Chapter 3: Chapter 3
The predawn chill bit through the layers of my uniform as I stood at the head of my squad. 0330. The gate was a monolithic shadow against the grey-washed sky. My face felt like a mask, carved into the calm, focused expression I’d practiced. Holger checked his gear for the tenth time. Grese stared straight ahead, her jaw set. They were looking for my face. I made sure it was the one from the drills.
Levi wasn’t here. He’d left hours earlier to position his support team on the western ridge. His absence was a physical hollow in the courtyard. Erwin stood by the control mechanism, giving a final, slow nod in my direction. It wasn’t a brotherly look. It was the Commander’s look. The bet was placed.
The gate groaned open, revealing the mist-cloaked world beyond the wall.
We moved.
The plan was clean in theory. Advance to the designated coordinates in the sprawling forest to the east. Deploy the sonic lures in a staggered sequence, pulling the Abnormal from its suspected territory into the prepared kill zone—a rocky canyon where Levi’s team and two other squads would be waiting above, ready to sever its nape from three angles. We were the shepherds. They were the butchers.
For the first hour, it was textbook. The forest was a cathedral of silent, towering pines, the ground soft with needles. Our gear hissed, propelling us in graceful arcs between the trunks. The morning fog was thick, swirling in eddies as we cut through it. Too thick. A prickle, different from the cold, traced a line down my spine.
We reached the primary marker. I raised a fist, and the squad anchored on a thick, horizontal branch overlooking a small clearing.
“Deploy the first sequence,” I said, my voice low.
Holger unholstered the launcher, a modified firearm that shot canisters emitting a high-frequency screech. He aimed, fired. The canister sailed in a low arc, embedding itself in a tree trunk fifty meters ahead. A moment later, the sound began—a piercing, mechanical shriek that set my teeth on edge. We waited, breaths fogging in the air.
Nothing.
The forest absorbed the noise. The mist hung, impassive.
“Second sequence,” I ordered. “Further out.”
Grese fired. Another shriek, deeper into the white. We listened. Only the rustle of a distant bird, the creak of the trees.
The plan required the Abnormal to take the bait. For the pattern to hold. This silence felt wrong. It felt like the forest was holding its breath.
“Lieutenant?” Holger whispered, his knuckles white on his gear handles.
Before I could answer, the world changed.
The fog to our left didn’t part. It exploded.
A shape, colossal and moving with impossible speed, plowed through the treeline. Not our Abnormal. This thing was broader, encased in what looked like jagged, segmented plates of hardened skin. An Armored Titan. Its fist, a boulder of knotted flesh and bone, swung in a casual, obliterating arc.
The tree we were anchored to ceased to exist.
It wasn’t a breaking of wood. It was a vaporization of everything in that horizontal plane. The shockwave hit me first—a wall of compressed air that stole my breath and ripped the gear handles from my grip. I was falling, spinning. The world became a blur of green, brown, and white.
I slammed into a lower branch, the impact cracking against my ribs. My training screamed. I clawed for a handhold, my fingers scraping bark. I caught one, my body swinging violently beneath it. Gasping, I looked up.
Chaos.
Holger was gone. Simply gone from the point of impact. Grese was screaming, tangled in her own wires twenty feet below me, one leg bent at a sickening angle. The rest of the squad were scattering, firing anchors wildly into the dissolving mist.
The Armored Titan turned its hollow, expressionless eyes toward us. It didn’t roar. It was eerily silent. It raised a foot to stomp down on Grese’s writhing form.
My body moved before my mind could catch up. I kicked free of the branch, fired an anchor into the Titan’s raised knee, and retracted. The gear shrieked, pulling me through the air in a desperate, diagonal line. I unsheathed my blades mid-flight, crossing them above my head.
I couldn’t kill it. I just needed to divert it.
I sliced a deep groove across the back of its massive hand as it reached for me. The blades shrieked against the armor, throwing sparks. It was like cutting stone. But it flinched, the hand veering away from Grese.
“Fall back!” I screamed, my voice raw. “Canyon! Regroup at the canyon!”
Then, the heat.
It started as a pressure, a sudden, profound warmth on the back of my neck, like the sun had descended into the forest behind me. The light changed—from misty grey to a blinding, hellish orange.
I turned.
Behind the Armored Titan, rising above the pines, was another impossibility. A skyscraper of pale, steaming flesh. A skeletal face. The Colossal Titan.
It wasn’t moving. It was just there, and its sheer, mountainous presence broke something in my understanding of the world. It blotted out the sky.
And it was emanating heat like a forge.
My brain stuttered, tried to process. Two? Two of them? Working together? The intelligence Erwin feared wasn’t in one Abnormal. It was a coordination between monsters.
The Colossal Titan’s chest began to glow from within, a network of fiery lines like cracked lava.
Time didn’t slow. It fractured.
I saw Grese, trying to crawl. I saw Holger’s discarded gear, glinting on the forest floor. I saw the Armored Titan, shifting its weight, preparing another swing. I calculated trajectories, escape vectors, the positioning of my surviving squad members. My mind, the one that organized pantries and tactical formations, raced through options. There was no clean solution. Only a least bad one.
Get its attention. Lead it away. The heat was the immediate threat. The blast.
I fired my anchors into the Armored Titan’s shoulder plate, using it as a launch point. I propelled myself upwards, not away, slicing a wild, glancing cut across its cheek. “Hey!” I roared, my voice tiny against the gathering inferno. “Over here!”
The Armored Titan’s head turned. The Colossal’s glow intensified, the air rippling with distortion.
I kicked off, aiming for the thickest cluster of trees between me and the colossal thing, a pathetic shield. My gear whined, gas reserves plummeting. Go. Go.
The world turned white.
Then orange.
Then silent.
There was no sound. There was only a force. It wasn’t an impact. It was a conversion. The air itself became a solid, burning wall. It lifted me, not like a leaf, but like a rag doll in a hurricane of pure energy.
My wires snapped. One. Then the other. The metallic pings were lost in the roar that never reached my ears.
I saw my left blade, still clutched in my hand, turn cherry red, then white, then vanish.
The heat cooked the air from my lungs. My uniform smoldered, then blackened.
Then came the impact with something unyielding. A tree trunk, a rock—I don’t know. It didn’t matter. My body broke against it. I felt something in my back, my right leg, my ribs—a series of wet, internal crunching sounds that were more feeling than noise.
I tumbled, a broken thing, through burning branches and scorched earth.
Then I was still.
The world swam back in pieces. The deafening silence was replaced by a high-pitched ring. The orange glow faded to the normal grey of smoke and ash. I was on my back. The sky above was a dirty smear through a canopy of burning pine needles.
I tried to breathe. A searing, jagged pain erupted in my chest. I coughed, and my mouth filled with the warm, metallic taste of blood.
I couldn’t feel my legs.
I couldn’t move my right arm.
My left hand twitched, scraping against dirt. I turned my head, ash grating against my cheek. The forest around me was gone. Replaced by a shattered, smoldering clearing. Trees were snapped like twigs or reduced to blackened spikes. The air stank of ozone, burning pine, and cooked meat.
The Colossal Titan was gone. Vanished as quickly as it appeared, leaving only the devastation.
The Armored Titan stood at the edge of the clearing, steam rising from its plates. It looked down at the ruin. Then, it turned its head. It looked directly at me.
Its empty eyes held no malice, no curiosity. Just a blank, biological purpose.
It took a step toward me. The ground trembled.
This was it. The messy end Erwin had joked about. Not with a bang, but with a boot.
I closed my eyes. I thought of stone floors. Easy to clean.
---
From the western ridge, through the scope, the world was a chessboard.
My finger rested alongside the trigger of the long-range rifle, not on it. Too far. The range was extreme, the wind a subtle devil across the canyon. My role was overwatch and cleanup. Aria’s role was to bring the piece into the square.
I watched her squad move into the forest, dots of green cloaks against the green and grey. Efficient. Disciplined. My chest was a vault, everything of value locked behind steel doors. The fear was in there. I acknowledged it, named it, and shut it away. It had no place in the scope’s crosshairs.
The first sonic lure went off. A tiny, distant shriek. Then the second.
Nothing moved.
The silence was wrong. It was the silence before a landslide. My shoulders tightened. Below me, my team shifted, sensing it too.
Then the trees erupted.
Not from the expected direction. From the flank. A shape, all bulky armor and brutal speed. An Armored Titan. My brain rejected it, then screamed the reality. Ambush. It wasn’t an Abnormal. It was a trap. They were the prey.
I saw the tree disintegrate. Saw the figures thrown like chaff.
My scope found her. Aria. Clinging. Alive. She moved, a desperate, brave, stupid lunge to draw the thing away from her injured soldier. That fury, that relentless, organizing heart. It was going to get her killed.
I was calculating windage, drop, the uselessness of this rifle against armored plating, when the thermal bloom registered in my peripheral vision.
A change in the light. A swelling of heat haze.
I swung the scope left.
And I saw it.
The Colossal Titan. It wasn’t possible. It was there. A monument of flesh and steam, towering over the pines behind the Armored one.
The air in my lungs turned to stone.
No.
My scope was on her. She was a tiny figure, launching herself toward the Armored Titan, a gnat attacking a bull. To divert it. She saw the Colossal. She had to see it. She was changing course, veering towards cover.
The Colossal’s core ignited.
“Get down!” I yelled, a raw, useless sound lost in the distance.
The world in my scope flashed white. Then orange. A silent, expanding flower of annihilation.
The sound reached us a second later—a deep, thunderous WHUMP that shook the rock beneath our boots. A shockwave of superheated air rolled up the ridge, carrying the smell of a forest turned to cinder.
In the scope, the center of the forest was just… gone. Replaced by a crater of fire and shattered timber.
I searched the edges, the periphery. Panic, cold and sharp, jabbed icicles into my veins. Where is she where is she whereisshe—
There.
A crumpled shape, tossed against the blackened base of a broken tree at the clearing’s edge. A smear of green on grey ash. Not moving.
The vault in my chest blew open. Everything I’d locked away—the dream of the smoke, the fear, the sheer, fucking terror of that silence—flooded out, corrosive and blinding.
The Armored Titan was still there. It took a step. Towards her.
The chessboard was gone. The plan was ashes. There was only that thing moving toward that still, broken shape on the ground.
I dropped the rifle. It clattered on the rocks.
“Captain!” someone shouted.
I didn’t hear them. There was no room for sound. There was only a roaring in my ears and a single, silent command firing from my brain to my limbs.
Move.
My gear cables shot out, not with precision, but with raw, violent force. The anchors bit into the rock face below the ridge. I didn’t wait for a secure pull. I jumped.
I fell, then the gear caught and I was yanked forward, my body a projectile fired from a cannon. I didn’t take the route. I made one. Straight down the cliff face, into the smoky hellscape of the canyon, toward the burning forest. Branches whipped past, lashing my face. I didn’t feel them.
The Armored Titan’s foot lifted, poised to crush the life from the only thing in this godforsaken world that felt like more than a weight to carry.
I wasn’t going to make it.
The distance was too great.
I fired my anchors again, not at the trees, but at the Titan itself. The metal spikes sparked against its armored calf. I reeled myself in, a hopeless, furious dart aimed at a mountain.
Its foot began its descent.
No.
Faster.
I ejected my blades. They were useless against the armor. I didn’t care.
Its shadow fell over her.
I was close enough now to see the details. The scorched fabric of her cloak. The unnatural angle of her leg. The blood, dark against the ash.
Not like this.
My cables hit their limit. I was still thirty feet out, twenty feet up. The foot was dropping.
There was no tactic. No strategy. Only a scream torn from a place I thought had died years ago.
I released my anchors.
Free fall.
I twisted in the air, and with every ounce of strength, every fragment of speed and desperation, I threw my blades.
Not at the Titan.
At the ground in front of her crumpled form.
They struck the earth, hilts deep, crossing just above her body. A pathetic, metal X. A marker. A promise.
The Titan’s foot slammed down.
The impact shook the earth, sending a plume of ash and soil into the air. It obliterated the spot where she had been.
I landed hard, rolling, coming up in a crouch amid the scorched stumps.
I looked up, my breath frozen in my throat, my hands empty.
The Titan’s foot settled, grinding into the earth.
My blades were gone. Buried.
So was she.
The world didn’t end in crushing darkness. It opened.
The foot didn’t flatten me. The earth directly beneath me gave way as the armored sole descended, a section of it swallowing me whole. I fell maybe six feet, tumbling into a pocket of cool, damp earth and solid muscle. The impact with the ground was brutal on my broken body, a fresh lightning bolt of pain.
Then strong, human arms caught me, halting my roll.
The stomp above was a cataclysmic, final shudder, a explosion of dirt that blotted out the world. Clumps of soil rained down into the dim space. The sound was immense, a deafening finality. Then, relative silence, muffled by tons of earth and flesh.
I was in a hollow, a deliberately crafted cavity within the Titan’s own foot. The air smelled of wet soil and something sharply, unnervingly human—sweat and heat.
A hand clamped firmly over my mouth before I could scream.
“Don’t.” The voice was low, close to my ear, young and strained. “Just don’t. It’s better if you’re quiet.”
I struggled, a pathetic, pained thrash. My vision swam, adjusting to the gloom. The arms holding me belonged to a tall, lanky boy with shaggy hair and an exhausted, hollowed-out face. Bertholdt. From the 104th. He held me against his chest, his grip unbreakable but not cruel, simply functional, like securing a wriggling, dangerous package.
Above us, through a lattice of what looked like hardened muscle fibers and earth, I saw a sliver of daylight. It framed a massive, familiar face peering down. Reiner Braun. His expression was a terrifying, impossible mix of warrior concentration and profound apology.
“Is she intact?” Reiner’s voice echoed weirdly in the chamber, a god speaking from the ceiling.
“Mostly. Conscious,” Bertholdt murmured, adjusting his hold as I tried to twist my head. His hand stayed over my lips. “She’s hurt pretty bad, Reiner.”
“He saw the stomp. He has to believe it.” Reiner’s voice was all strategy, a grotesque mirror of Erwin’s planning sessions. “We need to move. Hold onto her. This is going to be rough.”
Believe it.
The words cut through the pain-fog. He. Levi. He saw. The crossed blades. The impact.
He thought the grinding sole had turned me into a red smear in the dirt. The final, clean ledger entry. A weight off the board.
A sound, a wounded, muffled thing, escaped me against Bertholdt’s palm. It wasn’t a scream. It was the echo of that vault in his chest slamming shut forever.
The world lurched violently. We were moving. The Titan was walking. Each step was a jarring, planetary shift, sending shocks of agony through my shattered leg and ribs. Bertholdt braced us against the curved wall of the chamber, taking the brunt of the motion. I was a rag doll in his arms.
I stopped struggling. The fight drained out, replaced by a cold, sprawling comprehension. This wasn’t a random act of monstrous violence. This was a kidnapping. An extraction. They had targeted me, specifically, and they had used Levi’s own fear, his own inevitable reaction, as the perfect cover.
Reiner’s voice came down again, softer now. “The Captain’s still there. He’s not pursuing. He’s just… standing there.”
The image was a knife. Levi, standing in the ashes, looking at a patch of churned earth. Seeing his own blades buried there. Thinking he’d been a half-second too slow for the rest of his life.
My chest hitched. Bertholdt’s hand tightened slightly.
“I know,” he whispered, and the sheer, inappropriate sympathy in his tone made me want to vomit. “Just breathe. It had to look real.”
It had to look real. The casual horror of it. They knew. They knew about the gamble, the faith, the fear. They used it all as stagecraft.
The marching steps continued, rhythmic and world-shaking. We were traveling away from the canyon, away from the scorched forest, away from him. Deeper into territories the Survey Corps hadn’t mapped. The sliver of
light above grew thinner, filtered through a mesh of fibrous tissue that pulsed with a slow, hydraulic rhythm. Each step was a separate earthquake. My body, already a collection of sharp, wrong sensations, jolted with every impact. Bertholdt adjusted his grip, his arms like iron bands, taking the shock against his own frame.
"Can you stabilize her any better?" Reiner’s voice was distant, muffled by layers of flesh and earth.
"I'm trying," Bertholdt grunted, shifting me so my head lolled against his shoulder. The movement sent a white-hot wire of pain from my hip down my leg. A strangled gasp escaped the cage of his hand.
"I know it hurts." His whisper was apology and instruction. "The femoral artery isn't cut. The ribs are the big problem. Try not to breathe too deep."
The absurd, clinical advice in the belly of a monster almost made me laugh. It came out as a wet, painful cough. I tasted more blood.
The marching rhythm changed. The titanic footsteps grew slower, more deliberate, as if navigating uneven terrain. The sliver of light vanished completely, plunging us into a hot, dark closeness that smelled of overheated machinery and salt. We were descending.
"Gate's ahead," Reiner called down, his voice tense. "Two minutes. Is she quiet?"
Bertholdt's hand pressed a fraction harder. My protest was a weak twist of my neck. "She's fading. Pain's doing the work for us."
Fading. The word had a luxurious, welcoming sound. To slip away from the jarring, the smell of Bertholdt’s sweat, the echoing, traitorous voices. To let the ledger close. But the image of Levi standing in the ash, his last gesture a pair of crossed blades in the dirt, hooked into some stubborn part of my mind. It held me to the pain, to the reality of this moving prison.
The light returned, different. Not forest-filtered sun, but the flat, grey glow of an overcast sky seen from a deep pit. The footsteps ceased. A deep, resonant groan echoed through our chamber, a sound of immense pressure and shifting weight.
Then, a new sound. The clang of heavy machinery. Shouts. Human shouts.
"Clear the passage! Quickly now!" An unfamiliar, authoritative voice barked orders.
"We're transitioning," Bertholdt murmured, his body tensing around me. "Hold still."
A violent lurch made my teeth snap together. We were rising, the muscular walls around us contracting and pushing upwards. The world tilted. Then, with a final, gut-wrenching heave, the wall beside us seemed to dissolve.
Cool, dank air washed over us, a relief after the suffocating heat. The light was dim, coming from flickering gas lamps mounted on rough-hewn stone walls. We were in a tunnel, massive and cylindrical, slick with condensation.
Bertholdt stood, carrying me as if I weighed nothing, and stepped out of the pulsating cavity in the Titan's foot. Behind us, the Armored Titan stood immobile in the vast tunnel, steam beginning to roll off its plates in great, weary sighs. Reiner was already free, sliding down the Titan's leg with practiced ease, his face grim and exhausted.
Two men in crisp, unfamiliar uniforms approached. Their eyes swept over Bertholdt, then fixed on me in his arms with a detached, analytical coolness.
"Subject is secure," one said, his voice devoid of inflection. "Injuries?"
"Multiple fractures. Probable internal bleeding. Consciousness is intermittent," Bertholdt reported, his tone shifting into a flat, military cadence. The sympathetic boy from minutes ago was gone, shelved.
"Processing to medical ward seven. Commander will debrief after stabilization." The man gestured, and a wheeled stretcher was brought forward by other silent attendants.
As I was transferred from Bertholdt's arms to the cold canvas, my head lolled to the side. I saw Reiner accepting a canteen from another soldier. He drank deeply, wiped his mouth, and glanced at me. There was no apology in his eyes now. Only a deep, hollow fatigue, and a completion of duty.
The stretcher wheels clattered on the stone floor, a rhythmic counterpoint to the fading, metallic groans of the Titan behind us. The lamplight streaked past overhead, painting moving shadows on a ceiling lost in gloom.
"Levi," I whispered, the word a shredded thing.
The attendant pushing my stretcher glanced down, his expression unchanging. He didn’t speak.
The tunnel curved, and the last glimpse of the Armored Titan, of Bertholdt and Reiner standing small before its massive, silent form, disappeared. Ahead lay only the sterile, echoing throat of the unknown, swallowing me whole.