The first seventy-two hours were about survival.
Not the dramatic kind—not dodging bullets or outrunning Titans. The quiet kind. The kind that determined whether you existed in a society or were simply a ghost moving through it. In Marley, in Liberio, a man without papers was a man without a future. And a man without a future attracted exactly the kind of attention that got you dragged into an interrogation room by the Public Security Bureau and never seen again.
Henry had known this. More importantly, *Loid* had known this.
The knowledge sat in his mind like a second operating system running beneath his own consciousness. He didn't have to think about how to forge documents—he simply *knew*. The way you know how to breathe. The way you know how to walk. Loid Forger had spent his entire adult life becoming other people, and that expertise was now woven into Henry's neural pathways with the intimacy of muscle memory.
He found a printing shop on the western edge of the internment zone on his first afternoon. Not one of the official Marleyan-licensed establishments on the main thoroughfares—those kept meticulous records and reported irregularities to the authorities with patriotic enthusiasm. This was a basement operation run by an elderly Eldian man named Kessler who printed pamphlets, funeral notices, and—for the right price—documents that didn't ask questions about the person they described.
Henry didn't need to negotiate. He read Kessler in four seconds flat.
The ink stains on the man's left hand—dominant hand, printer by trade, not by choice. The framed photograph on the workbench showing a young woman in a nurse's uniform—daughter, based on the resemblance, but the frame's glass was cracked and hadn't been replaced, suggesting she was gone. Not dead—the photo would be pristine if she were dead, kept perfect out of reverence. Gone meant taken. Sent to the front lines. Marley's wars consumed Eldian medics at a rate that no one discussed in polite company.
The slight tremor in Kessler's right hand. Not Parkinson's—too intermittent, too responsive to stress. Anxiety disorder, likely untreated. This was a man who lived in a state of perpetual low-grade terror and had for years.
Henry paid him fairly. Didn't haggle. Didn't threaten. Spoke softly, maintained open body language, and let the old man see someone who was not a danger. It was manipulation, yes—but the gentle kind. The kind that left people feeling better than you found them.
Kessler didn't even blink at the name on the documents.
**Loid Forger.**
Occupation: Civilian consultant. Background in psychology and therapeutic practice. Licensed in the southern Marleyan territories—a region whose records had been conveniently devastated during a recent border conflict, making verification functionally impossible. Age: twenty-seven. Nationality: Marleyan citizen of non-Eldian descent.
That last part was critical. Without an armband, without the invisible cage of Eldian designation, Loid Forger could move freely through Liberio. Enter and exit the internment zone. Access Marleyan infrastructure. Exist in the spaces between the oppressors and the oppressed without belonging fully to either.
Henry studied the finished documents under the basement's single electric light. The paper stock was slightly off—Marleyan government forms used a specific cotton-linen blend that Kessler couldn't perfectly replicate—but it would pass casual inspection. And casual inspection was all that most checkpoints administered. The soldiers manning the internment zone gates were bored conscripts, not intelligence operatives. They checked armbands, glanced at papers, and waved you through.
He thanked Kessler. Left a tip that made the old man's eyes widen. And walked out into Liberio as someone new.
---
The city was worse than the anime had shown.
That was the thought that kept circling back as Henry—*Loid*, he needed to start thinking of himself as Loid, needed the name to become reflex—moved through the streets of the internment zone in the amber light of late afternoon.
Animation, even at its most detailed, was an act of aesthetic curation. It chose which details to render and which to omit. The crumbling facades of the residential blocks had been depicted on screen as *atmospheric*—the visual language of a downtrodden people, sad but cinematic. In person, they were something else entirely. The plaster was leprous, peeling away in sheets to expose brickwork that was itself cracking, held together by mortar that had turned to powder decades ago. Water damage traced dark arterial lines down every surface. The buildings weren't old in the way that European architecture was old—storied, dignified, preserved. They were old in the way that things got old when no one was allowed to repair them.
And the smell. God, the *smell*.
The anime hadn't had a smell.
Open sewage ran in shallow channels along certain streets—not all, but enough. The internment zone's waste infrastructure hadn't been updated since its construction, and Marley had no incentive to invest in Eldian sanitation. Coal smoke from a hundred cooking fires layered over everything, mixing with the salt-rot of the nearby harbor and the sour tang of too many human bodies in too little space. It wasn't overpowering. It was *ambient*. A constant olfactory reminder that this place was not designed for living. It was designed for containing.
Loid walked.
He passed a group of children playing in a square—actual children, not the stylized figures of animation, but small humans with dirt under their nails and hollows under their eyes that no child should have. They were playing soldiers. One of them pretended to be a Titan, stomping dramatically while the others "attacked" with sticks. They were laughing.
He thought of Gabi.
Somewhere in this zone, right now, Gabi Braun was training. Twelve years old, ferocious, brilliant, utterly convinced that if she could just prove herself—just become the perfect Warrior, the perfect weapon—she could earn the right to be seen as human. She believed it with every cell in her body. And the tragedy was that she wasn't wrong to believe it, because the system had been designed so meticulously that belief was the only rational response. When the cage is all you know, the jailer's approval feels like freedom.
He passed a checkpoint. Two soldiers, rifles slung lazily. They glanced at his lack of armband, registered *Marleyan*, and didn't even ask for papers. He was invisible in the way that privilege always made you invisible—not unseen, but *unchallenged*.
On the Marleyan side, the contrast was visceral. The streets widened. The buildings straightened. Gas lamps gave way to electric lighting. A café on the corner had white tablecloths and a menu in the window listing prices that would feed an internment zone family for a week. Two women in fashionable coats walked past him, laughing about something, and the sound of their uncomplicated happiness hit him like a slap.
He turned back toward the internment zone.
He wasn't ready for the Marleyan side yet. Not emotionally. He needed to *think*, and he couldn't think surrounded by the casual architecture of a society that had industrialized cruelty and filed it under *national security*.
---
Loid found a rooftop.
It wasn't difficult. The internment zone's buildings were packed so tightly that their rooftops formed a near-continuous landscape—a second city above the first, all uneven tiles and laundry lines and rusted ventilation pipes. He reached it via a fire escape that groaned under his weight but held. Loid's instincts mapped every hand-hold, every structural weakness, every exit route. The assessment was automatic. Effortless. Like breathing.
He sat on the ledge with his legs dangling over a four-story drop and looked out over Liberio as the sun began to set, painting the harbor in shades of copper and blood.
And he began to plan.
The first impulse was brute force. Not physical—strategic. He knew *everything*. He knew that Willy Tybur was going to hold a festival. He knew Eren was already in Liberio, disguised, waiting. He knew the exact sequence of the raid—the transformation, the destruction, the chaos, the deaths. He knew that Sasha Braus was going to die on that airship with a bullet from Gabi's rifle, and he knew the exact moment it would happen.
So *stop it*. Intervene. Find Eren now. Find the Survey Corps infiltration team. Expose the plan. Prevent the raid. Save Sasha. Save the soldiers who would die in the plaza. Save the civilians—Eldian civilians, people in the *internment zone*—who would be crushed under falling debris when the War Hammer and Attack Titan clashed in streets that were never built to withstand gods fighting.
The thought was intoxicating. Righteous. It tasted like purpose.
And it was *catastrophically* wrong.
Loid closed his eyes. The spy's mind—his mind, now—dismantled the fantasy with clinical precision.
*You intervene in the Liberio raid. You prevent Eren's attack. What happens next?*
Willy Tybur still declares war on Paradis. The global coalition still forms. Marley still has the Jaw, the Cart, the Armored, the Beast, and the War Hammer. Paradis still has the Founding Titan locked behind a royal blood requirement—a requirement that, in the original timeline, only Zeke's cooperation or Eren's manipulation could bypass. Without the raid, the Survey Corps never captures Zeke. Without Zeke, Eren can never access the Founding Titan's full power. Without that power—
*Paradis has no deterrent. The invasion happens. Everyone on the island dies.*
And that was only the first-order consequence. The butterfly effect cascaded from there in directions he couldn't predict. Every change he made to the timeline would ripple outward, altering events downstream in ways that might be better, might be worse, and would almost certainly be *different enough* that his foreknowledge became worthless.
That was the trap. The seductive, lethal trap of knowing the future.
If he intervened too aggressively, too early, too broadly, he wouldn't be a man with a roadmap. He'd be a man who'd burned his own map and was now stumbling through unfamiliar territory with the same blindness as everyone else—except worse, because he'd be making decisions based on a timeline that no longer existed.
Loid opened his eyes.
*No.*
The answer wasn't active interference. It wasn't rewriting the story from page one. It was something more delicate, more surgical, more *patient*. He needed to identify the critical inflection points—the specific moments where a precisely applied nudge could alter the trajectory without destroying the overall structure of events. Keep the broad strokes intact where they needed to be intact. Let the dominoes fall where they had to fall. But adjust the angles. Change where they *landed*.
Significant nudges at required points in time. A scalpel, not a sledgehammer.
It was the difference between a spy and a soldier. A soldier met the enemy head-on. A spy ensured the battle was already won before the first shot was fired.
*Think like Loid. Be the spy.*
He breathed in. The air tasted of coal smoke and sea salt and the distant sweetness of something baking somewhere in the zone—bread, maybe. Someone was making bread. The world was ending and someone was making bread.
*Alright. Start with the endgame. What is the actual problem I need to solve?*
---
The problem was annihilation.
Not the Rumbling—or not *only* the Rumbling. The Rumbling was Eren's solution, monstrous and absolute, born from the conclusion that coexistence was impossible. But the Rumbling was a response to something older and deeper: the world's intention to destroy Paradis Island and every Eldian on it.
Loid turned it over in his mind the way you'd turn over a puzzle box, looking for the seam.
*Can I change the world's hatred toward Eldians?*
He sat with the question honestly. Not optimistically, not cynically—*honestly*. He owed the question that much.
The hatred was not irrational. That was the part that made it so intractable. It wasn't a misunderstanding that could be resolved with dialogue and good faith. The Eldian Empire had ruled the world for nearly two thousand years, and its reign had been defined by atrocities that defied language. The Titans were not metaphors. They were real. They had eaten people. Crushed cities. Erased civilizations. The historical record was not propaganda—it was *memory*. Generational, collective, burned into the identity of every non-Eldian nation on the planet.
And what had followed the Empire's collapse? A century of Marley using Eldians as weapons of war—confirming, in the eyes of every other nation, that the Eldian threat was not historical but *ongoing*. Every time Marley dropped Titanized Eldians on a battlefield, it reinforced the narrative. *They are monsters. They will always be monsters. The only safety is their extinction.*
Could that be undone?
Loid thought about the characters who had tried. Armin's diplomacy. Hange's desperate attempts to find another way. The Azumabito alliance—fragile, transactional, based not on goodwill but on resource extraction. Even in the most optimistic interpretation of the original timeline, the post-Rumbling peace had been temporary. A ceasefire, not a resolution. The hatred had survived the story itself.
*No,* he concluded. *I cannot transform two thousand years of earned trauma into acceptance within the timeframe I have. Diplomacy requires generations. I have months.*
He felt the weight of that settle onto him. It was not a comfortable weight.
*So if I can't change their minds, I need to change their calculus.*
The thought sharpened. Loid leaned forward on the rooftop ledge, elbows on his knees, fingers interlaced.
Deterrence.
Not moral transformation. Not kumbaya around a campfire while Eldians and Marleyans sang songs of unity. *Deterrence.* The cold, mathematical proposition that attacking Paradis would cost more than it gained. That invasion would not be conquest but *suicide*. That the price of aggression would be so catastrophic, so absolute, so mutually assured in its destructiveness, that no rational actor—no general, no politician, no coalition—would authorize it.
Make the war unwinnable. Make the first strike unsurvivable.
*But how?*
The Rumbling was the existing deterrent, and it was failing. It was failing because it was tied to specific people—Eren, Zeke, the royal bloodline—who could be killed, captured, manipulated, or who might simply *choose not to use it*. A deterrent that depended on individual will was not a deterrent at all. It was a hostage negotiation with a single point of failure.
Titans themselves were a deteriorating asset. The world's military technology was advancing. Anti-Titan weaponry was already effective against the lesser Titans and increasingly dangerous to the Nine. Within a few decades—Yelena had said it herself in the original timeline—conventional military power would surpass Titan power entirely. The walls of Paradis, the Rumbling, the entire Eldian military paradigm would become obsolete.
Paradis needed something that *didn't* become obsolete. Something that scaled. Something that wasn't biological, wasn't dependent on Subjects of Ymir, wasn't tied to bloodlines or royal genealogies or the metaphysical architecture of the Paths.
Something *technological*.
*But there's a gap,* Loid thought. *Paradis is pre-industrial. They've barely begun adopting thunder spears and basic firearms. Marley has railways, battleships, early aircraft. The wider world is even further ahead. How do you leapfrog a century of industrial development?*
The answer came to him the way answers always came to the spy—not as a lightning bolt, but as a slow, inevitable convergence of facts he already possessed.
*You don't leapfrog the century. You leapfrog the paradigm.*
There was one category of weapon that, in his original world, had rendered all previous military calculus irrelevant overnight. One technology that had transformed global politics from a game of territorial conquest into a game of existential standoff. One invention that had kept superpowers from direct warfare for seventy years not through goodwill or diplomacy but through the pure, crystalline logic of mutual annihilation.
Loid's hands went still.
*Nuclear weapons.*
He stared out over Liberio. The sun had nearly set. The harbor was dark. The lights of the Marleyan quarter glittered on the far side of the zone like jewels in a display case—beautiful, untouchable, belonging to someone else.
*Nuclear weapons on Paradis.*
The logic was merciless in its clarity. A single nuclear device, demonstrated publicly—detonated on an uninhabited island, perhaps, or in the open ocean within view of a Marleyan fleet—would accomplish what no army of Titans could. It would communicate, in terms that every military strategist on the planet would understand, that the invasion of Paradis was not a campaign to be planned but a civilizational death sentence to be avoided.
And unlike the Rumbling, it wouldn't require one traumatized nineteen-year-old boy to make the choice to end the world. It would be infrastructure. Institutional. A capability that existed independent of any single person's will or mental state or moral collapse.
It was, Loid realized with a sensation that was equal parts exhilaration and horror, the only option that actually *worked*.
Diplomatic solution—impossible within the timeframe, possibly impossible ever.
Conventional military buildup—Paradis was too far behind, and the tech gap was widening.
Titan deterrence—a depreciating asset with single points of failure.
Nuclear deterrence—paradigm-shifting, scalable, impersonal, and permanent.
The horror was real. He wasn't naive about what he was contemplating. Nuclear weapons were not clean. They were not surgical. They were the distilled essence of human capacity for self-destruction, and their development in his original world had created a shadow that had never fully lifted. He would be introducing the concept of atomic annihilation to a world that had not yet conceived of it.
But the alternative was the Rumbling. Eighty percent of humanity, flattened. Or the other alternative—Paradis, destroyed. An island of people, exterminated because the blood in their veins could become monsters.
Between those options, deterrence was not moral. But it was *survivable*.
*Alright,* Loid thought, and his mind was moving fast now, the spy's training clicking into operational mode. *Alright. Nuclear weapons. That's the endgame. That's the keystone. Everything else—every nudge, every intervention, every calculated choice between now and the Rumbling—needs to serve the goal of getting nuclear capability onto Paradis Island before the world decides to wipe it off the map.*
*But I need to actually know how to—*
He stopped.
The thought hit him mid-formation like a wall.
*I don't know how to build a nuclear weapon.*
Of course he didn't. He was—had been—a twenty-six-year-old with a bachelor's degree in communications and a Netflix subscription. He knew the *concept* of nuclear fission. He knew the names—Oppenheimer, Fermi, the Manhattan Project, Little Boy, Fat Man. He knew that uranium was involved, and enrichment, and something about critical mass. He'd watched documentaries. Read Wikipedia articles at two in the morning.
But the actual engineering? The metallurgy? The physics of implosion lenses and neutron reflectors and isotope separation? The centrifuge cascades and gaseous diffusion and the thousand precise technical steps between "uranium ore exists in the ground" and "a functioning nuclear warhead sits in a silo"?
He'd never asked R.O.B. for that knowledge. It hadn't occurred to him. He'd been so focused on survival capabilities—combat, espionage, healing, Paths access—that he'd completely overlooked the single most important piece of technical knowledge his entire strategy required.
*I'm an idiot. I'm an absolute—*
Loid stopped again.
Something was surfacing. Not a new thought—an *existing* one. Knowledge that was already there, already integrated, already part of the architecture of his mind. He reached for it carefully, the way you'd reach for a light switch in an unfamiliar room, and—
*Uranium-235. Fissile isotope. Natural abundance: approximately 0.72% of mined uranium ore. Must be enriched to weapons-grade concentration of approximately 90% U-235. Methods of enrichment: gaseous diffusion, gas centrifuge, electromagnetic separation. Centrifuge method most efficient for clandestine programs—requires less physical infrastructure, lower energy input, modular and scalable—*
Loid's eyes widened.
*Critical mass of U-235 in a bare sphere: approximately 52 kilograms. Reduced significantly with neutron reflector—beryllium or natural uranium tamper—to approximately 15-20 kilograms. Gun-type assembly: simplest design, fires subcritical slug into subcritical target to achieve supercriticality. Implosion design: more complex, more efficient, requires precisely shaped explosive lenses to compress subcritical plutonium-239 sphere—*
It was *all there*.
Not as a vague memory of documentaries watched and articles skimmed. As *knowledge*. Detailed, structured, technical knowledge that he could access with the same fluency as his ability to pick a lock or assume a cover identity.
Two sources. Two lifetimes of information, merged.
Henry Ashford had been a child of the information age. He'd grown up with the entirety of human knowledge accessible through a device in his pocket. And he had been, in the particular way of his generation, a *collector* of information. Not an expert in anything, but conversant in everything. He'd read about nuclear physics for the same reason he'd read about Roman aqueducts and deep-sea biology and the history of cryptography—because it was *interesting*, because it was *there*, because the rabbit hole was always one click deeper. He'd consumed books, articles, videos, podcasts, forum threads. He'd watched *Trinity and Beyond*. He'd read Richard Rhodes' *The Making of the Atomic Bomb*—all eight hundred pages of it, over the course of a very specific two-week period during lockdown when he'd had nothing else to do.
He hadn't memorized it. Not consciously. But the information had been *absorbed*, layered into the sediment of a mind that consumed content the way his lungs consumed air.
And Loid Forger—the spy, the operative, Westalis's finest—had operated in a world of Cold War parallels. His work had intersected with weapons programs, military research, state secrets of exactly this nature. The technical details of weapons of mass destruction were not academic curiosities to Loid. They were *operational intelligence*. The kind of knowledge that a top-tier spy acquired, retained, and filed away because you never knew when a mission would require you to identify a centrifuge cascade in a photograph or assess the feasibility of a weapons program from fragmentary intelligence reports.
Two lifetimes. Two knowledge bases. Merged into one mind by an omnipotent being who probably hadn't even realized the full implications of what it was combining.
Loid pressed his palms against his face and laughed.
It came out shaky—half relief, half disbelief, entirely unhinged. He laughed into his hands on a rooftop in Liberio while the last light of the sun died over a harbor that would, in a matter of weeks or months, be consumed by fire and screaming.
"My *goodness*," he breathed, and his voice cracked on the word. He dropped his hands. Stared at them. They were trembling. "I was damn lucky I possessed prior knowledge."
Lucky. Absurdly, impossibly, *cosmically* lucky. If he'd been anyone else—a plumber, a farmer, a man who hadn't spent two weeks reading about nuclear physics because a pandemic had trapped him in his apartment with nothing but books and existential dread—this entire strategy would have been dead on arrival. The keystone of his plan, the single most important technical requirement, had been met not by the wishes he'd carefully negotiated from an omnipotent being but by the *accident* of who he'd been in his previous life.
Or maybe it wasn't an accident. Maybe R.O.B. had known. Maybe the combination of Henry's general knowledge with Loid's operational expertise was the entire point—the reason a Random Omnipotent Being had chosen *him* instead of someone else.
It didn't matter. What mattered was that the knowledge was there, and it was *usable*.
But it also what he had been fearing, that he would have to be much more careful than ever if he hoped to make any progress.
Loid stood. The trembling had stopped. The spy's calm was settling back over him like a coat—not eliminating the emotion, but *housing* it. Channeling it. Turning it from static into signal.
He looked out over the darkened city one final time. Somewhere down there, Eren Jaeger was sleeping in a hospital, missing a leg and an eye that he could regenerate at will, waiting for the moment that would set the world on fire. Somewhere, Reiner Braun was suffering through another day of a life he'd tried to end more than once. Somewhere, Falco Grice was writing letters for a man he didn't know was the devil.
And somewhere, in a Marleyan war office, the plans for Willy Tybur's festival were being finalized.
The clock was ticking.
Loid Forger turned from the ledge, mapped the rooftop exit in a single glance, and began to move.
He had a nuclear weapons program to plan. And much more to do.