We hadn’t managed to beat Glory Girl here. She was standing off to the side next to a folding chair where Panacea sat bundled up in two coats and with a thermos filled with hot coffee cradled in her arms. She shot Crystal and I a glare, then turned back to her sister. They were arguing, or maybe just talking passionately, about something, but I had neither the desire nor energy to listen in.

“Give me a second,” I mumbled to Crystal. I felt… strange. Weirdly tired. Flying had never taken so much out of me before, at least not when I’d done it on pegasus-back, and airplanes were always super stressful but not like this.

“Take your time.”

By the time I was good to go, Glory Girl had finished arguing with her sister and flounced over to join Crystal and I. She’d taken the time to change out of her mundane clothing into the same outfit I’d seen on Wednesday. As I’d noticed then, like this she really did look the part of a superheroine.

Between the short skirt, cape, golden tiara holding back her long hair, and white heeled boots, she wouldn't have looked out of place on the cover of a comic book or on a movie poster. Before she looked like any other pretty teenage girl. Now she looked every inch the young heroine I knew her to be.

“So how are we doing this?” I asked.

Glory Girl grinned, showing off a row of pearly-white teeth. “Full contact. Powers, costumes, the works. Obviously nothing like, super lethal? But Amy can patch us up if anything goes wrong as long as we’re careful.” She paused for a second. “You do have a costume, right? You said on PHO that you did. Is it like your sword?”

“That works for me!” It was exactly what I’d been hoping for in fact. I didn’t bother answering the rest of her question, she’d see it soon enough.

Without further ado, I peeled off my sweater and tossed it aside. Crystal looked like she wanted to say something, but thought better of it and bit her lip as she stepped away.

Stretching my arms out above my head, I cracked my knuckles, then cracked my neck one way and then the other. It was mostly for show––I could actually crack basically any part of my body on demand with a bit of effort. Turns out synovial fluid, the stuff that lubricates your joints, is basically just water and making some tiny little nitrogen bubbles was a piece of cake compared to some of the training dad put me through.

Then I grinned at Glory Girl and slapped my chest, where the harness-form of my armor lay waiting, twice in rapid succession. Shimmering waves of bronze rippled out from the center of my chest, spreading out along my torso and then down my limbs. In their wake, layers of armor appeared.

The first wave covered me in a skin-tight layer of liquid bronze, the metal shining like well-polished gold despite the gloom. The second wave refined the liquid metal into proper armor. Layers of gleaming fish-like scales emerged from the undefined mass, each one no larger than a fingernail.

My usual chestplate and greaves flowed into existence, sweeping lines molded perfectly around my body to provide maximum protection with no impact on my speed and flexibility. My helmet came next, growing out of the metal around my neck to fully cover every inch of exposed skin until only two narrow slits remained for my eyes. Despite the obstruction, I could still see perfectly. The metal was completely opaque when looking in, but for me it was as clear as water.

Finally the third wave passed, leaving behind the intricate ornamentation that Hephaestus had painstakingly designed into the armor. Each and every scale was inscribed with my father’s trident, the metal work so fine that it was nearly impossible to see with the naked eye. Two more tridents adorned my back and chest, surrounded by an intricate design of hippocampi swimming through a coral reef. Lastly, a plume of blue and red hair grew from the top of my helmet like a mohawk, completing the image of a classical Greek warrior.

“Holy shit that’s so cool,” Crystal whispered under her breath.

I raised my arms on either side of me, barely feeling the weight of the armor on my shoulders. The movement was completely silent, scales rolling against one another without so much as a clink.

Brushing my hand across my hip, Riptide’s pen form appeared in my hand and I flicked the cap off with my thumb. “A bit like my sword, yeah,” I told Glory Girl, who was staring at me with wide, delighted eyes like a kid in a candy store for the first time.

She shook her head and floated up a few inches off the ground. “Showy, but let’s see if you have what it takes to back it up! You said your stuff’s pretty durable, yeah? Don’t want to wreck anything.

I twirled Riptide. “It can take a beating and the armor can repair itself as long as the mechanisms aren’t damaged. I’ll tell you to stop if I’m worried.”

“Sounds good! Ready?”

Crystal hurriedly shot away, landing on the ground beside Panacea and surrounding the two of them in a transparent forcefield tinged with crimson like the rest of her abilities. Panacea looked less annoyed than she had before, though she had eyes only for her sister and her coffee. I imagined one of the greatest healers in the world had seen some pretty impressive stuff over the years.

“Ready!” I confirmed, and it was on.

Vicky took the initiative immediately, shooting towards me like a bullet with her fist extended. My first instinct was to meet her blow for blow––I’d faced down Kronos, or at least a limited version of him, what was one teenage superhero compared to that––but that was the curse talking. Even if I could do so, that wasn’t the point of this the same way I wasn’t just going to drown her under a million gallons of seawater. This was not a battle to be won, but rather a learning opportunity.

Riptide came up and I sidestepped just far enough that an uncontrolled projectile would have missed entirely. Glory Girl, for all the demeaning nicknames I’d seen on PHO, was very much not a wild wrecking ball. She stopped on a dime and threw a sharp, well practiced straight punch at my chest.

I swung Riptide up to knock her arm aside but underestimated the needed force. Her arm shifted to the side a fraction of an inch as Riptide’s edge slipped frictionlessly along her bare forearm and then a battering ram slammed into my shoulder and sent me skidding backwards leaving two long trenches through the sand in my wake.

Huh, interesting. I straightened and found her floating several feet away from me where we’d exchanged hits.

“You’re pretty fast,” she told me simply.

“That was a good punch.”

A second later she was on me again. I dodged the initial charge, then ducked under the follow up punch and caught her leg between my armored elbow and side.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

That barely seemed to slow her down though. Like some of the more annoying monsters and gods I’d fought over the years, her strength completely ignored any sort of principles of physics.

That was probably because of her flight––she didn’t seem to have any issues leveraging her strength despite not having touched the ground a single time in our first exchange. Sort of like the opposite of that annoyingly durable monster I’d killed in the labyrinth, except without the healing.

She spun like a windmill blade, folding her arms over her chest as her long hair dragged through the sand. I let go of her leg before she could do a full three-sixty and slam me into the ground, but I was still sent flying on a narrow arc up and over her.

I twisted in mid air to get my feet under me, but decided against using my powers to catch myself. That proved to be a mistake. She took absolutely no time to recover, not even bothering to finish her spin as she rocketed towards me with her hands still folded over her chest and her legs extended together towards me.

The literal flying kick caught me under my ribs and launched me nearly fifty feet through the air. This time, I was much less reluctant to use the rest of my abilities. She was strong, stronger than almost any demigod I’d ever faced. I’d met Laistrygonian giants who didn’t hit like she could.

A column of seawater rose from the surf and caught me before I could hit the ground. “Being able to fly is such bullshit!” I called out loudly. Even if she wasn’t as strong as Ares or Kronos or even my brother Triton, the way she used her strength was completely different. Fighting two people like her would be a total nightmare; they could just bounce me back and forth through the air at their leisure without giving me a chance to fight back.

Glory Girl very maturely stuck her tongue out at me. “Giving up so soon?” she asked teasingly.

“Not in the least. My turn, I think.”

I waved Riptide dramatically through the air like a conductor’s baton. There was a wrenching in my gut and a half-dozen geysers blasted out of the waves beneath me, each one curving unnaturally through the air to home in unerringly on my sparring partner.

The look of surprise on her face was both comical and endearing. Had she somehow missed that I’d told her I was a hydrokinetic or was she so distracted by our first few exchanges that she’d forgotten?

Whatever the case, she didn’t let it distract her for long. She wove expertly between foamy columns of seawater, moving in three dimensions in a way that spoke of either natural aptitude or long hours of practice. Fighting underwater, or evidently in the sky, was very different from doing so on land. You had to really think about your positioning in a way that just didn’t happen on land outside of some particularly showy dodges.

Even for me it had taken some time to wrap my head around it. Being able to dodge up and down was just the start of it, particularly if you were nimble enough to rotate your body every which way fast enough. She was no master, but her level of skill was impressive for a mortal as young as her.

Eventually, the sheer number of attacks filling the sky overwhelmed her. She dodged one column, spun like a top to avoid a second, and folded nearly in half at the waist to evade a third. The fourth, coming up through her blind spot, smacked straight into her butt and sent her flying.

These were not the narrow, blade-like jets of water moving fast enough to cut clean through steel beams I’d gotten used to using in recent months, but rather much more gentle pillars of foam-filled cold water. Still, the simple mass and volume of water hit like a battering ram and knocked her out of the sky.

She recovered right before she hit the ground, but by then it was too late. A dome of water nearly two yards thick surrounded her like the cupped palm of a very wet giant. She experimentally punched the barrier and the blow sent water spraying out from the outer edge of the barrier, but more water quickly flowed into place, trapping her fist in the process.

She tilted her head to the side and said something I couldn’t hear. I shrugged and tapped the side of my head meaningfully with my finger. She shrugged back, then shoulder checked the barrier hard enough to turn a tree into pulp. More water sprayed, but that was about it.

She shrugged again, then tapped the ground several times with her free hand, prompting me to drop the barrier.

I let the column of water still holding me up drain back into the sea and walked over to where my temporary opponent was studying the circle of dry sand and rocks she was standing on surrounded by a thick band of waterlogged earth.

Despite the loss, there was a huge smile on her face and she laughed loudly as I approached. “That was awesome!” she exclaimed. “Do you want to go again?”

“Do we still have time?”

“Plenty! It's like… not even three yet, right? Mom won’t be home till five at the earliest, maybe even six or seven.”

“Great!”

Crystal, who had hurried over when she saw us stop fighting, sighed loudly. “You’re welcome to join us!” Glory Girl quickly glanced over towards me, “right Percy?”

“Yeah, of course.”

That only made her sigh again. “Maybe later.”

The next hour was honestly pretty great. We had two more no-holds-barred fights, both of which I ended up winning. After that however we had a few much more interesting fights. Some were physical only, others restricted only certain parts of our powers, like no barriers for me or flying for her.

About half-an-hour in I retracted most of my armor, mostly to prove that I was just as indestructible without it as I’d claimed, and we had a lovely boxing match that quickly devolved into wild, super-powered wrestling that left craters in the sand and kicked up great sprays of seawater. By the end of it she was breathing heavily and I had to quickly dry her costume off with my powers while Panacea ranted about hypothermia and reckless idiots. She seemed… prickly.

It didn’t take me long to notice a few peculiarities about Glory Girl’s strength, though I didn’t mention any of my suspicions just yet. She always made sure to back up for a moment after any particularly hard exchanges and the first time I’d left any actual mark on her actual body was when I double-tapped her with a column of water and a nearly-dodged blow from Riptide. She’d waved things off, the tiny cut quickly healed by her sister, but once I had that single data point, it didn’t take long to confirm things.

Crystal joined us for exactly one fight, right after the wrestling match that had pissed off Panacea. That time we all limited ourselves to ranged abilities and she proved herself to be a real menace with her speed, lasers, and barriers that could momentarily block the waves and geysers I was limiting myself too.

Funnily enough it was Glory Girl who got her in the end, before herself falling before my barrage. Turns out super strength plus an easy supply of very throwable rocks was a rather dangerous combination.

Having to heal her cousin also didn’t seem to endear me anymore to Panacea, even though it was her sister who had injured Crystal and not me. It was just a slightly broken arm, barely even a scratch, and she dealt with it in literal seconds anyway.

Eventually however, both of us were starting to get tired and it looked like it was about to rain, so we decided to move things to the Dallon family home. Once again Crystal carried me in her arms while Vicky, who had changed out of her Glory Girl costume into skinny jeans and a cute red sweater, carried her sister.

As the rain began to fall, we flew together inside one of Crystal’s red domes and chatted about the fights and their lives as outed superheroes. Eventually this transitioned into Vicky complaining about her on- and off-again boyfriend Dean, with whom she’d broken up for (at least) the fifth time a few days earlier. Apparently he’d said something ‘just horrible’ during their double date with Amy and some other boy that Vicky knew and that had been enough to make her break it off again.

I didn’t pay very much attention towards the end––flying felt really, really not great, though being carried by a pretty girl like Crystal certainly made it better. From what I gathered, Vicky was considering breaking things off all together if she could find ‘someone new, someone who really gets me, you know?’ Amy seemed to be all for it at first, then changed her mind, while Crystal thought she should give this guy Dean another chance and stick with guys in her own year.

I had no real opinion one way or the other. I just wanted to get back to the ground, or even better, into the sea. Fish weren’t meant to fly and clearly neither was I. Give me a nice, rocking boat or even a horse any day of the week. Or honestly I’d take a flying boat or a flying horse. Damn, a flying boat would be so cool. Maybe we could stick like a dragon head on the front or something? I’m sure we had some dragon heads gathering dust up in the big house at camp…