Within the sea of sand, dusk was eternal.
Aeternus sensed that Annie was different tonight. Her figure beneath the tree of light seemed somewhat more solid, and her presence was no longer merely sharp. It was more like the deep sea after its waters had settled, carrying a restrained pressure. Even her movements possessed an effortless poise she had not had before.
During a break in their sparring, the two sat upon the frigid sand. Aeternus studied the sharply defined profile of her face and finally spoke.
"Has your training... entered a new stage?"
Annie lifted a hand and brushed the hair at her temple. "The adaptation training is over." Her voice was calm, yet it struck Aeternus’s ears like thunder. "I inherited the power of the Female Titan."
As expected. Aeternus’s heart sank sharply. She was no longer a candidate, but a true Warrior, burdened with the thirteen-year curse. That "predetermined path" had reached its most dangerous and irreversible stage.
"Then..." His throat felt dry. "The plan to seize the ‘Coordinate’ has been put on the schedule too?"
"Yes." Annie gazed toward the distant tree of light. "Next year. The final strategic simulations and infiltration training have already begun."
The word "final" pierced the last vestige of luck in Aeternus’s heart like an ice needle. Frieda Reiss’s violet eyes flashed through his mind, along with that cold will that had tried to erase his memories.
Fear drowned him like a white tide of ice. He did not want the people inside the Walls to be reduced to ruin, nor did he want Annie to die beneath that power.
"No, Annie, listen to me." He abruptly turned toward her, his voice trembling without his realizing it. "You can’t go! That ‘Coordinate’... I’ve seen it! That power isn’t battle at all. It’s rules. It’s annihilation! If you challenge her, you’re walking into your deaths!"
Annie turned her head, her ice-blue eyes meeting his agitated gaze. There was no surprise in them, only a bottomless calm that was almost numb. "This is the path that was laid out for us. Become a Warrior, inherit the power, complete the mission. There are no other options."
"Laid out by whom?!" Aeternus was beginning to lose control. The part of his soul that belonged to Diablo—the researcher from Utopia Academy who believed in communication and understanding—awoke and cried out at that moment. "Why must problems be solved through theft and slaughter? Can’t you... talk?"
He seized her arm with enough force to make her frown faintly.
"Annie, think about it! Both sides possess destructive power. Why can’t they try to communicate? Maybe the king inside the Walls has his own reasons. Maybe there is a way to coexist without bloodshed. Violence only breeds more violence. Someone has to take the initiative and break the chain of hatred!"
His eyes shone with a light Annie could not fully understand—a nearly naive insistence on peace.
Annie looked at him as if he were a child who did not understand the world. She gently pulled free of his grasp, a faint, almost imperceptible mockery entering her voice.
"Talk?" she repeated, as though the word were absurd to a Marleyan Warrior. "Talk to the ‘king’ who used Titan power to imprison his own people within the Walls and alter their memories at will? Aeternus, you’re too naive."
She rose to her feet and looked down at him, her voice cold and cruel. "This world is not your unrealistic utopia. Those who cannot give up anything cannot change anything. Marley needs the Founding Titan’s power to maintain its hegemony, and the king inside the Walls will never hand over the ‘Coordinate.’ Negotiation? It never existed from the beginning. Seizing it is the only path. The sacrifices that result from it... are a necessary price."
"A necessary price?!" Aeternus sprang to his feet, fury and profound sorrow intertwining in his chest. "Do you know what that ‘price’ is? Tens of thousands of living people! My parents, Uncle Busch, all those people at the pasture struggling to survive! They know nothing. They are simply living ordinary lives. Why should they become the ‘necessary price’ for your struggle over power?"
The cold brutality he had witnessed in a laboratory in his previous life violently collided within him with the ordinary warmth he had felt inside the Walls in this life. He loathed the logic that treated human lives as numbers and costs.
"And breaching the Wall!" His voice was hoarse with agitation. "That is what you plan to do, isn’t it? Destroy the Wall and let countless Titans pour through, devouring everything... Annie, that would be a massacre of defenseless civilians!"
He stared at her intently, his eyes filled with struggle and pain.
"If I told you that I live within Wall Rose—my home, everything I have, is there—and if I begged you, for the sake of... for the sake of everything between us, not to destroy that Wall, not to turn my world into hell... what would you do?"
He laid down his final boundary, and his deepest fear.
Annie fell silent.
It was a long, suffocating silence. The sea of sand seemed to freeze. Aeternus could see fine cracks forming in the unbreakable layer of ice within her ice-blue eyes. Her fingers curled unconsciously, clenched, then loosened.
The mission... her father’s expectations... Marley’s glory... all of it frantically tore at the image of the boy before her, at the near-desperate plea in his eyes, and at the mountain of corpses and sea of blood he had described.
She remembered the Eldians in the training camp who had been expended as a "necessary price," the fear hidden deep within her father’s clouded eyes, and the only person in this sea of sand who had ever told her, "Find a way to survive."
At last, she exhaled, so slowly it was almost imperceptible.
"The mission... cannot be canceled." For the first time, her voice carried a weighty rasp. "The Founding Titan must be taken."
Aeternus’s heart sank.
"But..." She raised her eyes and looked at him with a complicated expression. "Wall Rose... does not have to be destroyed." She paused, as though seeking a reason for her own "betrayal." "Tactically... breaching the Wall is not the only option. Infiltration, reconnaissance, a precise seizure... perhaps... would reduce unnecessary losses and attention more effectively."
Then her gaze became incomparably clear and resolute. Word by word, she told Aeternus:
"I promise you, I will not actively destroy Wall Rose. And I will not... let myself die there so easily."
This was not an order from her superiors, nor was it Marley’s strategy. It was a personal promise from Annie Leonhart to Aeternus Andres.
"Tell me." She took a small step forward. "Where are you? Where inside the Walls?"
Aeternus saw the unquestionable sincerity in her eyes and knew this was not an attempt to pry for information, but to confirm it. He took a deep breath and gave her his trust—and his coordinates.
"Reiss Territory. I live near a pasture in Reiss Territory, within Wall Rose. There’s a small hill beside it that stands out on the open plain."
Annie’s pupils contracted slightly. This information confirmed many of her suspicions, and made the burden on her shoulders seem heavier still.
"...I understand." She spoke softly, engraving that name into her heart. "I will go to Reiss Territory. I will find you."
She said nothing more. Yet they both understood that, from this moment onward, the relationship between them had become more complicated and more dangerous. They stood at the crossroads of conviction and survival.
He despised war and slaughter, yet had no choice but to accept the reality that she had to carry out her mission.
She bore the fate of a Warrior, yet within that cold mission, she had drawn an emotional line for him.
The sea of sand was silent. Yet the thread called "bond" between their two souls did not break in the raging winds of fate. Instead, it was pulled taut and made even stronger.
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