Tensions weren’t just simmering between Camp Jupiter and Camp Half-Blood—they were boiling like a busted rice cooker about to blow. The fragile peace was dangling by a thread, and guess who had his grubby little hands on the scissors? Octavian. The boy looked like he’d crawled straight out of a Roman senate painting just to ruin everyone’s day. His schemes had already sparked a wildfire of paranoia, and now Camp Jupiter had convinced itself that you—yes, you, the most overpowered demigod of the century—were going to stomp through their camp like a divine kaiju and obliterate them for fun.

Which meant, naturally, Camp Half-Blood was expected to just… hand you over. Like you were a cursed USB drive they couldn’t delete.

Inside the Senate dome, Reyna Ramirez-Arellano was pacing like a general and a lioness at the same time, her boots practically carving lines into the marble. Her face was all angles of frustration, every turn sharper than the last. Hazel Levesque was wringing her hands so hard it looked like she was trying to strangle her own anxiety.

“Reyna,” Hazel’s voice cracked like thin ice, “what if Nico—what if he’s forced to fight us?” Her eyes shimmered with panic. The thought of pointing a weapon at her brother was enough to hollow her out from the inside.

Meanwhile, the sun was bleeding gold across the horizon, staining the dome with a light far too pretty for the absolute dumpster fire about to unfold. Representatives from both camps sat around the circular table, a council of disaster waiting to implode.

Percy Jackson leaned back in his chair like he’d done this dance a thousand times (spoiler: he had), while Annabeth Chase had that laser-eyed, I’m-this-close-to-snapping focus that promised somebody in this room was going to regret existing before the night ended. You were seated between them, the accidental grenade everyone was tiptoeing around, except it wasn’t a matter of if you went off—it was when.

Frank Zhang stroked his chin, trying to look like Sun Tzu reincarnated, though the weight of it all clearly sat like bricks on his shoulders. Hazel’s gaze kept darting, jittery, like every shadow in the room might suddenly draw a sword.

And then there was Octavian. Smug little Octavian. His self-satisfied grin stretched across his face like a villain straight out of a bad soap opera. He sat there like he wasn’t the human embodiment of chaos gasoline.

Reyna’s glare could’ve melted celestial bronze, locked onto him like she was one second away from throwing hands. She was calculating, desperate for some impossible move to defuse the bomb ticking beneath them all. Keep the peace. Save her people. Stop a war before it ate everyone alive.

But as Octavian’s smugness practically glowed in the torchlight, Reyna had a horrifying thought—what if they were already too late?