GUYS, I GOT MY FIRST REAL HATE COMMENT FROM mamba queen12345: "this whole storyline is absolutely shit. Total rubbish. just stop fucking writing."

Dear mamba queen12345,

Allow me to personally thank you for your service to this fic. Your three kind sentences really made my day, so I took some time from my short break to start writing the next installment early.

I also just clicked on your profile and your expansive catalogue of stories make me tremble within my slippers. My MacBook air just exploded under the weight of your exquisitely constructed sentences. I have to write my story now on a shitty android phone, but I don't care since your mind must be a true haven for the soul. I'm lucky to have even received a drop of it.

Thank you for being my first named hater.

Your service won't be forgotten.

Sincerely,
gaujay7

Oth Man1: Thank you for your comment. I'm glad that you find the humor and the drama is well done. Much appreciated.

irosokuyammamoto: Thank you for sticking around! I guess we are author friends haha. And I'm glad that you agree with that guest down there. I wonder if they're still around as well. When I read your comment earlier last week, it made my afternoon when I was walking about my college campus.

As for this story ending, it should end even sooner than that I'm afraid (probably April).

I've been lazy these past two weeks in terms of writing this fic, so I still need to remove the italics on most of these chapters.

An Eldian's Journal

Part 4

An Interlude

I know what you're thinking.

"Heinrich, don't you have a prologue at the beginning of each part?"

I have three prologues already. It's time to switch things up a bit with an interlude. On that note, I also need to find a new name for this part; I can't use "Wartime Shenanigans" twice. I guess I can think on that one a little later.

That brings me to an important point. Allow me to pull you out of the storyline where Viktor, Kurt, and I left the internment zones for the first time. Let's return to the current year where I'm actually writing all this from.

There's an issue.

To be more precise, a new issue or twist. Yesterday, the crows above us squawked a new piece of news that Marley is preparing their retaliation against Paradis. I can't wait to see the deadly, pillow-like blimps float below the clouds... They're such dastardly evil pillows, poking the faces of the ground with their fluffy guns...

If there's one thing that I've noticed in my almost 19 years of life, retaliation keeps bouncing back and forth between groups that carry grudges for a while. In the case of the mid-east allied forces, it ended with a treaty. But with Marley and Paradis, a treaty seems too trivial for 2000 years of violence. It can only end with the destruction of one party, as mentioned above.

Look at me. I'm so brilliant that I could go to university.

Anyway, suppose Paradis gets blown to hell. In that case, the rest of the world will be happier (until they find new problems to satiate their lust for violence.) If Marley gets destroyed, I wonder if Paradis would stop right there or continue with other countries? Damn, my head hurts.

If you're so clueless about things, you can live without understanding the pain.

I can see why ignorance is bliss.

If Marley were to get destroyed, I assume I would get killed with it as well. You can't eat a pizza and purposely miss the cheese, can you?

I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not sure who'll take over this story for me. Will it be the annoying girl that keeps bugging me nowadays and asks me to teach her how to write? That doesn't make sense since the girl would probably die as well. Or will it be the neighborhood rat that keeps stealing my biscuits?

***A SUBSTITUTE AUTHOR***
A rat

Rats pretty much survive anything.

Would our souls survive as well?

Excuse my rant, but as the days pass, my brain grows hungry to philosophize. I guess that's what it means to be an author and an adult.

If Marley gets destroyed, our bodies will line the street as expected. But, since we can transform to titans, will our souls be any more tainted than a regular human's? I have a hunch that it will. When these souls get left hiding in the bones, who will come by to pick them up and store them where they belong? The other countries won't do shit. They hate Marley as well.

Allow me to make a bold statement.

Maybe the grim reaper will take care of us.

From the stories, I've learned that he's someone people have feared from the Middle Ages and the times of the plague since he specializes in soul extraction. He wears a black cloak and carries a scythe that looks like a nice, fancy toothpick. I've even come across some accounts in school that he was a stray Eldian floating between our material world and the PATHS. Much like the gods in the prominent religions out there, I've yet to meet him as well.

Would he be angry with all the dead souls that he has to pick up during wartime? Or is he happy with his 24/7 reaping schedule?

Is he critical of life, like me?

Or maybe he sounds sarcastic and has a sense of humor.

Now that I think about it more, maybe he's exclusive to non-Eldian folks. For us Eldians, he could have an accomplice. Our souls are probably too dirty for even him to touch, so maybe he hires someone to scoop up our filthy souls in his stead. It could be a secretary. An intern, perhaps?

Or Ymir.

Not the imaginary Ymir.

The real one.

The one sitting somewhere on the edge of time, overlooking us from the clouds that are squatting in the sky. In the PATHS. Whenever one of us is killed, maybe the real Ymir comes down and looks at her next job. I assume she uses a bucket instead of a scythe. That's what slave girls probably used back in the day before Ymir got sent up to where she is now.

She looks down at a hole-filled corpse and picks up the black and moldy soul. She drops it into the bucket filled with thousand others.

She collects a million souls in a millionth of a second. That's how being the manipulator of time works, right? She makes her pencil scribbles on the paper of time.

She probably reports back to the grim reaper, and he gives her a friendly pat on the head while he's making his reports. "Good girl. You did well today." She's probably a slave to him as well.

What about the soul of the battlefield?

I've said many chapters ago that the battlefield is a set of hungry tastebuds needing to be satiated. In this comparison, would war as a whole be the body? The blood can be the bullets, and the white cells can be the soldiers.

All bodies should have a soul, right?

I found the title of this next part. It may be a little pretentious, though.

***PART 4's TITLE***
The Soul of War

The events to follow may not deserve such a peaceful-sounding title, but that'll be the irony in it.