He is humanity's greatest soldier.
His blades slice through a titan's neck, spraying blood, dousing his uniform in red. The beast falls forward - but before his eyes, transforms: into a small, crumpled figure, brown hair; green cloak, emblem rippling in the wind.
Gunther collapses to the ground.
The blood on Levi's clothes does not evaporate.
Before his mind can even register what happened, he is flying through the forest once more. Up ahead, another titan, ambling away. He readies his blades, but falters; the edges are still slick with blood. [Seeing the dirtied surface makes his stomach churn with disgust.]
He tells himself again: he is humanity's greatest soldier.
Wires whistling, he aims and slashes; and to the ground the titan crashes. The smoke clears, and it's not a dissolving body he sees, but Eld's lifeless face, blood trickling from the corners of his mouth and from his severed torso, staining the earth.
He is humanity's greatest soldier.
Away he swings; there are titans to kill, no time to waste. [But the smell is clogging his nose, his throat, his mind; no amount of scrubbing and cleaning will purge his senses of it.] With one clean slice, a titan smashes into a tree. When he dares to turn around, he sees Petra instead, glazed eyes gazing at nothing, blood blooming upon her face.
He is humanity's greatest soldier.
He cuts through the air, and Auruo is the last to fall. Blood spurts from his mouth; has he bitten his tongue again? [His stomach is twisting, his chest has been scorched with hate. Hate for the female titan, he tells himself; he doesn't call her Annie, because Annie is too human of a name to give to that monster, although he wonders: what would that make him?]
He is
humanity's greatest soldier.
He wakes up, sweat-drenched and eyes wide, choked in a tangle of bedsheets. At the throbbing in his tongue, he lifts a hand to his face; his fingers are coated with a dark liquid. Grimacing, he jolts upright, only for a familiar ache to shoot through his leg.
A curse escapes blood-stained lips, but his eyes are too heavy, his chest is too heavy, his entire body is too heavy. But still he gets out of bed, hobbling to the bathroom. [If the blood stays on his skin any longer, it'll leave a permanent stain.]
The cold water is much too refreshing on his face, the stinging inside his mouth too easily fading. He watches the droplets stream down his face [too reminiscent of tears, he scowls], the drying blood washing away. [Still, he imagines their barracks to be filled with it, and once again feels sickeningly sticky.]
A few more swear words, then a river - "fuck, shit, fuck, fuck fuck" - as he dresses himself, the chatter of sunrise nothing but a monotonous drone in the back of his mind. He snaps his harness in place, slips on his jacket, and wipes the last trace of blood from his skin.
There are titans to kill, no time to waste.
He is humanity's greatest soldier.