A little later than usual, but hey, it's up. And it's the longest chapter yet!
Flood
Armin stares out at the battle field from his perch on Erens's head. As a titan, his brother is taller than most of the surrounding buildings and the height advantage allows the young tactician a bird's eye view of the surrounding fight. Titans coming from the south, three aberrations at the head. Eren is watching them closely, marking their distance from the human on human battle taking place in the town. Instructing Eren to shift had been a calculated risk on Armin's part. They try to keep him human when fighting the military police. He's harder to kill that way, far more skilled on the 3DMG than many of those in the unicorn brigade. Outsid Wall Rose, though, the scouting legion needs the protection of his titan form so that they can fight the military police without worrying about being bitten in half. They worry anyway, a force of habit. The other downside is that Eren inadvertently winds up protecting the military police as well.
Mikasa shoots a cable into Eren's shoulder and flies up to crouch next to the blonde. Her swords dangle from her loose grip, nowhere near ready to fall, but at rest. There is a cut on her arm. The blood shows in stark outline against the white of her shirt. Armin glances down at her. That's the problem with fighting humans. Their blood, your blood, it doesn't evaporate like titan blood. Now the blood on their clothes is not that of only fallen comrades, but that of those they kill and their own. Swords means for titans devastate human flesh with alarming ease.
The young captain can see Levi flying through, around, and over enemies. Silver steel glints in fading sunlight, one blade caught in a man's back and pulling up as the former squad leader spins away, task complete and searching for another. Green wings flare out behind him, his cloak caught in the wind. He's the only one who doesn't seem to mind killing humans. He treats each target like a titan, diving in from behind like some giant bird of prey. In for the kill. Dead falling out of the sky.
Even human wars can't be fought on the ground anymore.
Eren lurches to the left, right foot lashing out and catching a seven meter square in the neck. Its head snaps off, steam billowing as it disintegrates. A quick stomps has the base of its neck destroyed.
Mikasa takes off over the next building and Armin flings himself into a complicated nest of beams someone once dared call a water tower. The top is higher up that Eren's head, safer too now that his brother is fighting, Mikasa darting in between furious swipes of gigantic hands and snapping teeth to dispatch the titans Eren's can't fight. They're an excellent team like this. Brother and sister fighting the monsters from beyond the Walls while Armin watches for -
Him. Or her, doesn't really matter. It's a rush of brown and white leathers propelled by cables and gas aimed straight at Eren's unprotected back, the unicorn blazing clear against its back. Armin allows himself to drop from the tower without use of the gear. He falls silently. Uncontrolled. The shorter blades he uses for this kind of attack click into place and - there! He fires one hook straight at the ground, pulling him down faster than gravity would normally allow onto the back of the MP. The blade strikes true before the man, apparently, even notices he's there. Dead. Armin releases the hook, firing his left at Eren for a quick lift up before disengaging and retreating back to the water tower. He wipes the blood off on his pants leaving streaks of red behind.
"Hello!" One of the kids is banging on the door. He's been going at it for the past twenty minutes. "Hello! Lemme out! I need t' pee!" Each time he hits the door it rattles more on its hinges. Hinges that must be getting old. Bianca has heard full grown men throw themselves at the door without so much as a shiver from the surrounding walls. One little kid is not strong enough to bother the door. The hinges must be getting old, very old. Loose even. They'll have to fix that later. "I really, really, really need t' peeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"
"Make it stop whining!" Coalman snarls. He broke fifteen minutes ago, sliding down the wall with his hands pressed over his ears. Bianca notes that children are a weakness of his. Could be useful.
A particularly hard thump is echoed by a faint cracking, splintering sound. Was that the door? No. "If you don't lemme out, I'll pee out the door! I can! I need to pee!"
And that is not something Bianca wants to clean up. Nope. Not at all. The floor isn't exactly even; it tilts towards the opposite wall for ease of cleaning. She swirls and yanks the door open. "Listen here, you little insect!" she snaps. "You will shut up. You will walk to that toilet over there, leave the curtain open, pee, and hurry your insignificant ass back into this cell. Then - "
"Now Mikasa!"
A small dark blur flits from the shadowed cell, ducking in front of the boy and too the side. One small foot darts out. It impacts the side of Bianca's knee, snapping it inwards. The woman screams. She goes down hard on the floor, scrambling along her pants for her gun, a knife, anything! Coalman roars to life, gun drawn and aimed at the girl - the girl who is fast on her feet with quick hands, Bianca's knife already secure within her grasp. The boy throws himself in the path of the gun.
The shot rings out.
The boy drops, choking.
Coalman gasps wetly, one hand pressed to this throat where the handle of Bianca's knife glints dark with blood. The woman watches as he falls, watches the girl's dark eyes to see if she knows what she did. This girl. She's just a child. No. Not a child. She's a demon. She has to be a demon, there's no other way she could have made that throw with that knife. A knife not made for flying. A quick move, a sharp sound - flesh striking flesh, Bianca realizes, and she can't take in more air, falling sideways, throat bruised from the force of the hit.
"Stay," the demon-girl orders. She sidles across the distance to Coalman, the man still choking on metal, kicking the gun far away from either adult. Where are the other two? Jeremy and Baker. They should have hear the shot. Right? The house isn't soundproof. A tiny hand reaches out to brush Coalman's sweat drenched face. "I skinned the last person who shot my brother," she croons. "Consider yourself lucky." She rips the knife from the soft flesh of the dying man's neck, red spraying everywhere, and plunges it up through his jaw. Out again and down, handle buried an inch deep in Coalman's chest. His heart. He's not even twitching.
Delicately removing the blade from the dead man's corpse, the demon-girl turns back to Bianca. Blood, viscous smears and drops of red, decorates her expressionless face, eyes cold. This isn't the first time this demon-girl has killed. She said so herself. Bianca edges her good foot away from the spreading pool of blood. Pain throbs from her broken knee, lancing up and down her leg in sharp bursts. "Please," she says. Tried to say. Fails at even getting a whisper past the swelling in her throat.
Thunder rains down from the upper story, Jeremy and Baker bursting in to find the small girl they picked up kneeling on Bianca's chest, her hands and face covered in blood so thick there's hardly any skin left clean. The boy is dead, thrown against the wall in a heap of tangled limbs and blood. Coalman slumps in a lake of the stuff, face slack and torn open. Bianca - the girl slashes down and Bianca is dead, shuddering a few times as she tries and fails to breathe past the gaping hole in her neck.
"Well, that's inconvenient," the blonde boy remarks, breaking the silence. He's leaning on the door frame for support. The two men stare at him incredulously. "I had been hoping we'd at least get upstairs before you noticed something was wrong."
"What the fuck?" Baker explodes, charging across the room like an enraged elephant. He yanks the boy up by his shirt, casually backhanding the girl to the ground as he passes. The muzzle of his gun presses red spots into the kid's face. The blonde looks unfazed. "How - why - fuck!"
The blonde coughs. He coughs again, entire body shaking with the force. Baker leans back in disgust. "S-sorry. M'sick. Sorta. See, we're trying to escape. You just happen to be in our way. Heh, this isn't the first time we've been kidnapped, just the first time anyone has been stupid enough to put us in the same room."
Distracted by the crazy blonde kid, neither Baker nor Jeremy see the girl strip Bianca of her weapons. Nor do they see her press a few into the dead boy's hands. A boy who isn't as dead as they think, because he springs up underneath Baker, knives impacting somewhere below his ribs and dragging down under the weight of the kid. Baker and the blonde fall as the girl launches herself off the wall and into Jeremy. His head cracks on the cement from the force of her blow, bouncing up again to bang one last sound before death.
Armin scrambles away from Eren. The brunette isn't all there, his eyes glowing green as he yells, stabbing the dead man over and over, his intestines already leaking onto the floor and filling the room with a foul smell. Mikasa ignores their brother, riffling through the pockets of the man at her feet. She comes up with a cell phone. "Leave him, Armin," she instructs, dialing 911. The connection clicks.
"911, please state your emergency."
"Hello? Um, we need help, please." Eren stops mid stab, both boys looking over to stare at Mikasa in shock. They didn't know that she could sound quite to small and terrified. They would rather not know that. She smirks at them, switching the phone to speaker.
"Where are you, sweetie? What happened?" dispatch asks.
"I dunno. A house? Scary man took us and there's so much - I don't know what to do! I'm scared!" Eren scoots off the dead man, a little disconcerted. Mikasa sounds close to tears, but her face is still impassive. He pokes her cheek. She swats his hand away with a glare.
"Calm down, sweetie, I need you to stay on the phone, alright? I'm sending some officers over right now. Is there anyone with you? Are you hurt?"
A little hiccuping noise echoes around the room. "I'm not, but Armin's sick. Eren, are you hurt?" She glares at him, glares at the steam pouring from his mouth and out of his back.
"No," he mumbles, attempting to copy her frightened child voice. He's not as good at it and Armin snickers, breaking into coughs. Mikasa raises a skeptical eyebrow. 'You were shot,' she mouths. "I'm fine, Mikasa. Knock it off."
"Easy kids. It's going to take Are you somewhere safe?"
The trio glances around the room, taking in their blood soaked forms and the veritable lake of red on the floor. They glance up at the stairs. "Not really," Armin hedges. His face is all scrunched up in thought. Eren wraps an arm around his waist when the blonde begins listing to one side. "We don't know when Kenny will be back."
This is probably the most stressful call Freddie Micks has ever taken in his twenty years of working dispatch. Three kids hang on the other line. Terrified. keep talking about a scary man and arguing that one of the boys, Armin - Armin Arlert, the report says. Eight years old, parents murdered, missing for ten days now - is sick while the other one might be hurt. Eren, Micks thinks the kid's name it. There's a new report on his desk about an Eren Jeager, seven, who went missing this morning. It says there was an intent to contact, but nothing yet. The girl is a complete mystery. No report, no file, nothing with the name Mikasa that he can find.
"Who's Kenny?" he asks, just to keep them talking. The closest car is more than thirty minutes out still. Wherever these kids are, it's in the middle of nowhere. He's surprised they have service. Speaking of service, where did they get the phone?
Silence meets his query and he worries something might have happened. Then, "Scary man," they say as one, small voices hateful in a way Micks never thought he'd hear from children. "Kenny Ackerman," the boy he thinks might be Armin continues. Coughing noises crackle over the line. "He hurt mommy and I tried to run, but he got me. Don't remember much. I got really sick."
Micks searches the name in the database, encouraging the kids to find someplace safe to wait. Nothing comes up. Wait. No, there is something. Kenny Ackerman was a suspect in a series of murders down in Virginia a few years ago. Evidence pointed to a different man, but Ackerman is still on file. He radios the officers speeding towards the kids. "Go faster! Suspect was questioned for a multiple homicide several years ago. He's still out there. The kids two of the kids have been reported missing already." Twenty minutes until they arrive.
He keeps the kids talking, asking where they're hiding, what they can see. They talk about corn fields and a basement. Eren complains about being sticky. Armin mocks him for sounding like someone called Levi. Mikasa suggests they she can find a garden hose to rise off with, but Micks encourages them to stay where it's safe. "Why are you sticky?" he asked at some point during the discussion. An awkward silence engulffed the kids and they were quick to change the subject, Armin describing the clouds and what types they were. Not exactly subtle, but they're traumatized kids. He'll let them keep secrets. The cars are five minutes out when a new voice cuts in.
"You three made quite a mess of my employees," it drawls and Micks twitches away from the sound of the phone falling to the ground. "Hello Eren Jeager. It's nice to see you again."