"He was taking me through the dungeons, where he kept all his slaves and I saw her, I saw Anna. I didn't know she was alive, and I think Argo forgot about her as well. The moment I saw her there sitting in her own feces like an animal I broke.
"I attacked Argo with all I had, every single thing he taught me I used to fight him. I managed to get Anna out of there and we ran, ran as far and as fast as we could. I carried her on my back until I ran out of breath. I thought we were going to die when a couple found us, they took us in and they nurtured us back to health. They were Kristoff's parents and they were the first couple that accepted us both. Over the years I learnt to control my powers, not through anger but through sheer will power. I was in control of my powers, not the other way around."
"Why are you telling me this?" Percy finally asked.
"Because I saw you back there, and you reminded me of myself when I was young. You reminded me of how lost I was when serving Argo. Back then the ice was using me, not the other way around."
"Just because I'm a little extreme in the way I do things doesn't make me a monster Elsa."
"No, but it makes you less human," Elsa said.
"Well, then it's a good thing I'm only half human then huh?" Percy said ending the conversation.
The duo placed a bomb along the side of the tunnel they were going through before walking forward. Percy looked at his watch, it was 11:20, they had forty minutes to get out, but both Percy and Elsa wanted to find Argo before anything else.
As Percy kept walking along the tunnel a warning rung out in his head;
Warning! There's a pressure pad in front of you!
Percy jumped to the side pushing Elsa to the wall. "What are you-" Elsa began when Percy pointed at a lifted tile on the ground.
"Trap," Percy said letting Elsa go, "see, told you I have a sixth sense when it come to danger."
Percy smiled and took a few steps forward and suddenly the floor gave out below him causing the demigod to fall down. Gamer's mind kicked in fast destroying all signs of panic. Percy looked down and saw spikes at the bottom of the pit, he poured 2000 mana into his marble skin skill. He didn't know how much he would need, but better safe than sorry;
Defence— 158,000
Percy braced for impact but instead of feeling several points of impact Percy's body hit something solid. Percy got up and opened his ice and found himself standing on top of a platform of ice. The demigod could see the spikes underneath the ice and turned up to see Elsa with her hands at the side of the pit with a trail of ice leading to the platform.
"Argo doesn't just use pressure plates, he also uses motion sensors," Elsa explained as she formed ice platforms along the side of the pit to help Percy back up.
"Thanks, I guess you were right, it was better to have help. But just for the record I had it handled."
Elsa raised an eyebrow, "really? And how did you have it handled?"
Percy knocked on his skin causing it to ring out, "I can strengthen my skin to be as hard as stone. The spikes would have hurt, but wouldn't have killed me. Heck I doubt they could have even pierced my skin."
Elsa looked impressed but said nothing as she created a bridge of ice over the pit for them to cross.
Along the way Percy's area sense detected more and more traps and Elsa helped them get around them all. Eventually the skill leveled up;
Area Sense, Lv-4 (50%)
Allows the user to get a sense of the area around him/her. The higher the level the more information is provided.
Effective until 35 feet.
Soon the tunnel became filled with painting and fancy looking torches along the wall, if Percy had to guess he would say they were in Argo's living quarters. Soon the duo came upon a set of doors, each opposite to one another. They carefully checked the first one to find a storage room. Inside were tanks filled with body parts of different monsters, there was a cyclops eyeball and the wings of a pegasus near the edge of the room with the center filled with a huge tank containing the body of a Hellhound.
"Argo is a sick mother fucker," Percy commented as he looked at the green liquid containing the monster. The Hellhound's eyes were already liquefied, and if Percy had to guess so were the rest of it's organs.
"How can he even possess their bodies?" Elsa asked horrified, "don't they disappear after you kill them?"
Percy narrowed his eyes at the liquid and focused;
Preservation liquid,
This liquid when used on a monster causes preservation of the body allowing it to die a natural death, i.e. fade.
Warning! This product does not work on devious beings or monsters with significant power.
Percy's eyes shot open, "this thing can kill monsters Elsa!"
"What?!'
"This thing can cause monsters to fade!" Percy exclaimed.
"Bu-but that's impossible! If that's true... how powerful is that man?" Elsa asked the frightening question on Percy's mind.
Percy looked around the room and found three kegs each four foot tall with the label for the preservation liquid on top. Percy walked to the kegs and lifted them up putting them into his inventory.
"Where did those things go?" Elsa asked surprised.
Percy sighed, it was time like this when he really wished that people knew about his powers so he didn't have to keep explaining them every six seconds, "I put them in a pocket dimension for storage. Now let's see what's there in the other rooms."
Percy put one bomb on the wall of the room and left. The room directly opposite to this one was arranged like a chemical lab. There were chemical set ups located all over the room with ongoing chemical reactions. The beakers and vials were filled with chemicals that Percy couldn't even begin to pronounce, even with his now stellar English language skills.
"So this must be where he makes all his drugs," Percy said looking at the room.
"No...it's too small," Elsa said as she placed her hands on the walls causing it to slowly freeze over. The ice spread out from the wall to the floor and soon the entire room was frozen over with all the ongoing reactions destroyed, "I hope that at least irritates the bastard a little."
The two then walked out to the tunnel and went further down. After a while they came upon another door and this one lead into a huge library. Percy's eyes widened comically, here was information that Argo himself deemed worthy of attention. The man was mad, but a genius.
"Come on let's go, it's just books," Elsa said moving to leave when suddenly a gust of wind blew across her face.
Percy had gone super speed as he quickly began looting everything in sight. He threw all the books he found into his inventory He kept pulling each one up without even looking at what he picked up. Finally when it was all over Percy had around 58 books stored up inside his inventory and he noticed several boxes open up in front of him;
You have obtained the book containing the skill : Beginners Botanist
Would you like to learn?
YES/NO?
You have obtained the book containing the skill : Advance Zoology
Would you like to learn?
YES/NO?
You have obtained the book containing the skill : Basic physics
Would you like to learn?
YES/NO?
You have obtained a book containing the knowledge of Business administration
Would you like to learn?
YES/NO?
You have obtained a book containing the knowledge of The Universe
Would you like to learn?
YES/NO?
You have obtained a book containing the knowledge of Understanding languages
Would you like to learn?
YES/NO?
You have obtained a book containing the knowledge of creating a Nazism regime.
Would you like to learn?
YES/NO?
Percy bleached at all those notifications, and these weren't the only ones, there were around 30 more notifications behind these ones. He was so going to use these books to bribe the Athena kids. Those book worms always get the best food because they always get up so early! Seriously! Who the fuck gets up at 5 in the morning just to study more books?! Percy appreciated knowledge, but there was a limit!
Elsa blinked, "I didn't realize you were that fast."
Percy closed all the boxes in front of him, "yeah I know, people tend to have the same look whenever they see me do that."
Elsa then asked, "What are you going to do with them?"
Percy shrugged, "study them, maybe learn about what Argo is trying to accomplish by starting a war with the Olympians. You know, the usual."
Elsa nodded and walked up to the desk in front of the book shelf, she bent under the table and began running her hands over the side of the desk.
"Ah, what are you doing?" Percy asked.
"Argo always kept some papers hidden away, if I were to guess...." Click!, "right here." A hidden compartment opened up on the table's surface and in it was a brown leather brown book. Elsa picked it up and threw it to the side.
"That kind of looked important," Percy commented.
"It's a dummy," Elsa said as she began inspecting the bottom of the hidden compartment, "Argo had several like them all over the place. He used to pretend he couldn't see me and would hide them all over the place to give me a false sense of security, to make me think that I knew a secret of his. But he always used to hide his real journal elsewhere," Elsa then formed a thin line of ice and pushed into to the edge of the drawer slowly pulling it out.
Warning! Bomb!
"Elsa wait!" Percy shouted as he sent a blast of ice mana freezing the compartment whole.
"Why did you do that?" Elsa asked removing her hand from the compartment.
"My danger warning system kicked off," Percy explained as he slowly broke the wooden table away using Body From. The whole hidden compartment was then revealed through a block of ice. There was a trigger hidden underneath the hidden compartment with a bomb right below it, so if the false bottom was removed it would have exploded in Elsa's face.
"Thanks," Elsa said, "you have some quick reflexes."
Percy nodded as he carefully removed pieces of the ice to disengage the trigger and pull the real book out. It was identical to the one Elsa threw away but something told Percy this was the real one. Inside was filled with notes about secret projects and other things that Percy couldn't make out for the life of him, maybe Annabeth could help him out later. Percy put the journal inside his inventory and the two walked out of the now empty library. They continued down the tunnel and found a double door at the very end. They pushed the doors aside and stopped when they saw the room.
It was a lab of some kind, Percy saw the wall lined up with surgical instruments, some were clean, others were covered in blood. The room had tables all over, there were 12 in total and each had leather straps on them covered with blood. The demigod didn't need to guess what this room was used for.
"He used these for human experimentation," Elsa said as her arms began coating themselves with ice involuntarily, "fucking bastard."
Percy nodded and looked around finding charts and files lined up near the side. He approached them and read them, and he almost wished that he didn't.
From what he could understand Elsa wasn't the only one Argo had been doing experiments on. There were hundreds of them. The files here spoke of how Argo tried to put traits of different monsters into human beings.
There were several test subjects, with a lot of deaths and few successes. One test subject was a boy, age 11, Argo had put the cells of Hellhounds into the boy's body causing him to become a hybrid of sorts. He could Shadow Travel, something Percy never really got the hang of doing, and could also pass as a Hellhound himself. Something about him smelling like one.
Then there was the case about Argo transforming a woman into a gorgon before trying to transform her back. The experiment failed but the result gave the woman the uncanny ability to transform between her human form and he gorgon form, but anyone who looked at her in either form died instantly.
Then there was the case about Mist manipulation. This was different, instead of creating illusions the things created by this experiment would be real. Argo tried to experiment on a woman, age 21. He tried to make her into a conduit for the Mist, the results were...unexpected. The woman had gone through drastic physical alterations, her body had been de-aged, she looked 13, and instead of controlling the Mist to change the world around her to create illusions, she could only change her own body. It seems that the woman's brain had been damaged heavily causing her to be in a childlike state to mind, this restricted her transformations to cartoon characters.
Percy felt like puking the more he read. Argo was sick, he knew that, but never in his wildest dream did he guess he would be capable of doing something like this.
"What are those?" Elsa asked.
Percy looked downcast, "you don't want to know. Let's just go on and find this sick fuck."
Elsa nodded, "there's an exit over there," she pointed to a door on the far end of the lab, "I think it leads to the training room directly below us."
"Training room?"Percy asked raising an eyebrow.
"He has to have some place to train his 'prized possessions' doesn't he?" Elsa said. Percy nodded and placed the last of their bombs on the wall of the room as the two walked to the door. But as they walked past the middle of the room someone started to sing;
"All the other kids with their pumped up kicks better run better run, outrun my gun."
Elsa's eyes widened in fear and anger as she formed ice claws around her arms, "he's here."
"All the other kids with their pumped up kicks better run better run, faster than my bullet," Percy recognized the voice now. It was coming from outside in the tunnel.
"All the other kids with their pumped up kicks better run better run, outrun my gun," his voice was smooth, yet right under those soft tunes Percy could still make out the creepy voice of the man they came here to kill.
"All the other kids with their pumped up kicks better run better run, faster than my bullet," Percy could see a shadow now underneath the other side of the door. Slowly the double doors were pushed open and there stood Argo Kishin in his black and white suit and top hat. He smiled his creepy smile and showed off his sharp shark like teeth. "I work so hard and I have to come home to this? Didn't I tell you not bring boys home Elsa? You should listen to your daddy you know."
"SHUT THE FUCK UP!" Elsa roared as she sent a blast of icicles at the man. Argo smiled as suddenly his body turned black. The moment the ice touched his body it disappeared into nothing leaving him unharmed.
