Part Two: Sword
Everything changed when Wall Maria fell. The loss of life was enough to bring even the strongest soldier to his knees—a fifth of the population gone in one titanic surge. Levi felt the burning gazes every day, the silent and spoken accusations written in the blood of so many lost lives:
Where were you?
He'd been in uniform. He'd been on duty. But he'd been inside Wall Rose, one of so very many people in the wrong place at the wrong time. And could he have prevented the fall of the Shiganshina gate even if he'd been there? A 60-meter titan. It was unheard of. Unimagined. A titan so massive, its sunken eyes were seen looming above the wall before it plunged one foot right through the gate that had previously been impenetrable.
It was still out there. Someone would have to kill it. Levi was barely a meter and a half tall; he'd brought down titans ten times his size. Never one forty times his size.
But still the demands came: Find it. Kill it. If not humanity's strongest, then who?
It wasn't so much an instinct as it was an unconscious response—to find himself suddenly on the ground, at Poppy's garden gate.
She was already hard at work and sweat-streaked, her wavy brown hair tied back at her neck, her white sleeves rolled up to avoid the dirt on her hands. She saw him approach, and her mismatched eyes widened.
"Oh," she said, her usual smile a little shakier than usual. "I'm glad."
Whether it was glad to see him face-to-face or simply glad he hadn't perished in the tragedy of Wall Maria, he couldn't tell. Either way, he didn't have much room to be glad beyond the 60-meter shadow hovering at every edge of his vision.
He didn't have anything to say. There had been no point in coming.
"Here." Poppy held out a shovel.
Levi took it, and the next second, he was turning potatoes out of the ground side-by-side with a girl he didn't know.
"They need food in Trost," she said.
"They'll never feed everyone," Levi murmured. He'd seen the jagged rivers of refugees pouring in. Though the body count of Wall Maria's loss had been staggering, the loss of land was even more so—one-third of the land available to humanity, and the majority of their farming and ranching space. Food stores would deplete before winter with no way to replenish them.
There was more loss of life to come.
"Do you fight because you'll save everyone?" Poppy gestured to his ODM gear. She shook her head. "We do what we can, and we count the difference, however small."
Levi looked down at himself, at the leather straps so much a part of him that he had scars beneath his clothes from the constant weight and wear, at the double sheaths that held his eight ultrahard steel blades, at the gas cannisters that propelled him through trees and allowed him to fight eye-level with creatures he otherwise couldn't scratch.
We do what we can.
What was he capable of? He hadn't reached his limit at 15 meters. Maybe he wouldn't reach it at 60.
They loaded potatoes and carrots and onions into a little wagon until it was full and the carefully tilled ground was barren.
"You'll have nothing left," Levi warned.
"We'll manage," Poppy said. She gestured at an underground cellar and the open forest.
"Can you fight?" He'd meant to ask if she could hunt, but he didn't correct the question, and in the back of his mind, he saw merciless titan eyes looming above Wall Rose, a possibility he had never before considered.
"I'll manage."
But he heard the hesitation in the response.
Levi washed his hands at the well, carefully cleaning the dirt from beneath each fingernail, while Poppy hooked a docile bay horse to the cart.
When he retrieved his discarded Scout cloak from the fence, she said, "Be careful out there, blackbird."
He didn't have anything to say in return, but he left two of his replacement blades leaning against the gate.
