Beyond the confines of this isolated island, a vast population of humanity thrived.
They were none other than the exiled subjects of Ymir—the Eldian race. Even the horrific giants that plagued their existence were, in reality, flesh-and-blood Eldians forcefully converted into mindless monsters.
By the time Erwin Smith and his inner command circle thoroughly ingested the handwritten journals, it felt as though the literal sky were collapsing over their heads.
The revelation systematically validated every dark hypothesis they had harbored. The catastrophic entities that had breached the gates a year prior were undeniably Intelligent Titans—indoctrinated warriors dispatched across the sea by the hostile nation of Marley.
Levi Ackerman and Hange Zoë turned their heavy gazes toward Erwin. The commander had spent his entire existence obsessing over the fundamental truth of the world, yet the resolution offered zero historical peace. Instead, it delivered a brutal blueprint of existence:
The entire world beyond their shores was an absolute, unyielding enemy.
A world consumed by a deep-seated hatred for the Eldian lineage would, sooner or later, extend its malicious hand to wipe them out completely.
Erwin's expression was an incredibly complex maze of emotion. A hollow, self-deprecating smile formed along his lips before fading into a sharp wave of pure bitterness—a fleeting micro-expression that bypassed the notice of the entire vanguard, save for Roy's trio and Levi.
Yet, Erwin was ultimately the fastest individual to forcefully stabilize his mental faculties. "Roy... what exactly do you wish for us to execute?"
"It is fundamentally not a matter of what I hope you achieve, but rather how you choose to safeguard your own sovereign homeland," Roy countered, a flicker of genuine approval surfacing deep within his gaze as he evaluated the blonde commander.
Roy dropped another tactical weight into the conversation. "Grisha Yeager systematically transferred his underlying titan capabilities into the body of his young son, Eren Yeager. Furthermore, the Colossus Titan and the Armored Titan who shattered your walls a year ago are currently lurking deep within the military infrastructure as double agents, eagerly awaiting the prime tactical vector to strike."
The moment those syllables cleared his lips, the surrounding perimeter dissolved into a prolonged, suffocating silence.
Long beats passed before a crisp autumn gales swept across the masonry. The psychological impact left the hardened veterans visibly swaying, their knees buckling as if they were on the verge of collapsing onto the stone floorboards.
For the very first time in their lives, they realized that the inner territory wasn't a sanctuary at all—it was a catastrophic powder keg. The legendary Intelligent Titans were actively eating, sleeping, and training directly alongside them!
Recognizing the unfathomable scale of Roy's information network, Erwin bowed his spine in a deep, absolute display of humility. "We desperately require more granular intelligence... I beg of you."
Beholding the typically iron-willed Commander Smith reduce himself to such a vulnerable posture, the rank-and-file soldiers felt a heavy, complicated knot form in their chests. Yet, they fully understood that the youth standing before them was entirely worthy of this caliber of reverence. Information of this tier was simply too critical to prioritize personal pride.
Roy complied smoothly, detailing the operational coordinates. "Eren Yeager is highly probable to be registered within the ranks of the 104th Training Corps vanguard. He operates alongside two inseparable companions—Mikasa Ackerman and Armin Arlert."
"Ackerman..." Levi's sharp intellect immediately locked onto the linguistic keyword.
"Mobilize immediately! Secure Eren Yeager at all costs!"
Under Erwin's authoritative command, the Survey Corps division departed as rapidly as they had materialized. Hoisting themselves onto their mounts, they galloped back toward the inner sectors at a breakneck pace. They left behind only the naturally eccentric Hange Zoë, instructing her to utilize her existing rapport to extract every single scrap of strategic data from Roy.
"Captain, what about our sector?" Tiona asked, her face brimming with an intense, uninhibited excitement. She was thoroughly itching to test her blades against the legendary Intelligent Titans.
"Refrain from rushing. They will deliver themselves straight to our doorstep in short order," Roy replied smoothly, reaching out to playfully pinch the tip of Tiona's small nose.
"They will deliver themselves...? What exactly does that imply?" Hange inquired from the side, her tone shifting into a cautious, hyper-vigilant drawl.
However—
Roy, who had previously maintained an exceptionally transparent, answer-all demeanor, completely closed his lips. A deeply enigmatic, highly mysterious smile played along the contours of his mouth, instilling a profound wave of impending dread within Hange's thoughts.
Hange's heart plummeted straight into an absolute abyss. She realized that the military high command had systematically overlooked a massive, glaring variable—a detail of monumental significance.
Just what was this mysterious youth's underlying objective?
Previously, swept up in the mind-shattering revelations provided by Grisha's journals, not a single soul had vanished to analyze a separate, fundamental question: Was Roy's trio a group of altruistic saints who had crossed dimensions purely out of the goodness of their hearts to offer structural salvation?
The cognitive dots connected in Hange's mind. This was the precise reason Erwin had engineered her deployment as a stationary observer—to systematically dissect the true motive driving these three anomalies.
Roy understood her analytical realization completely.
Yet, the gears of his grand design had already locked into place; it was entirely too late to alter the trajectory.
The exact millisecond the Survey Corps acquired confirmed intelligence regarding Eren Yeager, they were structurally incapable of remaining passive. The moment them mobilized their forces to intervene, the dominoes would fall precisely according to Roy's blueprint.
This was an unmitigated, absolute open gambit—a flawless yangmou.
Granted, during his initial cross-dimensional descent into this node, he had refrained from executing major structural deviations to the timeline. However, he had zero intention of gambling his harvest on the assumption that the narrative would naturally unfold according to his memory. Rather than wasting weeks infiltrating the inner walls and painstakingly hunting down the tracks of Eren, Reiner, and the rest of the Shifters on his own, utilizing the Survey Corps to flush them out into the open was an infinitely superior tactical vector.
Furthermore, Roy had noted an anomalous detail within his active quest interface.
The hunting criteria explicitly listed the Female Titan as an active target, yet he had personally executed Annie Leonhart a year prior.
Within the metaphysical laws governing the Nine Intelligent Titans, if a current holder perishes abruptly without undergoing the mandatory ritual consumption process, the cosmic capability does not dissolve. Instead, it is randomly distributed to a newly born Eldian infant among the global population.
It appeared the cosmic gears had already selected a fresh, unsuspecting soul to inherit the mantle of the Female Titan.
Just who exactly was the new host?
Heh.
A cold, detached smirk curved the corners of Roy's lips. Strictly speaking, his operational confidence wasn't anchored to the strategic competency of the Survey Corps—it was anchored to the absolute directing capabilities of Eren Yeager himself.
While the Survey Corps was aggressively mobilizing its elite divisions to execute the capture protocol on Eren Yeager, a separate movement was unfolding within the perimeter of the 104th Training Corps encampment.
Taking full advantage of the guard rotations, several figures stealthily slipped past the barracks boundary—the core vanguard trio of Eren, Mikasa, and Armin, closely flanked by their peers: Jean Kirstein, Connie Springer, Sasha Blouse, Reiner Braun, and Bertholdt Hoover.
"Sneaking out of bounds yet again... if the Commandant catches wind of this, you're as good as dead," Jean muttered in a thoroughly irritated tone. He and Eren routinely engaged in physical brawls, and his patience was wearing exceptionally thin.
"I didn't exactly drop on my knees to beg for your attendance, horse-face," Eren spat back with a sharp pout. He was internally baffled as to how a private search mission had managed to snowball into a massive group excursion.
"If you possess a burning desire to court disciplinary action, feel free to destroy your own life, but refrain from dragging the rest of us down with you!" Jean countered with a cold snort, his eyes casually stealing a brief, protective glance toward Mikasa.
"Who the hell am I dragging down, you miserable bastard?!" Eren's hot-blooded temperament flared instantly, coiling his fist as if he were ready to initiate an immediate brawl.
Beholding the familiar sequence, the surrounding trainees rapidly intervened, establishing a physical barrier to separate the hot-headed duo.
"We've spent an entire solid year turning the local sectors upside down. For all we know, that individual perished during the initial collapse anyway. This is a total waste of operational energy," Jean reasoned'?ยบbluntly.
Eren gritted his teeth, his jaw locking tight. "No... she isn't dead. My father explicitly commanded me that she is definitively alive."
The memory tracked back to the chaotic events of a year prior.
Following their maritime evacuation from the ruins of Wall Maria into the inner refuge camps, he had briefly encountered his father, Grisha. Though the subsequent sequence of events remained completely blurred within his consciousness, a single, frantic directive had burned itself indelibly into his cognitive pathways.
"Eren... you must locate Dina at all costs! She has successfully reverted into a human form, she is definitively alive! One year... you possess exactly one single year to achieve this, otherwise everyone will perish!"
Grisha's hysterical, ear-shattering voice continuously roared within his subconscious mind like an ancient temple bell, frequently snapping him awake from the depths of his nightmares in a cold sweat. As time ticked forward, the memory grew increasingly vivid, refusing to grant him peace.
Throughout the grueling cycles of his military training, he had never allowed the objective to slip from his focus, routinely sneaking past the camp perimeter to locate the mysterious "Dina" his father had spoken of.
Yet, his efforts had yielded absolutely zero results.
"Dina..." Eren whispered the name softly under his breath. As the temporal limit approached its final hour, an intense wave of existential urgency began to compress his heart.
Just what catastrophic event was scheduled to manifest at the conclusion of his father's timeline? Everyone will perish! The thought left his consciousness deeply fractured and unsettled.
"Hostiles!" Mikasa's sharp voice cut through the ambient air, her battle-honed Ackerman instincts identifying a coordinated network of concealed soldiers lurking within the shadows.
Ultimately, Eren and his peers were merely raw trainees who had logged a single year of baseline drill instruction, entirely devoid of actual battlefield execution. Hearing Mikasa's sharp warning, their immediate reaction was a collective, stunned freeze. We are operating within a heavily populated public sector; just what caliber of danger could possibly materialize?
"Strike!"
The direct command detonated like a lightning bolt. Materializing from behind residential brickwork, cloaked alleyways, and masquerading as common civilian pedestrians, the seasoned operatives of the Survey Corps launched a flawless, unified ambush.
Faced with a vanguard division composed entirely of battle-hardened veterans, these raw military recruits lacked even the baseline capacity to mount an effective counter-offensive.
Jean, Armin, Connie, Sasha, Reiner, and Bertholdt were forcefully neutralized and pinned to the cobblestones in a literal fraction of a second.
Cold sweat erupted across Reiner and Bertholdt's faces, their hearts hammering violently against their ribs as their fingers instinctively drifted toward their mouths. They had nearly triggered their Titan transformations right then and there out of sheer survival reflex.
The solitary anomaly within the ambush perimeter was Mikasa. Relying on the absolute peak parameters of her awakened Ackerman lineage, she single-handedly overthrew several elite soldiers in a spectacular display of raw kinetic force.
"Release me! Just who the hell are you people?!" Eren roared, thrashing violently as an operative pinned his torso to the earth.
"Maintain your position!"
Levi Ackerman arrived like a phantom shadow, executing a swift, high-velocity whip-kick that slammed directly into Eren's cheek.
BAM!
The brutal kinetic impact sent a spray of thick crimson blood flying through the air. Armin and the rest of the trainees gasped, their eyes filling with horror at the absolute ruthlessness of the short captain.
Beholding the sight, Mikasa's gaze turned deathly cold. Completely abandoning any semblance of self-preservation, she launched herself straight toward Levi. The duo instantly locked into a high-velocity physical engagement, their impeccable technical mastery and blinding agility leaving the surrounding soldiers thoroughly jaw-dropped.
Levi's expression turned exceptionally complex as he parried her strikes. She is undeniably... an Ackerman.
Pinned firmly to the cobblestones, Eren's face was heavily masked in fresh gore. A separate Survey Corps veteran reinforced the pin, applying absolute force to suppress his movements.
Yet, at this exact juncture, Eren lacked the cognitive capacity to register the physical torment. The exact moment Levi's heel had collided with his skull, his shifted field of vision had locked onto a woman standing a short distance away within the military perimeter. His gaze became completely, irreversibly magnetized.
Those precise facial contours... they were identical to the horrific visage of the abnormal titan that had slaughtered and devoured his mother a year ago.
He would gladly embrace death before allowing that face to fade from his memory.
"It's you...! You're the piece of trash who slaughtered my mother!"
In that single fraction of a heartbeat, Eren's eyes turned entirely bloodshot. An unfathomable, cosmic surge of raw energy detonated within his physical pathways, granting him the strength to forcefully throw off the veteran operative pinning his frame. Like an unhinged, feral beast, he charged straight toward the woman.
His gut-wrenching, soul-tearing roar of pure hatred instantly monopolized the attention of every single individual within the sector. Even Levi and Mikasa froze mid-strike, their lethal dance halting abruptly.
Beholding the blood-maddened youth barreling toward her position, the woman stood entirely frozen in place, appearing thoroughly paralyzed by intense fright.
THUD!
His face twisted into a horrific, snarling mask, Eren violently tackled the woman to the earth, wrapping his hands tightly around her throat as he applied absolute, strangling pressure.
The exact millisecond their physical flesh established direct, uninhibited contact, their consciousness was forcefully ripped from the mortal plane, plunging into the cosmic reality of the Paths.
Within this boundless, transcendental nexus entirely devoid of the constraints of linear time or three-dimensional space, the collective memories of the absolute past and the ultimate future cascaded into Eren's cognitive pathways like a roaring waterfall. Following a brief, fleeting moment of stunned processing, the remaining innocence and youth entirely drained from his features.
When he raised his eyes, his countenance had transformed into a mask of profound maturity—his gaze heavy with ancient sorrow, absolute exhaustion, and unyielding, iron-clad resolve.
"So this... is the absolute threshold," Eren murmured with a heavy sigh. The moment that specific entity re-entered his operational perimeter, his ephemeral days of playing soldier alongside his childhood friends had reached their definitive conclusion.
This development was fundamentally not a freak anomaly—it was an absolute, pre-orchestrated cosmic inevitability. The future incarnation of his existence was actively manipulating the temporal framework, calibrating the sequence down to the literal second!
With a single movement of his sovereign will, the collective consciousness of every single Eldian soul across the face of the globe was forcefully dragged into the majestic expanse of the Paths.
An endless, desolate desert unfolded beneath a dim, twilight sky. The solitary source of absolute illumination was a colossally massive, tree-shaped pillar of brilliant green light radiating in the far distance, its towering trunk piercing the high heavens as countless microscopic branches webbed outward across infinity.
It was the cosmic web connecting every single subject of Ymir to the coordinate.
Before the global Eldian population could even begin to process the nature of this mind-shattering anomaly, a low, resonant voice echoed within their consciousness—sounding akin to the ancient chant of a primordial deity, vibrating directly across their neural pathways.
"To all Subjects of Ymir across the face of the earth... My name is Eren Yeager. I am the sovereign entity who currently wields the absolute authority of the Founding Titan."
"The outside world harbors an unyielding, murderous malice toward my homeland of Paradis Island, and a network of mysterious adversaries is actively deploying resources to execute my hunting protocol."
"But I treats refuse to accept this decree of destiny!"
"The Rumbling... is hereby initiated. The Colossus Titans sealed within the concentric walls have begun their march. Whether it be these mysterious cosmic adversaries, or the entire population of humanity beyond our shores... everything shall be reduced to absolute ash and utterly annihilated!!"[System Notification: The Extra Objective has undergone a catastrophic structural mutation! The rewards parameters have been exponentially upgraded. The objective is now optional. Do you wish to accept?] Objective Node: Light of Humanity! Difficulty Tier: Level 7 Description: Subjugate Eren Yeager (The Source of All Living Matter / Hallucigenia). Reward Multiplier: 2,000 Attribute Points + 1 World Tree Seed. Operational Warning: The target currently exercises absolute sovereign control over the global Pure Titan population, backed by the capacity to continuously manifest and summon every Intelligent Titan variant from the past thousand years of Eldian history.
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