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Avery Blaschko
Monsters will merely reform in Tartarus and come back whenever their physical forms are destroyed. One example is when Percy Jackson kills the Minotaur on his first day realizing he is a half-blood. Four years later, he sees the Minotaur again in Kronos' Titan Army. This proves to be an ordeal for heroes, for after a monster is killed it can reappear and attack again, in any time period between weeks and hundreds of years. However, not every monster when killed goes to Tartarus. When killed, they usually turn to golden dust, yellow vapor or crumble to ashes, although Medea's sun dragons simply stayed as decapitated corpses.
Like the gods, monsters can fade from existence if they lose their will to live, and if people don't believe in them (like in the case of Pan), they will fade from existence. In the case of Briares' brothers, they had faded because no one believed in them, but Percy suggested that they also stopped believing in themselves. The same can happen to monsters if not enough people remember them, but Gaea managed to find a way to reverse this somehow, as she brought back Medusa's sisters, who Medusa had claimed faded in The Lightning Thief.
Monsters often serve as minions of evil and cause trouble for Olympus. Normally, since they can't hurt the gods directly, they go after their demigod children instead.However, some monsters, such as some Cerberus, Pegasus, and the Furies serve Olympus.There are other monsters like the cyclopes, dragons, harpies, hellhounds that work for Olympus or run wild on their own, and are not actively pursuing demigods unless they run into them.
Percy Jackson recounts the story of Thalia Grace: pursued by monsters on their way to Camp Half-Blood, a young Thalia sacrificed herself to save her friends, Annabeth Chase, Luke Castellan and Grover Underwood. Her father Zeus honored her sacrifice by turning her into a tree, which forms a protective barrier around the camp, keeping everyone within a safe zone. In the present day, Percy's quest for Zeus's bolt[a] has faded in popularity and he is called a one-quest wonder by camp bully Clarisse La Rue, but is still supported by Annabeth and Grover. He is joined at camp by a young cyclops named Tyson, a previously unknown son of Poseidon, and therefore his brother, albeit the son of Poseidon and a sea-nymph, rather than a human.
Escaping the yacht, they are consumed by Charybdis, where they discover Clarisse also in the monster's stomach. They work together to escape by shooting a hole through Charybdis's gut, then chart a course to Circeland, off the coast of Florida. There they discover Polyphemus's lair, where the fleece is kept and Grover is in disguise working for the cyclops. They rescue Grover, retrieve the fleece and trap Polyphemus in his cave. Luke ambushes them and shoots at Percy with a crossbow for not handing over the fleece, but Tyson takes the bolt and falls into a roaring stream. Luke takes the fleece and the group hostage.
The statistics major is back! I took a break from scouring the Riordanverse books for useless numbers so that I could settle into my third year of college. But now that everything has calmed down a little, I'm here to investigate just how many monsters Percy killed in the original pentalogy, plus the three short stories in the Demigod Files. Before I get started, we should set some rules and definitions:
I will only count a kill if the monster/mythological figure actually dies and either disintegrates or dissolves into whatever the spoil of war is. I will also only count it if Percy lands the final blow (with one exception in TTC). For example, if there's a scene where Percy is fighting a monster, and then Annabeth stabs it and the monster dies, then she would get credit for the kill, according to my criteria. Now that we've cleared that up, let's get into it.
The Lightning Thief (377 pages): 8 monsters. Percy's first quest has him kill quite a few monsters. He gets the Minotaur, Medusa, Procrustes, a boar summoned by Ares, and the scorpion Luke summons. Also, Percy kills each Fury once in this book.
The Sea of Monsters (279 pages): 5 monsters. Here is where I first started to have some difficult counting. First, Percy doesn't kill any of the Laistrygonians/Canadians. That was done by Tyson and Annabeth. Clarisse kills the Hydra. The only 'kills' we get is when the Stymphalian birds attack, and Percy "slashed a wave of birds" from his chariot. There was not a specific number, so I made an educated guess of him killing 5 birds, since they were described to be fairly small, so one slash of his sword could get five in a row.
The Titan's Curse (312 pages): 1 monster. Percy, surprisingly, does not go on a cross-country killing rampage when Annabeth gets captured by Atlas. His only credited kill is the Nemean Lion. Although Zoe and Bianca shoot the lion in the mouth with their arrows, Zoe herself says "thy ice-cream sandwich" killed it, so Percy gets to take the lion's fur.
Battle of the Labyrinth (361 pages) 29 monsters. I had to make another educated guess in this book. Specifically, when Percy makes Mount St. Helens erupt. There is no specific number of how many Telekhines are in the forge, but it sounds like a fairly large operation, so let's say there are 70. On Ogygia, Hephaestus tells Percy that "some vaporized. Some got away." So let's give him 20 kills in that eruption alone. Then at the titular Battle of the Labyrinth, Percy's main function is to run around the battlefield and act as reinforcements. He kills a hellhound, a dracaena, and helps at other various spots, so I'll add an extra five kills. Then you include Geryon and Tammi the empousa, and you have your 29.
Percy Jackson and the Bronze Dragon (33 pages): 1 monster. Percy kills 1 Myrmeke. It is Festus (I'm assuming it is the same bronze dragon that appears here) who does most of the killing of the Myrmekes.
The Last Olympian (381 pages): 494 monsters. First, I'll start by saying that I didn't include the blowing up of the Princess Andromeda. Beckendorf (RIP) set the explosives, and then triggered the detonator. And we never get a good description of just how many monsters are on that ship (the average capacity of a cruise ship is 3,000, so probably less than that since monsters are bigger than humans, and there was a mix of half-bloods and monsters on board). Percy does kill 6 Telekhines and one giant crab while on the ship, before escaping. Then, we skip forward in the story to after he bathes in the River Styx, and here is where the numbers start to get HUGE. Percy kills the entire skeleton army of Hades. There was "a hundred skeletal Roman legionnaires...[and an] equal number of british redcoats." So that's 200 kills right there. Then we get to the Battle of Manhattan, where he has 207 kills. When he first takes on the Kronos army of monsters, he drove them back so that there were "about twenty left alive out of two hundred," giving him 180 kills. Then there's the Minotaur, a hellhound, 3 skeleton horses that had demigods on them, and 2 Hyperboreans. After that, I had to make another educated guess on how many monsters he killed in a section of the battle. He was described as "wading into legions of dracaenae, taking out dozens of Telekhines with every strike, destroying empousai," so I'll give him another 100. I did not include Hyperion, Percy essentially holds him back while the satyrs who trap him in the tree.
TOTALS: 548 kills over 1461 pages. Percy kills a monster every 2.67 pages, but that number is not very accurate or reliable, because of the inflated number of kills Percy has in the last two books. So the rates don't make a whole lot of sense for this project, especially since the kills aren't spread evenly throughout the books. The majority of them come at the climaxes of the stories.
CONCLUSION: Percy kills a lot of monsters, especially in those last two books (95.44% of his kills come in BOTL and TLO). He most definitely has the most kills out of any main character in the Riordanverse, mainly due to his invulnerability and general badass-ness in TLO. I don't know if I'll do this for him in HOO or for other characters, since this took a lot more effort to put together. The Seaweed Brain and Wise Girl projects were easy because I could just word search for them. But for this, I basically had to skim through each book, and carefully read all the fight scenes (so it is possible that I missed or added a few kills).
With roughly a year left until the show's release, audiences are beginning to wonder just what, exactly, from the books will appear on-screen. There are plenty of monsters that Percy (Walker Scobell) and the other demigods at Camp Half-Blood fight in the novels, and there is a good number that could be featured on the show.
In light of his many adventures, sometimes it is easy to forget that the very first monster that Percy fights is a Fury from the Underworld. Posing as his math teacher, Mrs. Dodds (Megan Mullally) corners Percy on a school trip and tries to kill him for his supposed thefts.
This legendary woman-turned-monster is a villain that fans are eagerly waiting to see return to the screen. Many hope that the scene with Medusa, recently announced to be played by Jessica Parker Kennedy, will be a mixture of hilarity and high stakes, similar to the book's depiction of the harrowing encounter.
Cerberus, just like Medusa, is one of the most famous monsters from Greek legends. The three-headed dog crops up throughout pop-culture (remember Fluffy from the first Harry Potter movie?), and he's a nearly undefeatable obstacle for any hero venturing into the Underworld.
In the novels, Ares (Adam Copeland, a.k.a. WWE fighter Edge) causes as many problems for the leading trio as any monster. He is the 'god who had turned' from the prophecy, helping Kronos frame Percy for stealing Zeus' master bolt. When he discovers that Ares tricked them, Percy's temper gets the better of him, and he challenges the god of war to a duel.
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