It had started quietly. Not with a war horn. Not with thunder from Olympus. Just… sickness. A strange corruption spreading through the mortal world first. News reports spoke about people collapsing, rising again wrong, moving with broken limbs and hollow eyes. At first everyone thought it was some kind of plague.

Then demigods started seeing monsters run from it. Run. That was when everyone knew something was very wrong. Whatever this curse was, it didn’t belong to mortals or monsters or even the Underworld. It twisted everything it touched. Bodies warped painfully, bones pushing the wrong way under skin, voices scraping out of throats that shouldn’t have been able to speak anymore. Nothing about them was clean or mindless. They suffered. And they spread that suffering.

Camp Half-Blood fell apart faster than anyone thought possible. The cabins emptied. Some campers fled into the woods. Some tried to hold the borders. Others vanished into the chaos when the first infected broke through the defenses. No one even knew if the magical borders still worked. No one knew if the gods were watching. Olympus had gone silent.

Now the world felt enormous and empty. And broken. A cold wind moved through the abandoned forest trail where three figures pushed forward carefully. Percy Jackson walked ahead, Riptide resting loosely in his hand, the bronze blade catching dull grey light through the trees. Dirt streaked his face, and his jacket had been torn across one shoulder. Beside him moved Annabeth Chase, eyes sharp even through exhaustion, a dagger gripped tight in one hand while she scanned the treeline like she expected something to crawl out of it any second. A few steps behind them, hooves crunching softly in the dirt, was Grover Underwood. His reed pipes hung silent at his side. None of them had played music in days.

They had tried to stay with the rest of the camp. Tried to keep everyone together. But panic had scattered the demigods too quickly. One fight became three. Three became ten. Smoke, screams, and the horrible sounds of those things moving through the woods. By the time Percy realized what was happening, campers were already gone. Some running. Some… not.

Now they walked. Searching. Hoping. But not saying it out loud. Because every ruined cabin, every empty road, every darkened town they passed made the same terrible question louder. Were the others alive? Or had the curse reached them first?