The battle did not unfold.
It *detonated* — a cascading series of violent eruptions that turned Liberio's internment zone from a place where people lived into a place where people died, with no transition between the two states. One moment, a city. The next, a warzone. The distinction erased in the time it took the Attack Titan to take its second step.
Loid pressed himself against the parapet wall and watched.
The Marleyan military responded faster than he'd expected. Professional soldiers, trained for titan combat, conditioned by four years of the Mid-East War to operate under conditions that would break civilian minds. Anti-titan artillery batteries activated within ninety seconds of the Attack Titan's emergence — field guns positioned around the plaza's perimeter, their crews pivoting the heavy barrels toward the fifteen-meter target with practiced coordination.
Shells struck the Attack Titan's body. Loid saw the impacts — detonations against hardened flesh that would have obliterated conventional armor. Chunks of steaming meat tore free, exposing the crimson musculature beneath. The Titan didn't slow. The wounds sealed in real time — tissue knitting itself closed with a wet, organic urgency that was simultaneously fascinating and revolting.
*Regeneration. Not healing. Regeneration. Biological reconstruction at a cellular level that violates every principle of thermodynamics and energy conservation. Where does the mass come from? Where does the energy—*
He caught himself. Loid Forger's operational mind reasserting control over Henry Ashford's academic curiosity. *Not now. Observe. Catalog. Survive.*
The Attack Titan's fist came down on the nearest artillery position. The gun, its crew, and a section of the street beneath them ceased to exist as distinct objects. The shockwave rattled the building Loid was crouched on, and a crack appeared in the parapet wall six inches from his left hand.
*Move. Different position. This building won't survive sustained combat proximity.*
He shifted — low, fast, keeping below the parapet line — to the building's eastern edge. The service stairwell was still intact. He had an exit route. He filed that information and returned his attention to the battle.
And then the Scouts arrived.
---
They came from the sky.
Not like birds. Not like aircraft. Like *something else entirely* — human bodies moving through three-dimensional space with a fluidity and precision that Loid's Taskmaster potential recognized immediately as combat art of the highest possible caliber.
ODM gear.
He'd known about it. Read about it. Watched it rendered in animation. Understood the mechanical principles — compressed gas propulsion, grappling anchors, cable-based momentum transfer. He'd studied the physics and concluded that the system should be functionally impossible. The g-forces alone should render operators unconscious. The cable tension should tear anchors free from any surface softer than hardened steel. The human body should not be able to withstand the acceleration profiles required for the maneuvers he'd seen on screen.
Watching it in person, he understood that the physics *was* impossible. And the Scouts did it anyway.
The first figure he tracked was anonymous — a dark-cloaked soldier launching from a rooftop two blocks south, cables firing in rapid alternation, body spinning through a gap between buildings that couldn't have been more than four meters wide. The soldier's trajectory was a compound arc — horizontal acceleration into a banking turn into a vertical climb, each phase flowing into the next without pause, without hesitation, without the mechanical stiffness of a person operating equipment. The gear was an extension of the body. The body was an extension of the gear. The boundary between operator and machine had been erased through years of training until the system moved as one organism.
Loid's eyes tracked every motion. Every weight shift. Every cable release and reattachment. Every micro-adjustment of posture that altered trajectory by degrees.
*Taskmaster potential activating.*
He could feel it — the thing R.O.B. had given him. Not understanding. Not competence. *Recording*. His visual cortex was capturing movement data with a fidelity that went beyond normal observation. The soldier's exact body angle during the banking turn. The precise moment of cable release. The hip rotation that initiated the spin. The shoulder engagement that controlled the arc.
He was *learning*. Not learning in the way you learn from a textbook — intellectually, abstractly, separated from physical execution by the gap between knowing and doing. Learning in the way a camera learns — capturing data that could, with sufficient training and physical conditioning, be *reproduced*.
The gap between capture and execution was vast. He knew that. His body didn't have the conditioning. His reflexes didn't have the calibration. His proprioceptive sense didn't have the spatial mapping that years of ODM training built into the nervous system. If he strapped on ODM gear right now and attempted what that soldier had just done, he would die. Not probably. Certainly.
But the data was there. Stored. Accessible. Waiting for the body to become capable of what the mind had already recorded.
*File it. All of it. Every movement. Every technique. Every angle and rotation and timing.*
More Scouts. Dozens of them. They moved through Liberio's airspace like a coordinated flock — individual trajectories that wove around each other without collision, each soldier covering angles that complemented the others' positions. It was choreography written in cable lines and compressed gas, and it was *beautiful* in the way that only supreme competence applied under mortal pressure could be.
Thunder spears.
He saw the first volley — four soldiers converging on a Marleyan gun emplacement from different angles, each firing a projectile that looked like a lance trailing smoke. The impacts were near-simultaneous, and the emplacement vanished in a cluster of overlapping detonations that left a crater where stone had been.
*Shaped charge. Propellant-driven delivery. Impact or proximity detonation. Effective against hardened targets including titan armor. Limited payload — anti-materiel, not area effect. Reload time—*
Another volley. Different target. A watchtower at the zone's perimeter, Marleyan soldiers firing rifles from its elevated position. Two thunder spears struck the base. The tower folded inward on itself like a man dropping to his knees, and the soldiers on top went with it.
Loid cataloged. Thunder spear flight characteristics. Effective range. Detonation patterns. Delivery angles. The way the Scouts adjusted their ODM trajectories to compensate for the recoil of firing while airborne — a subtle but critical technique that prevented the launch from destabilizing their cable-supported movement.
*All of it. Everything. Every piece of data is a piece of survival.*
---
Then he saw *them*.
Mikasa came first — or rather, Mikasa was the first one he *recognized*, because her combat signature was unmistakable. She moved differently from the other Scouts. Not faster, exactly — though she was faster. Not more precisely — though she was more precise. She moved with an *economy* that the others lacked. Zero wasted motion. Zero unnecessary adjustment. Every action was the minimum required to achieve maximum effect, and the result was a fluidity that made the other Scouts look like they were trying while she simply *was*.
She engaged a cluster of Marleyan soldiers on a rooftop three blocks west of Loid's position. Two cable attachments, a lateral swing that built momentum, blade deployment at the apex of the arc, and then she was through them. Past them. Gone. The soldiers dropped — not dramatically, not cinematically, but with the abrupt finality of bodies whose structural integrity had been compromised faster than their nervous systems could register pain.
Loid's Taskmaster potential *screamed*.
The data flood was almost overwhelming. Every micro-movement of Mikasa's engagement contained information density that dwarfed anything the anonymous Scouts had demonstrated. The hip rotation on her swing was different — tighter, more efficient, generating equivalent momentum from a shorter arc. Her blade angle wasn't standard — she'd adjusted the grip by perhaps fifteen degrees, allowing a drawing cut that used the cable's momentum rather than fighting against it. Her spatial awareness was operating on a level that suggested she was tracking multiple threat vectors simultaneously while executing a maneuver that would consume the entire attention of a normal operator.
*Ackerman combat instinct. Not learnable. Not reproducible through Taskmaster potential. The physical technique can be captured. The superhuman processing speed that enables its real-time application in lethal conditions cannot.*
The distinction mattered. Loid filed it with the cold precision of a man who understood that knowing his limits was the difference between ambition and suicide.
Connie was next — shorter, stockier, fighting with a controlled aggression that contrasted with Mikasa's surgical calm. His ODM technique was textbook-perfect rather than transcendent, but textbook-perfect from the Survey Corps was still a level of competence that most militaries couldn't dream of. He engaged a Marleyan squad attempting to set up a heavy machine gun position, thunder spears eliminating the weapon while his blades handled the crew.
Jean — directing rather than engaging, his ODM movements more conservative but his positional awareness acute. He was coordinating the Scouts' coverage patterns, ensuring overlapping fields of fire, preventing gaps in the aerial screen that protected Eren's titan form.
And Levi.
Loid almost missed him. Not because Levi was hard to see, but because Levi was *too fast to see*. A dark blur at the periphery of vision, cable lines appearing and disappearing so rapidly they looked like momentary glitches in reality. Loid caught fragments — a spinning attack that bisected a Marleyan gun turret. A trajectory change so abrupt it seemed to violate inertia. A moment where Levi appeared to be in two places simultaneously because the transit between them was faster than the eye could resolve.
*Captain Levi Ackerman. Humanity's Strongest Soldier. And that is not hyperbole.*
The Taskmaster potential captured what it could. Which was less than it wanted. Levi's movements exceeded the recording threshold in places — not because the potential failed, but because the human visual system couldn't process the input fast enough to feed the recording mechanism. Loid was trying to photograph lightning with a manual camera.
*Partial data. Fragmentary technique capture. Enough to inform training. Not enough to replicate.*
He filed that too. Everything was data. Everything was future capability.
---
The battle raged and Loid moved.
Down the service stairwell. Controlled descent — fast but not reckless, each landing checked for structural integrity before committing weight. The building was groaning. Somewhere above, a support beam had cracked. The structure had minutes, maybe, before accumulated damage cascaded into collapse.
Street level was hell.
The chaos was total — the comprehensive, overwhelming chaos of a warzone experienced from inside rather than observed from above. Smoke reduced visibility to meters. Sound was a continuous wall of overlapping inputs — explosions, gunfire, screaming, the deep subsonic vibration of titan footsteps, the mechanical shriek of ODM gear cables, the crash of collapsing masonry. The air tasted of cordite and powdered stone and something organic that Loid chose not to identify.
Bodies.
They were everywhere. Marleyan soldiers and Eldian civilians indistinguishable in death — the same broken geometry, the same stillness, the same dark pooling on stone. A formal dress jacket torn open by shrapnel. An armband soaked in blood until its color was unreadable. A child's shoe, empty, sitting upright in the middle of the street as if placed there deliberately.
Loid moved through it. Not past it — *through* it. Letting the spy's training filter his sensory input into categories: threat, opportunity, irrelevant. The grief was there. The horror was there. He could feel them pressing against the operational partition in his mind like water against a dam. He would process them later. He would fall apart later. Right now, falling apart meant dying, and dying meant the plan died with him regardless of his contingency copies.
*Opportunity.*
A Marleyan soldier — dead, face down, the back of his uniform charred by a thunder spear's peripheral blast. Young. Maybe twenty. His helmet had rolled two feet from his head, cracked but intact. His rifle was still slung across his back. His sidearm was holstered. His ammunition pouches were full.
Loid knelt. Checked sightlines. Clear — the smoke provided concealment, and the nearest living combatants were a block away. His hands moved with the automatic efficiency of Loid Forger's training — thirty seconds to strip the relevant equipment. Helmet on. Rifle slung. Sidearm holstered at his hip. Ammunition distributed across his own coat pockets.
The helmet was too large. He tightened the chin strap. It would do.
He kept moving.
*ODM gear.*
The thought had been running in the background since the battle began. He needed a set. Not to use — not yet, not without training that would take months at minimum. To *have*. For the airship. For what came after.
But the Scouts' gear was proprietary. Modified from standard military specifications. Maintained and calibrated by Paradis's own engineers. And every Scout wearing a set was either alive and using it or—
He found one three streets deeper into the combat zone.
The Scout was dead. Female, he thought, though the damage made certainty difficult. She'd been caught by what appeared to be concentrated rifle fire from multiple angles — a crossfire ambush, probably while her cables were transitioning between anchor points. The brief window of vulnerability that every ODM operator learned to minimize but could never fully eliminate.
She'd fallen from height. The landing had been... unkind.
Loid knelt beside her and paused. One second. Two. Not operational time — *human* time. Acknowledging the person. The life that had been here and was gone. The face he couldn't fully see but that belonged to someone with a name and a history and people who would grieve when they learned.
Then his hands began working.
The ODM gear's harness system was more complex than he'd anticipated from visual study alone. Straps interlaced with buckles and tension adjusters at multiple points — hips, thighs, chest, shoulders. The gas canisters were mounted at the small of the back. The blade housings sat at the hips. The grappling mechanisms were forearm-mounted, connected to the main housing by cables that ran through guides sewn into the harness itself.
Loid's fingers found each connection point and released them with a methodical patience that belied the explosions echoing through the streets around him. He couldn't rush this. Damaged equipment was worse than no equipment — a frayed cable that snapped mid-flight, a gas seal that leaked and left you stranded at altitude, a blade housing that jammed when your life depended on a clean draw.
Four minutes. The harness came free. He bundled it — compact, efficient, distributing the weight across his back beneath the stolen Marleyan jacket. The blade housings he secured at his hips, hidden under the jacket's length. The gas canisters went into a field pack stripped from the same dead soldier who'd supplied the helmet.
He was now a walking contradiction — a man wearing Marleyan military equipment over Paradisian combat technology, belonging to neither side, carrying the tools of both.
*Find Gabi. Stay close. Wait for her move.*
He knew where she'd be. Where she *had* to be. The girl was predictable in the way that absolute conviction made people predictable — she would be at the heart of the fight, or as close to it as a twelve-year-old Warrior candidate without a titan could get.
Loid adjusted his stolen helmet, checked the rifle's chamber — loaded, safety off, Marleyan standard infantry issue — and began moving toward the combat's epicenter.
---
He felt Armin before he saw him.
A pressure change. Sudden. Immense. The air itself compressing, becoming dense and hot in a way that had nothing to do with the fires already burning across Liberio. Loid's ears popped — again, harder this time — and a sound began building at the edge of perception. Not a sound, exactly. A *presence*. A displacement of atmosphere so vast that the human sensory system interpreted it as sound because it had no other category for the input.
*The harbor. Armin is at the harbor. The Colossal Titan transformation targeting the Marleyan naval—*
The world turned white.
Not metaphorically. The light came first — a flash that burned through the smoke and dust and darkness of the battle-choked streets with the absolute authority of a second sun being born. Shadows reversed. Details vanished. For a fraction of a second, Liberio existed in a dimensionless white void that obliterated depth perception and spatial awareness entirely.
Then the shockwave.
It picked Loid up and threw him.
Not gently. Not like a strong wind. Like a wall — a solid, invisible wall of compressed air moving at a velocity that turned atmosphere into a bludgeon. He was airborne before he understood what was happening, his body ragdolling through space with zero control, the stolen helmet torn from his head by the force, the rifle ripped from his shoulder and sent spinning into the chaos.
He hit something — a wall, a cart, debris, he couldn't tell — and the impact drove the air from his lungs in a single explosive gasp. He bounced. Hit the ground. Rolled. Fetched up against a pile of rubble that had been a storefront and lay there, face-down, ears ringing with a high-pitched whine that drowned out everything else.
*Get up.*
The thought was distant. Muffled. His head was wrong — the world tilting and swaying in a way that indicated concussion or inner ear disruption. His ribs screamed when he breathed. Something warm ran down the left side of his face — blood from a scalp laceration, probably superficial but bleeding freely.
*Get up. The healing will handle the damage. Get up or die here.*
He got up.
It took three attempts. His balance was compromised — the shockwave had done something to his vestibular system that made vertical orientation feel like a suggestion rather than a fact. He leaned against the rubble pile, blinking, waiting for the world to stabilize.
It stabilized slowly. The ringing faded to a persistent hum. His vision cleared from white-washed blur to smoke-filtered clarity. His ribs hurt but functioned — bruised, not broken. The scalp wound was already clotting with an efficiency that a normal human body shouldn't possess.
*Superior healing. Thank you, R.O.B.*
He looked toward the harbor.
The mushroom cloud rose above Liberio like the fist of God.
It was *exactly* like a nuclear detonation. The shape. The scale. The billowing column of superheated air and vaporized matter climbing into the upper atmosphere, the cap spreading outward in a flattened dome, the light still radiating from the base with an intensity that cast hard shadows across the entire city.
The Colossal Titan's transformation. Armin's transformation. The controlled detonation of a human body converting into a sixty-meter titan, releasing energy equivalent to a tactical nuclear weapon in the process.
The Marleyan fleet — every ship docked in the harbor, every vessel being prepared for the invasion of Paradis — was *gone*. Not sunk. Not damaged. Gone. Vaporized. Reduced to component atoms by a blast that had turned the harbor itself into a crater of boiling seawater.
Loid stared at the cloud and thought: *That is what I'm trying to build. That is the power I'm trying to give Paradis permanently, without requiring a human being to become a god and sacrifice years of their life to produce it. That is what nuclear weapons are.*
The thought was clarifying in its horror. He looked away. Checked his equipment — sidearm still holstered, ODM gear bundle still secured on his back, field pack still intact. The helmet and rifle were gone, lost in the blast. He'd find replacements or do without.
*Find Gabi. The timeline is accelerating.*
He moved.
---
He almost missed it.
The Attack Titan — Eren's titan — was engaged with something Loid couldn't clearly see through the smoke and dust. The Jaw Titan — Porco Galliard — small, fast, armored with that distinctive crystallized jaw capable of cutting through virtually anything. Porco had been fighting with the desperate ferocity of a man defending his homeland, and he was losing.
Not immediately. Not obviously. He was fast enough to evade the Attack Titan's grabs, agile enough to strike and retreat, experienced enough to exploit the larger titan's relative sluggishness. But Eren wasn't fighting alone. The Scouts provided aerial support — thunder spears driving Porco back into Eren's range whenever he tried to create distance, cables crisscrossing the airspace to limit his movement corridors.
And Eren was *learning*. Each exchange, each near-miss, each of Porco's attack patterns was being cataloged and adapted to. The Attack Titan's movements grew more anticipatory with each pass. Porco's windows of opportunity were shrinking.
Then Eren caught him.
The Attack Titan's hand closed around the Jaw Titan's body — a grip that locked Porco's limbs against his torso, immobilizing the smaller titan completely. Porco thrashed. The crystallized jaw snapped — biting at the fingers holding him, the hardened teeth scraping against the Attack Titan's flesh with a sound like industrial machinery grinding against stone.
And then Loid saw it.
The Warhammer Titan's crystal. The shell — that perfect, translucent prison of hardened titan material that protected the Warhammer's operator. It lay in the rubble near the crater where the stage had been, intact, impervious to everything the Scouts had thrown at it. Cables. Blades. Thunder spears. Nothing had cracked it. Nothing *could* crack it.
Nothing except the Jaw Titan's bite.
Loid understood what was about to happen one second before it happened, and in that second he felt his stomach perform a slow, deliberate revolution.
Eren forced the crystal between Porco's jaws.
Not gently. Not surgically. With the brute mechanical force of a fifteen-meter titan using a smaller titan as a *tool* — pressing the crystal against those indestructible teeth and *squeezing*, the Attack Titan's fingers wrapping around the Jaw Titan's skull and jaw and forcing them together like a man using a nutcracker on a particularly stubborn shell.
The sound was indescribable.
Crystalline fracture. Titan bone stress. Porco's muffled scream — audible even through the closed jaw, even through the crystal, a sound of pain so fundamental that species and scale became irrelevant. And underneath it all, the wet, structural cracking of the Warhammer's prison splitting open under pressure it was never designed to withstand because it was never supposed to encounter a force this specifically, grotesquely applied.
The crystal shattered.
Fluid — warm, dark, biological — cascaded from the broken shell. And inside, exposed, vulnerable, the Warhammer Titan's operator. A woman. Small. Human. Dwarfed by the titans that held her fate between their jaws.
Eren ate her.
Not the Attack Titan — *Eren*. Loid could see the shift in the titan's movements, the intentionality that went beyond combat reflex into something deliberate and hungry and strategic. The Attack Titan brought the broken crystal to its mouth, and the jaw opened, and the Warhammer's operator disappeared into the dark.
Loid's gorge rose. He swallowed it down. Pressed his back against the wall he'd been using for cover and closed his eyes for three seconds.
*Disgusting. Necessary. Both things simultaneously.*
Because it *was* necessary. The Warhammer Titan's power — the ability to create structures, weapons, anything from hardened titan material using will and imagination — was too dangerous to leave in Marleyan hands. And it was too useful to waste. In the strategic architecture Loid was building, the Warhammer's creation ability was one of the Nine Titans' most valuable constructive assets. Manufacturing. Infrastructure. The ability to build from nothing.
Eren needed to consume the Warhammer. The plan required him to have it. The future required this grotesque, primal act of consumption — one human being eating another through the medium of fifteen-meter biological monstrosities — because the alternative was leaving a weapon of incalculable value in the hands of people who would use it to annihilate Paradis.
*Disgusting. Necessary. Both.*
Loid opened his eyes. Breathed. Reset.
The Jaw Titan was still in Eren's grip, limp now, the fight gone out of Porco. Whether he was conscious or not was unclear. The Attack Titan dropped him — a dismissal, not a mercy — and turned toward the harbor. Toward the airship that would be arriving soon. Toward extraction.
Loid checked his sidearm. Checked the ODM bundle. Wiped the blood from his face with a sleeve that was already ruined.
*Gabi. Find Gabi. The airship is coming. The next phase is coming. Sasha is coming.*
*Move.*
He moved.