No, I can't let that happen! He was startled by the thought, realizing that this time, the Titan could appear in a perfect, non-deformed state.
This would be the beginning of a true nightmare and horror for him and all of remaining humanity on Earth—of course except for the Eldians on Paradis. Everyone would die, and this time, they wouldn't even have the chance to fight back.
Back then, Eren was acting like a sitting duck and this happened; if he started to fight for real like he did just a few seconds ago, Armin couldn't even imagine the destruction the Founding Titan would summon.
No, I have to do something. But what can I do? I am no match for him even now. How would I stop him in that form? Stopping him right now is the best course of action.
But how? How can I stop him? Eren, why?! he shouted inside the earless Colossal Titan, but no one could hear it.
"Why, Eren, why? Why? Why are you doing this? Please stop this bloodshed!" Tears welled in his eyes, his voice cracking with sobs, but he repeated these words again and again, as if believing that if he said them enough, Eren would somehow hear them. But he knew it was no use. In the end, his voice became quieter and quieter, until only the silent movement of his lips remained inside the compact, fleshy chamber of the Colossal Titan.
Unbeknownst to him, Eren—who had emerged specifically to say the words that Armin, Mikasa, and everyone else were starving to hear—realized that he couldn't speak because of the crystal cocoon wrapping his body. To speak, he needed to leave the safety of it.
For a former military officer, trusting someone in the middle of a battlefield was nearly impossible. He knew he was strong, but if he was smashed enough times, he would die just like anyone else. He knew that being strong meant survival, not immortality.
But to end this madness, I rearranged my thoughts once again. For some reason, I reached the conclusion that I should trust him just this once. I felt a little strange, but I ignored it. What I didn't know was that with the memories of Eren also came the left-over, untold emotions of this body. Maybe I personally don't and won't trust Armin, but the original Eren's trust in him exceeded my estimations. I don't know whether I should laugh at him for the fool he was, or pity him for the cruel reality which has also exceeded my expectations.
I already came out of the Titan's body because of a sliver of trust, so trusting one more time shouldn't be a problem.
So—crack, crack—piece by piece, the hardened crystal cocoon on his body began to break down. The falling fragments of the cocoon started to glow and sparkle, looking as if thousands of small diamonds had been thrown high into the sky before gravity pulled them back down.
Armin, who was watching Eren like a hawk to find a way to stop him and crush the nightmare before it could even begin, saw Eren emerging from his cocoon. His mind buzzed, sounding as if hundreds of birds had suddenly started chirping at once.
This urgency, instead of making him panic, cleared his thoughts even further. An idea formed in his mind. Although it wasn't entirely reliable, he didn't have any better choice, so without a single moment of hesitation, he executed it. He knew that time was the ultimate key to the plan.
Crush him before he can even transform or initiate the transformation—that's the plan. This could be the most foolish plan he had ever come up with, but with no other choice, desperate situations required desperate choices.
The key to this plan lay in the fact that Eren had been fighting and sustaining the Rumbling for hours, and his massive, ribbed Titan form—which must have consumed a vast amount of stamina—was now destroyed. He shouldn't have many transformations left. Maybe he could transform one more time. Armin knew the heavy energy consumption of a Colossal Titan's body, he himself can only transform once in a single battle.
And so he deduced that Eren also didn't have much stamina left. Without the glowing centipede, Eren was just like any other Titan host, bound by the same limitations that any other combat Titan possessed.
His massive fist raised into the air and came crashing down. The slicing sound of the air being pushed aside, along with the sheer, destructive velocity of the punch, could be felt from hundreds of meters away.
Eren, who was just about to open his mouth to speak, widened his eyes. A massive fist, cutting through the air, was coming directly at him. He couldn't believe that Armin had attacked him without a word, without a shred of hesitation—as if he had been waiting for this exact moment from the very start.
His mind buzzed. Unknown to him, his eyes held a strange emotion that he again failed to notice: there was anger, but it also held the deep sting of betrayal. Seeing the explicit killing intent driving the punch without a single shred of hesitation made his heart turn cold.
Eren knew that trusting an enemy was the worst possible thing one could do in the midst of a battle, but he had still held onto a sliver of hope. A hope that Armin would hesitate, just for once, and that it would grant him enough time to explain a few things and initiate a talk.
I can understand that Armin's decision was the best tactical decision one could make in a battle, but still, somehow, I hoped. Just as I had spared them again and again due to their past friendship, I expected them to just hesitate. Just hesitate for once.
First Mikasa, and now Armin—not a single one of them hesitated to swing their blade or fist at me. For whom did the original Eren do all of this? Committing all sorts of evil, killing millions... they are just ungrateful wretches.
With a cold heart, he decided that this fight couldn't go on like this. In the original story, when Eren transformed into the colossal elf Titan, there hadn't been an explosion.
The reason for that wasn't because he lacked the ability to release energy like a Colossal Titan, but because he simply hadn't wanted to; as the master of the Founding Titan, his control over his transformation parameters far exceeded any other Titan host.
From the start, the original Eren never wanted to fight them; even the thought of killing them was the farthest thing from his mind—it was entirely out of the question. He easily could have released the standard transformation energy when manifesting the elf Titan, which would have instantly turned almost all the Alliance members into ash, but he chose not to.
But now, I am not that Eren. They are not my friends. They need an explosion to understand a few things.
Eren initiated the transformation, but then he felt it. Something was wrong. It was like attempting to deliver a powerful punch—the muscles contracted, but the moment you went to strike, the momentum completely lost its power. He could easily transform two to four times more, far exceeding Armin's conservative estimations, but the explosion itself... something was actively preventing him from triggering it.
He wasn't entirely shocked. When he had first thought of teaching them a lesson, he knew that the lingering simp would try to hinder his actions. But judging by the current resistance, which was far more fierce than before, he deduced two things:
First, the intended explosion really was on the same, or perhaps an even more destructive level than a standard Colossal Titan's nuke; otherwise, the original Eren wouldn't have triggered such a violent, defensive backlash.
Second, the original Eren's residual control over the body was actually weakening. Although this specific resistance was fiercer, he could feel that the overall grip the simp had on the host functions was loosening.
He wasn't afraid of the oncoming fist because he knew he would be fine. Although it would be incredibly difficult for any other Titan host to maneuver in such a tight situation, it was nothing to him. He could transform anytime he wanted, even now, with the fist a mere hair's breadth away from his face.
But he wanted to test something. He had guessed a thing or two from the resistance: the original Eren's active control over the body loosened significantly when he himself resisted his friends, or when they actively tried to attack him.
It was still fresh in his mind that when he had tried to kill Mikasa the second time using the bone spikes, the mental control he felt was the same as before, which confirms the theory that when ever his friends for whom he is resisting me to protact try to harm him his control over the body become weaker, same thing happen with Armin just now.
He tried to control his body to manifest a new crystal cocoon for protection, shifting his control over the hardening. Instead of regenerating from the open bottom of the crystal near his legs, the crystal formed a thin, hasty layer over his body as a whole.
But before the crystal could thicken—BOOM!
Armin's fist landed squarely on the Titan's chest. Without its armor, the host Titan began to buckle backward, like a massive building during a demolition. With a thunderous crash, like a boulder weighing thousands of tons falling from the sky, the Titan's massive body collapsed onto the ground.
Armin felt it the crystal on his upper body shattered instantly due to its lack of thickness. But the crystal wasn't the only thing that broke in that clash.
Armin's arm, which had struck like heavy artillery, was ruined. His tendons and palm bones were nothing but mangled flesh hanging from his arm bones. And the bone itself was in no better shape—a greenstick fracture splintered the upper hand bone, and the forearm bone was completely in pieces, with only a few fine muscles and tendons holding the hand together.
Even though his hand was broken by the impact, Armin knew this was far from enough to stop Eren. But seeing no immediate Titan transformation occur even after that direct hit, he came to the conclusion that Eren's stamina was finally exhausted and that he couldn't transform for now.
He didn't want to give him a single chance to catch his breath or launch a counter-attack. He wasn't sure if Eren had been successful in forming the crystal cocoon, but he had no time to check.
Without waiting, his intact left hand formed a fist, his knuckles tighter than ever.
Within seconds, that hand landed a devastating punch on Eren's Titan's chest. Then again, and again, and again. The punches did not stop. One after another, Armin pounded the Titan below him. As his right hand rapidly regenerated, it doubled the frequency of his strikes.
A bloody hole caved into the elf-like Titan's chest, but Armin could guess Eren was still fine because there was no sign of steam or cellular degeneration from the host. He could feel the chest of the Titan healing itself over and over again, while his fists relentlessly broke the melded muscles and tissues right back down.
He couldn't stop now. There was no way back. He didn't truly know what he was doing. Did he want to kill Eren? No, no, was the answer his mind and mouth wanted to give, but his hands were telling an entirely different story—acting as if they wouldn't stop until Eren was dead.
His actions were speaking the words he refused to say out loud, and as smart as he was, Armin knew it. He just didn't want to face it; he didn't want to face the reality he was actively creating.
After a grueling five minutes, the punches finally stopped. Armin was panting heavily. Nothing could be seen on Eren's side because the smoke and dust had created a thick, heavy layer over the ground, completely blocking their vision.
But when the dust and smoke finally settled, a Titan body with a massive hole caved into its chest lay motionless on the earth. Blood and gore were splattered everywhere, and steam began to rise from the scattered flesh and blood as the elf-like Titan finally began to degenerate. Armin had only stopped his assault two full minutes after the Titan's body ceased its regeneration.
After delivering hundreds, if not thousands, of punches, Armin's Colossal Titan had grown visibly thinner than before, his energy and stamina reserves almost entirely depleted.
Armin, inside his fleshy control chamber, was panting as if he had just run an entire marathon, which was highly unusual for a Titan host; but due to his volatile psychological state and raw physical limits, he was breathing heavily.
On the other hand, Mikasa, watching everything from above, had no expression on her face. She was as quiet as ever, but she was the only one who could truly understand and feel the profound misery her heart was in. Levi, sitting beside her, shared her stoic expression, but unlike her dull, lifeless eyes, his sharp gaze held a glimpse of surprise at the ruthlessness Armin had just displayed. He had never thought this brat, with his saint-like, idealistic brain, could be this ruthless—and against Eren, of all people.
He looked at Mikasa and could easily guess the chaotic turmoil she must be feeling, but he said nothing. Comforting people had never been his expertise, and Mikasa wasn't the only one who had lost someone, or was currently watching someone they loved slip away right before their eyes.
But when they looked down at the ground after the smoke and dust fully cleared, their breathing hitched.
BOOM!
Titan transformation was initiated.
Now it's your bad day, boy. That simp is finally gone!
continue—