Word Count: 2,370


Leaving the castle with only Eren by her side felt very strange to Mikasa even though she had only had other travelling companions for two days. But it also felt very nice to have some guaranteed time alone with him for a few days. He was the best companion she could ask for. Armin became conscious of the silence too quickly and tried to fill it with his rambles and she found Annie somewhat creepy. She was unsettling and in their brief time of travelling together, Mikasa could never find it in herself to put her guard down around the girl.

The village they were heading to was quite a rural one, many miles from the nearest town or city, though just a few miles away from Levi's castle. Technically speaking, Levi was lord of their lands, though the legends of him being a beast persisted long after Petra had come and broken the spell, so no one ever bothered him, according to Hange.

Yet even with the lack of visitors, there still seemed to be a vague path in the direction of the village. Mikasa had been somewhat suspicious of it when Hange pointed it out to her, but it seemed the quickest route.

"Hey Mikasa?" Eren asked as they walked. All around them were dead trees and decaying leaf litter, and despite it being early morning, it felt as though they were walking during the evening.

"Yeah, Eren?" Mikasa quietly responded. She was feeling strangely on edge, her hand constantly straying to the basket on her arm, ready to whip out the knife at a moment's notice. Her eyes were constantly surveying the area, her brain subconsciously recording every tiny movement she saw and every sound she heard.

Eren's ear twitched in what appeared to be irritation and he suddenly stopped in his tracks. "Do you hear that? Sounds like hoof steps."

Mikasa stopped as well and began to actively listen.

Clip, clop, clip, clop. Hoofsteps. They were soft, but she could definitely hear them.

She reached into the basket and dug out the knife, adjusting her grip on the hilt and ready to fight at any second. Eren stayed close to her feet.

A centaur shyly ambled into the path in front of them. He was tall, even for a centaur, with a palomino coat and a shock of dirty blond hair that grew not only on his head, but all the way down his spine. He looked at the duo and looked genuinely surprised when he noticed their hostile looks. His face flushed red and he took a few steps backward, almost rear-ending a tree just off the path.

"I-I'm sorry, Miss. I saw you walking down the path a-and I-I-I… I just wanted to say you have very b-beautiful black hair," he stammered.

"Thank you," Mikasa calmly replied, not letting go of her knife.

The centaur became even more flustered and panicked. "I'm really sorry about this," he awkwardly said. "I-owe-you-one-mynameisJeancallmeifyouneedme!" His voice crescendoed and sped up as he turned heel and galloped away.

Eren bared his teeth slightly. "Something seemed off about that centaur," he noted, "and not in the sense that he's Cursed. He smelled funny."

Mikasa, however, seemed indifferent and absently put the knife back in her basket and started walking again. "He seemed like just a regular centaur to me, Eren. I'm sure there's nothing odd about him."

Eren sprinted ahead and blocked her path. "Mikasa, no. Centaurs don't just wander over to people and compliment their hair! They stay in their colony grounds in the woods, staring at the stars! They're noc-tur-nal. It's the middle of the morning; don't you find that entire instance rather weird?"

Mikasa pursed her lips as she thought about it. "Yeah, that is kind of weird," she finally agreed, but then looked down at him sternly. "But what are we going to do about it? We have a goal in mind that we should probably accomplish before prancing off on a side quest. It's not just the two of us anymore, and because of that we have a better chance of getting you back to normal. Please Eren, just leave it for now."

Eren sulked for a few moments, but fell in step beside her. "How do you think we'll be able to identify the Cursed from the others when we get to the village?" he asked after a spell.

"I don't know," Mikasa replied and they fell silent again.

A couple hours passed and they walked in comfortable silence together on their path through the woods. The dead trees and leaf litter had long made way for gradually healthier and more alive trees.

In the distance, there were sounds of laughter and a fair. Slowly, the sounds drew nearer and nearer until the trees grew sparser and sparser and the two found themselves at the edge of what appeared to be a carnival, and quite a lively one at that. Children swarmed in and out of tents, even at the fringe, and there seemed to be well worn paths of trampled grass that appeared to lead to food stalls that sold only… soup?

"This is really weird," Eren loudly whispered to Mikasa from the corner of his mouth. "Why are the vendors only selling soup?"

"I have no idea," Mikasa whispered back. She drew her hood over her hair, and crouched down. "C'mere, you," she said to Eren, holding her arms out as though expecting a hug. "And pipe down. You'll already look suspicious enough even in my arms, we don't need another talking dog type headline branding us as weirdos."

"Yeah, yeah, sure," Eren replied as he climbed into her arms. They'd done this numerous times in the past when they needed to pass off as just a simple girl and her dog. Mikasa's black hair and china pale skin was a rarity in the areas that they wandered, often attracting a lot of unwanted attention, so she pulled the hood of her cloak up to hide her hair and carried Eren so that her arms were hard to see in his thick fur. That, and it was harder to identify him as a wolf when she carried him.

With her fiancé snuggled safely in her arms, Mikasa plunged headfirst into the carnival. She ignored the brightly colored tents advertizing games and fun houses and instead tried to head towards the center, where she assumed the town was located.

Many vendors loudly advertised their waresㅡ namely soups of various kindsㅡ when Mikasa passed by, often picking her out from the crowd specifically. Luckily, she managed to ignore them without any reaction, and it made sense considering how loud, lively, and bustling the fair was.

The heart of the festival, when she finally found it, was not, in fact the center of the town, but instead an inn. And what a busy inn it was! It seemed that everyone wanted to visit this particular building all at once.

Mikasa looked down at Eren, who blinked slowly at her. "You think this is the place?" she asked him in a hushed voice. He glanced over at the building: it looked fairly normal to him, and it didn't give off any odd or particularly magical vibes that he could sense.

But then again, they were used to having places of magic avoided and the feeling of it piling up. Perhaps the people flocking to the inn were taking bits of magic with them when they left. They had no way of knowing.

Eren looked back at Mikasa and subtly nodded. She acknowledged him and wove her way through the crowd and into the inn.

The inside had a rather homey feel, though it was rather ruined by the jostling and bumping of all the people entering and exiting. Mikasa was starting to feel rather annoyed at all of them for pushing her around and stepping on her toes and whatnot, but there was honestly nothing she could do about it.

She pushed her way to the front, which, oddly enough was a bar. After pushing a rather touchy-feely and emotional drunk away from her, she took a seat on a miraculously open barstool.

The man behind the counter was large and rather strong-looking, his shaggy brown hair and scruffy beard streaked with grey. His eyes were crinkled around the edges with crow's feet, his face smiling merrily, but his eyes were spiritless and melancholy, as though all the life had been taken out of them.

He put on a smile and leaned against the counter in front of Mikasa as he wiped down a bowl. "Yeh here fer the soup?" he asked.

Mikasa shook her head. "No, thank you. Though I would like to know why the whole town is having a soup festival."

The man's eyes became filled with nostalgia and he put the bowl down. "Ah, well, it started a num'er of years ago when an animated teapot hopped inter town askin' for a soupçon of soup." He laughed, then continued. "M' daughter had been tendin' the inn that day, yeh see, an' the teapot's request just happ'ned to tickle her fancy, so after the teapot left on what m' daughter had claimed to be 'a grand quest to find true love,' she tried to convince me to start an event dedicated to soup er somethin'."

The innkeeper's eyes went from being filled with a daydreamy nostalgia to an indescribable melancholic sadness and spoke no more.

Eren was fidgeting on Mikasa's lap, begging and whining to be let down, but Mikasa didn't let him go. "Did something happen to her?" she gently asked the man.

He waved his hand lazily in the air but didn't reply and moved onto another, assumedly paying customer.

Mikasa sighed. She had a strange hunch that the innkeeper's daughter was connected with the nearby Cursed, even before she learned about the girl's encounter with Hange, and while the innkeeper's response gave her reason to believe that something had happened to the girl, she had nothing to support her hunch that she'd been Cursed.

Eren squirmed again, whining louder to remind Mikasa of his presence.

"What is it, Eren?" she quietly asked, leaning in so she could talk directly into his ear.

"Did you see where his hand was waving to?" he whispered in reply, so softly she almost didn't catch it in the rowdy inn. Mikasa shook her head, so he flicked his own head in the direction of a notice board.

Mikasa wordlessly slipped off the barstool and wove her way through the traffic to the empty corner with the notice board. There were several flyers on it of various stages of age and decay, and while most of them were job applications or requests, one of them in particular caught her eye.

It had a rather hasty looking sketch of a smiling, ponytailed girl with a childishly soft, round face on it. The girl appeared to be laughing, though since the flyer looked several years old, it only make Mikasa's heart ache with sadness. She read the caption.

Missing: Sasha Braus, age 12.

Brown hair and eyes, soft build, somewhat pudgy.

161 centimeters tall, 61 kilograms.

Missing since April 17th, 1420

Missing from Dauper, Kingdom Rose.

If found, please return to Kartoffel Inn.

"Missing for four years now," Eren breathed, then looked up at Mikasa. "That's an awful long time. No wonder the innkeeper looked so sad when we asked."

Mikasa nodded. "I'm going to have to put you down now; I'm taking this flyer."

Eren's eyes widened and he looked up to her as she delicately removed the tack pinning the flyer to the board and gingerly folded the fragile flyer before putting it in her basket. "You really think she went missing from a Curse?" he asked.

Mikasa stretched her arms. "It's all we have to go off of for now, so we can't eliminate the possibility of it," she replied and began to leave the inn.

Eren scampered after her. "But how are we going to find her?"

"Do you remember how the innkeeper smelled?"

"It's kind of hard to forget a smell you smelled five minutes ago, Mika."

"Then we'll try to use that to track her. Somehow."

"But it's been four years since she went missing. I doubt she smells like this place anymore, if you want me to be honest."

"I told you Eren, I don't know quite how we'll pull this one off. But do you remember the general direction in which the spots were on the map in comparison to the village?"

Eren nodded. "To an extent, yes. But weren't there two blips on the map, not just one? What if we have it all wrong and it's not Sasha?"

Mikasa chewed her lip as they wove through the currently empty streets of the non-festival side of town. "I'm not sure, Eren, but there's no other towns around for miles and miles. I'm guessing that the inn's notice board is the only one in the town, since it's so small, and Sasha is the only person missing, and she's been gone for years. It's our only lead right now, so we'll have to follow it."

Eren audibly gulped.

Mikasa paused and looked at her fiancé, her gaze softening. "Eren, if you don't want to come, you can go back to Levi's castle. I'm sure they wouldn't mind a bit of help with Annie."

But he didn't. Instead, Eren's expression hardened and he growled. "Mikasa, I will follow you into the depths of hell if you asked me to. Just don't go where I can't follow," he replied and marched onward.

Mikasa nodded, and adjusting her hood, followed him.


Author's Note ix. I've been wanting to use the phrase "a soupçon of soup" since, like, chapter three and honestly, I'm pretty happy I got to use it. And yes. I did just do that. I just made Jean into a centaur. I would have introduced him later into the story, but Mikasa's hair was clean, so it probably looked pretty nice, so ehhhh. He'll be important later, as I'm sure you figured out from the 'Jean owes Mikasa a favor now that he embarrassed himself by complimenting her' thing. At least now you guys know who's up next: Sasha! And you'll probably know who's the other one just by that, but eh. But the next chapter's going to switch back to Armin and Annie and the Snow Queen thing, since these things are happening simultaneously and all. Anyway, enough of my rambling.

If you like the story so far, feel free to leave a follow or favorite, they're always appreciated! Leave your thoughts in the reviews (if that's what you're into~) and as always, have a great day!~~