COMRADES • Eren Jaeger

CHAPTER 37: Assault

EREN WENT FOR THE MILITARY LEADERS almost immediately. He took a running start before diving onto the wooden risers where the members of the brass had been sitting, effectively crushing them under the Attack Titan's body. Whatever stragglers that had somehow managed to survive were torn apart and slaughtered almost immediately when Eren began to pound his large fists against them.

They killed his loved ones. They destroyed his hometown. They took away his childhood and any sense of joy in life in repentance for sins he never committed. They painted him as the devil and tried to turn the entire world against him.

Your lives. Your dreams. It was all gone, because of Marley.

You had always known that peace would never be obtained peacefully. You didn't think that Willy Tybur had the right to announce that he didn't wish to die, because there was no room for complaints when the demon he created came knocking on his doorstep.

But then you heard the screams. The wails and the cries and the weeping for the dead. Somewhere, sometime later, a sinless citizen of Marley would call for your blood. Would they be wrong to do so? You didn't think they would be, because you had just passed on the cycle of hate of what their people did to the Walls, to them.

Maybe there was another Eren in the crowd, unable to understand why this was happening to him, to his home. And maybe he too, would plot his own vicious counterattack in the name of sweet revenge.

This is what they did to Trost District! A voice in your head screamed. This is how they killed your classmates! They destroyed your home!

Despite their wrongdoings against your people, you were still reluctant to give them payback.

Down below, a dark-haired woman in a long black dress struggled to stand up amongst the fray of heavy rubble and thick dust. You squinted your eyes to get a better look at her from afar, and sure enough, beams of light began to emit from her wounds. An unidentified Titan shifter had made her appearance unannounced.

Apparently you and Eren had been barking up the wrong tree when you theorized that the War Hammer Titan had been passed onto the head of the clan, Willy Tybur. The clever noble family had passed on their precious wild card to the least conspicuous member of their exclusive tree. And now it was about to go against the Attack Titan.

You couldn't call out to Eren and warn him of the Titan shifter's materialization as he wouldn't be able to hear you, but there was no need to. He could already see her. The miscestimation was irksome on your part, but you trusted that Eren would be able to handle a fight against it. All you could do was watch from your skulky spot within the shadows of the light tower as the imperious War Hammer Titan transformed.

A peculiar sight caught your eye almost immediately as the yellow light lit up the night sky. The War Hammer Titan was forming from the ground going up instead of branching from the nape. You wondered what that meant, but there was no time to ponder about it as its face collided with the Attack Titan's fist before it could even finish transforming. It smashed backwards into the fractured building where the latter Titan had emerged from, and Eren leapt onto it almost immediately.

He quickly crystallized his fists before repeatedly punching its upper body to try and crush it through the nape. The War Hammer Titan was barely even moving, and for a moment you wondered if the woman who owned it even knew how to control its supposedly all-great powers. Your attention was taken away by shouts below, where you could see the soldiers from Magath's team in a full-blown panic as they begged him for instructions on what to do.

The enemy commander was gritting his teeth as he looked back at you, poised to shoot and still out of reach on your spot on top of the tower. He fired a useless but symbolic shot in your direction, and all you had to do was duck. The bullet had not been a death order but instead the signal of the start of Willy Tybur's declared war. Even if it didn't mean anything, you kept a wary eye on them as you waited for the Survey Corps to move in.