"Captain, you're injured?" Traute, with her low ponytail tied at the nape of her neck, walked up to Kenny.
A bloodstained strip of cloth was tied around Kenny's arm.
Kenny bared his teeth in a grin, casually set the top hat in his right hand onto his head, and did not answer Traute's question. Instead, he turned around as if to leave.
Looking around them, it was as though they were standing in a crystal world. Towering crystal pillars surrounded them; even the floor and the ceiling were made of crystal.
"Captain, Captain, Kenny! Stop!" Traute was practically shouting.
Kenny stopped. The smile still hung at the corner of his mouth.
"What? Traute, you're losing your composure. Are you trying to challenge the captain's authority?"
Traute looked straight into Kenny's gray eyes and said,
"The Central Military Police headquarters and the royal government have been suppressed. Those people's next target will definitely be us. Kenny, are you really going to do nothing?"
Kenny suddenly pulled a dagger from his coat and said carelessly,
"Ah~ I see. So it turns out you're scared, Traute. It's fine. You don't have to wait here to die. You and the other Central Military Police members can choose to leave."
His tone was extremely unfriendly.
"You bastard!" Traute cursed Kenny, something she rarely did, and once she started she couldn't stop.
"You self-righteous asshole! If you despised us so much, why did you use that ridiculous dream to trick us in the first place?
"And now you won't even look at us and just tell us to get lost? As expected! Trash from the Underground is still trash! Listen well, we won't leave. And the blood debt of the thirteen comrades who died at the hands of the Survey Corps—we'll repay that too!"
Kenny stood there blankly, listening to Traute's accusations. He even noticed the tears welling up in her eyes, and for some reason felt an oddly unfamiliar sensation.
"Heh, Traute, since when did you start learning the Survey Corps' way of talking—comrades and all that? I'm Kenny the Ripper. I don't need those things." Kenny's thoughts were in disarray, and he responded perfunctorily.
"Do whatever you want. The action squad will block the first line of defense. Go explain it to your king!" With that, Traute activated her Vertical Maneuvering Equipment and left.
Kenny was left behind, his smile frozen in place.
...
"Vice Captain, what should we do?" Traute returned to where the action squad was assembled. More than thirty Central Military Police members immediately crowded around her, all talking at once as they asked.
Traute hesitated inside. She knew this situation was almost certainly a dead end. Perhaps, just as Kenny had said, letting these Military Police hurry and escape would be the best choice.
But Traute was extremely unwilling. Back when they had been selected from the Military Police, Kenny's declaration—Kenny's personal charisma—had deeply won these soldiers over. Kenny's dream: the power to overturn the entire world.
Traute closed her eyes.
"Everyone, since we chose to follow Kenny back then, now is the time to test that resolve. Hold the line. For Kenny Ackerman's dream, offer up your hearts!"
"Yes!" xn
...
"It's really complicated. But people have to have something they strive for, don't they? Uri, I believe you'd understand me."
Kenny murmured to himself as he walked toward the end of the crystal world. This crystal cavern was the ancestral land of the Reiss family, the holy ground where the Reiss family passed down that power capable of overturning the world.
Kenny had personally witnessed Uri Reiss's power being inherited here by his niece.
When the aged and decrepit-looking Uri was stuffed into the mouth of his Titanized niece, Kenny, who was present, instinctively reached for his sharp dagger.
But Uri seemed to sense something. At the final moment of his life, he turned his head and looked at Kenny.
Kenny released the dagger. Uri was eaten. Uri, the only one Kenny could truly call a friend, was dead. That girl inherited Uri's eyes.
Uri had once subdued Kenny with force. When Kenny learned from his father that the existence of the Ackerman clan was the doing of the royal family, the hot-blooded young Kenny naturally went to settle accounts.
From the mouth of some cowardly noble, he easily learned that the true royal family was the Reiss family.
After showing up at their door, Kenny saw a power that made him look up in awe. Before absolute Titan power, Kenny was nothing.
Kenny, who had scraped by in the Underground, had no sense of honor to speak of. He begged for mercy on the spot, admitted defeat with his mouth, while inside he endlessly plotted revenge, even imagining torturing Uri countless times.
What surprised Kenny was that Uri not only did not retaliate, he even knelt down humbly to apologize, saying that the misfortune of the Ackerman clan was the royal family's sin.
Uri's behavior formed a sharp contrast with Rod beside him, who was tense and hysterical, doing nothing but clamoring to kill Kenny.
With the goal of coveting that power in mind, Kenny began working for the royal family. Perhaps out of curiosity about why Uri possessed such tremendous power yet was so humble, the two became friends.
As time passed, Kenny himself no longer knew whether he was still after that power or not.
After Uri's death, Kenny honored his promise and continued to serve the Reiss family. But without Uri, his curiosity toward the power Uri once possessed grew intense. He wanted to see the world through Uri's eyes—to know what it was that made Uri so gentle.
The Central Military Police, the Underground's Levi—Kenny had never truly cared about any of it. Yet now, one by one, these things he never cared about were all throwing his mind into turmoil.
When he took that skinny little boy—nothing but skin and bones—from the brothel, he, the fearsome Kenny the Ripper who terrified countless Military Police, actually felt a trace of guilt? How ridiculous!
If he had arrived earlier, perhaps the child wouldn't have been so miserable. He'd heard that after the boy's mother died, the child had gone hungry for four whole days.
Kenny had never had any experience raising a child. All he possessed were the killing skills and schemes he'd honed while surviving in the Underground.
After passing all his skills on to that child, Kenny chose to leave silently. Before he left, he didn't tell the boy his identity, because Kenny felt he couldn't shoulder the responsibility that identity carried.
"Come to think of it, I've never heard that guy Levi say that word either—uncle? Heh, that really sends a chill down my spine."
The Central Military Police action squad was the same—nothing more than a batch of knives in the Reiss family's hands. Kenny never cared about those foolish-looking Military Police. The number of Military Police who died at his hands might even exceed those who died on missions for the Military Police.
He never expected that the action squad members he had never cared about would actually be won over by him. They followed Kenny instead of the king. Kenny couldn't understand it, and at the same time, it made him crave Titan power even more.
He believed that if it were Uri, he would surely know why.
The wound on his arm left by Levi was still faintly seeping blood.
Kenny reached the very end of the crystal cavern. There, he saw Rod, his illegitimate daughter, and the chained boy.
(A/N: At the request of everyone, starting from the next few chapters I'll try writing more emotional scenes. If it's not done well, please forgive me.)