---
The world, for a horrifying moment, was nothing but teeth.
The creature that had erupted from a flash of golden light was a nightmare of animalistic fury. It was not a lumbering giant. It was a predator, lean and wiry, a five-meter-tall monster of pure, terrifying agility. It moved on all fours, its long, powerful arms ending in claws that tore deep gouges in the ancient trees. Its face was a grotesque mask of jagged, needle-like teeth in a jaw that seemed to unhinge, and its wild mane of dark hair whipped around it as it moved with a chaotic, terrifying speed.
The Jaw Titan.
It hit the abnormal that had been looming over the blonde-haired girl like a cannonball of condensed rage. There was no strategy, no martial arts. There was only a brutal, savage efficiency. It scrambled onto the larger Titan's back, its claws digging deep, and with a sickening, wet crunch that echoed through the silent forest, it sank its incredible jaw into the Titan's nape, tearing out a massive chunk of flesh and bone in a single, brutal bite.
The abnormal collapsed, its steaming corpse crashing to the ground just inches from a stunned, terrified Christa.
The surviving soldiers of the 104th could only stare, their minds, already fractured by the day's betrayals, now completely shattered.
"No... no, no, no..." Connie whispered, his face pale as death. He stumbled backward, tripping over a tree root, his eyes wide with a horror that went beyond simple fear. "Not another one... please, not another one..."
Jean just stared, his grief-fueled rage momentarily extinguished, replaced by a hollow, laughing despair. "Of course," he snarled, a bitter, broken sound tearing from his throat. "Of course. Why not? Everyone's a monster. We're the only ones left."
The small, panting Jaw Titan turned, its chest heaving, its jaw dripping with steaming Titan blood. Its dark, intelligent eyes, so unlike the dead, smiling eyes of the mindless ones, swept over them. They landed on Christa, who was still frozen on the ground, a statue of pure, unadulterated terror.
For a long, tense moment, the two figures stared at each other across the small clearing. The monster and the girl it had just saved. Then, with a deep, groaning sound of tearing flesh, the nape of the Jaw Titan split open. Steam billowed out, and a human figure, slick with slime and exhaustion, emerged, collapsing to the forest floor.
It was a girl. A tall girl with brown hair and a familiar, cynical smirk that was now nowhere to be seen.
"Ymir..." Christa whispered, the name a fragile, broken thing in the dead air.
Ymir pushed herself up, her body trembling with a fatigue that went bone-deep. She looked at the horrified, disbelieving faces of her comrades. She saw their fear, their disgust, the new wall of suspicion rising between them. Her gaze finally settled on Christa, and the hard, cynical mask she always wore cracked, revealing the raw, vulnerable girl underneath.
"You... you're a..." Connie stammered, unable to finish the sentence.
"Yeah," Ymir shot back, her voice a harsh, defensive rasp. "I am. What of it?" She took a shaky step towards Christa, her eyes never leaving the smaller girl's face. "Are you okay?"
The question, so simple, so human, was a jarring note in the symphony of horror. Christa didn't answer. She couldn't. She just stared, her mind a whirlwind of confusion. The girl who had always been so abrasive, so distant, who had teased her and protected her in equal measure... was one of them. A monster.
"I did it for you, you idiot," Ymir finally choked out, the words a raw, painful confession. "I wasn't going to let that thing eat you. I couldn't."
Jean, his face a twisted mask of grief, finally found his voice. "Another one," he spat, the words dripping with venom. "Another traitor, hiding among us. Just like her," he snarled, jerking his head towards Annie, who stood silently by the cart. "How many more of you are there?! How many more of our friends have to die before we kill you all?!"
His grief, raw and untamed, finally boiled over. With a guttural roar that was more animal than human, he launched himself forward, his blades a blur of motion, aimed not at a Titan, but at the exhausted, trembling girl who had once been his comrade.
He never made it.
Just as his blades began their descent, a faint, almost imperceptible pulse of pure cyan light emanated from the cart. It wasn't an explosion. It was a gentle, silent wave of force, a quiet but absolute command. The air itself seemed to push back against Jean, shoving him off balance. He cried out in shock as he was thrown backward, tumbling to the ground in a heap, his attack thwarted by an unseen hand.
He scrambled up, his eyes wide with confusion. "What the hell was that?!"
The other soldiers stared, just as baffled. But two women were not.
Mikasa, her hand still resting on the cart, felt the faint, familiar warmth of his Ki wash over her. Her breath hitched. Even unconscious, even broken, he was still protecting them. From themselves. A single, hot tear escaped her tightly controlled facade, tracing a silent path down her cheek.
Annie felt it too. A gentle, sorrowful energy that held no malice, only a desperate plea for peace. She looked from the stunned soldiers to the cart, and the weight of his impossible kindness, his unwavering mission to save everyone, settled on her shoulders like a shroud.
From inside the cart, Akira stirred in his sleep, his brow furrowed in a pained dream. He had felt it. Not the monster. But the hate. The desperate, self-destructive rage of his friends. And in the deepest, most broken parts of his soul, a tiny, flickering ember of his own light had reached out, not to fight, but to shield.
He was still there. He was still fighting. And so would they.
---
The truce was a fragile, ugly thing, forged in the crucible of shared terror and held together by the thinnest of threads. They were no longer a military unit. They were a traveling freak show, a caravan of monsters and the broken soldiers who were forced to ride beside them. Ymir now rode with them, a pariah in her own right, her presence tolerated for one reason and one reason only: Christa had made her choice. In a quiet, defiant act that had stunned them all, she had moved her horse to ride beside the new traitor, her loyalty a silent, unwavering shield against the glares and whispers of her comrades.
This new, impossible dynamic was a strategic nightmare that made Commander Erwin's face a grim, unreadable mask of stone. He rode at the head of the formation, Annie on one side, and his furious, stone-faced Captain on the other.
"Two of them," Levi growled, his voice a low, dangerous rumble that was for Erwin's ears alone. "Two of them in our ranks, Erwin. And that's just the ones we know about. How many more are there? Are we a regiment, or a goddamn Titan nursery?"
"They are assets, Levi," Erwin replied, his voice calm and measured, his eyes fixed on the dark, looming trees ahead. "Unpredictable. Volatile. But assets nonetheless. The Jaw Titan's speed and agility, the Female Titan's martial prowess... they are weapons we may need."
"We need the weapon in the cart," Levi shot back, hooking a thumb towards the back of the formation. "Not these... things. He's the only one I trust to get the job done."
Erwin's lips curved into a faint, grim smile. "Do you, Levi? Do you trust him? Or do you trust his power?"
The Captain fell silent, the question a sharp, uncomfortable truth he had no answer for.
---
The forest grew darker, the colossal trees blotting out the last of the twilight. The air became still and heavy, the silence so absolute it felt like a physical weight. Annie reined in her horse, her head snapping up, her warrior's senses screaming.
"It's a trap," she whispered, her voice tight with a tension that instantly put every soldier on edge.
The world exploded in a shower of earth and splintered wood. It wasn't an ambush of Titans. It was an ambush of one.
From the darkness, a fifteen-meter cannonball of plated armor and raw, unstoppable force burst through a line of giant trees, its movements a brutal, terrifying declaration of war.
"REINER!" Jean's grief-stricken voice screamed, raw and full of hate.
The Armored Titan didn't charge them head-on. He was a soldier, not a mindless beast. He ran a parallel course, a phantom of destruction in the gloom, his objective clear: to harry them, to separate them, to break their formation and pick them off one by one. He slammed his armored shoulder into the base of a colossal, ancient tree. With a groan that sounded like the world itself was breaking, the giant tree began to fall, a slow-motion avalanche of timber aimed directly at the center of their column.
"SCATTER!" Erwin roared.
The formation shattered. Horses screamed and reared as soldiers fired their ODM gear, a desperate, chaotic scramble to escape the crushing path of the falling giant. The tree crashed down with a ground-shaking impact that split the earth, creating a massive, impassable barrier that cut the company in two.
It was a brilliant, brutal tactic. On one side were Erwin, Levi, and the bulk of the remaining soldiers. On the other, isolated and exposed, were the cart carrying Akira, and its small, fractured honor guard: Mikasa, Annie, Ymir, Christa, and the handful of shell-shocked survivors from the 104th.
Reiner stood on the other side of the fallen tree, his hardened form a silhouette against the gloom. He wasn't attacking. He was waiting. He had isolated the queen and her most powerful pieces. Now, his master could make his move.
From the deepest, darkest part of the forest, a new sound emerged. It was not the thudding of Titan footsteps. It was a wet, slithering, dragging sound, accompanied by a low, guttural clicking that made the blood run cold.
A new monster emerged from the shadows, and it was a creature of pure, alien nightmare.
It was not a Titan. It was not a Kaiju of brute force. It was something else. Something worse. It was a twenty-meter-tall horror, a grotesque fusion of insect and reptile. Its body was a long, segmented, chitinous thing, like a monstrous centipede, held aloft by a dozen spindly, multi-jointed legs that clicked and scraped on the forest floor. Its head was a bulbous, eyeless horror, with a gaping, circular maw filled with concentric rings of needle-like teeth. And from its back, a series of long, whip-like tentacles, each tipped with a glistening, razor-sharp barb, writhed and tasted the air.
This was Leech-Ghoul. A creature designed not to smash, but to drain.
"What... what in the name of the walls is that?" Connie whispered, his voice trembling.
The creature's eyeless head swiveled, its unseen senses locking onto the most powerful energy signatures in the clearing. It ignored the humans. It ignored the horses. It moved with a terrifying, unnatural speed, its spindly legs scuttling across the ground, directly towards the two shifters.
"Annie! Ymir! Get back!" Mikasa screamed, her blades already in her hands as she launched herself forward.
But it was too late. The two women knew what they had to do. With a shared look of grim, desperate resolve, they leaped from their horses.
"Christa, stay back!" Ymir yelled, a blade flashing in her hand.
Two simultaneous flashes of golden light erupted in the dark forest. The Female Titan and the Jaw Titan stood ready, a desperate, impossible alliance against a creature from a world beyond their darkest nightmares.
---
•To Be Continue•
---