"Armin imagined his grandfather amidst the bloodbath. Had his grey head turned in the hour of death to watch humanity's strongest soldier carving a swath through the battle? Had the sight inspired faint hope in his heart even as he stumbled onwards, shoulder-to-shoulder with the ranks of the doomed legion of the year 846?"—Chapter 1, Just What Else Needs to be Thrown Aside?
Apologies for the delay—this story has spiraled beyond the one-shot I originally envisioned, and it now looks like it will be a two-part episode with a special guest cast!
We all know that one year after the fall of Wall Maria, the central government organized an infamous operation to recapture the lost territory. Two hundred and fifty thousand former residents of the Wall Maria lands were sent to reclaim the outer walls, led by soldiers of the Scouting Legion. From the anime, we also know that in the year 850, only a handful of members of the Scouting Legion were given Erwin's full and complete trust during the operation to capture the female titan. These soldiers—Nanaba, Mike, Levi, and Hanji—were trusted on the basis of the fact that they had been serving continuously in the Legion for over five years, having joined the branch before the destruction of the gate at Shiganshima. In addition, we know that Erwin, as well as Keith Shadis, were also Scouting Legion veterans since well before the fall of Wall Maria.
I have always been struck by these facts, as I can only draw one conclusion from the canonical timeline, which is that Keith Shadis, Erwin, Levi, Mike, Hanji, and Nanaba almost certainly were combatants in the ill-fated expedition to retake Wall Maria in the Year 846. This possibility has always fascinated me, given that they had to have been among the few hundred survivors from an army that had numbered in the hundreds of thousands. How did they survive? What was the battle like?
To me, writing this story also serves to answer another question about Levi's backstory. When did he become famous across the human territory for his skills in combat? To me, the answer is simple—this, the expedition of 846, simply must have been the battle in which Levi earned his reputation as humanity's greatest soldier.
With the publication of the A Choice With No Regrets manga series, some of the story here may eventually be proved non-canon. Until then, however, I hope it provides an interesting take on an episode of the Scouting Legion's past that not that many writers have ever looked at.
As always, please leave feedback! I hope you enjoy reading!
Chapter 6: The Legion of the Year 846 (Part 1 of 2):
On the day the walls finally fell, the final stand of humanity would look exactly like this.
All Levi could hear was the nightmarish cacophony of screams and battle orders, punctuated incessantly by the hisses and pops of maneuver gear and the crashing of titan footsteps. Cries of pain and panic echoed near and far, their voices young and old, male and female. Horses echoed the vocalizations of their masters, whinnying and neighing as they wheeled and reared amidst the battle. Then there was the constant sound of tearing flesh and cracking bone as soldier after soldier was erased between rows of great teeth. Every so often, the battlefield shook with a great roar as a titan finally fell, annihilating the ground where its lifeless corpse landed. Beneath this earsplitting roar of noise, the background was filled with the impact of thousands of feet, boots, and hooves, the rattle of maneuver gear, the clink of weapons and stirrups, the rustle of flags and clothing, and the gasps, coughs, groans, and excited breathing of humanity's army.
To the eye, the battle was a blur of vibrant color. Blue sky. Green grass. White clouds. Red and crimson blood, thick in the air. Great pillars of titan flesh. Silver blades and speartips. Dust of all kinds—grey, brown, tan, and even blood-red—swirled like an ocean of waves in the air. Flags, green, with the white-and-blue Wings of Freedom, flew, dipping and rising amidst the melee. The army itself was a patchwork of colors. Everywhere, shirts and cloaks that were rose-colored, blue, yellow, or white crowded together beneath heads of hair that were black, brown, blond, and gray.
As far as Levi could see, this great mass of humanity swarmed beneath the titans that stood over them like a field of towers.
On his left, an aberrant crashed mindlessly though a wall of pikemen, steam disgorging from its wounds as it grabbed man after man to be devoured, oblivious to the stabbing spears. Nearer, Levi saw a crowd of humans overpowering a three-meter-class, pinning it to the ground while three spearmen gouged away at its neck in a frenzy of rage and panic.
Even the stench of battle was terrible. Everywhere Levi rode, it swirled in the air as a mix of apocalyptically foul smells. Human sweat. Blood. Excrement. Urine. Horses. The atmosphere was worse than the alleys of the poorest slums. People fought, whirled, ran, and died within this odor of a slaughterhouse, so overpowering that it seemed an instrument of death itself.
A fellow soldier of the Scouting Legion, or perhaps a comrade from the Garrison, fell cartwheeling through the air to the ground, blood spraying from amputated limbs and a torn neck. The corpse hit the ground with a thud of flesh and the crunch of metal as the body crushed the maneuver gear it wore on impact.
Perversely, it was precisely the opportunity that Levi had been waiting for. He spurred his horse forwards to the crumpled body and swung himself from the saddle, glancing rapidly from side to side for danger. His boots landed in the bloody grass, and he immediately knelt by the dead soldier, fingers scrambling to detach the gas canister from the undamaged side of the corpse's maneuver gear. His palm brushed the body's blood-soaked, still-warm torso as he yanked and pulled the tank of 3DMG propellant free, then rapidly attached the canister to his own gear. Next, he pulled out each of the dead soldier's unused blades, slotting them one after another into his own sheaths.
This was far from the first corpse that Levi had robbed of its belongings, nor had Levi been brought up a stranger to the sight of death, and so his movements were steady and sure where another scout's hands might have trembled. Yet at the same time, his heart was racing madly, fully aware of the death and chaos that swirled around him as he thrust the last steel blade into his maneuver gear's set of holsters. Without so much as a glance downwards at the body, he stood, mounted his horse, and set off through the aimless throng of spearmen at as fast of a gallop as he could manage.
"Somebody help—!" a voice cried some minutes later. Levi's head whirled to look just as the yell dissolved into a scream of pain.
An eight-meter-class suddenly loomed up in front of Levi as it straightened, pulling a bite from the dying human in its grasp. There was no need for Levi to use even a cubic millimeter of gas. He sprang up, standing with his feet planted on the saddle, then leapt from his horse on leg power alone, carving a deep slice of flesh from the corpulent titan's neck. Levi closed his eyes briefly as he fell back to earth, splashes of hot titan blood burning his face, neck, and hand as he hit the ground in a controlled roll, the reverberating crash of the titan's falling body echoing behind him. In a second, he had returned to his feet to grip the horn of his saddle as his horse rode back for him.
As he climbed onto his mount once more, his eyes briefly met those of a foot soldier standing nearby. The wretched pikeman's face was fixed in a mask of terror, yet his eyes stared at Levi, then at his maneuver gear with a look of mixed relief, anger, and jealousy. The two of them held the gaze for an instant, but then Levi was turning, riding onwards, his attention already fixed on the next titan.
OOOOO
He spurred his horse into a headlong charge towards a four-meter-class; he cut it down without leaving the saddle.
Levi rode on, passing through a cluster of discarded pikes and banners that protruded from the earth like blades of grass.
They hadn't even managed to make it halfway to Shiganshima, and Levi knew they never would.
The mission at its most basic had been simple. Marching forth from Wall Rose, the human army would proceed at the greatest possible speed directly to Shiganshima, its flanks guarded by the mobile maneuver-gear-equipped soldiers of the regular military. There, the bulk of the force would stand and fight to hold both sides of the breach while laborers worked to permanently seal the southernmost gate. Upon completion of the operation, the entire force was to return to Trost. In subsequent weeks and months, the army, supposedly reinforced by the full might of the entire human military, would be tasked with exterminating the thousands of titans now trapped in the Wall Maria territory, slowly reclaiming the lost land through a long, careful campaign.
Twenty-eight miles south of Trost, all forward progress had stopped.
They had always known that crowds of humans attracted titans. Soldiers that stayed in a group beyond the wall soon found themselves fighting three, then five, then six titans. And on Levi's first missions, before the fall of Wall Maria, back when the Legion had ventured into titan territory as a tightly clustered wedge of men and horses, they had always faced an ever-increasing number of giants that converged from seemingly every direction, inevitably forcing them to ride back for the wall.
But today…
The two titans were distracted, surrounded by a growing collection of ghastly corpses that littered the grass. Levi chose his anchor point, using the taller of the two giants as a center of rotation as he slew the other, then catapulted himself upwards into a slashing somersault that felled the first.
Two hundred and fifty thousand. Two hundred and fifty thousand civilians, barely trained to march and obey orders before they were handed crude spears and forced through the gate at Trost. The entire standing force of the Scouting Legion, three hundred soldiers strong, deployed for the offensive along with one thousand soldiers of the Garrison, backed by the two thousand graduates of the most recent trainee classes. By royal proclamation, branch no longer mattered, as each of the regular soldiers wore the cloak and insignia of the Scouting Legion—four thousand pairs of shoulders embroidered with the Wings of Freedom. An army of two hundred and fifty-four thousand—this mass of humanity stretched as far as the eye could see.
But just an hour's march from the walls, a curtain of smoke signals from the scout patrols had risen across the entire horizon. Red and black smoke trails—first several, then dozens, then countless signals, so many that they almost seemed to replace the sky as they curled and twisted. For a minute, the soldiers had simply watched as the fingers of smoke reached towards the clouds, their thin wispy lines winding, carefree, high in the air. Then, the first silhouettes had appeared on the horizon, and the greatest battle of the century had begun.
Frantic orders. A line of spearmen racing into formation as the ground thundered and shook. Gasps of shock and terror. Blades clearing sheaths with a metallic ring. The familiar surge of adrenaline, the familiar mad drumbeat within his chest. As the giants had closed to half a hundred paces of the battle line, a brief moment of calm had fallen upon the plain as thousands of men and women braced themselves behind long pikes. That calm was the first victim of the massacre, annihilated as the first half-dozen titans met the human legion in a resounding crash that had seemed to fracture the world itself.
Levi had since long lost track of how much time had passed since that cataclysmic moment of impact. Two hours. Three. Enough time, certainly, for him to have fully exhausted his supply of gas once. How many titans had he slain? He did not keep a count like many soldiers of the Scouting Legion did, and as morning had given way to the bright afternoon sun, his kills had mounted, surpassing first a dozen, then a score, before melting together into a bloody mire of fragmented impressions of combat.
A spearman blinded a stooping titan, providing the opening Levi needed to throw himself at its exposed neck. His tired knees protested as he landed toes-first in the grass.
It was a perfect nightmare. There wasn't a single tall structure in sight. The soldiers with maneuver gear had no choice but to fire their anchors into the titans themselves to launch their attacks before falling back to earth, clambering to their feet or onto horseback and throwing themselves into the air again and again. Under these circumstances, with options so limited and the ground so crowded with foot soldiers, squad-based tactics were impossible. Each soldier confronted their titan alone, perhaps in a pair if they were lucky, supported by just a handful of brave spear-thrusts from those on the ground. Woman after woman and man after man was snatched from the sky or plucked from the ground to a terrible fate.
The spearmen fighting on foot were even more unfortunate. All they could do was die by the scores as they stabbed viciously at the titans' legs and faces, attempting to distract the giants long enough for assistance to arrive from better-equipped soldiers.
Levi fought alone, riding through the melee, leaving an unknown, growing number of titan bodies in his wake.
OOOOO
Dirt and a mix of titan and human blood smeared together across the back of his hand when he moved to wipe the sweat from his brow. He returned the hand to his reins with a grimace.
Turning his head to survey the battlefield, Levi searched the horizon yet again for any survivors from the mixed squad of Scouting Legion members, Garrison soldiers, and fresh trainees that he'd been marching alongside that morning.
There, in the patch of brush near the rapidly disintegrating corpse of a thirteen-meter-class, lay the half-eaten body of the first trainee who had been killed. Jan, the Legion's supply officer, had vanished after launching himself into the air in pursuit of the aberrant responsible. Levi had not seen him in hours. The trainee carrying the spare gas canisters had been swallowed whole shortly afterwards, horse, gear, equipment, and all. Beyond, on the bloodstained hill, the middle-aged soldier of the Garrison had been slapped out of the air by a flailing titan arm—an unlucky death that had at least spared him from being devoured. Titans had interest only in the living.
One by one, the rest had fallen in battle or disappeared, their names unknown to him.
An earsplitting crack rang through the air as a skeletal titan blundered through a tree, splintering its trunk and sending up a plume of dust as the canopy of leaves collapsed onto the earth. The company of pikemen nearby backed away as the giant emerged from the cloud of suspended dirt, its bloodstained hands outstretched and reaching for the men in the front ranks. The titan's face contorted grotesquely as it opened its jaws, making a laconic sound that might have passed for a yawn.
They really did have the stupidest expressions.
With the casual confidence born of experience, Levi removed his feet from the stirrups, planted his heels on the back of the saddle, and stood slowly, keeping his balance as his horse galloped towards the fray, its back heaving and rocking. A quick glance to either side. No immediate secondary danger. A moment of careful aim, and his anchor was suddenly flying with a hiss of gas, embedding itself into the titan's hip. Levi could feel dozens of pairs of eyes watching him as he hit the triggers of his maneuver gear and rose skywards to commence his attack.
He pulled the first anchor free, firing a second directly into the nape of the titan's neck itself. As predicted, the titan wheeled right to face him. The barbed hook in its flesh tugged at his wire with the titan's sudden movement. Using the additional wire tension to further increase his acceleration, Levi swung himself into a carefully timed spin, his eyes already centered on the vulnerable flesh around his anchor point. His blades carved through titan fat and muscle, slaying the titan and freeing his anchor in the same action.
A third pull of a trigger, and Levi felt his rate of descent slow as the wire he'd fired into the falling titan's back arrested his fall. Soft dirt yielded beneath his military boots as he landed. Levi's dead adversary hit the ground a millisecond later with a shockwave that sent tremors through every joint in his body.
He winced. He'd felt another momentary ache shoot through his knees. Even with superb physical conditioning, a soldier with 3DMG could only keep fighting without rest for so long.
Thick steam was already rising from the titan corpse, and wisps of mist swirled upwards from his bloodstained blades. Levi was suddenly aware of the battle's oppressive heat, of the sweat drenching his undershirt beneath his uniform, of the hint of an acidic sensation in the muscles of his legs. Something brushed his cheek at that moment, and Levi flinched violently and instinctively before he realized that it was nothing but a falling leaf, drifting to the ground from the limbs of the shattered tree behind him.
Suddenly, the hubbub of incredulous exclamations from the nearby pikemen that had persisted in the wake of Levi's feat of arms gave way to multiple cries of warning, and Levi perceived the approaching thunder of another set of titan footsteps.
The reverberations shaking the ground were rapid and heavy. He spun, his fingers flying to the triggers of his maneuver gear, tensed. Then Levi saw it, and a genuine wave of panic shot through his entire body.
It was an aberrant, an agile crawler, heading straight for him on all fours. Levi was on foot, his horse over twenty meters away, and without a nearby surface to anchor to, he was completely out of options.
Ignoring the foot soldiers on either side, the aberration lunged towards him, jaws flashing open.
OOOOO
Levi had once read in a Scouting Legion report that veterans who had survived several missions tended to be light and shorter in stature. The paper had proposed several possible explanations, from the superior aerial acceleration of lighter soldiers, to their better endurance at full speed on horseback, to a correlation of petite physical size with natural caution or even cowardice.
These were factors, Levi conceded, but the truth was entirely different.
It was a tenet that Levi had painfully learned and taken to heart during the darkest days of his childhood. The short kids had always been the most dangerous.
A tall or strong youth growing up in the underground relied on their physical dominance over the weak to survive from day to day. The smaller children, however, had no choice but to find the will to fight, or die. The scrawny girls, the malnourished boys, the midgets, the cripples—they lost three out of every four fights, and many died alone, bruised, bleeding, a skull cracked or bones broken, in dark alleys or amidst garbage heaps. Most chose to give up their independence, living out their short lives as minions and slaves in exchange for any small, uncertain protection. Of those that refused to yield, most would die, hunted down without mercy. The survivors, however, not only found the resolve to live, but learned to hate the strong. They slept every night clutching a shiv for self-protection, and when they dreamed, they dreamed of vengeance. Every time they hid or ran from adults or bigger children, every time they were forced at knifepoint to hand over a hard-earned coin or crust of bread, they smoldered deep inside and imagined the excruciating torture that they would one day inflict on their oppressors. They planned the next fight in vicious, ruthless detail. Next time, they would wrench at a finger to break it. Next time, they would gouge at an eye. Next time, they would bite at flesh until they tore it free with their teeth.
Levi could have died like so many of the others; instead, he had survived, building his reputation upon rumor and legend until he finally became the one that was feared, the figure of strength and violence that was hated by the less fortunate.
Levi's skill with his blades and his maneuver gear was no natural talent—a truth that the other soldiers of the Scouting Legion utterly failed to understand. It was the product of a lifetime of merciless suffering. The monsters Levi fought beyond the walls were even slower, more predictable, and far less intelligent than the brutish enforcers of the merchants' guilds and crime gangs—those terrifying titans of his childhood. And so the giants died, grasping vainly at the flying soldier that eluded their fingertips even as they bled from the mortal gashes in their necks.
On many a night, Levi had found himself cornered against a slimy, filthy wall in the deepest part of the secret city. In that dark hour, when the weak boy was forced to fight, the leering thug or club-wielding bandit had soon learned to their danger that the small, the starving, the skinny child fought with a ruthlessness and a cunning that struck sudden terror into their heart before stilling it forever.
OOOOO
As the titan flew towards him with a gaping maw, Levi knew he was already dead.
Yet Levi had always refused to die quietly.