Chapter 252 — The Steam Titan, Analysis of the Serpent
Armin's entire worldview had collapsed.
He could not bring himself to face this cruel truth.
The first girl who had ever made his heart flutter turned out to be none other than his dearest friend, Eren Yeager!
"Hey! Armin, wake up!"
The brown-haired young woman patted Armin on the head, and he was instantly overcome with a flattered, overwhelmed feeling.
But in the very next instant, that feeling curdled into a strange and complicated expression.
"Where's Mikasa?"
Armin remembered that Eren had been taken away together with Mikasa by the members of the Nine Colors Squad.
Judging by how Eren was behaving now, the two of them had probably both become full-fledged members of that legendary hunting corps, hadn't they?
After all, if Armin set aside personal feelings and judged objectively...
Mikasa's overall level really did surpass Eren's.
Hearing this, the young woman Eren did not change expression in the slightest.
She simply extended a slender hand with a smile and pointed to the south: "Master Zoro says Mikasa passed the Nine Colors Squad trial earlier than I did. She's probably almost finished with her hunting assignment by now."
His trial mission had been to "undergo a month of special training, then personally hunt and kill ten Abnormal Titans."
Mikasa's assignment could not have been very different.
Armin closed his eyes, drew a deep breath, and struggled to calm the turmoil churning inside him.
He could not fathom what could possibly have happened to his friend to transform him from a hot-blooded youth into a beautiful young woman.
Features, figure, voice, bearing...
Every aspect of Eren had been thoroughly feminized.
Yet from the look of her, she did not seem saddened or grieved by it in the least—only utterly delighted.
She toyed with the cicada-wing soft sword in her hand like a child who had gotten the toy she had always dreamed of.
"Eren, now that you've turned out like this, won't Dr. Yeager and your aunt have something to say about it?"
Now that Armin had accepted reality, he suddenly found this transformation rather... appealing.
Having read far too many books, his imagination was exceptional, and he could not help but let his thoughts take flight, casting himself as the hero of some legendary tale.
"I've already been home."
The young woman Eren waved her hands carelessly, her manner proud and pouty: "It's fine."
Her parents' attitude had been strange.
When she had been a boy, they had both been extremely strict with her.
But after she had become like this, her mother doted on her to the extreme, giving her whatever she asked for, and her father's attitude seemed to have softened a great deal as well.
After the special training under Master Zoro, the three-sword-style swordsman, all six of Eren's senses had been vastly sharpened.
She had come to realize that her father—though praised by all as a "good doctor"—had something unknown and secret buried deep in his heart.
Because of that secret, her father had seemed to treat her as a certain kind of "thing."
But now, Dr. Yeager seemed to truly regard her as his child.
At the thought of this, Eren felt a surge of irritation.
Did boys simply have no human rights?
In a moment of distraction, she noticed that a small dessert radiating a cool, icy aura had been brought before her.
"Um... Eren, try some."
Armin held out the pastry, fragrant and sweet and cold, to Eren, doing his best to look casual and unconcerned.
Eren knew that to buy this "luxury item," Armin would have had to spend half a year's worth of his allowance savings.
She sighed and accepted his kindness.
As the two of them chatted...
Suddenly!
The sky spun and the earth turned; the city shook and the mountains trembled.
The townsfolk looked toward the sound and saw a super-giant Titan attacking the Shiganshina district!
Ordinary Titans ranged in height from six meters to thirty meters.
But an absurd hundred-meter Titan like this—they had not only never seen one, they had never even heard of one!
The creature's muscle fibers were exposed and turned outward, as though it had no skin at all, and its whole body radiated dense, boiling steam.
In environments fit for human survival, steam could often inflict far more damage than boiling water.
"A special Abnormal? No, that's not it! Those eyes..."
Eren narrowed her beautiful eyes slightly, her lovely face covered in frost: "This Titan is a rational living being!"
Among the crowd, all the commoners, merchants, high officials, and royalty completely lost their minds.
Even the worthless lot of the Garrison, at this moment, failed to perform the slightest duty of maintaining order.
Like ordinary people who had never received any training, they wailed hysterically and fled desperately toward the inner city.
Boom!
After a thunderous crash, the city wall crumbled.
A great host of Titans poured into the city.
A gluttonous feast had begun!
The facial expressions of these ordinary Titans always looked like those of idiots suffering from trisomy 21.
Their movements were twisted and deformed, utterly devoid of reason.
Humans scurried about in all directions like chicks, snatched up one by one and stuffed into mouths to be swallowed down.
On this day, humanity finally remembered the fear that had once ruled over them.
Armin had already collapsed to the ground, his whole body numb and tingling, his legs refusing to obey him.
For an ordinary person without training, such a reaction was perfectly normal.
Eren hauled him up in one motion, slung him onto her back, and sprinted toward home.
The whole way, her beautiful eyes narrowed slightly; while dodging the Titans' attacks, she was also turning many things over in her mind.
Master Zoro had once imparted a great deal of knowledge and intelligence to her.
She knew that Titans ate people but could not digest them.
Those malformed monstrosities had no digestive capacity at all.
So after swallowing a human and waiting for the person to suffocate to death in their stomach, they would vomit the body back out.
As for other living things—horses, dogs, sheep—they were completely ignored.
They were practically a biological weapon developed specifically to target humanity.
"That Steam Titan... how on earth did it appear?"
Master Zoro had trained Eren's combat skills and her intuition.
And Teacher Orochimaru had shaped her mode of thinking.
The Eren of now knew how to use her head.
Intelligence is one of humanity's mightiest weapons.
A hundred-meter-tall Steam Titan could surely be seen clearly from several kilometers away.
Yet it had appeared abruptly in the Shiganshina district...
In an instant, a great many possibilities surfaced deep in Eren's mind.
She discarded those with vanishingly small probability and kept two chains of deduction.
One: within the Garrison, there had emerged an anti-human traitor, and that person must be a high official with absolute power. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to make all those worthless Garrison soldiers pretend to be blind at the same time.
Two: the Steam Titan had been transformed from some "petite," inconspicuous traitor.
By the time Eren reached home with Armin on her back, she had already reached a conclusion.
The Steam Titan was either an ordinary Titan that had transformed, or else a being created outright from a human!
Gather intelligence, reason and analyze, argue and conclude.
Applying the mode of thinking Orochimaru had instilled in her to this sudden incident, Eren found the blind spot in this great event.
Once all impossibilities were eliminated, whatever conclusion remained—no matter how unbelievable—had to be the truth!