The scent of vaporized blood and rust always preceded the screaming.
High above the forest floor, surrounded by the towering, ancient bark of the Forest of Giant Trees, Kaelen Vance was running out of gas, running out of blades, and rapidly running out of hope.
Hiss. Thwip.
The pneumatic mechanisms of his Omni-Directional Mobility gear shrieked in protest as he fired his right grapple into a massive oak branch. The iron anchor bit deep into the wood. Kaelen slammed his thumb down on the trigger, reeling the wire in to slingshot his body through the dense canopy. Wind whipped his brown hair across his eyes, but it did nothing to block out the horrors unfolding below.
"Keep moving! Don't look down, Cadets! Keep moving!"
Squad Leader Elias's voice was hoarse, tearing through the howling wind. But the command was futile. How could they not look down?
Directly beneath them, the Vanguard formation of the 59th Exterior Scouting Mission was collapsing. Black smoke signals painted the sky behind them, but here, in the heart of the forest, the flares were exclusively, violently red. Abnormals. A swarm of them had bypassed the right flank, crashing into the center columns like boulders into a glass house.
"Elias!" screeched Elara, the only other surviving cadet in Kaelen's squad. Her face was pale, smeared with soot and the blood of the soldier who had been flying beside her mere seconds ago. "We have to go higher! They're scaling the trunks!"
"Conserve your gas!" Elias roared back, banking sharply to the left. "We just need to reach the rendezvous—"
A colossal, meaty hand erupted from the foliage to their right.
It was a fifteen-meter Abnormal. It didn't climb; it leaped. Its grotesque, disproportionate body launched upward with physics-defying speed, its jaw unhinging to reveal rows of blunt, yellowed teeth.
Elias didn't even have time to uncross his blades. The Titan's jaws snapped shut around the Squad Leader's torso with the sickening crunch of steel and bone. Blood sprayed into the air like a macabre fountain, misting against Kaelen's face. The Titan's dead, milky eyes rolled back in its head as it swallowed humanity's veteran whole, plummeting back down into the brush beneath the weight of its own jump.
"Elias!" Elara screamed, her voice breaking into a hysterical sob.
"Elara, don't!" Kaelen yelled, his throat raw. Panic, cold and absolute, seized his chest. "Keep your trajectory! We have to keep going!"
But terror had hijacked the young recruit's mind. Elara shifted her weight, firing both anchors toward the descending Titan. She drew a fresh pair of blades, screaming in a mix of pure grief and primal rage. She was going for the nape.
She was too slow.
Before Elara could even adjust her gas pressure for the strike, a second Titan—a spindly, long-armed seven-meter—swung out from behind a massive trunk. It snatched Elara out of the air like a child catching a butterfly.
Her scream was cut horrifyingly short as the Titan's fingers squeezed.
"No!" Kaelen bellowed. Without thinking, he fired his wires, redirecting his momentum toward the seven-meter Titan. He didn't care about the mission anymore. He didn't care about surviving. The adrenaline masked his fear, replacing it with a suicidal desperation.
He squeezed the triggers, his ODM gear hissing as he closed the distance. He swung his blades back, aiming for the monster's wrists to free his squadmate.
But Kaelen was just a cadet. His angle was sloppy. His speed was uncontrolled.
The seven-meter Titan barely registered his approach. As it brought Elara to its gaping maw, its elbow jerked backward, swatting Kaelen out of the air as an afterthought.
The impact felt like being hit by a speeding carriage.
Kaelen heard his ribs crack before he registered the pain. The blow shattered his blades and sent him spinning wildly out of control. His gas tanks ruptured, spewing pressurized mist into the air as he plummeted toward the earth.
He crashed through a thick canopy of leaves, his body slamming against a lower branch before tumbling the remaining twenty feet to the forest floor.
He hit the dirt with a bone-jarring thud.
For a moment, there was nothing but a high-pitched ringing in his ears. The world blurred into muted shades of green and brown. Every breath was a fiery stab in his chest. Kaelen tried to move his arm, but his shoulder was completely dislocated. His ODM gear was a twisted mess of useless metal strapped to his waist.
He was grounded. Defenseless. Dead.
Through the ringing in his ears, the heavy, rhythmic thuds of approaching footsteps began to vibrate against his cheek, pressed into the dirt.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Kaelen coughed, tasting copper. He managed to roll onto his back, his vision slowly swimming into focus.
The fifteen-meter Abnormal—the one that had eaten Elias—was towering over him.
Up close, the sheer scale of the nightmare was incomprehensible. The heat radiating off its skin was like an open oven door, carrying the putrid stench of rotting meat and vaporized blood. Its massive head tilted to the side, peering down at Kaelen's broken body. Its jaw hung slack, drool pooling and dropping onto the grass beside Kaelen's face.
Kaelen closed his eyes. The fear was entirely gone now, replaced by a hollow, cold acceptance. So this is it, he thought. This is how we all die. Chewed up and swallowed in the dark.
He waited for the hand to grab him. He waited for the crushing pressure of the teeth.
One second passed. Then five. Then ten.
Silence.
Kaelen slowly opened his eyes.
The Titan hadn't moved to grab him. Instead, the fifteen-meter monstrosity had lowered itself onto its hands and knees. Its massive, terrifying face was hovering just a few feet away from Kaelen.
But it wasn't looking at him with the mindless, ravenous hunger Kaelen had seen in the textbooks.
The Titan was trembling.
Its milky eyes, usually devoid of all intellect and emotion, were wide. The muscles in its grotesque jaw twitched. It let out a low, rumbling sound—not a roar, but a bizarre, vibrating hum that rattled the loose stones on the forest floor.
Slowly, carefully, the Titan reached out a colossal finger. Kaelen held his breath, unable to move away. But the finger didn't crush him. The Titan gently placed its fingertip on the earth mere inches from Kaelen's shoulder, lowering its head as if... bowing.
What... what is happening? Kaelen's mind fractured. Why isn't it eating me?
Suddenly, the heavy brush to Kaelen's left exploded.
The seven-meter Titan—the one that had killed Elara—burst into the clearing. It spotted Kaelen on the ground and let out a piercing shriek, lunging forward with its jaws wide open to claim the scraps.
Before Kaelen could even brace himself, the fifteen-meter Abnormal reacted.
With a roar that shook the very leaves from the trees, the fifteen-meter Titan lunged, intercepting the smaller Titan with terrifying speed. It tackled the seven-meter beast to the ground, its massive hands wrapping around the smaller Titan's throat.
Kaelen watched in absolute, paralyzed horror as the fifteen-meter Titan drove its fist into the seven-meter's face, crushing its skull into a pulp of bone and steaming flesh. Not satisfied, the larger Titan leaned down, sank its own teeth into the back of the smaller Titan's neck, and violently ripped the nape away.
The seven-meter Titan went limp, its body immediately beginning to rapidly evaporate in hissing clouds of white steam.
The fifteen-meter Abnormal spat the chunk of flesh out. Then, it slowly turned back to Kaelen. It didn't advance. It sat back on its haunches, resting its bloody hands on its knees, positioning itself directly between Kaelen and the dense forest, like a guardian hound standing watch over its master.
Kaelen stared at the monster. The monster stared back.
It protected me. The thought was absolute madness. It violated every law of nature, every doctrine taught by the Survey Corps. It protected me. Why?
Fwhoosh!
A blinding green flare shot into the canopy directly above the clearing, tearing through the billowing Titan steam.
High-pressure gas hissed through the air like an angry viper. A blur of dark green fabric and silver steel dropped from the upper branches. The movement was so fast, so impossibly precise, it looked less like a human and more like a bolt of lightning.
The spinning figure zipped behind the seated fifteen-meter Abnormal.
Snikt. Snikt.
Two silver blades flashed in a blinding cross-slash. The fifteen-meter Titan's eyes rolled back as a massive wedge of flesh was cleanly excised from the back of its neck.
The giant beast slumped forward, crashing into the dirt just feet away from Kaelen, instantly dissolving into scalding steam.
From the dissipating white fog, a figure landed softly on the ground.
He wore the dark green cloak of the Survey Corps, the Wings of Freedom boldly emblazoned on his back. He stood up straight, flicking his blood-soaked blades downward with a sharp snap of his wrists to clear them of gore.
Captain Levi Ackerman turned around.
His steely, slate-gray eyes swept over the clearing, taking in the evaporating carcass of the seven-meter Titan, the freshly killed fifteen-meter, and finally, the broken, bleeding cadet lying in the dirt.
Levi didn't ask Kaelen if he was okay. He didn't offer a hand.
Instead, humanity's strongest soldier slowly walked forward, the metal of his ODM gear clicking menacingly with every step. He stopped right at Kaelen's feet, his expression a mask of cold, terrifying suspicion.
"Cadet," Levi said, his voice quiet, flat, and colder than the winter winds in Sina. He pointed a dripping blade toward the evaporating skull of the fifteen-meter Titan. "I watched that from the canopy. Care to explain why that piece of shit was protecting you?"