HUMANITY'S STRONGEST?
CHAPTER 1: I Will be the Change
When he was at home, he had the best of everything; The best clothes, the best food, the best education, even piano lessons. But behind wall Sheena, life was boring. All the people were alike. All of them dressed in finery and sitting around talking about useless drabble all day and fulfilling their "social obligations" (whatever that was supposed to be . . . the child could never could figure it out). It was this last fact that allowed the boy to leave home to wander out beyond the wall surrounding the capital for extended periods of time without his absence being noticed. Once he was of school age, it became even easier. The schools within the capital were very exclusive and all of them had boarding for the students. His parents always assumed he was at school and the school assumed that he was being home schooled.
At first, he restricted his explorations to behind wall Rose, but soon was venturing out as far as wall Maria. Excursions to beyond wall Rose entailed staying out one or two nights, but once he found he could get away with it, he continued answering to his insistent wanderlust. Once he reached school age, he could get away with being out for weeks at a time. He liked the people in the towns and villages within the outer walls. They were real. Each one was different, with different skills and different ideals. His thirst for knowledge was unquenchable. It didn't take long for the boy to make friends of all ages. When asked his name, however, he ran into a problem. He instinctively knew that it would be unwise to reveal his true identity. For a while he just answered to "Kid". Eventually, he would have to come up with an answer to the question of his name. He thought on it a while. He didn't really like the name his parents had given him anyway, so he decided to come up with a new one. He eventually decided on Levi. He wasn't really sure why, but for some reason the name seemed familiar to him, and it seemed to suit him. He liked it. It was as if it had belonged to him all along. The boy's memory bordered on photographic, but he couldn't remember where he had heard the name before. So while behind wall Sheena, his parents knew him by one name, but outside the wall, he was known by all as Levi.
It was during these early explorations that Levi first learned of the titans. They were huge humanoid creatures ranging from three to over fifty meters in height, and they seemed to have only one purpose – to eat humans. At first he thought the tales were nothing more than stories to scare children, but one day he witnessed the Survey Corps returning from an expedition beyond wall Maria. He saw firsthand what a titan could do to a human. Not even six years old, and he knew in that moment what the course of his life would be.
This is madness, he thought. All the stories are true! We're no different than birds in a cage! If we get out, we get eaten! From his vantage point on the back of his massive horse, Firestorm, he saw the mangled bodies, missing arms and legs or more in the wagons passing by. The mumblings of the other spectators could be heard over the sound of horses hooves on the cobblestones. None of the mumblings were kind. The cries of a mother who had lost her daughter could be heard in the distance. Levi felt sick. This is stupid! Can't people see that these soldiers are fighting and dying to protect them; to give them back the world? It was then that Levi noticed the fear on the spectators faces. Some of the mumblings included, "Imagine what would happen if one of those monsters got inside the walls!" and "If the walls ever failed, humanity would be doomed!"
It was in this moment that Levi understood the reality of the world in which he lived. We are nothing but sheep being kept in a fold! he thought. If we wander out of the fold we get eaten by the wolves. But we are suffocating in here! We live in fear of the wolves getting in. We have to stop being sheep. We have to fight back! But the scouts fight back , and they are getting slaughtered. Something has to change . . . I will change! I will be that change! I will fight back! I will erase the titans from human history! I will return them to the pages of story books and fairy tales as nothing more than monster stories to scare little children around the fire at night! I will grow strong and I will destroy the titans if I have to do so by myself!
Levi's travels beyond wall Sheena took on a whole new importance for him. Already fueled by an insatiable curiosity, he read every book he could get his hands on, absorbing every bit of knowledge he could. Each time he saw someone with a skill he thought he needed, he would brazenly demand that they teach it to him. Everything ranging from cooking, blacksmithing, languages and fighting were on his itinerary. He found one man that used a fighting style that was ancient and from a distant land far to the east no longer occupied by humans. He found another that used an unusual fighting style called kick boxing. For one as small as Levi, this style made perfect sense. The strongest muscles in the body were in the legs, so a fighting style that used this power gave a smaller fighter a sizeable advantage.
He also sought out any knowledge he could find on the history of humanity, the titans and the walls. Sadly, there was precious little to be found. He raided every library collection he could find. Books on the world beyond the walls and on the history before those walls was illegal. All the better to control the sheep with Levi though wryly. He did find such books, however. He learned of ancient peoples, ancient legends and myths and ancient mysticisms. He learned of the true size of the planet on which he lived (not many people comprehended that it was a planet at all), the nature of the sun, moon and stars. He discovered that the world was full of wonders such as salty oceans, volcanoes erupting searing liquid rock, frozen tundra, deserts of sand, vast plains and mountains of rock reaching to the sky an stretching from one horizon to the next. He found out that there were more animals of all shapes, sizes and colors than he knew inside the walls. Mammals that could fly, fish that could live in salty water, mammals and birds that migrated thousands of miles with the seasons and even birds that could not fly at all.
Levi also discovered that humanity had forgotten all of the technology it had before it retreated behind the protective walls to escape extinction at the jaws of the titans. Things like electricity, weapons, medicine and transportation. He couldn't clearly remember where he had gotten it, but he was in possession of what he would eventually refer to as an electronic notebook. It's origins were as mysterious as those of Firestorm. Being a bright little child, he wasted no time in figuring out to use it. For the most part, he used it to keep a journal of everything he learned to forward his goals of eliminating the titan threat once and for all as well as copying all of the books he found regarding the world, titans and human history. He was also careful not to let anyone else know he even had such a device. He knew that people who questioned the status quo or possessed forbidden knowledge "disappeared".
The hardest thing for Levi to comprehend is how it was possible to suppress all knowledge of where the titans came from, how such massive walls encompassing such a large area were built in just a comparative blink of an eye and what the world beyond those walls was like. It seemed counter-intuitive; after all, if you wanted to motivate people to fight the titans to gain back the world, wouldn't such knowledge be the best motivator? Furthermore, there were bound to be some people that would have passed such knowledge down to their descendents. How could an entire species just forget? These were just a few of the questions that bothered Levi. And the quest to find the answers was to be a very long one. to be continued…