There is a fundamental, inescapable flaw in the design of the human body, and it becomes catastrophically apparent the moment the ambient temperature drops below freezing.
We are essentially walking bags of tropical ocean water, constantly radiating precious thermal energy into a hostile atmosphere.
We have no fur.
We have no blubber.
We just have an incredibly fragile circulatory system that immediately abandons our extremities the second we get a little chilly, sacrificing our fingers and toes to protect our internal organs.
It is a terrible, highly inefficient biological design, and I was currently resenting it with every single fiber of my being.
“Keep moving, you miserable frozen corpses!” Commandant Shadis roared, his voice barely cutting through the howling wind.
“If you stop walking, you die!
If you die, I will personally resurrect you just to assign you latrine duty!”
It was the peak of winter in the year 848.
The 104th Cadet Corps had been marched into the jagged, unforgiving northern mountains of Wall Rose for a three-day wilderness survival exercise.
A massive, blinding blizzard had completely engulfed the mountain range.
Visibility was reduced to less than ten feet.
The snow was drifting nearly to our knees, turning every single step into an agonizing, exhausting battle against gravity and friction.
I hated the snow.
I hated the cold.
I violently hated camping.
My unified mind was currently running a constant, exhausting background process, calculating the exact rate of my own thermal decay.
‘Ambient temperature is approximately negative ten degrees.
Wind chill factor increases thermal stripping by forty percent.
Core temperature holding at ninety-seven point two.
Mild peripheral vasoconstriction initiated in the distal phalanges,’ my brain analyzed coldly, mapping out exactly how long I had before frostbite set in.
Simultaneously, my survival instincts were absolutely screaming.
The blinding whiteout conditions completely neutralized my visual threat detection.
A Titan could be standing fifteen feet away, and I wouldn’t see it until it stepped on me.
To combat the horrific conditions, I had spent the previous night entirely ignoring military uniform regulations.
I had completely dismantled the inner lining of my standard-issue leather boots.
Using my Peter Parker structural intellect, I had interwoven a dense layer of scavenged sheep’s wool and sealed the seams entirely with my heavy-duty Duck Tales tape, creating an airtight, waterproof thermal barrier.
I had done the same to the inside of my jacket, essentially turning myself into a walking, silver-lined thermos.
I was actually quite warm.
But I was still profoundly annoyed by the mandatory cardio.
Ahead of me, Eren was stubbornly trudging through the snow, using pure, unadulterated rage to fuel his forward momentum.
“We’re going to conquer this mountain!” Eren yelled, completely wasting precious oxygen and thermal energy by opening his mouth to the freezing wind.
“Titans don’t stop for snow, so neither do we!”
“Eren, please stop yelling,” Armin chattered miserably, his teeth clicking together so fast it sounded like a telegraph machine.
“You’re losing body heat through exhalation.”
Armin was wrapped in a thick wool scarf, but his small frame simply didn’t generate enough basal metabolic heat to fight off the freezing temperatures.
He was shivering violently, his face pale and his lips tinged with a dangerous shade of blue.
Mikasa was walking right beside them, entirely unbothered by the apocalyptic weather.
She looked like she was out for a brisk autumn stroll.
I walked exactly three paces behind them, my hands shoved deep into my heavily insulated pockets, my hat pulled down to my eyebrows.
I was intentionally stepping directly into the footprints Eren was leaving in the deep snow, mathematically reducing the kinetic energy required to lift my own legs by exactly thirty-two percent.
‘Efficiency is the absolute cornerstone of survival,’ I reminded myself, keeping my head down.
Suddenly, the line of marching cadets ground to a halt.
The wind howled aggressively, whipping snow into our faces.
Through the whiteout, I could faintly hear the sounds of shouting up ahead.
“Someone went down!” a cadet yelled from the front of the column.
My tactical awareness immediately pinged.
‘Formation compromised.
Forward momentum halted.
Risk of collective hypothermia increasing exponentially by the second.’
I sighed, stepping out of Eren’s perfectly carved footprints and trudging forward through the snow to see what the logistical bottleneck was.
Eren, Mikasa, and Armin followed closely behind me.
We pushed through a cluster of shivering cadets until we reached the front of the group.
Lying completely motionless in a snowbank was Daz.
He was unconscious, his face deathly pale, snow quickly accumulating on his stationary uniform.
Kneeling next to him in the freezing powder was Christa Lenz.
She was desperately trying to haul the unconscious, dead-weight teenager onto her shoulders, completely ignoring her own violent shivering.
“We have to carry him to the base camp!” Christa cried out, straining against Daz’s heavy jacket.
“He’s freezing to death!”
Standing a few feet away, entirely unaffected by the panic, was Ymir.
She had her arms crossed over her chest, watching Christa with a dark, deeply frustrated expression.
“Leave him, Christa,” Ymir stated flatly, her voice cutting through the wind.
“He’s dead weight.
If you try to drag him through three miles of knee-deep snow, you’re going to exhaust yourself and freeze right next to him.”
“I am not leaving a comrade to die, Ymir!” Christa yelled back, a fierce, desperate light burning in her wide blue eyes.
She managed to pull Daz up by his collar, taking exactly one step before her boots slipped on the ice.
She collapsed backward into the snow, Daz falling heavily on top of her.
My brain instantly analyzed the physical reality of the situation.
‘Daz’s body weight: one hundred and sixty pounds.
Christa’s lifting capacity in optimal conditions: ninety pounds.
Current conditions feature zero traction and high kinetic resistance from the snowdrift.
It is mathematically impossible for her to move him more than ten yards.’
“We can help her!” Eren declared, immediately stepping forward to grab Daz’s arm.
“Stop,” I ordered, my voice deadpan but laced with enough icy authority to freeze Eren right in his tracks.
I stepped past my brother, my boots crunching heavily in the snow.
I walked right up to Christa, looking down at her as she struggled to push Daz off her legs.
“Ymir is entirely correct, and your martyr complex is currently endangering the structural integrity of this entire squad,” I said lazily, looking at Christa.
Christa stared up at me, her angelic facade completely cracking under the stress of the blizzard.
“Kai!
We can’t just leave him!
It’s murder!”
“I didn’t say we were leaving him.
I said you attempting to carry him is a catastrophic failure of basic physics,” I corrected her, dropping to one knee next to Daz’s unconscious body.
I pressed two fingers to Daz’s freezing neck.
‘Heart rate is dangerously slow.
Stage two hypothermia.
Central nervous system is shutting down to preserve core organs.’
“He has roughly forty-five minutes before his organs suffer irreversible damage,” I announced to the group, standing back up.
“Then help me carry him!” Christa pleaded, reaching out a trembling hand.
“Absolutely not.
Manual lifting is highly inefficient, and I refuse to pull a muscle for Daz,” I replied flatly.
Ymir laughed.
It was a sharp, barking sound that got swallowed by the howling wind.
“I told you, Christa.
Yeager doesn’t play the hero game.”
I completely ignored Ymir.
I unclipped the heavy canvas rucksack from my back and let it drop into the snow.
I popped the metal latches, revealing my bright red Master Mechanic’s toolbox and a small, heavy coil of spare steel ODM wire.
“I won’t carry him, but I will dramatically alter his coefficient of friction,” I muttered, pulling out my heavy-duty Duck Tales tape.
I turned to the dense tree line bordering the mountain path.
“Eren.
Mikasa.
Cut down two thick, straight branches.
Exactly six feet long.”
Eren didn’t question the order.
He was too cold to argue.
He drew his ODM blade and severed two sturdy pine branches, dragging them back to me.
I went to work.
My hands moved with a blinding, mechanical precision that completely defied the freezing temperatures.
I laid the two branches parallel in the snow.
I took Daz’s thick canvas sleeping roll from his pack and laid it flat across the branches.
Using the steel ODM wire and my pliers, I lashed the canvas tightly to the wood, creating a taut, sturdy hammock suspended between the branches.
I reinforced the stress points with thick, aggressive layers of my silver duct tape, binding the wood and canvas together with raw, unforgiving adhesive pressure.
“What are you doing?” Ymir asked, her eyes narrowing as she watched me work.
She recognized the terrifying, unnatural efficiency of my movements.
“I am building a travois,” I answered without looking up.
“A traditional drag-sled.
By distributing Daz’s weight across the surface area of the canvas and elevating him off the deep snow, I am reducing the kinetic drag by roughly seventy percent.”
I rolled Daz’s unconscious body onto the makeshift sled.
“Now,” I said, pulling out a small flask of my magical WD-40.
“I need to connect it to a power source.”
I walked over to Ymir.
Before she could react or step away, I grabbed the heavy iron carabiner on the front of her leather ODM harness.
“Hey!
Watch your hands, Yeager!” Ymir snapped, glaring at me.
“Your primary grapple lock is frozen solid,” I noted clinically.
I sprayed a burst of synthetic lubricant directly into the freezing iron mechanism.
The ice instantly melted, the rust dissolved, and the carabiner clicked open perfectly.
I clipped the front end of the steel drag-wires directly into Ymir’s harness.
I then walked over to Christa, sprayed her carabiner, and clipped the other side to her harness.
“There,” I said, stepping back and dusting the snow off my heavily insulated gloves.
“The weight is distributed between your harnesses, effectively turning you both into draft horses.
If you lean forward, your center of gravity will do the work.
You don’t have to carry him; you just have to walk.”
Christa looked at the makeshift sled, then at the wire connecting her to Ymir.
She leaned forward tentatively.
The sled glided over the deep powder with incredible ease, sliding smoothly over the snow without sinking.
“It’s…
it’s practically weightless,” Christa gasped, her eyes wide with shock.
Ymir tested the tension on her side, finding it equally effortless.
She looked over her shoulder, staring at me through the driving snow.
Her sharp eyes were calculating, stripping away my lazy persona and evaluating the terrifying competence hiding underneath.
“You’re a very strange guy, Kai Yeager,” Ymir noted, her voice dropping to a low, dangerous register.
“You pretend to be a lazy coward, but you just engineered a flawless rescue operation in under three minutes without breaking a sweat.”
“I am purely motivated by my desperate desire to reach a horizontal sleeping surface, Ymir.
Daz was blocking the path to my nap,” I deadpanned, picking up my red toolbox and shoving it back into my rucksack.
“Let’s move.
I am rapidly losing patience with this mountain.”
The trek to the base camp cabin took another grueling hour.
With the travois carrying Daz’s weight, Christa and Ymir were able to maintain a steady, highly efficient pace.
The rest of the cadet column fell in behind us, silently grateful that the bottleneck had been resolved.
My unified mind was entirely focused on the mechanics of walking.
‘Conserve energy.
Limit exhalation.
Monitor peripheral blood flow.’
When the dark, heavy timber outline of the base camp cabin finally appeared through the whiteout, a collective wave of relief washed over the squad.
We practically kicked the heavy wooden doors open, stumbling into the massive, dimly lit interior.
The cabin was warm, heated by a massive stone hearth roaring with a huge fire in the center of the room.
Commandant Shadis was standing near the fire, holding a clipboard.
He looked up, his eyes widening in genuine surprise as the entire squad filed into the room, shivering and covered in snow, but entirely alive.
He looked at the makeshift duct-tape and steel-wire travois dragging Daz across the floorboards.
“Who authorized the construction of that extraction rig?!” Shadis barked, stepping forward to inspect the immaculate tension knots.
“Recruit Yeager built it, sir!” Eren announced loudly, his teeth still chattering as he pointed a proud finger at me.
I completely ignored Shadis.
I didn’t care about commendations, and I certainly didn’t care about proving my worth to the military.
I walked straight past the Commandant, completely disregarding standard military protocol.
I marched directly to the stone hearth, selected the absolute warmest, most geographically optimal square of floor space, and dropped my heavy rucksack.
I sat down, pulled my flat cap over my eyes, and mentally activated my [Nap Anywhere] passive skill.
“Yeager!
I am speaking to you!” Shadis roared, marching toward me.
But I was already gone.
The roaring fire, the shouting Commandant, and the freezing wind outside completely faded to black.
My body instantly shut down, dropping into a deep, impenetrable, highly restorative sleep.
Through the fading edges of my consciousness, I briefly felt someone sit down on the floorboards directly next to me.
I didn’t have to open my eyes to know who it was.
My Leon S.
Kennedy spatial awareness recognized the precise, silent shift of weight and the total lack of wasted kinetic movement.
It was Annie Leonhart.
She sat entirely still, resting her back against the warm stone of the hearth, silently guarding my flank while the rest of the cabin devolved into chaos around Shadis and the unconscious Daz.
She didn’t say a word, and neither did I.
We had an unspoken agreement.
She knew I was a fraud who was terrifyingly lethal in combat, and I knew she was a living weapon hiding among the cadets.
But right now, none of that mattered.
We were just two highly trained, entirely exhausted people who deeply appreciated a warm fire and absolute silence.
I let the darkness take me, perfectly content to let the rest of the 104th deal with the logistics of survival while I finally caught up on my sleep.
_______________
*Yawns loudly and slumps over the keyboard…* **Typing_In_My_Sleep** here!
I am keeping this as short as possible before my brain completely shuts down for a medically necessary nap.
10 stones.
2 chapters.
Drop them in, and I will let my subconscious do the rest of the typing!
*Snore…*