The sea wind carried salt, the smoke of distant battlefields, and the faint, intermittent scent of blood as it swept through Marley’s military harbor. Massive warships, like crouching beasts of steel, were being loaded with supplies and soldiers. From a heavily sealed training zone near the harbor came the thunderous rumble and tremors of the earth.
Their training had long surpassed mere simulations.
The brutality of real battle had been carved into their muscle memory.
Fragments of memory flashed through Annie’s mind like bloodstained slides:
Before the fortress of the Middle Eastern Allied Forces, smoke blanketed the battlefield and corpses lay everywhere. Bertholdt’s Colossal Titan, a walking natural disaster, unleashed a violent explosion of steam that turned an entire stretch of wall and its defenders into ash and charred remains. The heat melted nearby metal into red-hot liquid iron, swallowing lives that screamed in agony.
During the street fighting in the town of Odia, Reiner’s Armored Titan was an unstoppable chariot. Its feet, clad in hardened skin, crushed barricades and soldiers alike. The sound of breaking bones was drowned out by roars and collapsing buildings, while bloody scraps of flesh were smeared across ruined walls and shattered streets.
On the eastern front’s plains, Zeke’s Beast Titan displayed an almost elegant cruelty as it hurled fuel-soaked iron barrels into the enemy ranks like a rain of shells. The barrels struck the ground and burst into seas of flame, turning living people into burning figures that flailed madly before curling into blackened husks. The stench of scorched flesh saturated the air.
While clearing battlefields, Pieck’s Cart Titan carried heavy weapons with astonishing endurance as it moved through mountains of corpses and rivers of blood. The cannon mounted on its back precisely picked off any enemy who tried to resist—or who had merely survived—driving their despair to completion.
The swiftest and most ruthless was Marcel’s Jaw Titan. Its body covered in bony armor, its bite terrifyingly powerful, it slipped into enemy formations like a phantom. It effortlessly tore through steel hatches, then used its fanged jaws to bite apart and rip to pieces enemy commanders and artillerymen along with their equipment. Blood and fragments of viscera often hung from its claws, fangs, and faceplate, displaying violence in its most primal and direct form.
Destruction. Conquest. Slaughter.
This was the daily life of Marley’s Warriors over the past year. They wielded the power of the Titans, branding the "sins" and "honor" of the Eldians alike upon the corpses, scorched earth, and seas of blood of countless foreign peoples.
All of it was preparation for the final mission: reaching that "island of devils" and seizing the Founding Titan.
Rumble!
Within the training grounds, the Beast Titan hurled a massive boulder. The Armored Titan charged forward to meet it, scattering fragments of stone everywhere. The Cart Titan raced through the field at high speed to provide support, while the Colossal Titan’s curtain of steam obscured the battlefield. At the heart of that chaos, Annie’s Female Titan burst forward like a phantom. Crystal instantly covered her leg as she delivered a fierce whip kick directly into the joint of the Armored Titan’s knee!
Clang!
The deafening collision of stone and metal dragged Annie back from her bloody memories into reality.
The training was over. The order to dismiss was given.
Annie did not speak to anyone. She headed straight for the barracks.
Her hands had long been stained with blood that could never be washed away. Her heart, too, had been repeatedly tempered by day after day of killing, encased in solid ice.
Only when she thought of her promise to Aeternus did the ice around her heart melt, if only a little.
It was the day of her routine visit home.
Perhaps it would be the last one before deployment.
She pushed open the familiar, weathered wooden door. Her father still sat beside the old table, his back more hunched than she remembered. An indescribable heaviness filled the room.
"Father, I’m home."
Her father’s body gave an almost imperceptible shudder before he slowly turned around. His gaze rested on Annie for a long time. The sternness and expectations that had once filled his clouded eyes were gone, leaving only a bottomless exhaustion that seemed about to overflow—and fear.
Had he, too, imagined his daughter transforming into a Titan and slaughtering people amid blood and fire from the scattered reports of the front lines?
Annie silently set down her bag.
"Annie..."
Her father’s hoarse voice rose, trembling with a nearly broken quality she had never heard before.
She stopped and turned back.
The next instant, she froze.
The man who had always armed himself with coldness and reprimands suddenly rose from his chair, staggered toward her, and then—with almost desperate force—pulled her tightly into his arms.
His arms clamped around her tightly, and his body trembled beyond his control.
"I’m sorry... I’m sorry, Annie..." His suppressed confession, thick with tears, poured into her ears. "It was me... I was the one who forced you down this bloodstained road... I’m such a useless father..."
Annie felt warm drops fall against the hollow of her neck.
Her father’s tears.
The cold shell that had long sustained their father-daughter relationship, disguised as "honor" and "expectation," shattered and peeled away completely in that instant. Beneath it lay the raw, bloody truth called love and fear.
"I don’t want you to become a hero... I don’t want any of that damned honor..." Her father choked out the words, each one seeming to exhaust all his strength. "I only want you... to live... No matter what, find a way to come back alive! Promise me, Annie!"
Annie’s body gradually softened from its initial stiffness. She raised her hands, hesitated for a moment, and finally returned the embrace gently, holding the man who had suddenly grown so much older.
The nihilistic ice that had always occupied her heart seemed to melt at one corner beneath those scalding tears. The bloody scenes from the battlefield, too, seemed to carry a different weight in that moment.
"Yes."
Her reply was brief, her voice muffled against her father’s shoulder.
Her father loosened his embrace slightly. With trembling hands covered in wrinkles and calluses, he searched inside his clothes and carefully pressed a small object into Annie’s palm.
It was a metal ring.
The material was ordinary, but the workmanship was meticulous. A concealed mechanism lay inside it. With a flick of her hand, sharp pointed teeth glinted with cold, dangerous light in the dimness.
"Take this... with you." Her father’s voice remained hoarse, but his resolve was beyond question. "When you need to use it... don’t hesitate. You must... come back alive."
Annie lowered her gaze to the ring in her palm, both a gift and a weapon for killing.
It represented her father’s final choice—
No longer Marley’s imposed "glory," stained red with the blood of others.
But his daughter’s most humble and most precious right: survival.
She clenched the ring tightly, as though it still retained her father’s body heat.
She raised her head. Her ice-blue eyes looked directly into her father’s face, still wet with tears, and she made a promise in a clarity and resolve unlike anything she had ever shown before:
"I will come back alive. Then we’ll see each other again."
There were no grand declarations.
No guarantees about the mission.
Only this one promise, made purely for the sake of meeting again.
Her father looked at her, and at last a faint glimmer of light appeared in his clouded eyes.
Annie solemnly put the ring on her finger. The sharp teeth hidden within its mechanism and the lingering warmth on its outer surface constantly reminded her of the even crueler battle ahead—and preserved the fragile warmth of the reconciliation she had only just found behind her.
Her preparations, at that moment—
Amid the blood-soaked past and her father’s tears—
Were finally complete.
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