Chapter 6: The Forest Massacre
The forest was a cathedral of nightmares. Sunlight fell in shattered beams through the canopy a hundred meters above, doing nothing to warm the chill that had little to do with the air. It was the silence. The absence of birds, of insects. Just the creak of ancient wood and the distant, echoing roar that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
“Squad Ito, hold the western flank! Do not engage, you are scouts only!” Amiya’s voice cut through the thick air, sharper than she felt. Her heart was a frantic animal against her ribs. They’d been ordered to observe, to trace the Female Titan’s path, not to fight. Erwin’s gambit. Levi’s team was the anvil somewhere to the north; her squad was just the eyes.
It happened in a blur of screaming metal and splintered wood.
One moment, Oluo was signaling a clear path ahead. The next, a shape of impossible speed and musculature burst through the tree line. The Female Titan moved with a dancer’s grace and a butcher’s intent. It didn’t roar. It was silent, its crystalline eyes scanning, calculating.
“Scatter! Evasive pattern Gamma!” Amiya screamed, firing her anchors into a massive trunk, her body swinging up and away in a gut-wrenching arc. The air behind her exploded. She felt the concussion, heard the sickening crunch of bone and steel that was Gunther’s squad being wiped from existence. No time. No time to think.
She caught a glimpse of Petra, a flash of red hair, maneuvering with flawless precision to draw the Titan’s gaze. “Petra, no! Fall back!”
It was too late. The Titan’s hand, faster than any Abberant they’d logged, swiped. Petra’s cables went taut, then one snapped with a sound like a rifle shot. The severed cable, a steel whip, lashed through the air. Amiya saw it coming, a silver blur. She twisted in mid-air, but the tree she’d anchored to shuddered from a direct hit from the Titan’s other fist.
The world upended.
The impact wasn’t clean. It was a massive, blunt crush against her right side. She felt the plates of her ODM gear buckle inward first, then the awful, giving way of her own body beneath them. The air left her lungs in a voiceless rush. She was thrown, a ragdoll in a storm of splinters, before colliding with the unforgiving earth.
She lay there, staring up at the fragmented sky through the leaves. There was no pain at first. Just a profound, ringing silence, and a strange detachment. She tried to breathe. A jagged, searing agony exploded in her chest, so intense her vision whited out. She tried again, a shallow gasp. It produced a wet, bubbling sound from her own lips. The taste of copper flooded her mouth.
She couldn’t move. She could only stare upwards. The battle sounds became muffled, distant. She heard Eld’s final shout, cut brutally short. Heard the monstrous footsteps receding, pursuing another target. Then, a closer sound. The soft thud of boots landing, running towards her.
Levi’s face filled her vision, blocking the sky. His usual composure was shattered. His eyes, wide and fierce, scanned her broken form. His lips were moving, but she couldn’t hear him over the roaring in her ears. She saw him reach for her, then freeze, his hands hovering over her chest, which was a misshapen, concave horror.
“Don’t,” she tried to say, but only a trickle of blood came out.
“Amiya. Look at me.” His voice was a cracked command, cutting through the fog. He didn’t try to move her. He knew. One wrong shift and a shattered rib could puncture her heart. He knelt, his knees in the damp soil, and carefully, so carefully, slid one arm under her neck, the other supporting her lower back without disturbing her torso. He pulled her upper body gently onto his lap.
The new angle sent a fresh tsunami of pain through her. A sound escaped her, a raw, animal whimper that didn’t seem like it could come from a human throat. It was a noise of pure, shattered physiology. Levi flinched as if struck. His hold tightened infinitesimally, a steadying pressure.
“I know,” he whispered, his lips close to her ear. His breath was warm against her cold skin. “I know it hurts. Just breathe. Nice and shallow. Follow me.” He took an exaggerated, slow breath in, held it, let it out. “Come on. With me.”
She tried. Each inhale was a knife twisting in the wreckage of her chest. Her sternum was gone. She could feel the grate of bone fragments with every heartbeat. The world began to dim at the edges, the green of the leaves leaching to grey.
“Stay with me.” His voice was low, relentless. “Look at me, Amiya. Your office is a fucking mess again. Who’s going to clean it if you don’t? Hmm?” He was babbling, wiping blood from the corner of her mouth with his thumb. “You used all the salve, didn’t you? I told you to make it last. You never listen.”
A faint, bloody bubble formed on her lips. Her eyes started to lose focus, sliding past him to the canopy.
“Hey.” He gave her a very slight, careful shake. Her cry this time was weaker, a thin thread of sound. “The key. That stupid iron key is on your nightstand. It’s going to rust. You need to oil it.” His voice broke. “You need to oil it, Amiya.”
Her chest stopped moving.
The shallow, agonized rise and fall simply ceased. Her lips, already tinged blue, went still.
“No.” The word was flat. Then, “No!”
He acted without thought. He tilted her head back, pinched her nose, and sealed his mouth over hers. He blew a steady breath into her lungs, watching with frantic eyes for the rise of her chest. It lifted, a grotesque, uneven heave from the broken cage. He pulled back, waited. Nothing. He did it again. And again. A rhythm as desperate as combat. Breathe. Wait. Breathe.
“Come on, you stubborn brat. Breathe.” He growled the order against her lips between breaths. Each exhale from him was a prayer, each pause a plummet into terror. He could feel no breath of her own. He kept going, his own lungs burning, his world narrowed to the feel of her cooling lips and the terrible, still weight of her in his arms.
Time dissolved. It was just the forest, the distant echoes of a retreating Titan, and his relentless, life-giving puff of air into her. The taste of her blood was on his tongue, iron and mortality.
A rustle of undergrowth. Boots pounding.
“Captain!”
He didn’t stop. He blew another breath into her as the medics skidded to a halt beside him. A field medic named Hal, young but sharp-eyed, took in the scene in a millisecond—the Captain, pale as death, desperately performing mouth-to-mouth on the crushed form of Second Officer Ito.
“Captain, I have her.” Hal’s voice was calm, authoritative. He dropped his kit, pulling out a leather-wrapped board. “On my count, we slide her onto the board. You keep her head and neck exactly as they are.”
Levi broke the seal over her mouth, his eyes wild. “She’s not breathing on her own.”
“I see that. On three. One, two, three.”
With a synchronized, agonizingly careful motion, they transferred her. Levi’s hands didn’t tremble as he cradled her head. Hal immediately placed a leather-covered bellows over her mouth and nose, working it with a steady, professional rhythm. The other medic secured straps around her body, immobilizing the catastrophic damage.
“Pneumothorax. Flail chest. Probable cardiac contusion,” Hal muttered, his fingers feeling for a pulse in her ruined neck. “Got a thready one. Let’s move. Now.”
They lifted the board. Levi rose with them, his hands empty now, stained with her blood. He watched as they ran with her through the trees, the bellows pumping, pumping, forcing air into lungs that had given up. He stood alone in the clearing, surrounded by the wreckage of his squad and the silence.
He looked down at his hands. They were absolutely steady. He flexed them once. Then he turned and followed the path the medics had taken, his pace a swift, silent jog. His face was a mask of dried blood and blank shock. Behind his eyes, all he could see was the moment her chest stopped moving, and the feel of her lifeless lips under his.
He followed the path the medics had taken, his pace a swift, silent jog. The journey back to the carts was a blur of green and shadow. The bellows’ rhythmic sigh was the only sound he registered, a mechanical ghost of the breaths he’d forced into her. When they loaded her onto the medical wagon, he climbed in without a word, ignoring the others, his eyes fixed on the medic’s hands as they worked—cutting away her gear, pressing pads against the bloody concavity, never stopping the bellows.
The ride was agony. Every jolt of the wagon over rough ground made him tense, expecting a final, fatal rattle from her broken body. She lay so still. The only signs of life were the artificial rise of her chest from the bellows and the occasional weak pulse Hal found and announced like a victory.
Inside the fortress walls, chaos erupted. Shouts. Running feet. The medical wing doors slammed open. He was shoved aside by professionals with sharper tools and clearer purpose. He stood in the hallway, a statue of gore and mud, watching through the closing door as they surrounded her, their voices a urgent cacophony.
“Needle decompression, now!”
“Tube her! I want a tube in now!”
“Get the Captain out of here.”
Someone was tugging his arm. He shrugged them off violently. He didn’t leave. He slid down the wall opposite the operating room door, his back against the cold stone, and sat on the floor. He pulled his knees up, rested his arms on them, and stared at the spot of Amiya’s blood on the floor where they’d wheeled her in.
People came and went. Hange, babbling about crystalline samples and behavioral patterns, saw his face and fell silent, placing a hand on his shoulder for a moment before leaving. Erwin stood before him, his own arm in a sling, saying something about casualties, about strategy, about the necessary cost. Levi didn’t hear a word. After a minute, Erwin too departed.
The hallway quieted. The only sounds were the muffled, urgent voices from behind the door and the drip of a loose pipe somewhere. Hours bled together. A medic came out once, covered in blood, his expression grim. He saw Levi and paused. “She’s alive. For now. The next few hours…” He shook his head and hurried away.
Alive. For now.
Levi lowered his head, his forehead touching his arms. The image that came, unbidden, was not of the forest or the blood. It was of her, weeks ago, in the clean light of her room, rubbing salve into her hip with that focused, determined expression. The smell of the ointment. The stupid plush Titan on the shelf. The solid click of her door locking.
He sat there, unmoving, as the fortress day turned to night outside the high, narrow windows. He sat there, listening for the sound of her breath, waiting for it to start again on its own.