The campers cheered and rushed to collect their equipment from the stacks along the walls.
"So we're the attacking team?" Selena asked over the noise. "Is that good?"
Hazel shrugged. "Good news: we get the elephant. Bad news—"
"Let me guess," she sighed, "The Fifth Cohort always loses."
Cato wrapped his arm around her shoulders, "Gods, you're smart. Come on, new friend. Let's go chalk up my thirteenth defeat in a row!"
Hazel grabbed her wrist and dragged her to a building to give her armour, "Reyna doesn't want you to use that dagger you arrived in camp with. It's not Imperial Gold, so we're gonna have to find something new for you."
It took a while, but they found a sword that was balanced enough for her. Not perfect, not like the dagger, but it was good enough.
Once they got out of camp, the Fifth Cohort formed two lines behind their centurions, Dakota and Gwen. They marched north, skirting the edge of the city, and headed to the Field of Mars—the largest, flattest part of the valley. The grass was cropped short by all the unicorns, bulls, and homeless fauns that grazed here. The earth was pitted with explosion craters and scarred with trenches from past games. At the north end of the field stood their target. The engineers had built a stone fortress with an iron portcullis, guard towers, scorpion ballistae, acid sprays, and no doubt many other nasty surprises for the defenders to use.
"They did a good job today," Hazel noted. "That's bad for us."
"Wait," Selena paused. "You're telling me that fortress was built today?"
Hazel grinned. "Legionnaires are trained to build. If we had to, we could break down the entire camp and rebuild it somewhere else. Take maybe three or four days, but we could do it."
"Let's not," She responded, "So you attack a different fort every night?"
"Not every night," Cato replied, "We have different training exercises. Sometimes death ball—um, which is like paint-ball, except with...you know, poison and acid and fire balls. Sometimes we do chariots and gladiator competitions, sometimes war games."
Hazel pointed at the fort. "Somewhere inside, the First and Second Cohorts are keeping their banners. Our job is to get inside and capture them without getting slaughtered. We do that, we win."
Selena's eyes lit up. "Like capture-the-flag. I think I like capture-the-flag."
Cato laughed sarcastically before his smile dropped, "Yeah, well...it's harder than it sounds. We have to get past those scorpions and water cannons on the walls, fight through the inside of the fortress, find the banners, and defeat the guards, all while protecting our own banners and troops from capture. And our cohort is in competition with the other two attacking cohorts. We sort of work together, but not really. The cohort that captures the banners gets all the glory."
