The Ordeals Of The Labyrinth - Part 6
Bianca swallowed roughly, readying herself for what was to come.
The monster had disappeared into the passageway it had emerged from, slipping back into the shadows and whatever horrors awaited within them.
The daughter of Hades - apparently - had taken the brief, brief window of time to crouch down in the crevice the three of them had hidden in, huddling in between a wary Hecuba and a blatantly distressed Ophiotarus as she flipped through the pack Hecate had gifted her with increasing fervor.
Save Zoë, find the others, and escape the death trap maze.
That was only way this ordeal ended. The only way it could end, and the only way it would end, if she had anything to say about it.
She could do this.
She chanted that motto over and over under her breath, steeling herself with it as she went about checking out the goddess's boons in search of anything that could help -
"Wait, what?"
-before quickly realizing that something was funky.
She'd pulled two first aid kits, a box with what looked like an entire tray's worth of brownies (ambrosia, she knew that much from Luna and the hunters), two flasks of nectar, a strange leather-bound book whose title was written in a language that was only vaguely familiar (greek, but she didn't stop to puzzle it out) and with a gnarly illustration of a gorgon on its front cover, two changes of clothes that she had a hunch would fit her perfectly (and that wasn't the slightest bit creepy, not at all), a double pack of Oreos (she wasn't complaining, but why even?), and...she was still going.
The backpack shouldn't have possibly fit all of that- the container of ambrosia alone should have been cramped for space, but it all seemed to slot together perfectly. It also didn't weigh nearly enough.
And yet...
"How...?" She blinked, before swallowing a groan as it came to her. "More magic?"
She wasn't really asking - not when it was so blatantly obvious - but Hecuba's ears still twitched, before turning and regarding Bianca with a look so flat and unimpressed she found herself flushing and turning back to her task without another word.
How the dog could look so judgemental and mean about it, she had no idea.
And then her fingertips brushed against a ceramic surface, nestled deep within, and she found herself paling and recoiling at once, eyes going wide with sudden panic.
Something in her brain screamed at her, a sixth sense that had her breath picking up and her heartbeat drumming erratically beneath her ribs. A slightly calmer but no less urgent part of her urged her to do the reasonable thing and get far away from whatever unholy surprise Hecate had gifted her with.
Naturally, Bianca listened to neither. Reasonable went out the window and off the edge of a cliff a while ago - literally, along with her best friend, her ex-principle turned Manticore and Annabeth Chase.
Slowly, with careful, wary movements, she reached into the backpack and gingerly wrapped her hands around the jar - one of many, she realized belatedly - and lifted it out just as gradually.
There wasn't much light, but she could still see the silt-colored jar perfectly well. Smooth, unblemished and sealed shut with a band of tape - or something close to it - binding lid to jar.
There was a label on too - Only this one was written in plain English.
It took Bianca ten seconds more to read it, and the small inscription beneath it, and realize exactly what it was she was holding.
She paled.
It took her about five minutes after that to come up with a plan.
…
Deep in the bowels of her new domain, Kampé suddenly stilled.
The prisoners who could see her from in the darkness began to cower in their cells - they were the monsters, nature spirits and the odd creature or three sentenced to her care by her benefactors - and they shied away from her as far as they could, straining against their chains in fear of her ire, but the former jailor beast of Tartarus paid the inferior maggots no mind.
Their time would come soon enough.
Instead, her attention stirred as she sensed a foreign presence lurking in her halls, dogging her chosen path. An unfamiliar scent, neither ally - in as much as the Kronos's mongrels could be called such - nor prey.
An interloper.
"Who thinks to walk in my shadow unannounced?" She snarled, her hiss the symphony of a thousand serpents. Her face pinched in anger, her scales twisting, and the heads on her midsection writhed and morphed into twisting chimera as her anger surged. "Step into the light, before I drag you out!"
Left unsaid was the fate the fool would likely meet regardless of their choice, but her lust for torment would not be denied.
For a moment, her order went unheeded. A malevolent screech welled up in her throat at the disrespect, venom frothing beneath her tongue, but before she could choose to act, a low growl ripped the silence asunder.
From the darkness ahead, a diminutive figure padded. A black labrador, smaller and less threatening in stature than even the puniest hellhound.
Kampé, however, was not so easily fooled.
"Mist." She spat derisively, recognizing the power that wafted from its form, however meek it appeared to be. "You reek of it, creature. A personal touch - you are a servant of the Three-Faced one. A favored pet, perhaps."
The mongrel gave no hint of a reply beyond the slight raising of its hackles.
Kampé was unimpressed. Her wings shifted, stretching out like looming sentinels until they scraped against the wall. Her tail beat the earth in ill-concealed warning, and she let the faintest hint of poison leak out of her maw as faint green fumes that could kill mortals in a single agonizing breath - even most demigods.
"What business does the Goddess Of Crossroads have with me?"
This time there was a reply - but not one she had been expecting.
The labrador gave another low growl, lowered its head, and charged right at her.
What?
The mongrel managed to make it five paces, crossing half the distance between them as Kampé momentarily lost her composure and floundered at the audacity.
And then her instincts snapped back into clarity, her rage ignited into an inferno akin to the roaring waves of the Phlegethon deep in Tartarus, and her barbed whip materialized in her hand and cracked through the intervening space with the furious snap of her hand like thunder most foul.
The blow struck the dog across its hide, but rather than tear it asunder, its form seemed to burst, dispersing into a cloud of smog-colored mist before it solidified once more - this time in the form of six snarling dogs, far larger than the first and attempting to surround her as they darted forward.
"Petty tricks." She hissed, just as unimpressed by the nuisance's efforts. "Observe"
Her whip cracked again, sweeping through the row and effortlessly rendering them into dust. The sixth retreated then, slinking back warily as it eyed the motion of her whip.
Kampé smiled murderously, raising her whip on high - before she quickly rounded in place and brought it down on an unassuming patch of shadows.
She relished the crack of her whip against flesh, the desperate whine of agony as the blow hit the real dog hidden behind layers of Mist, the would-be clever illusion behind her dispersing into nothingness as it failed to ensnare her senses.
"Did you think you could deceive me, little servant?" She crooned maliciously, looming over its trembling form. "I, who even the Olympians once feared to cross?"
The sharp scent of copper crept into the damp air, and she eyed the mongrel in satisfaction, observing its fur and delighting in how quickly it grew matted with blood from the rent she had wrought across its flesh. The traces of one of her milder venoms were also apparent, one that would bring the impudent thing pain unimaginable.
Such an enjoyable torment that would be.
And then it surprised her once more. It lunged, evading the second crack of her whip, and Kampé raised a foreleg and prepared to crush it into the dirt.
But it did not attack, as she had expected it to.
Instead, it slipped past her descending claws, narrowly avoiding being ripped to shreds as it bolted past her and shot off down the passageways behind.
"Cowardly pup!" Kampé roared in both anger and glee - it had been so very long since any of her prey had attempted to escape from her. All but the lowliest learned the futility of the attempt far too soon, and she would enjoy teaching the Hecate-servant that lesson as well. "There is nowhere to hide!"
She took off in pursuit, wings scraping trenches through the walls, her heads roaring a cacophony of predatory calls as they readied for the hunt. Her cackles were louder still, a nightmare all to their own.
As she thundered past, her prisoners trembled in their shackles once more, terrified of her terrible mirth and what it would mean for them once she tired of her latest quarry.
The chase might have lasted for hours or seconds, it did not matter. Kampé pursued the black dog through darkness and shadow and light, reveling in the rich taste of its fear, delighting in the way it began to flag and slow as the pain and poison took their toll.
It wasn't until the mongrel led her to the centerpiece of her collection, the very chamber in which she'd imprisoned Zoé Nightshade that it finally began to fall, slowing to a crawl as it struggled not to collapse.
"At last!" She roared and surged forward to claim her prize.
And then the trap she'd never suspected closed on her.
"Now!"
A high, unfamiliar voice called out, and Kampé had no time to search out its owner.
Something large, quick and wet rammed into her with all the force it could muster. A pair of horns gored into her side, far from a killing blow but far from pleasant, and the power of the impact sent her careening off to the side with a screech, crashing down far from her pray, her assailant and the suspended lieutenant of Artemis.
More filthy intruders!?
She leaped to her feet, whip at the ready -
"Moo!"
-and froze.
That form... that scent...
"Ophiotaurus." Kampé bared her fangs in shock, disbelieving. The bane of Olympus, here of all places?
For its part, the beast looked utterly terrified, as well it should be.
"Moo!" It cried piteously as Kampê stepped forward, shock falling away for familiar fury as she prepared to lunge and sink her teeth into the beast's hide in repayment for this indignity - the Titans could have its entrails when she was well and done with it.
She never got the chance.
"Hey! Leave him alone!"
The most insulting intruder of all appeared then. A half-blood child, pale-faced and sallow-cheeked but standing before her all the same. And slumped behind her, still dead to the world but very much not suspended in chains any longer was Nightshade herself.
The pieces fell into place.
The servant of Hecate was a distraction, Kampé realized at once, and this time her rage was so great that not even Typhoon himself could have matched it in that instant, a ploy to keep me distracted while the girl and the Ophiotaurus stole away with Artemis's pet.
"Demigod!" She hissed, unfurling her wings in all her monstrous glory. "You... you dare steal from me!?"
And the girl - this insignificant, wretched slip of a mortal - looked upon all the horror that she was and dared to glare back!
"My name is Bianca Di Angelo, and your damn right I do!"
And then she lobbed the object she'd been holding straight for her head. It sailed forward unerringly, propelled forward by surprising strength.
Kampé snarled and made to bat it away in her charge for the girl.
That was her greatest mistake.
Her claws rent through the jar, and the Greek fire within detonated with a blast of light and force fit to rouse the dead.
Boom!
Kampé howled in agony as the flames surged across her face, running across her scales and melting them off her very flesh.
"And there's more where that came from!"
A second later, another jar burst at her feet, and she was cut down to her knees as they began to crumble away. The heads on her torso lasted only until the third jar was thrown into the blaze, and then they too melted before the unnatural conflagration.
No!
She could not stop this - she had not been prepared for an attack of this magnitude, and all that was left to her now was to glare at the perpetrator through the blaze with all all the cruelty she had left to muster.
"I will have my vengeance." She vowed, voice a ghastly rasp over the roar of the flames and her own burning flesh. "You will live to suffer for this day, Bianca Di Angelo!"
The girl's face quivered, but her jaw set quickly, and her voice was remarkably steady when she replied.
"I'll take my chances. Now beat it."
And then she lobbed the last jar of Greek fire, and Kampé was incinerated into nothing, swearing vengeance most terrible against a girl who'd never fought a monster in the entirety of her life and still managed to cast one such as her back into the abyss on her first attempt.
…
Elsewhere:
A figure paused and gaped incredulously as the wind spirits in his employ whispered reports in his ears, each more ludicrous than the last.
His disbelief and mounting fury twisted his expression until it was nearly unrecognisable, and his silvery scars were stretched taught over his twitching face as he realised that his plans were actively being strangled in their infancy - not out of foolishness, or malice, but out of sheer, unmatched stupidity.
"What - exactly - do those bloodthirsty fools think they're doing?!"
And with that roar, he vanished in a flash of light and power so mighty it quite literally levelled his personal quarters and reduced everything in the immediate vicinity to so much dust.
...
Everybody else: Actively suffering
Bianca: Running successful rescue ops with her magical animal familiars and speedrunning her Demigod training arc.
Also, if anyone things Kampé was a bit weaker here than she should be... wonder why that is, hmm XD???
Next Chapter: The conclusion of Luna and Thalia's trip in Apollo's mind, and all the consequences that come with it. Only two chapters left until the third, shorter and final act of this arc begins!!!
As always, leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it, please be courteous.