-Camp Half-Blood, Earth; Right Where We Left Off-

~Kosmos' (Xander's) Point of View~

Every breath was starting to hurt less and less. The pain that came from my old wound in my abdomen going back to a phantom pain. My throat was easing up from the metallic taste of blood. "One day, I will kill him." I promised again softly.

Sharp stinging from eyes slowed. Relief made me collapse fully onto Nyke. "Whoa! Kosmos!"

"I'm fine." My voice was slowly going back to its normal monotone.

"No, you aren't!" Kasey's voice pierced through the haze. She soon appeared kneeling in front of me. "You were coughing up blood!"

"How would you know?" I shot back, feeling a spark of my defiant self. A part of me that I thought lost long ago.

"This isn't funny." Even Apollo was panicked. Ah, I really haven't had an episode this bad since I was starting to live with Chaos.

"I know." I commented, slowly pushing away from the head commander. "My apologies, Head Commander. I am fine now."

A sharp intake of breath. "Kosmos - Xander - stop with the formalities. You can call me Nyke." The head commander shook his head. "That doesn't matter right now. What happened? Do you need medical treatment? Don't answer that. Of course, you need medical treatment, you were just bleeding!"

I smiled a little at Chaos' second choice of Head Commander. "Chaos was wrong." I commented once I stood up. "You were the better choice."

"What?" Was the confused reply from Nyke.

"Kosmos."

"Chaos." I greeted, bowing my head slightly. "I apologize for the inconvenience."

He frowned at me. "How bad is it?" My rescuer stepped closer, reaching down to pull up my shirt. I hissed at the movement. Soon the summer air hit the closed gash on the left side of my stomach that spread from my ribs to my hips. "It's not bleeding anymore." He commented in relief.

"I'm not dying, Lord Chaos." I ignored the various reactions to the biggest reminder of my time with-

Chaos huffed. "Not physically."

"That does not matter-"

The creator cut me off. "It does! I brought you here to Camp Half-Blood in hopes that you would be healed. When I realized surrounding you with the army wasn't working, I knew bringing you here would perhaps work. Do I need to throw you into the ocean next?"

"Do not be dramatic-"

"Dramatic?!" He once again cut me off, looking stressed. "Dramatic is when you disappeared for almost a year after I introduced you to Hesper!"

"That had nothing to do with the first unit leader." I commented with no emotion.

"Quit distancing yourself and go home!" Chaos yelled in anger.

"You told me my home was with you, Lord Chaos." I calmly stated.

That seemed to have broken something in Chaos. "Percy Jackson, Son of Poseidon, stop your running. You are only hurting yourself." Silence followed.

Then the water from the beach exploded reacting to my sudden whirlwind of emotions. "Never call me that again." I quickly disappeared in a sea mist.

-Camp Half-Blood, Earth; Right Where We Left Off-

~Nyke's Point of View~

'Percy Jackson...is Kosmos - Xander? What in Hades...'

Chaos groaned in frustration. "That idiot!" He threw his hands in the air, pacing around irritated. "Self-sacrificing and selfless when someone else is hurt but has no issue not taking care of himself or his needs. Am I to be blamed for that? Did I not do enough for him? Did I not raise him properly? Teach him how to take care of himself? Take every opportunity to ease his worries, his pain, his nightmares?"

He suddenly rounded on me. "Have I not met every one of your needs, Nyke?" Chaos didn't wait for a reply before turning to the others. "What about you, Hesper? Malantha - or should I say Bianca? Vernandos - when did you reveal yourself to everyone here? Charis? Milos? Have I not provided every one of you with everything you could possibly need?"

"Chaos." I spoke when I realized he stopped and the others weren't going to say anything to this distressed version of the creator. "Can you explain to us what just happened?"

A blank stare was my only answer for a long minute. "Right." He sighed, shoulders sagging in a way that put me on edge. "Kosmos, his assassin alias, was given the name Xander by me when he accepted my offer - my second offer - back when we had first met."

"Second offer?" Hesper questioned. My mind went to Kosmos' words 'Chaos was wrong...you were the better choice'.

Chaos deflated, looking away. "I offered him the spot of Head Commander. He refused. Nyke was the second choice."  He laughed a little. "He picked you, Nyke. I was the one who officially offered you all your positions, but it was Xander who wanted you all to have a second chance. He argued that since he had been given a second chance, all of you deserved one as well."

"So all of the unit leaders are dead demigods?" Leo Valdez asked, tinkering around the shiny, bronze dragon. Does that metal dragon have-

"Leo!" Piper McLean hissed at the other.

"Don't worry, Piper McLean." Chaos smiled. "The army was meant to come back here. It was only a question of when."

"What?" Several of us questioned.

"Chaos." I sounded calm but I was the furthest thing from it. "What is going on? How is Kosmos Percy? I died and joined the army after Kosmos did. Percy was still alive when I-"

"Percy never died." Nico di Angelo interrupted me.

"Nico?" Malantha - Bianca - stepped closer to her brother.

"You're right, Son of Hades." Chaos smiled again. A small, sad thing that made me want to punch him. "Percy Jackson never died. Kosmos already told you the truth, however, he never quite explained it. About eleven years ago, Percy Jackson was taken by a Greek deity. When I realized what had happened...it was already too late. The young son of Poseidon was broken. I tried to get him to go back home; he refused. The only way I could help him was to give him a new purpose. He wanted a new name as well."

"But I met Percy when I was twelve. How could that have happened if he was with you?" Annabeth asked with a glare.

"Percy Jackson was an illusion." Athena answered her daughter. "That's what your assassin said."

Chaos nodded. "With the help of Chronos, Primordial of Time, I was able to have someone create an illusion that would act as who Percy Jackson was supposed to be. The illusion faded when Kosmos tracked down the one who created it. That happened shortly after the deity that...took Kosmos when he was younger moved to go against the gods of Olympus by going after Camp Half-Blood."

"Something has been bothering me." Hazel Levesque brought up.

"Hazel?" Her boyfriend, Frank Zhang, asked. The only reason I know that is because there was a lot of romance on the Argo II during their journey to the ancient lands.

"The time period of when the army was created doesn't line up with the deaths - or the time when they joined the army at least - of the unit leaders. Nyke said he had been with the army for over a thousand years and yet he was alive when Percy was here? How does that work?" The Daughter of Pluto raised some very good points.

"Excellent observations." Chaos smiled. "Time is different on Plant TO than here on Earth. A year here is a thousand there."

"Why didn't you ask me earlier?" Bianca asked her half-sister.

Hazel shrugged. "There was never a right time, I guess."

"Not to interrupt this moment of revelations," Connor Stoll stepped in nervously. "But what about the fire in the woods?"

Chaos barked a bitter laugh. "Xander took care of that already. His dramatic exits when running from tough conversations usually ends with floods. This time he put that energy towards dousing the fires." The creator was right. There were no flames in sight. How did we miss that?

"So that was my son?" Poseidon's eyes grew wet. "How was he able to leave the way he did?"

Chaos sighed. "Yes. He calls it mist travel, it's similar to shadow traveling. Xander hasn't used his powers over the sea in a very long time. Not since he first came to Planet TO." He paused. "Although there were a few times he was forced to use them on missions to save others. He would always become off-balanced whenever that happened."

"The Percy Jackson that I met and came to respect was an illusion?" Hesper asked, frowning in displeasure. Well, she looked more displeased than usual.

"Yes and no. He was an illusion, but it was based on what he would have been like if he had an ordinary demigod life." A pause. " Ah, normal for a child of the Big Three, that is." Was the reply.

A thought hit me. "Kosmos picked me to be Head Commander." Everyone's attention was drawn to me. My skin crawled at the sensation. I felt vulnerable. "Why me? He does realize who I was, right?" I couldn't help but to ask questions that have been lurking in my mind for a thousand years.

Chaos' face softened. "You said so yourself, Nyke. "Who I was?" That is why you were great for the role. You recognized your past mistakes and here you are, correcting them. Xander picked each and every one of you. I followed his lead hoping one of you would get him to open up."

It wasn't Annabeth who realized what Chaos was implying. "Does that mean that the unit leaders and Head Commander are demigods who died during the Titan and Giant Wars? Like Bianca?" Thalia spoke up. Lightning was dancing in between her fingers. "Does that mean that Luke Castellan is in your army?"

And the hunt for the dead began.

Wow, that ending was dramatic.

Anyway,  I finished writing chapter twenty four. I plan on writing chapter twenty five, which sadly will be the last one. I want to continue more but I think twenty five chapters with an epilogue will be for the best. I do plan on the epilogue to be long and really tie everything together.

Thank you everyone for reading. I want to finish this book today as I have the motivation and there's no guarantee I will be able to finish it later.

I hope you are ending enjoying the beginning of the end. I will published chapter twenty four when I finish twenty five. I will then publish chapter twenty five and the epilogue once I finish writing the epilogue.

I will be back soon.

~MsPenguingirl1234.

Published: June 17, 2023.