Libertas ↠ AOT

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Time seemed to move painstakingly slowly while she stared at the hole in the wall, her heart drumming in her chest as she waited for the first Titan to enter the innocent town of Trost. She wasn't sure if she could hear the first booming footsteps of a Titan or if it was just the blood pounding in her ears.

"This is it people! Do or die! Mounted cannons squad four take out the Colossal Titan, this is our chance, don't let it slip away!"

Eren's piercing screams harshly pulled Antheia out of her trance and forced her to look up to see the aforementioned teenager hurtling towards the top of the wall at full speed, right to where the Colossal Titan was.

"If any of you even think about following his orders I'll snap you in half!" Antheia immediately yelled out, not that anybody had actually moved a muscle to try and follow through with his demands. "Everyone head back to HQ, members of the Garrison Regiment should assign you all to your positions upon arrival, and for the sake of what little sanity I have left don't die while you're on your way there!"

"Yes ma'am!" The cadets shakily responded to her, following her commands without question seeing as she easily outranked Eren.

"Connie and the blonde guy, what's your name?"

"Thomas Wagner!"

"Alright, Connie and Thomas, you two help me stop that fucking idiot," she ordered them both, unsheathing her blades and pointing one of them to top of the Wall where Eren had disappeared to before taking off in that direction.

In normal circumstances Antheia didn't tend to use such foul language, there was enough of that with Levi and Oruo around but this wasn't a normal circumstance and if she needed to release the occasional swear word in order to ease the panic that had clutched her then she was going to do just that. She also wasn't one to stick to formalities such as using soldiers' last names when in a crisis or anywhere else for that matter (Shadis being the only exception), a firm believer that a name was a name and it was inconsequential whether or not she decided to use their given name or their surname.

By the time she stumbled onto the Wall the Colossal Titan was nowhere in sight, nothing but the last remnants of steam and the gigantic footprints in the ground to even suggest that it had been standing there in the first place. Two sets of footsteps came behind Antheia seconds after she landed to signal that Thomas and Connie had followed her as instructed.

"Eren, where'd he go? Did he get away or did you take him out?" Thomas called down to Eren.

"He's gone! Exactly like five years ago! He's here one moment and gone the next, just like that!" Eren called back.

"There's no use just staring at the air, get back up here!" Antheia yelled at him.

Without hesitation Eren made his way back up to the wall, his shoulders sagging slightly from defeat. "I'm sorry I—"

"Don't apologise. Look at us, we were too scared to move," Thomas said to try and console Eren.

"Hey, wallow on your own time, in case you hadn't noticed there's a breach. We have to act now, if they start pouring in that's it," Connie interrupted them, the slight waver in his voice betraying the fear that had made its way into his own heart.

"He's right. Right now we have to get back to HQ and report everything that we saw while preparing to defend Trost with our lives," Antheia added, turning to face Eren once she had finished. "I get that you want to kill all the Titans but don't run headfirst into danger without assessing the situation first unless you want to end up as nothing but a pile of blood and guts. Did you notice anything strange about the Colossal Titan?"