Chapter 8: Chapter 8
The Titan’s face filled the hole in the roof, a moon of idiot flesh. Its fingers, thick as timber beams, curled over the broken edges, splintering more wood. Plaster dust snowed down. Its breath was a hot, rotten gust.
Levi was already moving. He didn’t look back at Sage. His body became a calculation of angles and force. He launched straight up, ODM cables shrieking, not away from the Titan, but directly towards its grasping hand. He spun in the air, a blur of green and steel. The blades flashed, a silver X against the gray light. The Titan’s fingers severed at the knuckle, tumbling into the debris beside Sage with ground-shaking thuds.
The Titan recoiled with a sound like a rockslide, its stump spraying a hot, viscous drizzle. Levi landed in a crouch on a broken roof beam above, his eyes already scanning for the next. Another was shambling towards the tower, drawn by the commotion. He could take them. He could clear a perimeter. But it would take time. And time was the one thing her broken spine didn’t have.
Below, Sage dragged herself behind a collapsed section of wall, her arms shaking with the effort. The void where her legs should be was a silent scream. She watched him above, a deadly maestro conducting a symphony of dismemberment. He was buying seconds with his own life. It was a terrible, beautiful waste.
“Levi…go.” She whispered it, but the words carved a path through the din.
He heard. He decapitated the second Titan with a clean, upward slash and dropped back down through the hole, landing lightly beside her hiding place. Steam from the dissipating bodies curled around him like phantom limbs. His grey eyes were chips of flint.
“I’m not leaving you.” He growled it, a feral sound from deep in his chest. His gaze flicked to her legs, then back to her face. The control was there, but beneath it ran a current of pure, undiluted terror.
“You have to.” She pressed her palms against the gritty floor, pushing herself up slightly to look at him. Dust coated her lips. “I’ll be okay. I can hide. They won’t look through the debris.” She said it with a conviction she didn’t feel, forcing her voice to be solid, to be a wall he could lean a decision against.
He stared at her. The sounds of the dying city filtered in—distant screams, the crunch of masonry, the ever-present, hungry hiss of steam. His jaw worked. For a fraction of a second, the mask of Humanity’s Strongest Soldier slipped, and she saw the raw, tortured calculation beneath. He could save her life right now only to guarantee both their deaths moments later. Or he could trust her stubborn will to live, clear a path, and bring back help. It was no choice at all.
His hand shot out, not to comfort, but to act. He grabbed a torn, heavy tapestry from the wall and flung it over her, then kicked shattered wood and plaster over it, creating a shallow, concealing mound. He left a small gap near her face.
“Don’t make a sound,” he ordered, his voice low and final. “Don’t move. Even if you hear them walking above you. Breathe through your nose. Slow.”
She nodded, her eyes wide in the dim light of the cavity.
He reached through the gap. His fingers, cold and stained with Titan blood, brushed her cheek. It was over in a second. Two distinct taps.
Then he was gone.
The world narrowed to a slit of dusty light, the rough weave of the tapestry against her nose, and the crushing silence of her own body. She heard the shriek of his gear, the wet impacts of his blades, growing fainter. He was leading them away. Drawing the hunt from her hiding place.
Time became a thick, syrupy thing. She counted her breaths. Out. The pain arrived then, not in her legs, but in her back—a deep, sickening throb that radiated outwards, a lighthouse of agony in a sea of numbness. She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted copper.
A shadow passed over her slit of light. Heavy, rhythmic footsteps shook the floor. She held her breath. The footsteps paused. She could hear the low, wet rumble of its breathing, smell the peculiar, sun-washed stone scent of its skin. It was inches away, separated by a few pieces of wood and a threadbare tapestry.
They won’t look through the debris.
The debris shifted. A piece of timber groaned as weight settled on it. A fingernail, large as a shovel blade, scraped across the plaster dust not a foot from her head. She squeezed her eyes shut. Don’t move. Don’t breathe.
The Titan made a confused, bubbling sound. The pressure lifted. The footsteps receded, lumbering towards a more obvious noise—the sound of collapsing buildings, of distant, active prey.
She exhaled, a shuddering, silent release. The throb in her back intensified. She focused on the memory of his touch on her cheek. Two taps. A promise. A command to live.
Levi moved through Trost like a vengeful ghost. His mind had compartmentalized the image of her under the rubble, locked it in a steel box marked Later. Now, there was only the mission: clear a path to the inner gate, find a mobile unit, get a cart, get back. The math was simple. The execution was a slaughter.
He used no flair, no wasted motion. Every swing was a killing blow, every burst of gas a direct line to the next target. He became a machine of efficient eradication. When his gas ran low, he took canisters from the dead, his hands moving automatically, slick with other people’s blood. He didn’t clean them. The thought never occurred to him.
He found two of his squad members, Goren and Risha, holding a narrow alley.
“Captain!”
“Risha, status of the inner gate?” His voice was stripped of all inflection.
“Holding, sir! For now!”
“Goren, with me. Find a supply cart. Now.”
“Sir, the directive is to fall back—”
“The directive,” Levi interrupted, his eyes flat and deadly, “is to follow my order. Find a cart.”
They found one overturned near a looted bakery, its horse long gone. They righted it. Levi scanned the street, his gaze catching on a pair of abandoned draft horses shivering in a shattered storefront. He didn’t commandeer them. He simply walked over, cut their tether with a flick of his blade, and looked at them. They followed, their instinct for survival recognizing the apex predator in their midst.
He hitched them to the cart himself, his fingers fumbling with the leather traces. Goren watched, stunned into silence by his captain’s single-minded intensity.
“Get in,” Levi said, climbing onto the driver’s perch. He didn’t wait. He snapped the reins, and the cart jolted forward, weaving through the carnage. He drove not like a man fleeing a battlefield, but like one carving a highway back into hell.
Under the tapestry, Sage drifted. Shock and pain blurred the edges of consciousness. Sounds melted together—the distant battle, the rush of blood in her ears, a faint, high ringing. She thought she heard her name, but it was just the wind through broken wood.
Then, a new sound. The crunch of wheels on rubble. The snort of horses. Close.
The debris above her shifted again. Light flooded in, harsh and sudden. She flinched.
Levi’s face filled her view, framed by the wreckage. He was streaked with grime and dark, drying blood, his hair plastered to his forehead. His eyes scanned her, checking for new injuries, for the rise and fall of her chest.
He didn’t speak. He just started moving, throwing aside the wood and plaster with controlled, frantic strength. Goren appeared beside him, and together they cleared the mound. Levi’s hands went under her shoulders and knees. He paused for a fraction of a second, his touch achingly careful.
“This will hurt,” he said, the first words he’d spoken to her since leaving.
It did. A white-hot spike of agony drove up her spine as he lifted her. A broken sound escaped her clenched teeth. He carried her to the cart, which he had lined with stolen sacks of flour and straw. He laid her down as if she were made of glass. His cloak, the one he’d folded under her head in the tower, was already there, a worn grey pillow.
“Goren, drive,” Levi ordered, his voice raw. He didn’t take the reins. He climbed into the back of the cart with her.
The cart lurched into motion. Every jolt was a fresh torment. Sage gasped, her fingers scrabbling for purchase on the wooden planks. Levi’s hand found hers and pressed it flat against the sack of flour beside her. He braced his other arm across her torso, his body a living shock absorber against the violent sway of the cart.
“Slow down, you idiot,” Levi snarled at Goren, but his eyes were on Sage’s face, watching the pain etch lines beside her mouth.
She focused on his hand covering hers. His knuckles were split, crusted with dirt and blood. She turned her palm up and laced her fingers through his. His grip tightened instantly, a vise of flesh and bone.
They didn’t speak. The cart rattled through the dying city, past horrors neither had the capacity to process. His thumb moved, just once, across the back of her hand. A slow, deliberate stroke.
When they reached the inner gate and the triage area, it was chaos incarnate. The moans of the wounded were a constant, low undercurrent. Medics ran, their aprons black with blood. Levi jumped from the cart before it fully stopped.
“Medic! Spinal injury! Now!”
A harried woman with a bloodstained bandage around her arm rushed over. Levi didn’t let them lift Sage. He did it himself, transferring her from the cart to a waiting stretcher with a fluid, minimal movement. His hands never left her until the orderlies took the stretler poles.
Her fingers slipped from his. She looked up at him, standing amid the chaos, his squad regrouping around him, his duty reasserting its claim. The moment of raw, private terror was over. The Captain was back.
“Captain Ackerman!” Commander Erwin’s voice, calm and commanding, cut through the din from a nearby command post.
Levi’s gaze lingered on her for one last second. His grey eyes held hers, and in them she saw the unspoken words, the fear, the promise, the steel box shuddering under its lock. He gave a single, sharp nod.
Then he turned and walked towards Erwin, his back straight, already reporting, already shouldering the next impossible weight.
Sage closed her eyes as they carried her into the infirmary, the smell of antiseptic washing over her, a cold and sterile promise. The last thing she felt was the ghost of his thumb on her hand, and the terrifying, absolute silence below her waist.
The infirmary was a cacophony of low moans and sharp orders, a blurred hell of lantern light and moving shadows. Smells layered over each other—rust, sweat, burning coal from the autoclave, and underneath it all, the acidic sting of antiseptic that did little to cut through the stench of opened bodies. Sage floated in a haze, the jostling of the stretcher a distant earthquake. Hands, impersonal and efficient, cut her harness and uniform away. Scissors snipped through wool and leather like it was nothing.
“Pressure here,” a voice said. Cold metal touched her skin. She felt a pinch at her side, a tugging, but it was a faraway thing. The true reality was the dead weight on the cot, the complete disconnect. She focused on a water stain on the wooden ceiling beam, letting her mind drift away from the panic. She thought of lemon oil and a clean, quiet room.
Then he was there again. Levi stood just inside the curtained-off area, having bulldozed his way past a protesting orderly. He’d washed his hands and face, but Titan blood still darkened his undercut and streaked his gear. He looked at the medic, a weary-faced man named Klaus, not at her. “Well?”
Klaus didn’t look up from his probing fingers, which were pressing along the vertebrae of her lower back. Sage hissed at a particular point of brilliant, electric agony. “Significant swelling. No obvious deformity. Sensation?”
“Nothing,” Sage whispered. “My legs… they’re just gone.”
“Can you feel this?” Klaus dragged a blunt pin up the sole of her bare foot.
She stared at the ceiling. “No.”
Levi’s expression didn’t change, but a muscle in his jaw jumped once, a tiny spasm. He looked like a man watching a sentence being passed.
Klaus moved to her other foot, repeating the test. He then took her big toe and bent it sharply upward. Sage gasped. A jagged bolt of feeling, hot and bright and wrong, lanced up from her foot, through her ankle, and died somewhere in the void of her calf.
“What was that?” Levi’s voice was a wire.
“Pain,” Klaus said, a note of careful neutrality entering his tone. He looked at Sage. “You felt that? Describe it.”
“It was… sharp. Like a nail. But only for a second, and then nothing again.” Hope, a treacherous and fragile thing, cracked open in her chest. She dared to look at Levi. His eyes were fixed on Klaus.
“Good,” Klaus said, finally straightening up. He wiped his hands on a cloth. “The impact was catastrophic, but the structure is intact. The cord is bruised, not severed. The swelling is causing the paralysis.”
The words hung in the air, thick with meaning. Levi absorbed them, his gaze dropping to the floor between them. “Permanent?”
“No,” Klaus said. “But it’s a severe contusion. The neural pathways are inflamed, shut down. The feeling will return slowly, unpredictably. It could be days before she regains even the faintest sensation. Months of rehab before she stands. Walking…” He shrugged, a gesture of brutal honesty. “A long road. If she works harder than she’s ever worked in her life.”
Relief was a physical blow, leaving her weak. She wasn’t a piece of broken furniture. She was a project. A terrible, painful project. A sob mixed with a laugh escaped her, sounding slightly unhinged even to her own ears.
Levi didn’t react to the sound. He was still processing. “Months,” he repeated, the word flat.
“Best-case scenario,” Klaus confirmed. “She needs complete immobility now. Absolute rest to let the inflammation subside. I’ll strap her to a backboard.” He moved away to gather supplies.
They were alone, just the two of them and the curtain and the noise of the ward. Sage turned her head to look at him fully. The grim intensity had softened into something more complicated, more exhausted. “Months,” she said, echoing him.
His grey eyes flicked to hers. “You heard him. You’ll have to work.”
“I will.”
“You better.” He took a half-step closer, his boots silent on the straw-strewn floor. His voice dropped, meant only for her. “Throwing yourself at the Armored Titan was the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of dumb shit.”
She managed a weak smile. “It got its attention, didn’t it?”
He didn’t smile back. “It got you thrown through a building.” He looked away, his shoulders tightening. “Don’t do that again.”
“Plan to avoid flying through buildings in the future, sir.”
Klaus returned with a long wooden board and leather straps. Levi watched as the medic and an orderly began the careful, clinical process of securing her to it. Every movement was gentle, but the confinement was immediate and total. She was a bug pinned to a specimen card.
When they finished, she was a rigid shape under a thin sheet, only her head and arms free. The helplessness was a new kind of terror, more profound than any Titan. Klaus left, pulling the curtain mostly shut.
Levi stood there, a silent sentinel. He looked out of place, a weapon shelved in a room of broken things.
“You should go,” Sage said, her voice small. “They need you out there.”
“They’re managing.” He didn’t move. He was looking at her harness and gear, piled in a bloody, cut-up heap in the corner. His clean, oiled harness from that night in his room felt like a memory from another lifetime.
“Levi.” She waited until he looked at her. “Thank you. For coming back.”
He made a dismissive sound in his throat, but his eyes held hers. The noise of the infirmary seemed to fade for a moment. He reached out, his fingers hesitating just above her wrist where it was strapped down. He didn’t touch her skin. He tapped the worn leather of the restraint, twice.
Then his hand curled into a fist and dropped to his side. “I’ll check the duty roster for your rehab,” he said, his tone shifting back to practical, impersonal captain. “They’ll likely assign Petra. She’s thorough.”
He was building a wall again, stone by stone. She could see him doing it. It was necessary, and it hurt.
“Petra’s good,” Sage agreed, playing along.
He gave a single nod, the conversation clearly concluded. But he didn’t leave immediately. He stood for five more seconds, just looking at her, as if memorizing the lines of the straps against the board, the pale cast of her face against the grey pillow. “Rest,” he finally said, the word an order.
He turned and pushed through the curtain, leaving it swaying in his wake. She was alone with the ache, the itchy confinement of the straps, and the faint, phantom echo of sensation in her right toe—a tiny, distant star in the vast, silent dark of her body. It was something. It was a start. Months stretched before her, a prison of patience and pain. But he had come back. And he had tapped the leather, twice. She held onto that, and onto the sharp, bright memory of the pain in her toe, as she stared at the water stain on the beam and began the long, still wait for feeling to return.