Rick Riordan
The Sea Monsters - 02
One of the heads snapped at me experimentally. Without thinking, I swung my sword.
"No!" Annabeth yelled.
Too late. I sliced the Hydra's head clean off. It rolled away into the grass, leaving a flailing
stump, which immediately stopped bleeding and began to swell like a balloon.
In a matter of seconds the wounded neck split into two necks, each of which grew a full-size
head. Now I was looking at an eight-headed Hydra.
"Percy!" Annabeth scolded. "You just opened another Monster Donut shop somewhere!"
I dodged a spray of acid. "I'm about to die and you're worried about that? How do we kill it?"
"Fire!" Annabeth said. "We have to have fire!"
As soon as she said that, I remembered the story. The Hydra's heads would only stop
multiplying if we burned the stumps before they regrew. That's what Heracles had done, anyway.
But we had no fire.
I backed up toward river. The Hydra followed.
Annabeth moved in on my left and tried to distract one of the heads, parrying its teeth with
her knife, but another head swung sideways like a club and knocked her into the muck.
"No hitting my friends!" Tyson charged in, putting himself between the Hydra and Annabeth.
As Annabeth got to her feet, Tyson started smashing at the monster heads with his fists so fast it
reminded me of the whack-a-mole game at the arcade. But even Tyson couldn't fend off the Hydra
forever.
We kept inching backward, dodging acid splashes and deflecting snapping heads without
cutting them off, but I knew we were only postponing our deaths. Eventually, we would make a
mistake and the thing would kill us.
Then I heard a strange sound—a chug-chug-chug that at first I thought was my heartbeat. It
was so powerful it made the riverbank shake.
"What's that noise?" Annabeth shouted, keeping her eyes on the Hydra.
"Steam engine," Tyson said.
"What?" I ducked as the Hydra spat acid over my head.
Then from the river behind us, a familiar female voice shouted: "There! Prepare the thirty-
two-pounder!"
I didn't dare look away from the Hydra, but if that was who I thought it was behind us, I
figured we now had enemies on two fronts.
A gravelly male voice said, "They're too close, m'lady!"
"Damn the heroes!" the girl said. "Full steam ahead!"
"Aye, m'lady."
"Fire at will, Captain!"
Annabeth understood what was happening a split second before I did. She yelled, "Hit the
dirt!" and we dove for the ground as an earth-shattering BOOM echoed from the river. There was a
flash of light, a column of smoke, and the Hydra exploded right in front of us, showering us with
nasty green slime that vaporized as soon as it hit, the way monster guts tend to do.
"Gross!" screamed Annabeth.
"Steamship!" yelled Tyson.
I stood, coughing from the cloud of gunpowder smoke that was rolling across the banks.
Chugging toward us down the river was the strangest ship I'd ever seen. It rode low in the
water like a submarine, its