And the winner is…
Option B, Trick it into breathing fire!
Final Score:
Option A: Fight the dragon: 19
Option B: Trick it into breathing fire: 66
Option C: Tactical retreat: 6
Chapter 14
Midnight Snack
"You smell like rust!"
It was a new challenge, attempting to taunt something that was a couple hundred thousand pounds of metal instead of a person, but Perseus thought it was safe to say he'd gotten off to a good start, considering the way the dragon's head locked onto him.
"Yeah, I'm talking to you! I've seen grandmas that are better oiled! What happened, did your mechanic kick you out for burning down his garage?"
As Perseus yelled at the monster, he inched back. Further away from Clarisse. In the opposite direction of Annabeth. He kept moving, slowly, toward the cliff behind him.
"Watch out!" Annabeth shouted.
The warning wasn't necessary. The moment that Perseus saw sparks fizzing out of the dragon's neck, a sign of what was coming, he put himself tight against the rocks.
"You're not an automaton," he said, "you're an automaTON of worn-out crappy gears and hunks of metal scrap."
The dragon attempted to obliterate him with its morning breath.
But Perseus was already moving. His reactions were good— just barely good enough to get him out of the path of the flames in time. He could feel the heat. It scraped his back, and singed off the tiny hairs on the back of his neck. It was uncomfortable… but it worked.
As soon as the flames touched it the rock just opened. It peeled back in either direction; Perseus could hear cogs groaning out of sight. The dragon seemed surprised for a moment, like it had forgotten (or not noticed) what it was indirectly aiming at. Perseus popped up.
"Inside!" he shouted.
Annabeth listened straight away. She joined Perseus in racing through the opening, toward the dim interior that had been revealed. Clarisse was more hesitant. She stared at the dragon.
"Clarisse!" Perseus barked. "Don't be an idiot for once!"
Clarisse scowled.
"This isn't over," she told the dragon.
It tried to stop her. The dragon took a step forward to cut off her escape. But Annabeth picked something up and threw it. A bronze cog clinked off the dragon's mechanical eye, distracting it long enough for Clarisse to scramble past.
Meanwhile, Perseus hadn't just been standing and waiting. There was no guarantee that simply getting inside would be enough to escape. Fortunately, the mechanics on the door weren't the same on the inside as the outside.
An almost comically large lever was positioned beside the door. When Clarisse crossed the threshold, Perseus yanked the lever down, before flicking a switch beside it.
The doors grinded shut. The dragon roared and rushed forward, but only succeeded in headbutting the cliff. Their last view of the monster was one eye, peering through the last crack to the outside world, before that shut as well. The switch Perseus flicked functioned as a lock. When the doors shut, not even fire worked to open them from the outside. He knew because he could hear the dragon spewing flames with absolutely no luck.
All of them caught their breath. It was dark inside— predictably, there weren't any windows in the hidden room that required a wildfire just to get open.
"Are there lights?" Clarisse asked.
"How are we supposed to know? Look around and find some," Annabeth said.
The three of them felt around through the dark, poking and prodding things nearly blindly. Eventually, Perseus pushed on what seemed like an ordinary patch of wall, and it clicked in. With a succession of deep whirring noises, the lights turned on one after another, all built into the ceiling.
The bunker was big. The air inside was cold and a little musty, but not as bad as Perseus expected for a hidden room buried underground. They definitely weren't the only ones to open the entrance recently.
It looked like someone's super secret garbage dump at first, because there were all kinds of things, and most of them were obviously incomplete. But instead of being broken, they looked unfinished. There was enough celestial bronze sitting around that if you melted it down, you could've supplied the entire Ares Cabin with new weapons and armor. Perseus didn't voice this thought because he didn't want to give Clarisse ideas.
"What is this?" Clarisse asked.
"Bunker Nine…" Annabeth muttered, looking around excitedly.
"There's eight more of these?" Clarisse asked. "What a waste of perfectly good metal."
Maybe she was already thinking along the same lines as Perseus's observation.
"The Hephaestus Cabin used to run this place a long time ago," Annabeth said. "It's written about in the history books they keep at the Big House. But this place has been lost for decades!"
"But it's so easy to find," Perseus said. "You just have to walk super deep into the woods, dodge all the monsters, find a dragon willing to politely try and incinerate you, and voila."
"The point is, this place hasn't been used in forever," Annabeth said.
"By demigods, at least," Perseus said.
In the center of the room, two tables had been crushed, while tons of metal contraptions had been dragged over. It formed a sort of circle. No, not just a circle. A nest.
"I think we just locked that dragon out of its house," he said.
"Great. Then when it comes back for it, we kill it!" Clarisse said.
"This is its den, but Thalia's not here," Annabeth pointed out.
The three of them went quiet. Perseus had noticed, but hadn't been willing to bring it up. The only reason they came this deep into the forest was to find the daughter of Zeus. Yet now that they arrived, there was even less sign of her than at the scene of the battle. He didn't know if that was a good sign or a bad one.
"Come on," he said. "Let's check out what's here."
The answer: a whole lot.
The first thing they found was an old Porsche convertible. It took yanking off multiple other inventions to get a look at it, because the car was being used as one side of the dragon's nest. Somehow, it wasn't crushed, but it had clearly been disassembled part way and someone was in the process of fixing it back up, only with new features. That was the only explanation Perseus could come up with for the jet-engine-like motor affixed above the trunk.
"You think it was supposed to fly?" he asked.
"And more," Annabeth said, pointing.
A variety of buttons had been added to a control panel on the dashboard, featuring labels like 'Sports Mode,' 'Eco Mode,' 'Flight Mode,' and 'Submarine.'
The next thing they found in semi-working condition was a karaoke machine. And when he said semi-working, well… he mostly meant that it made any kind of noise.
"SCHREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"
"Turn it off!" Clarisse bellowed, covering her ears. "Get it off! Off!"
Annabeth managed to flick the power switch, ending the assault on their eardrums. When they investigated the machine, they found that the sound they'd been listening to was actually one of its songs. The entire karaoke system was made up of nothing but different monster sounds. Currently, it was stuck on 'Mating Calls of the Giant Eagle' but there were others, themed around Laistrygonian birthday songs or Gorgon lullabies. As soon as they saw that one of the options apparently offered an authentic Siren experience, they quit experimenting and decided to leave the thing as a horny eagle simulator.
The only other things they found that seemed to work were all grouped together. Discuses made of thick celestial bronze; golf clubs with their own miniature engines designed to speed up your swing; a pitching machine that had settings all the way up to three-hundred miles per hour on it; cleats with extendable celestial bronze studs capable of reaching six inches a pop… It was all sports equipment, but with clearly non-mortal twists. When he found them, Perseus went to town.
He raised the catcher's glove he found within the pile, eyeing the pitching machine in front of him. There was a pop. A ball flew out at the speed of an MLB pitcher's best fastball, but Perseus's arm snapped over and snagged it out of the air no problem.
"You play baseball?" Clarisse asked.
"I play everything," Perseus said. "Same reason I learned how to fight— chicks dig it, so I rock at it."
She snorted. "Should've known."
All three of them were bored. They had investigated the bunker top to bottom by now, and the dragon was still outside. They could hear it pacing and occasionally scratching on the cliff. Already they'd decided they had no choice but to stay overnight, which was making their stomach's ache. The bunker had a fountain that provided fresh water, but food was off the table. Literally.
Abruptly, as Perseus went to catch another ball, he felt his legs tremble and nearly give out.
He stumbled forward, drawing Annabeth and Clarisse's attention. Clarisse stepped forward and grabbed his arm to stabilize him.
"What's wrong?" she demanded.
"Nothing," Perseus gasped. "I just… pushed myself a little too hard, I think."
He hadn't been in a good state at the start of the day. Just look at how he failed chasing down that person in the cloak. But adrenaline let him move a lot better when his life was on the line against the dragon, and now he was paying for that. He ached everywhere, even underneath his fingernails.
"Sit down and stop playing with baseballs then!" Clarisse told him.
He listened. The three gathered around and discussed their options. They all agreed that if the dragon was still outside the next morning, they would have to fight their way past it. Unfortunately none of them could agree on what the best way to do that would be.
Finally, they were tired enough to settle in for the night, even with the anxiety around their situation. Annabeth dragged the cape off of a metal knight and used it as a blanket. Perseus decided to sleep in the passenger seat of the Porsche, while Clarisse sprawled out across the back seat.
"You used to be a god," Clarisse said as Perseus was laying back in his seat, trying to drift off. "Isn't there a way you can just heal yourself?"
"Used to be a god," Perseus reminded her. "If I still was one, I'd already be better."
"I guess that's true. So basically you're useless."
Perseus sighed. "More or less. Sometimes, interacting with my domain has given me brief bursts of power, but I can't make sense of it, and it isn't reliable."
"Huh," Clarisse said, and she didn't speak again.
The seat of the Porsche was at a bad angle for deep sleep. Perseus's arm ached. His legs did too, now that he thought about it. So he wasn't really asleep when thirty minutes later he heard the sound of a car door swinging open.
A moment later another one opened. He felt the Porsche dip at the front right corner, underneath his feet.
Perseus's eyes shot open, and he looked down in time to watch his pants be opened up.
"What are you doing?" he hissed.
Clarisse looked up at him, sliding her hand up and down his cock to make it harden.
"Getting you that power burst so you become less useless," she said. "The fuck do you think?"
"But Annabeth—"
"I waited," Clarisse said. "The wiseass is asleep."
Perseus looked to the side, toward where Annabeth was sleeping. But they had turned out the lights, leaving the bunker pitch-black. He could barely see Clarisse's face hovering around his crotch. There was no way he could see the daughter of Athena.
But he didn't hear her, and she definitely couldn't see them. So Perseus decided, fuck it. Literally.
He let his hands stroke the back of Clarisse's head. He was getting hard now, offering Clarisse a target to lick. Her broad, wet tongue slipped along him.
Soon she had her lips around him. She didn't take him all the way in her throat. Maybe she thought that would be too loud, or maybe she didn't fancy giving herself a sore throat the night before a battle. Either way, Perseus wasn't complaining. Her slobber ran down his shaft, while her hands grasped what her mouth couldn't reach. She had a strong grip, like she was holding a spear, but it somehow didn't feel bad.
Maybe it wasn't the noise Clarisse had been worried about, because she certainly wasn't being quiet now. Loud slurping noises filled Bunker Nine. Perseus grunted. He slid his hips forward and back just slightly, to experience Clarisse's mouth in different ways.
Her tongue slipped all around him. There wasn't a whole lot of technique, but she had plenty of passion, and the results were far from bad. Before Clarisse had a chance to separate her mouth from his glans, Perseus came inside her mouth.
He expected her to complain. Gods knew she complained about nearly everything. But Clarisse only pulled back, scowling, and paused long enough to swallow what she'd been given. She started to stand.
"Scoot over," she grunted.
"Ow!" Perseus said as she pushed on his broken arm.
"Quit being a baby!"
After a very confused, borderline-wrestling few seconds, they adopted a new position. Clarisse was now in the seat, her knees where a butt was supposed to go and her arms draped around the back. Her pussy jutted out as she arched her back, while Perseus stood directly behind her, still holding his messed up arm at a ginger angle.
"I did all the work last time," Clarisse muttered. "You're healed enough. Fuck me, for a change."
Perseues's body might've been laboring, but there were some tasks he would always be up for. With zero hesitation, he shoved his cock straight down Clarisse's pussy.
Her slobber still had his meat slick and lubricated, and her pussy was far from dry. Maybe Clarisse had a thing for being on her knees in front of a man? Suggesting as much would probably get you punched, if not stabbed, but it did make Perseus wonder.
Clarisse moaned as she felt him spear through her. Perseus's crotch clashed with her thick thighs and ass, all tight with muscle. He tried to go slow, to minimize the noise they were making, but that was easier said than done.
Perseus reached out, using his good hand to hold Clarisse's face against the headrest, practically forcing her to makeout with it.
"What did you call yourself on our way in here? My Mommy?" he asked. "Where'd that bluster go?"
Clarisse grunted something that probably contained more vile curses than PG words, but the message was lost forever, as she was gagged by the upholstery she was being pressed against. She tried to pull her head back, but at times like these Perseus's body felt like his old one. He was always strong enough to pull off what he wanted to during sex— almost like magic, it always worked out.
"I don't know why you're mad," he whispered. "You're the one who asked for this."
Clarisse's ass was rippling. He could feel the jiggle each time they collided. Despite her breasts getting most of the attention, she really did have an amazing butt to go with it. It was huge and shapely in the way that only hard work gave you, the kind that hinted at squats carrying more than the owner's body weight.
Amazingly, Clarisse's strategy was working. Perseus moved the arm that had been broken. It had still been extremely stiff, unable to be used properly, but now it felt like it contained real dexterity. It snaked around Clarisse's hip, pressing the top of her slit and flicking her clit back and forth. Clarisse responded by releasing a long, droning moan and orgasming.
"That's it," Perseus said, pressing her clit harder. "Good girl."
Clarisse was hugging the seat of the car for dear life. It had to be intense taking Perseus's dick like this, even for a girl of her size. The longer she was fucked, the higher her moans rose in pitch.
Suddenly, Perseus let go of her head. He gave her clit another love tap, then moved both arms around to Clarisse's ass, grasping those shapely cheeks. As he brought his hips forward, he dragged hers back into him. Thoughts of keeping the noise quiet had been forgotten in a haze of lust.
Clarisse moaned, no longer having her voice muffled by the headrest, and if Perseus had his eyes shut he wouldn't have believed what girl it was coming from. The sound was girly in a way he never counted on hearing from a tomboy like Clarisse. The contrast was so hot that Perseus couldn't handle it.
He came inside of Clarisse, causing her body to stiffen. A moment later he slid out of her, his weight falling back against the dashboard.
Perseus was so out of it, he hardly noticed his hand bumping a switch, until the car's headlights turned on, bathing the room in bright light.
He twisted around and mashed the button, cursing and squinting as the sudden light burned his eyes. He managed to shut them off, and the bright beams disappeared.
As they did, just before the room was plunged into darkness, Perseus saw a sight he couldn't tell if he was imagining.
In front of the car, on her back, Annabeth had been wrapped in the cape she was using as a blanket. Her head had been hurled back, while her teeth bit her lower lip. The cape had been moving. Right above her crotch, it had been bobbing up and down, as if her hands had been moving underneath.
Perseus rubbed his eyes, but the light was gone, and he wasn't willing to turn them on again. He had to have imagined it. He was too horny— it was even making him hallucinate.
Someone grabbed his hand. Perseus found himself pulled forward, on top of Clarisse, who had managed to spin around. Her legs were still spread, while her pussy pointed at him. She grabbed his shoulders, refusing to let him go.
"I'm not full yet," she grunted.
Perseus descended on her, his body pumping relentlessly.
O-O-O
The next morning, Perseus felt incredible. The same could not be said of his companions.
Clarisse and Annabeth were both pale and haggard. Not having eaten real food for almost an entire day was taking a real toll on them. The dragon was still outside; they could hear it. Perseus felt as full as if he just had a full breakfast, after the night he had with Clarisse, but he knew that was just his powers at work. To get out of this one, he was going to have to take the lead.
So he stood at the front entrance, rubbing his chin. The dragon was too powerful to take on in a normal fight. Fortunately, they had plenty of tools at their disposal.
The question was, which would serve them the best?
Choice: What should Perseus do?
Option A: Use the tricked-out car to escape.
Option B: Use the Monster Karaoke to escape.
Option C: Use the magic sports equipment to escape.
Option D: All out chaos; use all of them.
How to Vote: Write a review which says/includes A, B, C, etc. You can just write the letter, or feel free to type out all your reasoning. Who knows, you may even sway others to back your vote if you make a really good case.
I will count votes cast across all the sites this story is posted to (see my profile for details) and go with whatever has the majority. Chapters will generally be spaced out by at least a week, to give plenty of time for everyone who wants to vote to get the chance to.