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The Attack titan's roar still vibrated around the colossal trees clearing as said titan's neck tilted, vertebrae the size of wagon wheels grinded against each other. It sounded like a territorial challenge thrown into the heart of a land that knew only one type of sovereign: mindless, consuming hunger.
…And the land answered.
From the labyrinthine shadows between the gargantuan tree trunks, they emerged. Drawn not by strategy or malice, but by the simple, gravitational pull of movement and noise. Pure Titans. A grotesque gallery of pale, disproportionate flesh and vacant eyes.
A pair of 5-meter Class Titans shambled into the clearing first, their stunted, childlike bodies moving with a disjointed skip. Behind them, a 10-meter with long, gangly arms and a perpetually weeping expression shuffled, its head lolling. Then a 12-meter, built like a barrel, its face was a blank slate save for a lipless slit of a mouth. And leading the pack, a 15-meter Class; a hulking brute with a distended belly and shoulders like boulders, its expression one of dull, single-minded anticipation.
The Attack Titan's burning green eyes swept over them. The Omnitrix symbol on its chest pulsed, a steady, viridian heartbeat. There was no fear in that gaze. The fury that had birthed it had cooled from a supernova to a forge-fire; controlled, focused, and lethal. It saw them not as monsters, but as obstacles. Things between it and… and something else. A pull, a faint, familiar signal on the edge of its new, overwhelming senses. To reach that signal, the path needed to be cleared.
It shifted its weight. The movement was not the clumsy, earth-shaking step of a Pure Titan, but a coiled, athletic pivot. Muscles like steel cables tensed under steaming skin. It lowered its center of gravity, one powerful hand planting on the scorched earth for balance, the other curling into a fist that cracked the air.
The Titans didn't charge. They simply advanced, a slow, inevitable tide. The two 5-meter ones reached it first, reaching with clumsy, grasping hands.
The Attack Titan moved.
It was a blur of green-eyed violence. Its planted hand became a pivot point as it spun, its leg scything out in a devastating low kick. The blow connected and obliterated. The leading 5-meter Titan's legs shattered below the knees with a wet explosion of bone and steam. It toppled forward, and the Attack Titan's waiting fist met its face, crushing the skull inward like rotten fruit before a decisive stomp to the nape ended its twitching.
The second 5-meter leaped, aiming for the Titan's back. The Attack Titan didn't even look. An elbow shot backward with piston force, catching the leaping Titan in the midsection. There was a sickening crunch-pop as its spine folded around the joint. It was batted aside, a broken doll that slammed into the 10-meter weeper, entangling them both.
The 12-meter barrel Titan then charged next, a roaring avalanche of flesh. The Attack Titan met it head-on. It didn't brace. It leaned in. As the barrel Titan wrapped its thick arms around it in a crushing bear hug, the Attack Titan brought its own arms up inside the grip, palms slamming into the underside of the other Titan's jaw. With a roar that was more strategic than bestial, it pushed up and out, using the larger Titan's own momentum against it. The bear hug became a devastating over-the-shoulder throw. The 12-meter Titan was hurled through the air, crashing into the base of a giant tree with a world-shaking THUD that rained leaves and splinters down.
But the distraction cost a microsecond.
From the periphery, a small, wiry 4-meter Titan; one that had been hiding in the roots; sprang. It moved with insectile quickness, latching onto the Attack Titan's broad back like a parasitic tick. Its fingers, tipped with overgrown nails, scrabbled for purchase, and one hooked, tearing, into the flesh just beside the critical nape.
AGONY.
It was a white-hot lance of pain, deeper and more personal than any other wound. It wasn't just tissue damage; it felt like a violation of the core itself. The Omnitrix symbol on its chest flared bright green. The Attack Titan roared, this time a sound of genuine pain and fury. It twisted violently, reaching back with one hand to claw at the pest on its back. The smaller Titan held on tenaciously, biting into the shoulder muscle, tearing out great gouts of steaming flesh.
Gritting its serrated teeth, the Attack Titan stopped trying to grab it. Instead, it threw itself backward, aiming to crush the pest against the ground. The 4-meter Titan, sensing the move, let go at the last second, leaping clear. But it landed clumsily. Before it could regain its footing, a massive foot descended. The Attack Titan stomped down, pinning the smaller Titan's torso. It thrashed, its head snapping up to bite at the ankle. The Attack Titan bent, seized the squirming Titan by the head and one leg, and with a horrific, wet RIIIIP, tore it in two at the waist, discarding the twitching halves.
Panting steam, the Attack Titan straightened, one hand instinctively going to the bleeding wound near its nape. The green light of the Omnitrix pulsed faster, and the steam from the injury thickened, the flesh beginning to knit with visible, rapid intent.
There was no time to heal.
The 15-meter brute was upon him.
It barreled like a living battering ram of muscle and intent. The Attack Titan, still off-balance from its violent kill, couldn't fully dodge. It braced, crossing its arms.
WHUMPF.
The impact was cataclysmic. The sound was less a crash and more the air being forcibly ejected from two colliding continents. The Attack Titan was lifted off its feet. The two colossal beings became a tangle of limbs, crashing to the earth in a devastating roll that flattened smaller trees and carved a fresh trench in the forest floor.
They landed with the brute on top, its weight immense. Its maw, dripping hot saliva, gaped wide and snapped down towards the Attack Titan's face. The set of teeth clashed shut mere feet from the glowing green eyes. The stench of rot and heat was overwhelming.
Trapped, the Attack Titan did the only thing it could. It drew its knees up to its chest, feet planting against the brute's distended stomach. With a guttural snarl that vibrated from its core, it kicked with all the might in its powerful legs.
The 15-meter Titan was launched upward and backward as if from a siege cannon. It flew a dozen meters through the air, crashing down on its back with an earth-shattering tremor.
The Attack Titan rolled to its feet, movements still fluid but now tinged with a desperate urgency. The clearing, however, was no longer a battleground. It was a feeding ground. More Titans had arrived, drawn by the tumult; a 7-meter, a 9-meter, two more 5-meter types. They surrounded him, a closing circle of grinning, moaning death.
He was strong. He was fast. But he was one. And they were endless.
The 7-meter darted in, too fast. It managed to latch onto his left arm, its jaws sinking deep into the bicep. The Attack Titan roared, swinging the attached Titan like a flail, smashing it into a 5-meter that was charging his flank. Both went down in a heap like the former.
But the distraction was lethal. The 9-meter seized the opening, grabbing his right leg. Its teeth sheared through tendon and muscle above the knee. One of the 5-meter, seeing weakness, lunged and bit into the same calf, hanging on like a rabid dog.
The Attack Titan staggered. The pain was a firestorm. He shook his leg violently, the smaller Titan losing its grip and flying off; only to collide with another incoming 4-meter, sending them both tumbling. He brought his free fist down on the head of the 9-meter attached to his thigh, once, twice, until the skull cracked and it went limp, but its jaws remained locked.
He was being overwhelmed. Bitten, grabbed, weighed down. The green light on his chest was a frantic strobe. His regenerative steam poured from a dozen wounds, but they were coming faster than he could heal. A 12-meter he hadn't seen grabbed him from behind in a full nelson, pinning his arms. Another moved in for the kill, jaws aiming for his exposed throat.
A streak of orange fury shot from the treeline.
The Vulpimancer, a silent spectator until now, moved with a purpose that transcended its own fear. It didn't attack the Titan holding Eren. It went for the killer; the one lunging for the throat. It jumped at the last second, gliding across the stampede of titans, and landed directly in front of the attacking Titan's face. It latched itself onto the face of the titan and bit on its eye. The Titan's vison was obscured, its charge faltering for a crucial half-second.
It was all the opening the Attack Titan needed.
With a roar of effort that tore from a place of pure, survivalist will, he torqued his body. The Omnitrix symbol blazed. Green energy, not lightning but a surge of pure power, flashed through the luminous veins under his skin. His muscles swelled, and he exploded outward from the 12-meter's grip. The vulpimancer having leapt just on time to get out of the way.
The hold broke. The Titan behind him stumbled back from the force. The Attack Titan's now-free right hand shot out, not in a fist, but in a clawed grip. It seized the 12-meter Titan's extended arm at the elbow. Then, with a motion of terrible, precise violence, he wrenched.
CRACK-SNAP-TEAR.
The arm came off at the socket in a geyser of steam and fibrous tissue. The Titan stared dumbly at the stump. The Attack Titan swung the severed limb like a club, smashing it into the head of the disoriented Titan the Vulpimancer had distracted, caving in its temple.
The fight descended into a brutal, final frenzy. The Vulpimancer became a running small nuisance, harrying legs, disrupting bites, buying fractions of seconds. And the Attack Titan used every fraction.
He became an artist of dismantlement. A backhand shattered a neck. A knee driven upward pulverized a jaw. He grabbed a 10-meter by the head and the hip and bent it backwards until the spine snapped with a sound like a falling redwood. Each incapacitated titans then getting their napes dismantled before they could get up. For the final, largest of the new arrivals; a 14-meter with a snarling face; he used pure, predatory dominance. He dodged its charge, slipped behind it, and leaped onto its back. His legs locked around its torso, his arms wrapping around its head. He ignored its flailing as he lowered his head, his serrated jaws opening wide.
And he bit.
Not a nibble. Not a tear. A deep, anchoring, crushing bite into the flesh of the Titan's nape. He tasted the foul, electric tang of Titan flesh. Then, with a final, convulsive heave of his entire body, he ripped.
A massive chunk of flesh, spine, and the crucial neural matter within came away in his teeth. The 14-meter Titan stiffened, its eyes glazing over instantly, before it collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut, its body already beginning to vaporize.
Silence.
Heavy, panting, steam-filled silence.
The Attack Titan stood alone in a field of dissolving carnage. Titans in various states of dismemberment lay around him, their bodies evaporating into great, swirling clouds of white mist. The Vulpimancer crouched nearby, its orange fur matted with condensation, watching him with its smooth, head tilted.
The forge-fire rage was gone. Spent. In its place was a hollow, ringing awareness. And confusion.
The Attack Titan looked down at its own hands. They were huge, powerful, stained with evaporating Titan blood. It flexed them. It looked at the Vulpimancer, so small below. A low, questioning rumble emitted from its throat. Not a roar. A sound of profound bewilderment.
'Huh? What… what the hell am I?'
The thought formed in a space that was both alien and intimately familiar. The sensory overload; the smell of a thousand forests, the feel of the earth's vibration, the heat signatures of the dying Titans, the cold fear-scent of the orange creature, it all receded. And in that sudden, stark clarity, it hit him.
'I… am a Titan?!'
The realization was an ice bath. Eren's consciousness, which had been riding the torrent of the Titan's instincts like a raft in a hurricane, suddenly found the shore. He was in this. This colossal, powerful, monstrous body was his.
As if the thought itself broke a dam, the fatigue he had been holding at bay through sheer adrenaline crashed over him. The wounds, now sluggishly steaming, screamed anew. The titanic muscles, pushed beyond any reasonable limit, trembled. The green glow in his eyes flickered.
He swayed.
One massive knee buckled and hit the ground with a thud that sent a final tremor through the clearing. He caught himself on a fist, panting, great gusts of steam billowing from his mouth and wounds. The world swam.
Then, a sound. Not from the forest. From within.
BEEP… BEEP-BEEP… BEEP-BEEP-BEEP…
A rapid, urgent, digital sound. He looked down, the movement sluggish. There, embedded in the center of the Titan's chest, the Omnitrix symbol was no longer glowing a steady green. It was flashing a frantic, alarming red.
Timeout.
The word surfaced from the depths of his memory. The watch. It was out of energy.
The red flashing accelerated into a solid, pulsing light. Then, with a final, soft CHIME, the light died.
The transformation unraveled in a flash of red. It was like watching a mountain dissolve in fast-forward. The fifteen meters of sculpted muscle and bone shrank, collapsed, and flowed inward. The steaming flesh turned to light, then to nothing. The world yawned around him, growing terrifyingly large.
And then he was standing on his own two feet.
Human feet.
On the soft, churned earth.
Eren Yeager, ten years old, now dressed in the tattered, bloody remains of his clothes, stood wobbly in the center of the apocalyptic clearing. He stared at his hands; small, human, unscathed. He flexed his fingers. He looked down at his legs; whole, unbroken, bearing no marks of the savage bites that had been there moments before. They tingled with the phantom memory of agony and newfound strength.
He raised a trembling hand to his face. His fingertips traced unfamiliar ridges on his skin; thin, sunken red lines etching from the corners of his eyes down his cheeks. More traced down the sides of his neck. He had felt them before back when Zs'Skayr was still a thing. The sigil of the power that had just left him.
From the shallow cuts on his arms and the ghost-pain in his thigh, faint, wispy tendrils of steam still rose, the last vestiges of Titan regeneration working on his human form.
He was surrounded by the dissolving corpses of giants. The air was thick with their evaporating bodies, a hot, misty fog that smelled of ozone and salt. The Vulpimancer took a tentative step closer, its head tilting, sniffing the air deeply. The scent was now unquestionably that of the pup. The small two-legs. But it had seen.
Eren's knees gave out. He didn't crumple; he simply sat down hard on the damp earth, then let himself roll onto his back. He stared up at the narrow strip of sky visible between the impossible branches of the giant trees. The sun was higher now, but the mist diffused its light into an eerie, golden haze.
He held his hand up, blocking the diffuse light, looking at the lines on his palm, then at the faint steam curling from a scratch on his wrist. So all this time he had thought it was the omnitrix that healed his arm back then…that was a lie. He was-was…also a titan…another brand of monster.
His voice, when it came, was a raw, broken whisper, swallowed by the vastness of the forest and the hiss of dying Titans.
"What the hell," he breathed, "am I turning into?"
The sheer, existential weight of it; the transformation, the power, the violence, the healing, these strange marks; pressed down on him. His vision darkened at the edges. The adrenaline was gone, leaving a void of utter exhaustion deeper than any he had ever known. His eyes fluttered shut.
The last thing he felt was a wet, warm nudging at his side. Then, the sensation of being lifted with infinite care, the world moving around him. The musky, familiar scent of orange fur filled his nostrils as consciousness slipped away, and the Vulpimancer, cradling its fragile, impossible charge, moved with silent haste into the deep, protective shadows of the Forest of Giant Trees, leaving the field of steam and ashes behind.
Chapter 30-31 are already available on Patreon.com/Weeb Fanthom.