I held the makeshift bomb in my hand.
It was just an iron gas canister wrapped tightly in layers of silver duct tape.
A crude, ugly thing.
But physics didn’t care about aesthetics.
Physics only cared about pressure, containment, and violent release.
I looked down at the swarm of Titans crowding the supply depot’s reinforced oak doors.
There were at least twenty-four biological anomalies down there.
All of them smiling.
All of them hungry.
And behind me, on the slanted clay roof, Armin was sobbing.
It was a hollow, broken, agonizing sound that threatened to completely tear my tactical focus apart.
I struck the flint against the iron casing.
The spark caught the rudimentary fuse I’d rigged from frayed ODM wire and scavenged gunpowder dust.
It hissed instantly, burning a bright, angry orange in the gloomy, smoke-choked air.
“Cover your ears,” I ordered.
My voice was entirely flat.
Empty.
I didn’t wait to see if they listened.
I spun on my heel, transferring every ounce of kinetic energy from my hips directly through my shoulder.
I threw the heavy canister.
It sailed in a perfect, mathematically precise parabolic arc over the cobblestone street.
It landed exactly in the dead center of the swirling swarm.
Right at the massive, bare feet of a fifteen-meter class Titan.
One second passed.
Two.
Then, the makeshift pressure threshold catastrophically failed.
The explosion didn’t produce a massive, cinematic fireball.
It produced a pure, unadulterated acoustic shockwave.
A violent, rippling distortion in the air that shattered every single pane of glass within a hundred-yard radius.
The sound was absolutely deafening.
It hit us like a physical blow to the chest, rattling the teeth in my skull.
Down in the street, three Titans were violently thrown off their feet, their lower extremities temporarily pulverized by the pressurized shrapnel.
The rest of the swarm stopped clawing at the depot doors.
They turned as one.
Their empty, dead eyes locked onto the smoking crater in the middle of the street.
They forgot the heavy oak doors entirely.
They forgot the terrified cadets hiding inside the building.
The diversion was flawless.
“Now,” I breathed, my eyes narrowing.
Mina didn’t hesitate.
She fired her anchors, launching herself fearlessly through the thick, grey smoke of the explosion.
Thomas followed.
Then Nac.
Then Mylius.
I turned and grabbed the back of Armin’s leather harness.
He was practically catatonic.
His wide blue eyes were fixed entirely on the distant roof where Eren’s severed arm lay bleeding on the clay tiles.
I couldn’t let him look at it.
If he kept looking at that blood, his mind would snap, and he would die on this roof.
“We are leaving, Armin,” I said quietly, my grip tightening on his straps.
I fired my anchors, hauling his limp weight with me into the sky.
We swung through the lingering smoke, entirely blind for a terrifying, breathless second.
Then the solid stone wall of the supply depot loomed ahead.
Mina hit the second-story window boots-first.
The reinforced glass shattered inward in a brilliant spray of diamond-like shards.
We piled through the narrow opening, tumbling heavily onto the hard wooden floorboards of the depot.
We rolled to a stop, gasping for the stagnant, dusty air of the supply room.
It felt like a tomb.
The massive second floor was packed to the ceiling with wooden crates of standard-issue blades and dry rations.
But it was also packed with people.
Dozens of cadets from the 104th were huddled in the deep shadows between the crates.
Some were crying quietly into their hands.
Some were just staring blankly at the stone walls, their minds completely broken by the horrific reality of the Titans.
Jean Kirschtein was sitting on a crate near the center of the room, his head buried in his hands.
Marco Bodt was kneeling beside a cadet, gently trying to bandage a bleeding gash on the boy’s forehead.
They all looked up as we crashed through the window.
They saw the fresh blood splattered across our uniforms.
They saw the absolute, harrowing emptiness in our eyes.
“Mina?” Jean asked, his voice cracking slightly as he stood up.
“Did…
did anyone else make it?
Where’s Eren?”
Mina let out a sudden, choked sob, aggressively covering her mouth with her trembling hands.
Thomas turned away, hiding his face against a tall stack of supply crates, his shoulders shaking.
Armin collapsed onto his knees on the wooden floorboards.
He didn’t cry out this time.
He just stared at the grain of the wood, his small frame trembling violently.
I stood up slowly, my boots crunching on the broken glass.
I dusted the debris off the lapel of my military jacket.
My brain was running a constant, desperate loop of cold tactical data.
‘Secure the perimeter.
Check the ambient gas reserves.
Count the surviving combat assets.’
I was desperately trying to keep the cold, mechanical logic in the driver’s seat.
I needed the logic.
If I let the logic slip, even for a fraction of a second, the human part of me was going to scream.
It was going to scream until my throat bled.
Eren was dead.
My idiot, loud, overwhelmingly stubborn twin brother was dead.
He had been swallowed whole by a monster right in front of me.
And I hadn’t been fast enough.
All my math.
All my stolen comic-book genius.
All my lethal, hardwired government-agent reflexes.
And I had been exactly zero-point-three seconds too late.
I stared down at my hands.
They were covered in black grease, grey ash, and deep red blood.
Eren’s blood.
My chest tightened so painfully I thought my ribs were going to crack.
A sharp, agonizing spike of pure grief lanced directly through my heart, making it completely impossible to draw a full breath.
‘Tactical failure,’ my mind whispered clinically.
But it wasn’t a tactical failure.
It was a brother.
I remembered him stealing extra bread for me from the Shiganshina market when we were kids.
I remembered him aggressively fighting the older bullies who tried to steal my scavenged tools.
I remembered the genuine, blindingly bright smile on his face just yesterday when he finally mastered his ODM gear.
He was supposed to see the ocean.
He was supposed to be the loud, unkillable hero of this story.
I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, my breath hitching in a quiet, ragged gasp.
For one, agonizing moment, the cold machinery in my head completely shut down.
I wasn’t a tactical manager.
I wasn’t the phantom mechanic of the 104th.
I was just Kai.
A twelve-year-old boy stranded in hell, entirely alone without his other half.
A single, hot tear escaped my eyelashes, carving a clean line through the dark ash coating my cheek.
“Kai?”
A soft, hesitant voice broke through the suffocating silence of the supply room.
I slowly opened my eyes.
Marco was standing a few feet away, looking at me with deep, genuine concern etched into his kind face.
“Are you injured?” Marco asked gently, taking a small step forward.
I quickly, almost violently wiped my cheek with the back of my leather glove.
I locked the grief away.
I shoved it deep down into a dark, heavy, reinforced box in the absolute furthest corner of my mind.
I wrapped that box in mental duct tape.
I couldn’t afford to feel it right now.
If I broke down, Armin would die.
If I broke down, Mina, Thomas, Nac, and Mylius would die.
I took a slow, deep breath, manually forcing my erratic heart rate back down to a steady, mathematical rhythm.
“I am uninjured, Marco,” I replied.
My voice was back to its flat, deadpan baseline.
It sounded like it belonged to a ghost.
“What is the current logistical status of this depot?” I asked, looking around the room.
Jean stepped forward, his face pale and twisted with bitter anger.
“The status?
The status is we’re dead, Yeager.”
He pointed a shaking finger at the heavy iron doors leading to the internal stairwell.
“The main gas supply room is on the ground floor.
The Titans broke into the lower levels ten minutes ago.”
“There are three four-meter classes wandering around the gas tanks right now,” a cadet from another squad muttered from the shadows, his voice hollow.
“We can’t get down there to refill our gear.
We don’t have enough gas to make it back over the wall.”
“So we just wait here until the swarm outside breaks through the ceiling,” Jean finished, crossing his arms in defeat.
I looked at the heavy iron doors.
I looked at the terrified, hopeless faces of the surrounding cadets.
They had completely given up.
They were waiting for a miracle.
Or for death.
Whichever happened to find them first.
I let out a long, heavy sigh that echoed loudly in the quiet room.
I walked over to the nearest wooden supply crate and popped the metal latch.
I grabbed two fresh, perfectly sharpened steel blades from the rack.
I slotted them into my ODM grips with a sharp, echoing clack.
“Three four-meter anomalies in an enclosed space,” I summarized coldly, testing the weight of the blades.
“They are small, but the ceiling in the basement is far too low for standard ODM maneuverability.”
“Exactly!” Jean yelled, throwing his hands up in sheer frustration.
“It’s suicide to go down there!
You can’t swing!”
I slowly turned to look at him.
My eyes were completely, terrifyingly empty.
“It is suicide for a standard military squad, Jean.”
I walked past him, heading straight for the heavy iron doors of the stairwell.
“I am not a standard military squad.”
“Wait, Kai!” Armin croaked from the floorboards.
He was looking up at me, his face streaked with tears and dirt, his eyes wide with fresh panic.
“You can’t go down there alone.
Eren…
Eren went alone…”
His voice broke completely on my brother’s name.
I stopped walking.
I didn’t turn around.
I couldn’t look at Armin right now.
If I looked at his broken face, the duct-taped box in my mind might burst open again.
“Eren operated on pure emotion, Armin,” I said quietly to the dark iron door.
“I operate on physics.”
I reached out and firmly grasped the heavy iron handle.
“Jean, Marco.
Gather everyone who still has at least ten percent of their gas remaining.”
I pushed the door open.
The dark, echoing stairwell smelled heavily of stone dust, old rust, and fresh copper blood.
“When I clear the room, you have exactly two minutes to secure the spare gas canisters before the swarm outside breaches the main doors.”
“Clear the room?” Jean scoffed, though he sounded significantly less certain now.
“How are you going to clear three Titans by yourself without using your cables?”
I looked over my shoulder, locking eyes with him.
I offered him a tired, entirely humorless smile.
“I am going to drastically alter their center of gravity.”
I stepped into the cold stairwell.
The heavy iron door clicked shut behind me, sealing me in the dark.
I was entirely alone.
My threat-assessment radar was going absolutely wild, pinging the massive hostiles below me.
I could hear the heavy, wet footsteps of the three Titans echoing from the stone floor of the supply room.
I could hear their erratic, wheezing breathing.
I drew both of my blades, holding them in a loose, relaxed reverse grip perfectly suited for close-quarters lethality.
I didn’t need to swing from the ceiling to kill them.
I just needed to be faster than their biological synapses could fire.
I walked down the dark stone steps.
Each footfall was completely, unnaturally silent.
I wasn’t a lazy cadet anymore.
I wasn’t Rank Eleven.
I was the phantom mechanic of the 104th Training Corps.
And I was going to violently dismantle everything in my path until I got my brother’s best friend safely over that wall.
__________________________________
Stares blankly at a wall of complex equations before slowly holding down the backspace key…
Typing_In_My_Sleep here!
So, I had a bit of a change of heart while drafting the latest chapters.
Up until now, I’ve been trying to write the perspective of an absolute math and physics genius, detailing exactly how a hyper-analytical brain would calculate and see the world around them.
But let’s be real here: my own brain is currently running on cold coffee, three hours of sleep, and sheer willpower.
Trying to write like a 200 IQ physicist was completely frying my circuits, and I realized it might be making the story a bit too dense to actually enjoy.
Because of that, I am officially tweaking the writing style moving forward!
I am bringing the narration down to a much more “humane” level—you know, how us normal, everyday people actually process and understand the world.
It should make the story flow a lot smoother, feel a bit more natural, and most importantly, it saves me from having to consult an advanced physics textbook just to write a simple action scene.
I hope you guys enjoy the slightly more grounded and readable perspective!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am going to let my completely average, non-genius brain take a desperately needed nap.
Catch you in the next chapter!