The pressure was becoming a tangible force, a tightening noose woven from divine thread. For weeks, the Book of Probability had shown Nicholas a disquieting and accelerating pattern.
The random, confused satyrs were gone. In their place were determined hunters, their paths in the silver script showing singular purpose: find the son of Athena.
They were no longer Chiron's scouts; they were Athena's retrievers. His mother's patience had expired. The chessboard was tilting, and she was moving to take her pawn off the field and into the designated box of Camp Half-Blood.
He stood in the deep silence of his father's study; the only light was a green-shaded lamp that painted the room in pools of gold and shadow.
"I'm enlisting," Nicholas stated, his voice flat and final, cutting through the quiet hum of the mansion.
Jonathan Aldridge looked up from a draft of a gubernatorial speech, his pen freezing mid-sentence. The shock on his face was raw, unguarded. "Enlisting?" he echoed, the word tasting foreign. "Nicholas, be serious. The draft won't touch you. Our connections, your status at Columbia, you have a political future here. We've built the foundation for it."
"This isn't about the draft, and my future is the entire point," Nicholas replied, his gaze unwavering. He began to pace, a predator in a cage of books and leather. "The foundation we've built is a sandcastle at high tide. My mother is the tide. I need to leave America, that's the only way I will be safe from her influence."
He laid out the cold, irrefutable logic. A domestic political career, while part of the grand design, was now a trap.
It would keep him rooted, a stationary target in New York, easily cornered by the increasingly bold satyrs and his mothers machinations.
A direct confrontation with a god, even a minor one sent to fetch him, would result in attention from the Gods that would see him killed or worse. He needed to vanish from her immediate reach, somewhere she couldn't track him.
"The army is the perfect vehicle," Nicholas detailed, stopping to trace a line on a large globe in the corner.
His finger slid from New York across the Atlantic, then paused over the vast, fragmented expanse of the Pacific. "It provides instant, legitimate authority, a different kind of credibility that academia can't offer. It's a platform for a new kind of fame, not as a scholar, but as a leader of men. And most critically, it will deploy me overseas, far from the epicenter of Western power where the Olympians' influence is absolute."
"Where could you possibly go that would be safe from them?" Jonathan asked, his voice hushed, the scholar in him grappling with the theology of it.
"Here," Nicholas said, his finger tapping a cluster of islands. "Philippine Islands in the South Pacific. The jungles there are as far from Olympus's current seat as I can get while still serving under the American banner." He turned to face his father.
"The local pantheons are fragmented, their power diminished by forgotten worship. My mother's influence there will be a faint echo, a distant whisper. The satyrs and other lackies will struggle to track me, and her direct intervention would be costly and inefficient. It is the one place I can operate with a degree of freedom."
For days, he had used the Book not to plan a battle, but to plan an escape.
He had identified the perfect unit: an accelerated officer candidate school that prized "natural leaders" and "non-traditional candidates".
The silver script showed him a path where his intellect, his unnerving calm under simulated pressure, and a few carefully timed demonstrations of preternatural strategic insight would see him fast-tracked to a commission.
The threads of probability then wove a near-certain path from that commission directly to a deployment to the Pacific. It was perfect. He would earn medals, gain a soldier's fame, and all while putting an ocean and a continent between himself and Athena's direct line of sight.
"It's… it's a war, Nicholas," Jonathan finally said, the words heavy with a father's fear, a fear that warred visibly with his fanatical belief in his son's divine destiny. "It's not a theoretical exercise. Bullets and shells do not care about your bloodline."
"And staying here is a far more certain kind of death," Nicholas countered, his voice softening almost imperceptibly. "A death of autonomy. A lobotomy by Mist, trapped in a camp to be trained as a loyal hound. Do not think I am going to be a foot soldier. I will be an officer. I will have command. And I have capabilities no other soldier on that battlefield will possess."
He didn't need to elaborate, Jonathan already well knew all of the capabilities his son possesed.
His body was a weapon, his mind a supercomputer, the Book of Probability was a cheat code for reality itself, and his magic better than any weapon.
Not to mention that it would allow him to ingratiate himself with the military and give him valuable time to climb the ranks, outside of the Olympians' Influence.
Nicholas' plan was for him to raise himself high enough in the hierarchy to gather sufficient faith to obscure his mother's sight.
Currently if he appeared before the Gods in Camp Half-blood he would be like a torch before their sight, allowing them to immediately tell that he had been using magic.
However, if he got a sufficiently high position or gathered enough belief before that meeting took place, the faith gathering around him combined with a ritual, would obscure her sight and allow him to use magic without fear of the Gods noticing and would even allow him to get his mothers assistance into climbing higher.
The process was swift and efficient. His Columbia degree and his father's considerable political clout smoothed his entry into the accelerated program. The Book guided and manipulated his every interaction and luck.
It told him which gruff, combat-hardened sergeant valued blunt honesty over sycophancy, which colonel was impressed by unorthodox tactical solutions.
He aced every physical and academic evaluation well beyond what was required, not by memorizing manuals, but by knowing exactly what the evaluators were looking for before they did. Nicholas was marked not as a bookworm, but as a natural, a prodigy of the battlefield.
At his commissioning ceremony, he stood straight in the crisp, olive-drab lieutenant's uniform. The event was a media spectacle, meticulously orchestrated by the Aldridge political machine.
The headlines wrote themselves: "Governor's Son, Academic Prodigy, Answers Nation's Call." The narrative was flawless.
He was the scholar turned warrior, the patriot from a privileged background sacrificing for his country. Cameras flashed, capturing his stoic, determined expression.
Weeks later, standing at the railing of a heavily laden troop ship as it pulled away from the fog-shrouded docks of San Francisco, Nicholas watched America recede into a grey smudge on the horizon.
The salt spray stung his face, a physical sensation that grounded him. With every churning mile of dark, cold water that stretched between him and the West, he could almost feel it—the oppressive, ever-present weight of divine attention lessening.
It was like a constant, high-pitched hum he had learned to ignore, suddenly falling silent, leaving behind an immense and liberating quiet.
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