“You KNOW that Chance is the only one who can find the map in this labyrinth, right, Ed?” asks me the girl in red boots.
“What should I have? Leave Jackie dying?”
“You are not yet lost, so?”
“What do you mean, Crash?”
“Nothing, Ed. Oh oh”.
There are dozens of guards running toward us, up the stairs, armed to the teeth.
Rutuli! Sicani! Labici! All the warriors of this western land are coming down the mountains to salute the son of Venus! Like a giant porcupine, the mass of men, bristling with bronze swords, and axes, and long spears, are charging at me and at my ally, the maiden warrior Camilla.
“Aeneas” she says, looking at me. “For Juppiter!” and throws herself toward the armed people, like the lighting which dare to strike a mighty mountain. She, golden haired and swift, brands her sword, hitting the first line of warrior, which fall like ear under the scythe, in the hottest day of the summer.
I take out my bronze blade from the scabbard, and like a lion among vultures, I jump in the fry. Oh, divus Janus, why the door of your temple are always open? Why I had to fled from my beloved Troy, just to endure war all over my boats land?
Camilla fights as the brave and skilful warrior the poets writes poems about; but she would be easily overcome by the army of Italic peoples, like the mighty elephant could be killed by the legendary red ants of the desert. But that will not happen, because I join her in the fry.
The sword my mother Venus asked her husband Vulcan to create for me, from celestial iron, will make the difference. And as I rotate her in front of me, one after the other the bronze armed warriors die, mortally wounded. It takes the time a nightingale sings his joyful song under the moon, for me to end the life of these aggressor.
Crasher stares at me, while I wipe the blood away from my blade.
“Thanks for spoiling all the fun” she says, but I know it’s only a joke from her strange sense of humor, and the bitterness is because she disapprove of my methods. Or, at last, from my feral thirst of blood.
The deaths have brought power to my body. I feel myself full of energy, and I wonder…
…if…
A blow. A single punch, and the wall come down. Outside, below us, trees without and end.
“Ed, if you keep opening hole like this, I think the whole tower will crash down” the girl says, half smiling. “We must find the map, save the Hulk show for later”.
But in the far corner of my field of vision, an Apache helicopter appears, flying straight toward the tower.
“Other Hoods? “ I ask.
“Other? These are not Hoods, Ed” explains Crasher, pointing at the dead guards.
“I though…” I begin, but Crasher push me up the stairs, while a missile from the ‘copter hits precisely the place where we were standing.
“Fuck them!” I shouts.
Branding Ladnikia, I break the wall right in front of me, and jump outside.
The helicopter is hovering right in front of the hit spot, below me. I land on the back of the aircraft, and with my bare hands, I rip open the steel cover. Inside, three heads lift up. One is one eyed, on the front… but before I can even recognize what he is, the one at the pilot seat, raises his right hand, and from his gauntlet something explodes, and I am throw away from the copter.
Falling, I see two figure leaving the aircraft, one jumping in an elaborate move toward the opening in the wall, the other just flies away, steam threads from his boots.
The helicopter, then, just falls, right over me.
I manage to squeeze away just seconds before it crashes over me. I roll on the floor, get up, run a few hundred meters from the spot. I turn, and from the wreck, comes out the third man. The one eyed. He is taller, much more taller than any normal man.
And then I recognized him. He is a Cyclops. Just like his brother, Polyphemus. The one which took me and my men captive, and which I, Odysseus, made blind with a burning pole.
The son of Chronus, branding his axe, comes toward me: “I will avenge my brother, son of Laerte!” he shouts.
