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The Scout Regiment's main inventory storage was a carefully maintained ecosystem of cold, sharp scents: oiled leather, polished steel, the faint, clean tang of ethanol used for cleaning… and the ever-present, simmering aura of Levi's displeasure. It was an atmosphere as familiar to the regiment as the weight of their vertical maneuvering gear.
Levi stood with his arms crossed, a single, pristine white cleaning cloth dangling from his fingers like a judge's gavel. His grey eyes, narrowed to critical slits, were fixed on a high shelf of ODM gear canisters. A layer of dust, invisible to anyone else, was a glaring testament to negligence in his world.
"Explain this, Four-Eyes," he said, his voice a low, flat line of sound, devoid of heat but full of promise. He didn't need to gesture; his entire being was a pointing finger.
"The requisition forms from your last 'field test' are an insult to the concept of paperwork. You listed 'One High-Tension Wire, Titan-Grade' as 'consumable.' Enlighten me. How does one consume twenty meters of high-tensile steel cable?"
Hange, who had been mentally dissecting the gear ratio of a new grapple design, blinked, her brain forcibly shifted from mechanics to logistics.
"Levi! You're focusing on the most mundane details! It was consumed in the fiery crucible of discovery! The structural failure under multi-vector, high-velocity stress was… beautiful! It didn't just break; it underwent a catastrophic, harmonic disintegration! The data points alone are worth a hundred meters of cable!"
"The data," Levi deadpanned, not moving a muscle, "is a charcoal scribble on a piece of parchment that probably gave Moblit an aneurysm. That cable came out of my operational budget. You're a sinkhole for resources, Hange. A loud, chaotic, and unapologetic sinkhole."
He took a single, silent step forward, his voice dropping into a register that was more threatening for its lack of volume.
"This isn't about the cable. It's about a pattern. Your carelessness is a contagion. We are balancing on a razor's edge. The pigs in Sina are sharpening their knives, waiting for us to bleed a single unnecessary drop, and you're handing them a ledger written in lunacy and signed with a smiley face."
Hange drew a breath, her face flushed with a passionate, ready retort, her hands already shaping the air to illustrate her point.
"Hey, listen her-"
CRRRR-ASH-BOOM!
The sound erupted from directly above them. It wasn't just a single noise, more followed. A heavy, splintering crack; the sound of a massive oak desk being obliterated; was instantly followed by a percussive, high-pitched symphony of shattering glass. Not one or two jars, but a dozen or more, each crash more violent than the last. Then, a final, heavy thud that shook dust from the ceiling beams.
The silence that rushed in to fill the void was profound, thick, and unnerving. It was the silence of held breath, broken only by the faint, final tinkle of falling glass shards.
Levi and Hange stood frozen, their argument annihilated by the sheer, physical shockwave of sound. Levi's body coiled the whole time, every instinct screaming threat.
"…The hell?"
Hange's face on the other hand, had drained of all color, her passionate defense replaced by a look of dawning, personal horror.
"That came from my office…" she whispered, the words a ghost of sound. "My… my samples…"
Levi's expression didn't change, but the focus of his fury shifted in an instant from dusty shelves to the ceiling above. The irritation was gone, replaced by a cold, operational clarity. "We have to move, now."
He was moving before he finished the sentence, Hange stumbled after him, her scientific curiosity utterly overwritten by a visceral, panicked need to see the damage.
As they burst into the main corridor, they found it was no longer the quiet, sleeping artery of the headquarters. The crash had been a cardiac arrest. Doors along the hall were flung open, scouts stumbling out in various states of undress, hands fumbling for non-existent weapons. The air was thick with confused murmurs that quickly sharpened into alarmed questions.
"What in the hells was that?"
"Sounded like the whole ceiling came down!"
"Squad Leader Hange's lab—!"
The thud of boots on stone became a stampede as more scouts, those on night watch, converged from adjacent corridors, their faces grim and alert. Levi didn't break stride, moving through the gathering crowd with an immovable authority that forced them to part around him.
"You two, secure this stairwell! You, with me! The rest of you, fall back and form a perimeter on this level! No one comes up or goes down without my direct order!" His commands were sharp, precise, and brooked no argument. The scouts, galvanized by his tone, snapped into action.
"Yes sir!"
At the top of the stairs, they intersected with Erwin and Mike, who were emerging from the strategy room. Mike's head was tilted, his body taut and his nostrils flaring as he sampled the air like a hound. Erwin's face was a placid mask, but his steel blue eyes were a whirlpool of rapid calculation.
"Levi. Hange," Erwin's voice was a deep, steady rumble, a counterpoint to the rising panic. "Report."
"No time for reports," Levi gritted out, barely glancing at them as he rounded the corner into the officers' wing. "Something just decided Four-Eyes' office needed a structural reassessment."
The door to Hange's office was slightly ajar. From within seeped a foul, complex odor; a nauseating cocktail of spilled formaldehyde, sharp ethanol, the coppery reek of old Titan blood, and beneath it all, something else… something metallic and alien, like the air after a lightning strike.
Hange, her heart hammering against her ribs, pushed past Levi and shoved the door open.
The sight that greeted them was not merely destruction. It was a portrait of rage.
It was as if a localized tornado, filled with teeth and claws, had been born and died in the space of thirty seconds. Hange's massive, solid-oak desk was not just overturned; it was eviscerated, reduced to a heap of splinters and kindling, as if a beast of unimaginable strength had systematically torn it apart. Her bookshelves were toppled like dominoes, their precious contents; years of painstaking research on Titan behavior, anatomy, and biology; scattered and shredded into a snowdrift of confetti. The glass-fronted cabinet housing her Titan samples was a crystalline ruin, its jars shattered, their grotesque contents; pickled eyes, dissected fingers, chunks of greyish flesh; spilled across the floorboards in a stew of preserving fluids and decay.
But what was most chilling was the intent. This wasn't a search for valuables. It wasn't a hurried ransacking. This was a systematic, furious annihilation.
Hange stood frozen in the doorway, her hands slowly rising to clutch at the sides of her head. A low, wounded moan escaped her, building in her chest until it erupted into a raw, guttural wail of loss.
"MY OFFICE!" she screamed, her voice cracking with an anguish usually reserved for a fallen comrade.
"My life's work! My samples! Who… what could have… WHO DID THIS TO YOU?!"
She took a staggering step into the carnage, her boots crunching horrifically on glass and bone fragments.
Levi didn't follow her in. He remained on the threshold, his body a statue of controlled tension. All complaints about her usual mess were rendered absurd. This was a crime scene. His grey eyes, cold and hard as river stones, scanned the room, cataloging, assessing.
"Tch," he spat, the sound a venomous bullet of sound. "A breach. Inside our walls. Inside our goddamn headquarters." He turned his head, his gaze sweeping the horrified faces of the scouts in the hall.
"This isn't a spilled inkpot. This is an attack. What the hell got in here?"
Erwin moved past him, his broad shoulders filling the doorway. His presence was an anchor of grim reality. "Mike." he said, his voice low.
Mike had been silent; his eyes closed as his entire being focused on the olfactory nightmare before him. He was dissecting the air, layer by layer: the acrid chemicals, the sweet-rot of exposed Titan flesh, the dust, the panic-sweat of the scouts. His eyes snapped open, and they were sharp, focused, and deeply troubled.
"It's here too," Mike stated, his voice a low, gravelly rumble that commanded silence. "The scent from the wagon. It's the same, but… amplified. Ozone. A sharp, animal musk. Something… foreign. And… fear. Thick, panicked fear." He turned his head slowly, like a radar dish, pinpointing the epicenter. "It's strongest in there. It lingered."
"The delivery man," Erwin said, his tone leaving no room for debate. It was a statement of fact; a chain of causality being forged. "Find him. Detain him. He does not take a single step outside this garrison."
Mike gave a curt, grim nod and melted back into the corridor to inform some scouts nearby before returning back to the crime scene, the mission was clear. The stablehand, Gerth, was about to have the worst night of his life.
As scouts began to cautiously filter into the room under Levi's terse, clipped directions; "Don't touch anything! Just secure the area! You, get a salvage team, but tell them to wait for my command!"—Hange's paralyzing grief began to mutate. The scientist in her, the obsessive analyst, was reawakening, pushing past the horror. She dropped to her hands and knees amidst the wreckage of her life's work, her eyes scanning the debris with a feverish, desperate intensity.
"Levi… Erwin… look at this," she murmured, her voice trembling but clear, her finger pointing to a deep, savage gouge in the thick leg of her overturned desk.
It wasn't a clean cut from a blade. It was a set of four parallel furrows, each nearly an inch deep, torn into the solid wood as if it were soft clay. The edges were ragged, splintered.
"No knife did that," Levi observed, his voice flat. "No tool we have. That's… an animal. A big one."
"But what kind of animal…" Hange trailed off, her mind racing through possibilities—a feral dog? A bear? None fit. None could get in here. Her fingers hovered just above the gouge. She saw something that caught her attention. A splash of color that was utterly…strange.
In the deepest part of the furrow, clinging to the splintered wood, was a glob of thick, viscous fluid. It was black, but shot through with a sickly, phosphorescent purple sheen. It seemed to drink the light from the room.
"Ink?" Hange breathed, but the word itself feeling foreign on her tongue. With the reverent care of an archaeologist unearthing a relic, she pulled a small, empty sample vial and a scraping tool from her belt pouch. She carefully coaxed the black, tarry substance into the glass container, sealing it with a definitive click.
"It's not blood. Not any blood I've ever seen. It's… other."
Her eyes, wide and magnified behind her lenses, continued their frantic survey, piecing together the narrative of the attack like a detective at a grisly murder scene. She traced the path of destruction; the toppled shelves, the shredded books, the eviscerated cabinet. Her gaze finally landed on the epicenter, the ground zero of the rage.
The space where her desk had been was the most thoroughly destroyed. The wood wasn't just broken; it was pulverized. And lying amidst the splinters, half-hidden under a torn and crumpled map of Wall Maria, was the larger, main shard of Obsidian's crystal, defiantly unblemished. But the small, chipped-off piece she kept on her desk for daily study… it was gone. Her eyes darted around, finding it a few feet away, lying against the baseboard. It had been swept aside with enough force to scar the wall, but then seemingly ignored.
Her mind began to spin, but the gears were jammed by the sheer scale of the devastation. Facts and speculation warred, each new piece of data feeling like it belonged to a different, impossible puzzle.
"The wagon…" she muttered, the words tasting like ash. She rose slowly to her feet, her gaze distant, as she saw past the wreckage. "It arrived tonight." She looked at Mike, who had returned, his expression grim.
"Mike. You said it smelled 'off.' Define 'off.' What did you smell exactly?"
Mike's nostrils flared slightly, as if re-testing the air in the hall. "It's… layered," he rumbled, his voice low. "Under the meat and salt and the driver's fear. There's a sharpness. Like the air after a lightning strike. And beneath that… a musk. Not animal, not human. Something… foreign. The same scent is in that room, but it's hot. Fresh. And there's fear there, too. A lot of it."
"Foreign musk?" Hange's brow furrowed. She looked at the deep gouges in the desk leg, running a finger along the splintered edge without touching it.
"These claws… the force required… it's not a bear or a wolf. The size, the spacing is all wrong." Her eyes darted to the shattered sample jars. "And its behavior… this isn't foraging. This is a frenzy. Rage or pure, blind terror."
Her focus shifted to the small vial in her hand. "And this… this is the key. This isn't any biological matter I've ever seen." She looked from the vial to the claw marks, then back to Mike. "Your 'foreign' scent… and this 'foreign' substance… they're connected."
Levi, who had been silently surveying the room with a look of profound disgust at the severe damages, finally spoke, his voice a low growl.
"Get to the point, Four-Eyes. What are you suggesting? That some new breed of Titan learned to open doors and has a grudge against your filing system?"
"That we consider every possibility!" Hange retorted. "An impossible breach. An unknown creature. An unknown sample. A scent that doesn't belong!" She looked at Erwin.
"The one other 'impossible' thing? The rumors from the interior. The 'Demon Dog' of Wall Sina."
Erwin's face was grim. "The report stated it scaled the wall and vanished."
"Exactly!" Hange swept her arm around the room. "What if it's the same creature? It would explain how it got in here unseen!"
Levi scoffed, but the sound lacked its usual conviction. "Tch. Demon dog? You're building on gossip."
"Then what did this, Levi?!" Hange shot back, pointing at the shredded desk. "Mike's nose isn't fooled by gossip!"
A tense silence fell. The theory was a leap, but the evidence was undeniable.
Hange's eyes swept the room again, snagging on the epicenter of the destruction. She knelt, pushing aside splinters. Her fingers brushed against the main shard of Obsidian's crystal, then looked back at the smaller one flung against the wall.
That's a bit odd…
Mike's head snapped up, his body tensing up like a drawn bowstring. "The scent. It's moving. Downstairs—the main storage hall."
Before anyone could react, a chorus of shouts and the clatter of boots echoed from the floor below, followed by a sound that froze the blood in their veins; a deep, guttural, and utterly alien growl, layered with the screech of tearing metal.
Levi's eyes narrowed, caution kicking in. "It's in the gear lockup."
He was already a blur of motion, Mike a half-step behind him, both men bolting from the wrecked office and toward the staircase without a second glance.
"Levi! Mike! Do not engage!" Erwin's command was sharp, but it was lost in the chaos, swallowed by the sounds of panic and destruction from below.
Left in the sudden quiet of the demolished office, Erwin turned his full, formidable attention to Hange. The time for speculation was over.
"Forget the 'why,' Hange," he said, his voice low and intense.
"The 'what' is now an immediate threat to every life in this building. I need facts, not theories. What is this thing's biology? Is that substance toxic? Corrosive? Is it a tracker or a poison? Find me something we can use to stop it before they corner it and we have a bloodbath."
The order was clear. As the sounds of the hunt raged below, Hange's mission shifted from forensic analysis to urgent battlefield science. She looked at the vial of black ichor in her hand, no longer just a sample, but a potential key to survival.
"With me!" Erwin commanded, his voice cutting through her thoughts as he strode from the room, expecting her to follow. The investigation was now mobile, chasing the chaos.
Gear lockup
Phasing from the choking, chemical-tainted air of the lab, the Vulpimancer rematerialized in the cold, vast expanse of the Scout Regiment's main gear storage. Its world was still a screaming vortex of new, painful stimuli, and beneath it all; the gnawing, cellular hunger and the throbbing agony of its heightened senses were the only constants.
Once again, it was cornered and trapped. The walls of this new, larger "cage" were closing in. A fresh wave of panicked, feral rage surged through it. It couldn't destroy the walls, so it would destroy everything within them.
It lashed out. A powerful, blind swipe of its foreleg sent a rack of meticulously maintained ODM gear crashing to the stone floor, metal components screeching as they twisted and shattered. It slammed its body into a stack of wooden crates containing spare gas canisters, splintering them open. The clatter of metal and wood was a satisfying cacophony, a small outlet for its immense suffering.
The noise attracted attention.
The door to the storage hall burst open. Four Scouts, part of the newly formed search parties, stood frozen in the doorway, their torches casted shaky beams of light into the gloom till it fell upon the creature.
It was an abomination of nature. A hound from a fever dream, built of corded purple muscle and nightmare proportions. Along its spine and legs, sickly blue V-shaped patterns glowed with a malevolent, pulsing light. But its face… its face was a smooth, horrifyingly blank dome.
"By the Walls…" one scout whispered with a trembling voice. "What the hell is that?"
The Vulpimancer's head swiveled towards the sound. The sudden light, the shouting; it was all too much. A memory of shouting scientists, of blinding lights. A guttural, earth-shaking growl ripped from its chest, a sound of pure, undiluted threat.
One of the scouts stumbled back a step, his boot catching on a scattered gear component. The clatter was the final trigger.
The Vulpimancer moved with blinding speed. It didn't pounce; it flowed across the floor, closing the distance in a heartbeat. Before the soldier could even scream, a massive paw, tipped with claws like shards of obsidian, swiped down. There was a sickening tear of fabric and flesh, and a cry of agony as the scout was thrown back against the wall, his arm laid open from shoulder to elbow, blood instantly soaking his uniform.
"RYKKER!" another scout yelled, lunging forward to help his pinned, panicking comrade.
The Vulpimancer's tail, thick and powerful as a battering ram, whipped around. It caught the second scout square in the chest with a sound like a sack of grain hitting stone. The man was lifted off his feet and crashed into two others, sending all three tumbling to the ground in a heap of broken limbs and stunned gasps.
The creature loomed over the helpless Rykker, its blank face lowering, its jaws opening wide for the killing bite.
A blur of green and white dropped from the ceiling rafters.
THWUMP.
A heavy, booted foot connected with the side of the Vulpimancer's head with enough force to snap its neck if it were any other creature. It wasn't a killing blow, but it was a stunning impact. The beast staggered sideways with a roar of surprised fury, its attack on Rykker aborted.
Levi landed in a crouch between the beast and the injured scouts, his grey eyes burning with cold fire. Mike landed beside him a second later, a solid, imposing presence.
"What the hell…am I looking at?" Levi spat, his gaze never leaving the creature as it shook its head, the five good eyes on its head now snapping open, burning with malevolent blue light.
"Ugly bastard, isn't it?" Mike grunted, his own body coiled and ready.
"Are you lot still breathing?" Levi called over his shoulder, not turning.
"Y-yes, Captain!" one of the downed scouts managed.
"Then get the hell out of here! Now! Take the injured and go!"
The scouts didn't need to be told twice. They scrambled, dragging their bleeding, moaning comrade out of the storage hall as fast as their injuries would allow.
Now it was just the two aces against the nightmare.
The Vulpimancer, now fully enraged, charged. Levi stood his ground until the last possible second, then sidestepped with impossible grace, a stiletto knife; always kept on his person; appeared in his hand. He drove it towards the creature's shoulder. The blade skittered off the dense hide with a spark, barely drawing a trickle of black ichor. Useless.
"Mike!" Levi barked.
Mike had already moved. He snatched up two ODM swords from the destroyed rack nearby. One was bent, the other notched, but they were steel. He tossed the less-damaged one to Levi in a smooth, underhand arc.
Levi caught it, the weight familiar and comforting.
Mike, a mountain of strength, went low, his powerful swings hacking at its legs and hamstrings. The Vulpimancer yelped in pained surprise as Mike's sword bit deep into its hind leg, a gush of black ichor slicking the floor. It spun to face this new, powerful threat, but Levi was already there.
Exploiting the opening, Levi became a whirlwind of steel. He didn't swing with brute force; he executed a series of lightning-fast, precise thrusts and slashes. He drove the point of his sword into the joint of its foreleg, making it buckle. He sliced a deep furrow across its muzzle. He used the creature's own bulk against it, ducking under a wild swipe and coming up inside its guard to deliver a vicious cut along its ribs. For a glorious, brutal minute, their coordinated assault was a masterpiece of violence. The creature was being systematically carved apart, driven back by the two-front war, its roars of fury mingling with the wet, tearing sounds of steel meeting alien flesh.
Then, it simply… vanished.
One second it was there, a mass of purple fur and rage. The next, the space it occupied was empty, the air shimmering with a faint, heat-haze distortion.
Levi and Mike froze, their backs instinctively slamming together, swords raised. Their eyes, one pair sharp and analytical, the other scanning with primal senses, scanned the empty, wrecked hall.
"Where the hell did it go?!" Levi growled, every muscle taut.
The main doors swung open again. Erwin and Hange entered, drawn by the sounds of battle.
"Levi!" Erwin shouted.
"STAY BACK!" Levi roared, his eyes widening as he saw it. The air behind Hange was warping, the shadows coalescing, taking the shape of the monstrous hound as it prepared to phase back into reality directly behind her, its jaws opening wide.
Erwin saw it a split second later. He didn't hesitate. With a powerful shove, he threw Hange clear, sending her sprawling across the floor. But the act put him directly in the path of the materializing beast.
The Vulpimancer's jaws, meant for Hange's neck, instead clamped down on Erwin's outstretched right hand with the force of a steel trap. There was a wet, crunching sound of breaking bone and tearing flesh. Erwin let out a sharp, choked gasp, his face draining of all color, but he didn't cry out.
"ERWIN!" Hange screamed from the floor.
Levi was already moving. He didn't aim for the body; he aimed for the space between the jaws. He drove his notched ODM sword sideways into the creature's maw, wedging it between its upper and lower teeth just as its jaws began to close fully. The beast roared in pain and frustration, its bite halted by the solid steel now lodged in its mouth.
Levi held onto the hilt, bracing his face as his entire body strained against the creature's immense strength. It was a grotesque tug-of-war, the Commander's mangled hand still trapped between its teeth. With a furious shake of its head, the Vulpimancer flung Levi away, but the sword remained, prying its jaws open. It then turned its rage on the smaller man, pinning him to the ground with a massive forepaw on his chest, the weight crushing the air from his lungs.
'This is certainly not how I plan to fucking go.' Levi thought with a burst of grim clarity. He brought his knees up, kicking furiously at the creature's forelegs and underbelly, but it was like kicking solid rock. It didn't budge. The five burning blue eyes stared down at him, and up close, the ruined sixth was a blood clotted horrifying sight.
'Ugh, disgusting.'
Then Mike was there. He launched himself onto the creature's back, wrapping one powerful arm around its neck and driving his own damaged sword deep into the meat of its shoulder, using it as a grip to hang on. The Vulpimancer thrashed wildly, trying to dislodge him. Levi, seeing his chance, abandoned his futile kicks and instead used both hands to grab the beast's lower jaw, muscles screaming as he tried to pry its head back from Erwin's mangled hand.
The scene was one of chaotic, desperate struggle. Levi, pinned but fighting, was trying to physically wrench the monster's mouth open. Mike was on its back, sawing at the wound he'd created with his broken sword. Erwin was on his knees, clutching his bleeding hand, his jaw clenched in silent agony.
With a final, titanic effort, the Vulpimancer used its prehensile forelegs to grab both Levi and Mike. It ripped Levi from the ground and Mike from its back, shaking them violently like ragdolls before flinging them aside. Levi twisted in mid-air, managing to break his fall with a painful but controlled roll. Mike hit a stack of crates with a grunt, wood splintering around him.
Freed, the alien beast didn't press its attack. Its goal was escape. It turned, shouldered a stunned Erwin and a wide-eyed Hange out of its path with contemptuous ease, and bolted for the corridor from which it had come.
As it reached the doorway, it paused for a split second, turning its now eyeless face back towards them. It threw its head back and let out one final, echoing roar of defiance, pain, and primal fury that shook the very stones of the headquarters.
Hange, still on the floor, stared not in terror, but with a look of pure, unadulterated marvel. Her voice was a whisper lost in the echo of the roar.
"What… are you?"
Then, the air around the creature shimmered. Its form dissolved into a wave of intangible smoke and it poured itself into a narrow ventilation shaft high on the wall, disappearing from sight as if it had never been.
Silence descended, broken only by the ragged breathing of the wounded and the drip of Erwin's blood onto the cold stone floor. Just what the hell were they dealing with?
Chapter 24-31 are already available on Patreon.com/Weeb Fanthom.