Raven threads her arm through mine in a show of solidarity. “We can go beat on my brothers if you want. Will that make you feel better?”
“No.” I sigh. “They’re right. It’s not logical or practical to beat up my own army in training.”
“I’m sure they have done something to deserve a beating.” Raven squeezes my arm.
“Maybe later. We need to go talk to Chiron about this. If they have time to harass each other, they aren’t training hard enough. This war is coming sooner than any of us are ready for and they aren’t even trying.”
“They’re not. The week you guys were gone, a good chunk of students took the week off from training like some kind of vacation.” The Athena girl rolls her eyes.
“Motherfucker, do I need to make training mandatory? This is a joke, right? Do they not realize after all the changes we’ve made, how serious this is?” I ask.
“They are college idiots. You can’t expect them to take anything seriously, B,” Raven says.
“Well, they are really going to hate me after this.” I grin. “Thank you, um, I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
She giggles. “It’s Sara. Don’t worry. I don’t expect you to automatically know my name. That wouldn’t be logical as we have never interacted before.”
“Thank you, Sara, and I’m sorry for what I’m about to do.” I shake my head.
“Don’t worry about it. We need more training. If we could get some team building exercises in there too, it might help.” Sara takes a step back.
“That’s a great idea, thanks.” I nod and pull Raven to the admin building.
Jayden jogs up on my other side. As we make the trek to Chiron’s office, I run over in my head what needs to be done.
“You think it’s too harsh since we said not everyone has to fight?” I chew my lip.
“No, they will need these skills, even if they don’t choose to fight in this war. They will need team building and strategy skills in the human world.” Jayden plants a hand on my hip and squeezes.
“In all honesty, though,” Raven says. “We may say they don’t have to fight when the time comes but they might not have a choice. If we are attacked here on campus and they aren’t trained, they could die or end up hurting someone else.”
“Yeah, that’s true. We don’t know what’s to come or what sneaky shit they will pull to get one over on us.” I nod.
Decided, I knock on Chiron’s door and wait for his response before entering. Bethany is sitting in the chair in front of the desk. Her glare burns into me. Thad leans against the wall, his expression bored as we file into the office.
“Come to yell at me some more?” Bethany snarls.
“I honestly forgot you were in here.” I shrug.
“Whatever.”
I turn to Chiron, completely ignoring the idiot in the room. “Things are getting out of hand. We need to do something about the bullying. I was informed that it was worse when we went to save the world. Again.”
“I didn’t know it was still happening until Thad came in with this one.” Chiron points at Bethany.
“How do you plan to stop it?” She rolls her eyes.
I bend down in front of her, encroaching on her personal space. “By making sure that everyone at this academy is so tired and sore from training all day and half the night that they can’tbully each other. You all want to be assholes? Well, you just earned your way into boot camp for military school.”
“You can’t,” Bethany shrieks. “You said we wouldn’t have to fight if we didn’t want to.”
“The odds are you will have to fight whether you want to or not and being untrained during the final battle will only get you killed. If they attack the academy by surprise, they won’t care that you don’t want to fight. They will cut you down.”
“And what do you mean she can’t?” Raven crosses her arms. “We took over this academy and work with the headmaster Beth put in charge. We can do whatever we want so don’t test me.”
“You’re all power hungry,” Bethany grumbles.
I laugh. I can’t help it. “Power hungry? You can’t be serious. I wish I didn’t have the power that I do. That I could sit back and let someone else go on all these missions to save the world. Sadly, life isn’t fair and this is my fate. Now, because you guys are all a bunch of dicks with too much time on your hands, you’re going to military school.”
