"In Latin my name, Aurelia, basically means 'the golden one.' My mother literally named me her golden light through the storm that was her life. That is my job. To be everyone's light at the end of the tunnel. And I got stuck worrying so much about...
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Aurelia hated losing.
Correction: Aurelia hated losing to Octavian. The Fifth cohort almost always loses when it comes to war games, and she has accepted it as long as she managed to take Octavian down first. It was one of the only things that gave her joy these past couple of months.
Aurelia didn't always participate in war games. She was a reigning champ in the gladiator fights—and it was by far her favorite because it was a game where she wasn't tied to her cohort. Chariot racing didn't offer her much amusement and she barely tolerated playing Siege. Yet, here she was, marching alongside Frank, Percy and Hazel to the war games.
Once they got out of camp, the Fifth cohort formed two lines behind their centurions, Dakota and Gwen. They marched north, skirting the edge of the city, and headed to the field of Mars—the largest, flattest part of the valley. The grass was cropped short by all the unicorns, bulls, and homeless fauns that grazed here. The earth was pitted with explosion craters and scarred with trenches from past games. At the north end of the field stood their target. The engineers had built a stone fortress with an iron portcullis, guard towers, scorpions ballistae, water cannons, and no doubt many other nasty surprises for the defender to use.
Aurelia scanned the fortress, looking for weak points of entry as well as trying to figure out where Octavian would be hiding.
"They did a good job today," Hazel noted. "That's bad for us."
"Wait," Percy said. "You're telling me that fortress was built today?"
Hazel grinned. "Legionnaires are trained to build. If we had to, we could break down the entire camp and rebuild it somewhere else. Take maybe three or four days, but we could do it."
"Let's not," Percy said. "So you attack a different fort every night?"
"Not every night," Frank said. "We have different training exercises. Sometimes deathball—um, which is basically paintball, except with ... you know, poison and acid and fire balls. Sometimes we do chariot and gladiator competitions. Aurelia is always one of the winners for the gladiator comps." Frank chuckled. "I'm honestly surprised she's out here. She hasn't joined us for Siege the entire time I've been here."
"Reyna made me," Aurelia admitted, her eyes not leaving the fortress. "She said that I have to participate in every game at least once a month."
"You do know that the game hasn't started yet, right?" Percy said. "You death staring their creation of torture isn't going to knock it down."
Aurelia's lips twitched, almost forming a small smile. "Do not worry, Percy. I could not care less about the game itself. As long as I get to take out Octavian, the fortress will most likely remain intact." Her sentence made Percy grin at her and she shook her head, fighting a laugh at his dopey smile.
