Carl didn't even have time to blink before he heard the screams of many people. He was sitting on a padded seat in a carriage with cloth curtains over the windows so he couldn't see what was happening outside.
As he moved to peek out the window, Carl noticed the carriage was faintly rocking from some kind of impacts that were shaking the ground.
He moved the cloth aside and saw chaos. Many people in old fashioned clothes were running desperately in one direction while many tall figures gleefully chased them, snatching people up and eating them.
"Shit! I'm in the Attack on Titan world," Carl realized. "Status."
VIT 600
MUS 1200
ACU 350
PSY 550
Mission 1
Rising Rumbles: Defend Humanity
World: Attack on Titan
Time: 1 Month (Hunt Type)
Difficulty: CCC Rank
Combat: High
Magic: Moderate
Intrigue: Moderate
Science: Moderate
Reward: 3000 Points, 2D & 3C
In the town of Trost the second attack of the colossal titan has just begun, titans have had minutes to stream into the town, and major events have started. You appear minutes after wall Rose is breached in a broken down carriage near the breach in the walls.
Objective: Within the time limit, complete at least 2 of the following 3.
1. You personally neutralize or cure over 250 titans. 7-10 meter tall titans count for 2. 10m+ tall titans count for 3.
2. You neutralize or convince to turncoat all of the Marleyan infiltrators (Bertolt Hoover, Annie Leonhart, and Reiner Braun)
3. You reclaim wall Maria for humanity such that there are no roaming titans, and the breaches in the walls and districts are plugged.
Disadvantage
Geas: Binded Mind (+500 points)
You are restricted by a simple code of conduct, consisting of two rules.
Outer Origin: Your origin from another verse cannot be communicated to anyone in any way, nor can your 'metaknowledge' or the existence of other verses. You must truly attempt to blend into the verse and provide some plausible deniability for out of place abilities, if not never use them.
Truthspeaker: You are forbidden from knowingly telling any falsehood. A 'technical truth' or a 'lie of omission' is permittted, so long as you do not actually speak a falsehood to set them up. This restriction extends to writing, sign language, telepathy, and other direct forms of communication.
"Damn, Spider-Man's powers and ability to swing around on webbing would have been perfect for this mission," Carl muttered and then let out a curse as he saw a titan turn his way and start charging in its derpy manner the moment the titan spotted him.
He didn't have time to figure out the carriage door's latch, so he just shoved the door open, splintering the latch mechanism, and barely managed to jump aside before the carriage got snatched up by the eight meter tall abomination and crushed as it searched for him.
Carl summoned his Valyrian steel sword from his storage ring, pulled it out of the sheath, and sent the sheath back into the ring. He then sized up the titan that was looking around for its target.
He knew from watching the some of the anime that he had to slice a wedge out of the back of the neck of the titan if he wanted to kill them, or else they would regenerate.
'While I can jump high enough to land on its neck, jumping into the air will make me lose mobility and be a floating target,' Carl thought as he sidestepped the hand trying to grab him and cut half-way through the wrist, leaving the titan's hand dangling off its forearm. 'Thankfully I bought a magic sword that can stand the punishment I'm going to be putting it through. Though now I wish I had given into the temptation to make it the size of Guts' dragonslayer sword. This small sword isn't long enough to slice straight through a limb. At least I'm strong enough to cut effectively, though, so there's that.'
Carl dodged the next grab of the titan's other hand and dashed forward between its legs, turned around, and slashed its heels. Without the tendons supporting it, it crashed face first onto the ground. He didn't waste any time jumping onto its back and slashing twice across the back of its neck, cutting a wedge out.
'I guess that's why the military forces dual wield swords, so they can kill a titan with one pass, if they're talented enough to be accurate,' Carl thought as he jumped off the titan's back as it began decaying rapidly into goo and bones.
Carl was pretty close to the hole in the wall where titans were still pouring in. Five more titans had spotted Carl and were running his way, jostling each other in their eagerness to get him.
"Better part of valor," Carl mumbled as he turned around and ran. He ducked into a narrow alley to get out of line of sight of the titans, stashed his sword in his ring, and directly jumped up to grab onto the edge of the three story tall roof. He easily pulled him himself up and moved to the center of the building.
From there he had a good sight of the crowd of titans entering through the hole in Wall Rose. Turning to the side he stared at the line of buildings that had collapsed from the chunk of wall shooting into them from when the colossus titan had kicked a hole in the wall.
"Damn, that's a big chunk of stone." Carl shook his head and briefly glanced down at two of the titans that were about 11 meters tall and were heading his way. They were tall enough to peek over the edge of the roof he was standing on, so they would definitely be able to climb up and reach him. Several smaller titans were running around them, staring up at him with drool hanging from their mouths.
"Even as an Asgardian I'm not strong enough to pick up that chunk of stone and put it back to block off the titan's entrance, even if there wasn't a horde of titans running around making it more difficult to act. I guess I'll have to wait for Eren to turn into a titan and come plug the hole."
Carl temporarily ignored the titans and turned around to scan his surroundings, plotting a route he could roof jump away to thin out the herd of titans that were right behind him. He dashed forward and easily cleared the space to the next roof, leaving the titans howling and hooting behind him.
Once he had a bit of distance from the main group of titans, Carl stood at the edge of one of the roofs and watched for a moment as the frantic mob of humans ran by below him. Just from his brief survey of the titans entering through the hole created by the colossal titan he could imagine the amount of work the third mission objective would give him.
'Something tells me that cleaning up all the titans from the area between Wall Rose and Wall Maria is going to be prohibitively difficult for me to do in only a month,' Carl thought even as he spied a titan round the corner and chase after the tail end of the crowd. 'And that's not even counting the need to plug up the hole in Wall Maria. Well, better get started on my quota of titans and save some people by the way.'
With his sword in hand once more, Carl jumped off the roof and landed on the head of the lead titan. The unexpected weight caused the titan to smash face first into the cobblestone road, but by that time Carl had slashed the back of his neck once.
He wasn't sure if he only needed to sever the spinal column to kill the titan, or if he needed to cut out the whole chunk. Seeing the flesh starting to knit back together, it seemed that he really needed to cut out a large chunk to keep the parts separate long enough for death to take hold.
Carl quickly slashed again, tearing out a large chunk of titan flesh, and jumped off the titan even as it began disintegrating to dodge the clutches of the next titan in line.
"Eager bastard, aren't you?" Carl mocked the unthinking bald titan as he dodged another attempt to grab him. He repeated his earlier maneuver of dashing between the titan's legs, turning around, and slashing his legs to bring it down to where he could easily slash the back of his neck.
A heavy weight unexpectedly hit him from the rear, knocking him down, and Carl felt fingers beginning to close around him. He didn't sit still and wait for the titan to get a good grip on him. With how strong the titans were, if he let them bind him it would be a struggle to get free.
One of the important lessons he'd learned from his short training bout was to keep hold of his weapon, so the sudden impact hadn't made him lose his grip. He rolled to the side and slashed at the thumb in front of him, severing it, and continued to roll past the edge of the titan's hand.
A quick look around showed he was surrounded by titans eager to eat him, so he dashed forward, deflecting a swipe from a titan with a slash of his sword. The weight and momentum of the titan's strike sent him careening off at an angle, but he rolled with the momentum and passed between a titan's legs.
Leaping to his feet, he slashed at the back of the titan's legs before it could turn around. As the titan fell to the ground, Carl didn't wait for it to land before leaping to the back of the 5 meter tall titan. He grabbed its lanky black hair with one hand and slashed across its neck twice before they landed.
Four more titans eagerly rushed him, including the one he had been about to dispatch before being slammed to the ground by a different titan. Carl was learning, though, and didn't stay still or focus on only one titan, wary of another blindside attack.
Although the hit from the titan hadn't done more than bruise him and rattle his cage thanks to his high resilience from his MUS stat, it hadn't felt good either and he didn't want to get dog piled and restrained by the titans. Just because he was really tough and strong and faster than a human didn't mean he was invulnerable.
Carl continued to dodge around the titans, slashing at ankles that he could reach without leaving the ground where he could maneuver, and taking what opportunities he could to kill each one.
After he managed to kill another titan the fight got more complicated when a handful of 3-5 meter tall baby titans came running around the corner and joined the fray.
Carl saw that the crowd of humans had evacuated the street by this time, so he decided to turn this into a running battle so he wouldn't be swarmed and lose his mobility.
As he broke away from the fight he happened to see a few of the local soldiers swinging between buildings on their omni-directional mobility gear. One of them was snatched out of the air by a titan and bit in half. The other two fled in a panic rather than stopping to engage the titan.
Carl turned his attention back to his own flight to a more favorable area to fight at and thought with some envy, 'I really need to get hold of some of that gear so I can swing around like a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.' Even though he knew he would probably suck at it without training, Carl still wanted to give it a try.
He turned down another alley, really appreciating how he was able to run faster than the giant titans, and stopped to see how the titans would react to the enclosed space. The bigger ones would have a hard time fitting in the alley, while the shorter ones would fit and be easy to kill, he might even be able to simply lop off the heads of the shorter ones.
Even the shortest ones at 3 meters tall were a meter taller than him. If Carl weren't so caught up in fight and survival mode he might have had time to be intimidated by the giants he was fighting, but thanks to the short training session he had taken back on the Intermission Island he didn't lose his head and simply reacted.
Well, his reaction also probably had something to do with the battle oriented nature of the Asgardians that Carl was now one of.
A 12 meter tall titan was the first to arrive at the alley and stared at Carl for a long moment with its overly large head tilted in confusion before trying to move into the narrow space between buildings. Building material cracked off and fell to the ground as the titan tried to shoulder its way into the narrow space.
The buildings were solidly constructed though, and even though a powerful hit from the titan could probably crack the wood frame, just pushing its way through wasn't doing any damage other than to the facing of the buildings.
Shorter titans at about 9 meters tall arrived behind the taller one. They seemed to have forgot that they had been chasing Carl, not able to see him past the taller one, and they just wandered past.
The shorter baby titans at 3-5 meters tall spotted him between the legs of the tall titan and eagerly ran forward in between the legs of the tall titan in their derpy way to get a bite of him, chomping their teeth over and over on empty air in their eagerness, making a loud clacking noise that was bone chilling.
Carl just focused on combat, ignoring the intimidation of having creatures at least 1.5 times taller than him rushing forward to eat him. He let the small titans come to him to give himself more time to react and plan out his moves, and when they got close he began slicing limbs left and right.
When he got the chance he cheerfully lopped off the head of a 3 meter tall titan. Its body fell to the ground separate from its head and it dissolved into hot goop and a skeleton.
Carl kept moving backwards to give himself more room to maneuver, and soon managed to chop halfway through the head of a 4 meter tall titan. He frowned at not being able to behead the creature twice as tall as him with one slice of his sword. He really wished he had a longer weapon!
After several minutes of fighting and reducing the numbers of titans down to two, he suddenly threw himself backwards when a shadow above him made him nervous.
After rolling back to his feet he looked up and saw that the 12 meter tall titan had climbed on top of the buildings and was reaching down into the alley to grab him.
Carl dashed forward, slipping under the reaching arms of a 5 meter tall titan, and jumped forward to smash into a 3 meter tall titan while beheading it in one swipe even as it fell backwards from his impact.
His abrupt dash forward brought him out of range of the 12 meter tall titan above him, and gave him the time needed to deal with the last short titan in the alleyway before he turned his attention to the tall one.
After chopping into the legs of the 5 meter titan to bring it down to size and a couple chops to behead it, he turned his attention to the 12m titan above him that was crawling around on the buildings to get to him.
Carl's attention turned to the creaking buildings on either side of him and a frown appeared on his face as he wondered if the buildings could actually hold the titan's weight while it scrambled around up there.
He also didn't like the idea of trying to jump to the top of the buildings next to him to fight the titan while scrambling for foothold, so he decided to take a page out of the book of the fighter's in this city and get up close and personal to the titan.
He put his sword into his storage ring and when the titan reached for him again he dodged the hand and then jumped onto the titan's wrist.
Holding onto the wrist as it was raised straight to the titan's mouth, Carl calculated carefully and jumped to the side at the proper time. As he flew past the side of the titan's head, he snagged the heavy strands of black head hair as the wrist of the titan smashed into its mouth from trying to shove Carl into its mouth, rocking its head backwards.
Carl laughed as he swung wildly around on the titan's hair. A moment later he smashed into the back of the titan's head, killing his momentum. He repositioned himself and pulled out his sword, slashing twice on the back of the titan's neck and killing it.
He then jumped off the titan onto the damaged rooftop next to him as the titan began dissolving into a goopy skeleton.
Carl stumbled on the unsteady structure and barked a laugh after he finally got his footing. Those kinds of things didn't happen to the heroes in the movies, too bad he didn't have the power of film editing.
From his vantage point on top of the building he could see thick black smoke rising in various places around the city. Distant screams of fear and pain and grief reached his ears because of his enhanced hearing. And the loud bellows and hoots of the titans rose above it all as they excitedly chased down humans to eat.
"Damn, what a disaster," Carl muttered. He had seen a lot of situations depicted in movies, but he'd never been in a natural disaster like an earthquake or a flood, let alone such a supernatural disaster like these titans that actively hunted humans to eat. Seeing these kinds of tragic scenes in real life rather than through the screen of a movie impacted him deeply.
"Where is that titan that Eren turns into?" Carl muttered as he scanned the city, knowing that the three Marleyan infiltrators should be nearby. The chaos of this battle might be the only chance he had of ambushing them and killing them.
He hadn't had a lot of time to think about the missions in the short time since he arrived in this world, but with the Asgardian power he'd picked and his lack of combat experience he highly doubted he would be able to reclaim wall Maria for humanity and eliminate all the roaming titans in the short time frame of a month.
So that left killing over 250 titans and "neutralizing" the Marleyan infiltrators in order to accomplish his mission, which probably meant killing them. He didn't have any magic powers to convince the three infiltrators to give up their mission, and he highly doubted that his half-assed knowledge of this world would allow him to talk-no-jutsu them out of it either.
Nor could Carl expect to be able to capture them in their human forms and keep them from transforming into their titan forms for a full month to fulfill the mission objective since he didn't have any powers or technology to do so.
He couldn't even use his meta-knowledge of this world as a means of convincing the infiltrators to turncoat either since he would be heavily fined points if he did that. Aside from the danger of having a negative point balance which would result in his death, losing points meant not being able to buy new powers to better survive the next mission, which would result in his death.
With the increasing difficulty of these missions, even if he did survive the next mission by the skin of his teeth, he would always be one step behind in the power curve and would eventually be eliminated.
And it wasn't like the infiltrators were some sympathetic characters that deserved the benefit of the doubt, they were responsible for a lot of human death and suffering. This was the second time in five years they had broken through the walls keeping the roaming titans out of the Kingdom's territory.
The last time the infiltrators had done this exact thing at wall Maria five years ago many people had died as a direct result of them letting in the titans by breaking through the wall.
And then, due to the great loss of territory and farmland, the ruling government had sent a barely trained army of 200,000 to die on the supposed mission of reclaiming humanity's territory, when what they were really doing was culling the population so they wouldn't have famine and riots.
While the infiltrators weren't directly responsible for the government making the decision to cull those 200,000 people, they had caused the circumstances that led to that cold-blooded decision.
Not to mention that they were infiltrating a kingdom that was cowering behind its walls and not bothering anyone else and engineered the deaths of so many people on the chance they could accomplish their mission of finding and stealing the founding titan's body so the kingdom would be helpless when Marley killed finished genociding everyone in the kingdom of Eldia.
'Just because they were mistreated by their home nation of Marley doesn't mean they get a pass for killing so many people,' Carl thought. He tried not to consider how he wasn't any better because he was willing to kill them just so he could survive this twisted game the Purveyor sent him on, but the thought had occurred to him. He gave a self-deprecating laugh. 'I guess that makes me just as twisted a hypocrite as anyone else.'
Carl's short depressing introspective mood was interrupted by a 10m titan rounding the corner of a tall building and spotting him. Time to get back into the battle and rack up his kill count so he wouldn't die at the end of this mission.
He held his sword at the ready and watched as titan came running his way, planning how he would kill it.