Attack on Titan · Chat

Eren was woken up by the light seeping through his eyelids. When he opened his eyes, the leaves overhead rustled in the wind, and the dappled sunlight shattered into bright white spots that made him squint. He blinked three times before his pupils could focus. Then he found himself lying at the base of a tree, the back of his head resting against a piece of upturned bark, pressing uncomfortably against him. He propped up his upper body as something cool trickled down his forehead—whether it was sweat or something else, he wiped it with his hand, leaving a smear of dark red on the back of his hand. He was having another nosebleed. Mikasa was crouching right in front of him. Her black hair hung down, obscuring half her face, but Eren could see her eyes—that gaze, quiet as a pool of still water, which he had been used to since he was nine years old. She handed him a folded handkerchief without saying a word. As Eren took the handkerchief and pressed it against his nose, he suddenly felt something was off. He stared at Mikasa for three seconds. "...Your hair," his voice was a little hoarse, "why is it shorter?" Mikasa didn't answer. She merely tilted her head slightly, as if to say, "What foolish things are you talking about?" Eren looked down at the blood on the back of his hand, then at the ends of Mikasa's hair—shoulder-length and neat, cut by her own hands during some past winter. He felt as though he had just had a very long dream. So long that he couldn't remember the details, only that someone kept calling his name in his ear. He shook his head and gripped the blood-stained handkerchief tightly. Just then, the grass near the roots rustled, and Armin came scrambling up the slope, almost crawling on all fours. Grass seeds clung to his clothes, and he held a thick book with curled edges tightly to his chest, his face flushed from running. "Eren! Mikasa! Look!" He spread the book out on the grass, flipped to a certain page, and pointed to the illustration. The page depicted a vast ocean reflecting flames. The colors had been painted by hand, unevenly smudged, but the strange orange-red glow made Eren's eyes sting. "The book says," Armin gasped, his finger tracing along the edge of the illustration, "that outside the walls, there is fiery water, lands of ice, and snowfields of sand. There is everything." Eren lowered his hand from his nose. He leaned in to look at the drawing, and a drop of blood from his forehead fell onto the margin of the page, bleeding into a tiny red dot. He quickly wiped at it with his sleeve, but Armin didn't mind, simply pushing the book closer to him. "It's true, it's written in the book." "Keep your voice down," Eren whispered, glancing around. "If anyone sees us with this kind of book, we'll be arrested." Armin closed the book, hugged it back to his chest, his knees buckling slightly as he stood up. Mikasa stood up as well, brushing off the grass bits. The three walked out from under the tree, heading down the slope toward the wall. Wisps of smoke rose from the roofs on either side of the slope, the clanking of a blacksmith's shop echoed, and a middle-aged man pushing a wooden cart piled high with radishes passed by them, the cartwheels creaking as they rolled over the cobblestones. Children chased a leather ball at the alley entrance; the ball rolled to the base of the wall, hit a loose brick, and bounced into the drainage ditch. No one looked up at the fifty-meter-tall wall. Eren suddenly stopped in his tracks and turned around. The wall behind him shot straight up into the clouds, its greyish-white stone baked hot by the sun, its surface marked by several deep claw marks that scraped all the way from the top to the bottom. They were left there ten years ago. He didn't remember it himself, but he knew what they were. "Hey," Eren stared at the claw marks, a muffled sound escaping his throat, "if you say there's no one outside the walls, then where did that book come from?" Walking to his right with the book in his arms, Armin was taken aback by the question. "...I don't know either. But the book says the outside world—" "There's something in the outside world, right?" Eren cut him off. He didn't wait for Armin's answer. He turned his head and looked up at the watchtower atop the wall—the tip of the tower was tiny, like a needle stuck on top of the wall. Soldiers stood guard up there, their capes fluttering loudly in the wind. "I'm going to see it with my own eyes," Eren said, letting his blood-stained sleeve fall. "What is actually out there beyond the walls." Mikasa walked on his left. She didn't look at the wall; she looked at the back of Eren's head—the back of his head that had gathered bits of grass while he slept. She reached out to pluck a withered leaf stuck to the ends of his hair, then withdrew her hand, saying nothing. The three of them continued walking forward. Their shadows were stretched long by the sun, overlapping and casting crooked silhouettes on the cobblestone road leading to the city gate. The sentries on the wall changed shifts; the newly arrived guard raised his binoculars and swept his gaze over the area outside the wall. There was nothing outside the wall. A patch of open ground, a river, a few trees, and an empty grassland stretching all the way to the horizon. There was nothing on that grassland—for now. <choice_group> <choice id="1">Change the subject</choice> <choice id="2">Observe the current details</choice> <choice id="3">Advance the current plot</choice> </choice_group>