Looking at Eren, I couldn’t help but think of that fish. I don’t know, and would never know, what drove him to do all those things. Maybe only he himself knew, or maybe even he didn’t.
Sometimes we think our thoughts are entirely our own—that we are the ones consciously thinking them, creating and summoning them inside our heads.
But in reality, we don’t. Thoughts are never truly ours from the start. From the purest to the absolute dirtiest ideas, they never belong to us. Our thoughts are merely like cars speeding down a highway, and we are like children sitting by a window, watching them pass, fighting and worrying over them, insisting that a car should look a certain way, or that one vehicle belongs to us while another does not.
That is why when Carla asked Eren if he was the one who had wanted this from the very beginning, he didn’t answer. Life is all about choices; he had made his, and the others had made theirs.
Eren stopped sobbing. The woman—his mother—looked over at me. By now, the Eren had fallen sound asleep in her lap, his face holding a sense of peace and calm, as if he had finally found his safe haven.
Carla gently laid him onto the grass and stood up. Taking a step forward, she came to a halt right in front of me. She reached up, placing her hand on my head to softly ruffle my hair. My lips parted to say something, but no words came out. What could I even say? That I had taken over her son's body?
But she placed a gentle finger against my lips, halting the words right on my tongue. "Shh," she cooed, her lips forming an 'O' shape as she gestured for me to remain silent, telling me there is no need to speak any further.
"You should take care of yourself too, child. Eren and his past... let them go with him. he is leaving this all and coming with me, so you should also let things end here. Go and live your life as you wish," she said, retracting her hand.
For once, I was entirely lost for words. The small, fragile figure of this woman, who couldn't even reach my shoulders, suddenly seemed to loom larger than any mountain. Her small, weak shoulders looked as though they could carry any weight. Why was she saying this? I had possessed her son's body, yet she was telling me to live well.
I simply nodded. She took a step back and gently shook the sleeping Eren on the ground, waking him from his slumber.
"Wake up, Eren. It's time for us to depart."
Eren opened his eyes and rubbed them. As he stood up, his body began to shrink until he looked exactly as he did when the anime first started—a ten-year-old child. He reached out to take her hand, but his hand wasn't even large enough to grasp her palm fully, even though her hands were also small. She extended two fingers for him to hold onto instead. Eren grabbed them tightly, and the two began to walk away.
I just stood there, watching them walk further and further away until they began to blur in my vision. So, when Eren died, there was someone waiting to come for him, to take him away with them, I muttered to myself as I watched their departing figures. Eren broke into a run through the flower field, startling the butterflies and chasing after them, occasionally walking backward just to keep his eyes on Carla. He pointed excitedly toward the sky and the flowers, opening his arms wide as if trying to express something monumental.
They were both laughing. Carla covered her mouth with her palm, chuckling softly, while Eren let out a cheerful, ringing laughter, taking a short sprint before spinning around back to her.
Crack. Crack.
Splinters started forming across the vibrant sky, then the lush ground, and finally across my own vision. Like a glass vase slipping from someone's hands, the entire space shattered into pieces.
Rumble. Rumble.
I slammed back into reality at the exact split-second I had left it before entering that dreamscape.
BOOM!
My body immediately began to form a dense mass of muscle around me. Bones and tendons erupted and grew faster than the human eye could perceive, but that wasn't the most vital occurrence. Following the physical manifestation, a massive, large amount of energy detonated from my transformation. The ground beneath my feet instantly compacted into dense soil, and the surrounding rocks began to melt under the sheer intensity. The resulting heatwave was so punishingly strong that the mist, dust, and everything else caught in its path were instantly liquefied or evaporated.
However, unlike a standard Colossal Titan's explosion, my detonation was tightly channeled—it was entirely vertical, purposefully preventing the blast from flattening the entire area. The reason for this tactical restraint was simple: if I blew everything apart indiscriminately, there was a high probability that the glowing centipede would be vaporized as well.
The raw explosion I was going to initiated at first was equal to, if not greater than, a Colossal Titan’s nuke, but the moment the dreamscape shattered and I returned to reality, I remembered the glowing centipede, It survived the blast of colossal titan but I don’t know for sure that it’s because of the rib cage worked as the armour or it’s own toughness ,so at the end movement I changed my plan.
I watched as the Colossal Titan directly in front of me was utterly evaporated. His nose, fingers, toes, hands, legs—everything from his abdomen to his back disintegrated into the explosion. When the blinding explosion finally subsided, the only things left in view were a bubbling lake of magma at my feet and a sky completely clean of any clouds, steam, or dust above.
Where I now stood, a massive crater had caved in, measuring larger than a three Colossal Titans in diameter and deep enough to reach my knees from the original ground level. All the minor, mindless Titans had been violently blown away by the sheer atmospheric air pressure alone.
The main Titans—the Female Titan and the Armored Titan—had also been blown back far across the battlefield. The Female Titan lay in the dirt, desperately shielding her neck with her hands, while the Armored Titan had his hands and feet buried deep into the earth, leaving a long, plowed trail behind him that showcased the terrifying pressure current the explosion had whipped up.
The glowing centipede, finally freed from the Armored Titan’s grip, immediately began to scramble toward me with the fastest speed its multi-legged body could achieve. Spotting the crawling, glowing source, the Armored Titan forced himself up and sprinted toward it, attempting to intercept and stop it from reaching me.
But there was no longer a Colossal Titan standing in my way to block my path to the centipede. And as for the Armored Titan—if he honestly believed he stood a single chance of holding me off for even a minute, he was absolutely dreaming.
In a few massive strides, I closed the distance to the glowing anomaly. The Armored Titan arrived at the exact same moment, desperately grabbing the creature's tail.
I looked down at him and simply whipped my leg high into the air, delivering a brutal kick that sliced through the atmosphere toward the Armored Titan pinned to the ground. Like a massive boulder colliding with solid rock, my foot struck squarely against his chest plate. The signature hardened armor of the Armored Titan shattered instantly upon contact with that monstrous strength, my toe nail—followed by my toe—plunging deep into his chest cavity.
Like a lead cannonball fired from a medieval cannon, his massive body was sent flying backward through the air, creating a sharp whistling sound as it tore through the wind. My toe had broken from the impact, but it didn't take long before the hyper-regeneration mended the bone.
The Armored Titan flew for hundreds of meters before colliding violently with a massive rock formation. The monstrous kinetic force of the impact triggered a spiderweb of deep fractures across the monolithic stone. His armor was left in absolute tatters, a hollow crater gaping open across his entire chest as he hung slumped inside the fissures of the rock.
He cast a desperate glance toward Annie, who was still covering her head. The mindless Titans had begun to swarm and attack her once again, but she wasn't responding to them.
Eren ignored her entirely and extended his massive hand forward. The giant glowing centipede lifted its flower-bud-like head and made direct contact with his palm. Bright, crackling pathways of lightning began to spark violently from the touch.
Just then—
"E... R... E... N!"
A frantic, agonizing shout echoed from directly above my head. Just by the pitch of the voice, I knew exactly who she was. Mikasa!
The question of how she had survived that massive drop flashed through my mind, but that could easily be answered later. If this were a standard manga, the main character would have looked up, gotten dragged into a long-winded trash-talk session, and promptly gotten himself killed. But this isn't a manga, and I am certainly no tragic protagonist. I kept my focus locked entirely on the centipede.
The glowing entity crawled eagerly over my hands, its centipede-like form embedding itself directly into my Titan spine. Long tentacles spiked deep into my flesh, tracing along my rib cage as the anomaly began to fuse completely with my biology.
Up in the sky, the Jaw Titan was flying unsteadily, its underbelly scorched completely black, trailing a heavy line of dark smoke across the atmosphere. Sitting upon the Jaw Titan's back was Mikasa, frantically in the process of putting on a fresh set of ODM gear. Beside her sat Armin, his face deathly pale, his eyes wide and constricted with horror as residual steam continued to pour from his sunken cheeks.
And then there was Levi. He wasn't sitting up—and by the looks of it, he physically couldn't. His broken body was bound tightly to the ropes strapped across the Titan’s back to prevent him from slipping off. Half of his body was severely burned; the left side of his skull was completely bare of hair, the remaining strands melted and singed into brittle curls, and the entire left half of his abdomen was scorched black from the heat.
continue—