He found them in the smoke.
Not through skill. Not through the systematic search-and-track methodology that Loid Forger's training made available to him. Through luck — stupid, dumb, unearned luck. He turned a corner around a half-collapsed residential block and there they were, thirty meters ahead, two small figures moving through the debris field with the purposeful urgency of people who knew exactly where they were going.
Gabi Braun and Falco Grice.
Even from behind, even through the haze of smoke and particulate dust that turned Liberio's air into something barely breathable, he recognized them instantly. Gabi moved the way he'd expected — coiled, furious, every step carrying the compressed energy of a twelve-year-old who had just watched her world torn apart and was converting grief into momentum. Her fists were clenched at her sides. Her jaw was set. Her eyes — when she turned her head briefly to check a side street — were dry and burning with something that went far beyond anger into territory that didn't have a name suitable for a child.
Falco was different. He moved with Gabi, kept pace with Gabi, but his body language was wrong for rage. His shoulders were pulled inward. His steps were reactive rather than driven — following her trajectory instead of choosing his own. He kept looking back. Not at threats. At the destruction they were leaving behind. At the bodies.
*He doesn't want to be here. He's here because she is. Because leaving her alone in this is something he can't do.*
Loid pressed himself into the shadow of a doorframe and watched them pass. His heart was hammering — not the controlled, manageable elevation that Loid's training could regulate, but a deep, arrhythmic pounding that felt like his ribcage was trying to escape his chest.
*This is where she does it. This is where she gets the ODM gear and this is where she gets on the airship and this is where she kills Sasha and this is where Eren sees the future is fixed and this is where everything locks into place.*
*Unless I stop it.*
*How?*
The question wasn't rhetorical. It was operational, and the operational answer was brutally unfavorable.
Gabi Braun was twelve years old. She was also the top-ranked Warrior candidate in Marley's program — a program that began training children at age seven and subjected them to a curriculum that included hand-to-hand combat, weapons proficiency, tactical doctrine, and physical conditioning that would have been considered abusive by any standard from Henry's original world. She was small. She was young. She was also faster than him, more conditioned than him, and trained in close-quarters combat since before she could write her own name.
Falco was less aggressive but no less trained. The same program. The same years of conditioning. And he was loyal to Gabi with the specific, unshakeable loyalty of a boy who had decided that keeping her alive was his purpose, which meant engaging Gabi meant engaging Falco, which meant fighting two trained combatants simultaneously.
Loid Forger's capabilities gave him advantages. Superior technique. Better reading of opponents. More sophisticated tactical processing. But Loid's capabilities were *knowledge*, and knowledge existed in Henry's body — a body that had never thrown a punch in genuine combat. Never taken a hit. Never operated under the specific neurochemical conditions of a real fight where the other person was genuinely trying to hurt him.
The gap between knowing how to fight and *fighting* was the gap between reading about swimming and being thrown into the ocean. You might remember the correct stroke. You might remember the breathing technique. You might still drown.
And drowning here meant failure. Not personal failure — *civilizational* failure. If he engaged Gabi and lost, he was unconscious or dead in a Liberio street. No airship. No Sasha. No deviation. The plan died in a fistfight with a twelve-year-old girl, and that was such a pathetically absurd way to lose the future of an entire world that the thought alone was enough to eliminate the option.
*Don't fight them. Follow them. Get on the airship another way.*
---
He followed at distance.
Loid's training made this almost automatic — maintain visual contact without entering the target's awareness perimeter. Use environmental cover. Match pace without matching trajectory. Stay downwind if possible, though the smoke-saturated air made scent detection irrelevant.
Gabi led. Falco followed. They moved through the wreckage of the internment zone's eastern sector, past burning buildings and abandoned artillery positions and bodies that neither child looked at anymore because looking had become unsustainable.
They found the dead Scout in a side street.
Loid watched from behind an overturned cart as Gabi knelt beside the body — a male soldier, killed by what appeared to be rifle fire, his ODM gear intact. She studied the harness for perhaps ten seconds. Then her hands began working — unfastening straps, disconnecting housings, stripping the equipment with a speed and efficiency that spoke to her training. Warrior candidates studied enemy technology. They would have been briefed on ODM gear mechanics. She might not know how to *use* it, but she knew how to *take* it.
Falco helped. His hands were shaking. Hers weren't.
They had the gear free in under two minutes. Gabi slung the grappling mechanism over her shoulder, tested the weight, adjusted her grip. She said something to Falco — too quiet for Loid to catch at this distance. Falco's response was louder, urgent, his voice cracking with the specific desperation of someone trying to talk a person out of something they know they can't talk them out of.
Gabi didn't listen. Gabi was never going to listen. She'd made her decision the moment Eren's titan had risen from the plaza, and nothing — not Falco's pleading, not logic, not the sheer suicidal insanity of what she was planning — was going to unmake it.
*She's going to use that gear to reach the airship. She's barely trained on it. She might kill herself trying. But she won't stop.*
Loid looked at the ODM bundle on his own back. The gear he'd stripped from the dead Scout three streets ago. Complete harness. Gas canisters. Grappling mechanisms. Blade housings.
He had never used ODM gear.
He had never *touched* active ODM gear.
He had Taskmaster recordings of Scout movements from the battle — fragmented, incomplete, captured from rooftop distance through smoke and chaos. He had Loid Forger's general understanding of cable-based mobility systems, which was not nothing but was also not ODM-specific. He had a theoretical grasp of the physics — anchor points, momentum transfer, gas propulsion, the relationship between cable length and arc radius.
He did not have training. He did not have muscle memory. He did not have the proprioceptive calibration that years of practice built into the nervous system. He did not have the specific physical conditioning — core strength, grip endurance, rotational flexibility — that ODM operation demanded.
If he used this gear, he would not look like a Scout. He would look like a man falling with extra steps.
But Gabi was moving. The airship would be arriving soon. Eren's titan was being extracted. The window was closing with every second he spent calculating odds that were never going to be favorable.
*One chance. One. Sasha dies or the timeline breaks. There is no third option.*
Loid pulled the ODM bundle from his back and began strapping in.
---
The harness was a nightmare.
Not mechanically — the connections were logical, the straps intuitive in their routing, the buckle points clearly engineered for rapid deployment. Mechanically, it was fine. But "fine" in a maintenance context and "fine" in a combat deployment context were different things separated by an ocean of experience he didn't have.
The hip connectors sat wrong. He could feel it — the weight distribution was off, pulling him slightly left, which would translate to a lateral drift during any swinging maneuver. He adjusted. Over-adjusted. Adjusted again. Close enough. Not right. *Close enough.*
The gas canisters pressurized with a hiss that made him flinch. The grappling mechanisms felt alien on his forearms — heavy, mechanical, buzzing with contained potential energy that was one trigger squeeze away from launching steel cables at velocities that could embed anchors in stone.
His hands were shaking.
Not Loid's hands. *Henry's* hands. The spy's calm had cracked — not shattered, but cracked, and through the crack poured the raw, unprocessed terror of a man who was about to launch himself into the air on equipment he'd never used, toward a moving aircraft, in a warzone, with no margin for error and a very specific list of consequences for failure that included his own death and the deaths of everyone he'd come to this world to save.
*You are going to hurt yourself.*
The thought was not Loid's operational assessment. It was Henry's honest, gut-level certainty. He was going to hurt himself. The question was how badly and whether he'd be functional afterward.
*Enhanced healing. It'll handle it. Probably. Hopefully.*
*Great. "Hopefully" is doing a lot of load-bearing work in that sentence.*
He checked the triggers. Checked the gas levels. Checked the cable housings. Everything operational. Everything ready. Everything waiting for the person wearing the equipment to be equally ready, which he was not and never would be, so the only option was to go anyway.
The airship appeared over Liberio's skyline.
A dark shape against the smoke-stained sky, descending toward the extraction point. Cable lines were already dropping — Scouts ascending, some carrying wounded, others providing aerial security. The timing was now.
Loid saw Gabi fire her grappling line from a rooftop three blocks away. The cable arced upward, caught something — the airship's lower framework, a support strut, he couldn't tell at this distance — and she was moving. Rising. Swinging wildly, without form or technique, compensating for incompetence with sheer desperate force of will. Falco was with her, clinging to her waist, and the combined weight made their trajectory unstable, oscillating, barely controlled.
They reached the airship. Disappeared underneath it. Found purchase on the lower hull.
*She's on. She's already on. Go. NOW.*
Loid aimed his grappling mechanism at the airship from the opposite side. The angle was bad — too steep, too far, requiring an initial anchor point on an intermediate building to build enough height before a second cable could reach the airship itself.
He fired.
The recoil nearly dislocated his shoulder.
The cable launched with a violence that his body was entirely unprepared for — a sharp, savage *crack* of compressed gas expanding and the anchor rocketing outward trailing steel wire. It hit the face of a building forty meters away and bit into the stone with a sound like a pickaxe striking rock.
The cable went taut. The harness engaged. And Loid was pulled off his feet with a force that rearranged his understanding of acceleration in ways that no theoretical knowledge had prepared him for.
He swung.
"Swung" was generous. He *flailed* — launched forward and upward on a cable arc that should have been smooth but was instead a jerking, lurching catastrophe of incorrect body positioning. His weight was wrong. His center of gravity was wrong. His legs were doing something that his Taskmaster recordings screamed was incorrect — hanging instead of tucking, creating drag, converting momentum into oscillation.
He hit the building face with his right side.
The impact was enormous. His shoulder took the brunt — a collision that drove the joint inward and sent a white-hot lance of pain from clavicle to fingertip. His vision flashed. His grip on the controls nearly broke. He bounced off the stone, spinning, the cable the only thing preventing a four-story fall to the street below.
*Anchor. Second anchor. NOW.*
His left hand — the one that still functioned — found the trigger for the second grappling mechanism. He aimed upward. At the airship. At the dark hull shape that was close now, much closer than it had been, close enough to see individual rivets and hull panels and the rope ladder that Scouts were using for boarding.
He fired.
The anchor hit the hull. He heard it — metal on metal, the bite of engineered teeth into the airship's structural frame. The cable snapped taut. The first cable released — automatic, the mechanism cycling as designed — and he was airborne again, rising now, pulled upward toward the airship's belly with a speed that made his stomach drop and his injured shoulder shriek.
He reached the hull. His hands — one functional, one compromised — found the framework. Metal struts. Handholds not designed as handholds but usable as such if you didn't care about comfort or safety, which he no longer did because his entire body was a single unified experience of pain and adrenaline and he was *here*, he was on the airship, he was—
Hanging from the underside of a military aircraft by his fingertips with a dislocated or badly bruised right shoulder, a harness that was cutting into his thighs, and the absolute certainty that if his grip failed he would fall to a death that would render everything meaningless.
He climbed.
It took longer than it should have. Each movement was a negotiation between his body's damage and his mind's demand. Pull. Shift. Find new grip. Pull again. The hull's framework provided handholds at irregular intervals. His right arm participated under protest — every extension sending feedback that his nervous system interpreted as a strong suggestion to stop.
He found a maintenance hatch on the airship's port side. Unlocked — why would it be locked? They were in flight over a warzone, not parked at an airfield. His fingers found the release mechanism. The hatch opened.
He pulled himself inside.
---
The interior was dim. Utilitarian. Metal walls, metal floor, the hum of engines transmitted through every surface as vibration. He was in a secondary corridor — maintenance access, not the main cabin. Emergency lighting provided enough visibility to move.
He moved.
And almost immediately collided with a Paradisian soldier.
The man was young — early twenties, uniformed, rifle at low ready. He'd been walking toward the maintenance section, probably on a security sweep or heading to check on something mechanical. He was not expecting to encounter a blood-covered stranger in a Marleyan soldier's jacket emerging from a hull hatch with ODM gear strapped haphazardly across his body.
The soldier's eyes went wide. His mouth opened — to shout, to warn, to raise alarm. His rifle began to rise.
Loid's body moved before his conscious mind authorized the action.
Loid Forger's close-quarters training — the *real* training, the skills that were integrated into neural pathways with the depth of lifelong practice — activated with a precision that stood in humiliating contrast to the ODM catastrophe he'd just survived.
Left hand on the rifle barrel. Push it aside — not up, not down, *aside*, redirecting the muzzle away from his body without fighting the soldier's grip strength directly. Right hand — damaged shoulder screaming, overridden — to the soldier's throat. Not a strike. A grip. Thumb against the carotid, fingers wrapping the neck, applying pressure that was calibrated not to crush the trachea but to restrict blood flow to the brain.
The soldier's eyes went wider. Then unfocused. Then closed.
Four seconds. Unconscious. Not dead. Loid lowered him to the floor, eased his body against the corridor wall, and checked his breathing. Steady. Normal. He'd wake in two to three minutes with a headache and confusion but no lasting damage.
Loid pulled the cloth from the soldier's collar — a standard-issue field neckerchief — and used it to gag him. Not because the gag would hold long, but because it would delay any alarm by the thirty seconds he might need.
He bound the soldier's wrists with the man's own belt. Quick. Functional. Not elegant.
Then he moved deeper into the airship.
---
The main cabin was larger than he'd expected. Open, designed for troop transport, with bench seating along the walls and a central floor space currently occupied by Scouts in various states of post-combat exhaustion. Some were treating wounds. Some were sitting in the particular silence of people who had just killed other people and hadn't yet decided how to feel about it. Some were talking — low, clipped, the functional communication of soldiers confirming status and sharing information.
Loid didn't enter the main cabin.
He positioned himself in the connecting corridor — the passage between the maintenance section and the main space, shadowed, narrow enough to conceal his presence from casual observation. Through the open hatchway he could see into the cabin.
He could see *them*.
Connie — sitting on a bench, head back against the wall, eyes closed. His blades were still in his hands. He hadn't put them down. Couldn't put them down. The grip was a reflex that his conscious mind hadn't yet overridden.
Jean — standing near the far wall, arms crossed, jaw tight. He was looking at nothing. The look of a man doing math he didn't want to do — counting who was present against who should be present and finding the numbers wrong.
Armin — pale, trembling slightly, seated on the floor rather than a bench. The aftermath of the Colossal transformation. The physical cost of becoming a god and then becoming human again, the body trying to reconcile two states of existence that shouldn't be possible within the same biological framework.
And Sasha.
She was standing near the main door — the door on the opposite side of the cabin from Loid's position. Alive. Animated. Talking to another Scout about something, her hands moving with the characteristic expressiveness that was so fundamentally *Sasha* — warm, open, her body language radiating the specific approachability of a person who had never learned to perform emotional distance.
She was standing exactly where she'd been standing in canon when Gabi's bullet found her.
Loid's breath caught.
*She's right there. She's right there and she's alive and in less than five minutes she won't be unless I—*
A sound. Below. Faint. The scrape of metal on metal — someone climbing the hull framework the way he'd climbed it. Someone finding the same handholds. Someone pulling themselves toward an entry point with desperate, furious determination.
Gabi was already here.
Loid pressed himself deeper into the corridor shadow and felt the blood drain from his face.
*Oh no.*
He scanned the cabin. Sasha by the door. Connie on the bench. Jean against the wall. Armin on the floor. Other Scouts distributed throughout the space. None of them watching the secondary access points. None of them expecting a threat from *inside* the airship. They'd just won a battle. They were extracting. The danger was below and behind them, not within.
*She's here. She's already here. She has the rifle. She has the shot. She's going to come through one of the access points on the starboard side and she's going to see Sasha and she's going to fire and—*
He saw her.
A glimpse — partial, fragmented — through the lattice of internal framework on the cabin's far side. A small figure, crouched, moving with the controlled intensity of a child who had been trained to kill and was about to do exactly that. The rifle was in her hands. A Marleyan infantry rifle, standard issue, stolen from the same battlefield that had provided her ODM gear.
She was positioning herself. Finding the angle. Lining up the shot.
Sasha was twenty feet away, her back partially turned, laughing at something the other Scout had said.
*What do I do? What do I DO?*
The panic hit him like the shockwave had — total, overwhelming, a white-noise flood that drowned the spy's calm and left Henry Ashford standing alone in the wreckage of his composure. Not Loid. Not the operative. *Henry*. A twenty-six-year-old man who had never been in a fight, never fired a weapon at a person, never operated under conditions where a decision made in the next three seconds would determine whether someone lived or died.
*I can't stop her from here. I'm too far. The corridor is ten feet long and the cabin is another fifteen and Gabi is on the opposite side and there is no angle of approach that gets me to her before she fires.*
*I can't shout a warning. If I shout, she fires immediately — reflex, the trained response to discovery. She shoots before anyone can react and Sasha dies and it doesn't matter that I warned them because the bullet is faster than their response.*
*I can't shoot her. I have a sidearm. I have Loid's marksmanship. But she's partially concealed behind structural framing and the cabin is full of Scouts and a missed shot or a through-and-through hits one of them and I kill an ally instead of saving one.*
*I can—*
*I can get to Sasha.*
The thought crystallized.
Not Gabi. *Sasha*. He couldn't stop the shot from being fired. He couldn't intercept the bullet. He couldn't neutralize the shooter in time. But he could change where the target was standing when the trigger was pulled.
Push her. Tackle her. Throw his body into hers and knock her out of the firing line. The bullet hits empty air or hits the wall or hits—
*Hits me.*
The calculation took less than a second. Not because Loid's training made it fast. Because there was nothing to calculate.
If he pushed Sasha, the bullet might miss entirely. Best case. Sasha lives. He lives. Deviation achieved.
If he pushed Sasha, the bullet might hit him instead. Likely case. The firing angle, Sasha's position, his approach vector — if he came from this side and pushed her that direction, his body would cross the bullet's path during the displacement. He would be moving into the line of fire, not away from it.
Enhanced healing. R.O.B.'s gift. Not regeneration. Not invulnerability. Faster than normal. Cuts closing in hours. Bones healing in weeks.
A rifle bullet through the torso was not a cut. A rifle bullet through the torso was catastrophic tissue damage, potential organ perforation, massive hemorrhage. "Faster than normal" healing didn't matter if you bled out in three minutes.
*But I have the documents. Three copies. Three delivery paths. If I die here, the knowledge survives. The plan survives. Kessler's copy reaches the Azumabito. The copy in the wall cavity can be found if someone knows to look. The copy on my body—*
*The copy on my body will be found by the Scouts. On this airship. Tonight. They'll search a dead stranger and find a thirty-one page dossier addressed to their Commander containing information that no living person outside their ranks should possess.*
*Even if I die, the deviation occurs. Sasha lives. Eren sees the proof. The documents provide the alternative.*
*And if I don't die — if the healing holds, if the bullet misses the critical structures, if the Scouts' medics are good enough—*
*Then I'm alive. On the airship. Surrounded by the people I need to reach. With the most dramatic possible introduction to their attention — the stranger who appeared from nowhere and took a bullet for one of their own.*
*That's not a plan. That's a gamble.*
*It's the only gamble on the table.*
Gabi's rifle settled. Loid could see it through the framework — the barrel steadying, the small hands finding their position, the child soldier's breathing slowing the way she'd been trained to slow it before a shot. Controlled. Disciplined. Twelve years old and about to kill with the technical proficiency of a graduated marksman.
Sasha was still talking. Still smiling. Still standing exactly where the bullet would find her.
Loid stepped out of the corridor.
He was moving before the decision finished forming — legs driving forward, arms reaching, mouth opening. The distance was fifteen feet. The time was less than two seconds. His injured shoulder was irrelevant. His exhaustion was irrelevant. His fear was irrelevant. Everything was irrelevant except the geometry — his body, her body, the space between them, the angle of the approaching bullet.
**"MOVE!"**
The word erupted from him with a volume and desperation that he didn't recognize as his own voice. It filled the cabin. It hit every ear simultaneously. It turned every head.
Sasha's head turned. Her eyes found him — a stranger, blood-covered, sprinting toward her with arms outstretched, screaming. Her expression cycled through confusion-recognition-alarm in a fraction of a second, her combat instincts engaging, her body beginning to react—
Too slow. She was fast but the bullet was faster and the trigger was already being pulled and—
Loid hit her.
Not gracefully. Not with the controlled precision of Loid Forger's hand-to-hand expertise. He hit her the way a desperate man hits someone he's trying to save — full body, maximum force, shoulder-first, driving into her midsection with every pound of momentum his sprint had generated. The impact folded her — not painfully, not injuriously, but *completely* — lifting her feet from the deck and carrying her sideways, out of the position she'd occupied, out of the line that connected Gabi's rifle to the space where Sasha's body had been.
**BANG.**
The sound was enormous in the enclosed space. A detonation of compressed air and propellant that turned the cabin into an echo chamber, the report bouncing off metal walls and multiplying into a sustained acoustic assault that made ears ring and eyes flinch.
Loid felt the bullet before he heard it.
Not pain. Not immediately. A *punch*. A localized, focused impact on the left side of his back — below the shoulder blade, above the hip — that carried a force wildly disproportionate to the projectile's size. It felt like being hit with a hammer. A very small hammer moving at seven hundred meters per second.
Then the pain came.
It came all at once. Not building. Not crescendoing. *Arriving* — fully formed, comprehensive, a white-hot nova of sensory overload that started at the impact point and radiated outward in every direction simultaneously. His left side stopped being a part of his body and became a *location* — a place where something terrible had happened, distinct from the rest of him, screaming in a frequency that drowned out thought.
He and Sasha hit the deck together. Her beneath him — cushioned by his body, protected by his mass, uninjured. Him on top — collapsing, the strength leaving his legs in a single coordinated departure, his body's systems recognizing the damage before his mind could catalog it and beginning the emergency shutdown of non-essential functions.
*I'm shot.*
The thought was remarkably calm. Observational. As if the part of his brain that processed language had been placed behind glass and was watching the rest of him with clinical interest.
*Left posterior thorax. Below the scapula. The bullet entered through the latissimus dorsi and — based on the pain radiation pattern — may have clipped the lower lobe of the left lung. Or a rib. Or both. Hemorrhage is certain. Severity is unknown. I am going to lose consciousness in approximately—*
The cabin exploded into chaos.
Sasha was beneath him, alive, breathing, eyes wide with shock, her mouth open but no sound coming out. She was staring up at the stranger who had tackled her and was now bleeding onto her uniform from a wound she couldn't see.
Connie was on his feet. Blades in hand. His head snapping between the fallen bodies and the source of the gunshot, combat instincts overriding post-battle exhaustion in an instant.
Jean was moving — not toward Loid and Sasha but toward the starboard side where the shot had originated, his hand on his sidearm, his voice cutting through the chaos with the sharp authority of a squad leader: *"SHOOTER! STARBOARD FRAMEWORK! WEAPONS UP!"*
Armin hadn't moved from the floor. But his eyes were moving — fast, processing, the strategist's mind doing what it did. Scanning the scene. Cataloging variables. Building a picture from fragments.
Mikasa appeared. Loid hadn't seen where she'd been. Suddenly she was *there* — between the starboard access and the rest of the cabin, blades drawn, body positioned in the specific geometry of someone who had placed themselves between a threat and the people they would die to protect. Her eyes found the source of the shot.
Gabi.
The girl stood in the framework gap on the starboard side, rifle still raised, barrel still smoking, face twisted into an expression that was equal parts triumph and devastation. She'd hit someone. Not the person she'd aimed at — the stranger had ruined that — but she'd hit *someone*, and the twelve-year-old part of her that was still a child was colliding with the soldier part of her that had been trained to kill, and the collision was producing something that looked like it might shatter her from the inside.
Falco was behind her. His face was white. His hands were empty. He looked like a boy watching a nightmare confirm itself in real time.
Sasha was saying something. Loid could feel her voice vibrating through her chest beneath him — words, sounds, he couldn't resolve them into language because his auditory processing was degrading along with everything else. She was trying to push him off. Trying to see the wound. Trying to help.
*Sasha is alive.*
The thought cut through the pain and the fog and the encroaching darkness with a clarity that felt like sunlight through cloud cover.
*Sasha is alive. The deviation occurred. The timeline is broken. Eren will know. Eren will—*
His vision narrowed. Tunneled. The edges going dark in the specific, medically recognizable pattern of blood pressure dropping below the threshold required to maintain full cerebral perfusion.
*Enhanced healing. Please. Please work. Please be enough.*
His face was against the cold metal of the airship deck. He could feel Sasha's hands on his back — pressing, applying pressure to the wound, her training engaging through her shock because that was what soldiers did, they helped, they acted, even when they didn't understand what was happening.
He could hear voices. Overlapping. Urgent. Jean shouting orders. Connie shouting something else. Mikasa — silent, always silent, but her presence a force that restructured the room's geometry around her.
He could hear Gabi screaming. Not words. Just sound. The sound of a child who had done what she was built to do and was learning in real time what that cost.
*Sasha is alive.*
*The stone hit the water.*
*The ripples—*