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Chapter 1 – Titan Among Ants (≈ 3 100 words)
A pale square of dawn pressed through the sewer grate above Leon Ackerman's head, silvering the puddles that filled Mitras' undercity. He crouched beside an unconscious Military-Police guard and studied his own reflection in the water: sharp cheekbones, a mouth too pretty for a pickpocket, eyes of tempered steel. Even grime couldn't dull them. He looked—he admitted it to himself now—like something sculpted, not born.
Ten minutes earlier he had been running for his life, bread clutched to his chest while boots thundered behind him. A hurled bottle had promised to paint the alley red. Then the world snapped apart like wet parchment and every heartbeat became an age. Leon hadn't thought—he had moved, twisting under flying glass, plucking it from the air, redirecting it into the captain's gut hard enough to lay the armored brute flat. When time returned to normal, the other guards stared as if the devil himself had winked at them.
It was not the first time his body had done the impossible, merely the first time he had heard the voice that followed:
> [Hundredfold Core Online]
Every effort returns a hundredfold. Strength: Armored-Titan baseline ×100. Agility… Charisma…
The glowing words had faded as quickly as they came, but Leon still felt them humming under his skin, in the slow curl of his fingers, in the easy way he hefted the policeman and laid him gently against a wall. He left the last loaf of bread on the man's stomach—payment of sorts—then vaulted up a drainpipe.
The pipe shrieked and folded like paper beneath his grip. Remember, he chided himself, even calm movements carry the weight of giants. He climbed anyway, stepping onto a rooftop that dimpled under his boots, and let the first sunlight brush his face. Above ground the air didn't stink of mold. Crows wheeled. Another voice joined them—the growl of his own hunger. He tore the heel from one loaf and bit in.
A breeze carried a girl's laughter across the tiled sea of roofs, and Leon felt heads turn though he hadn't meant to attract them. The System's readout at the corner of his vision showed Charisma climbing—people noticed him the way moths noticed fire. It embarrassed him. He sank onto his haunches, finished breakfast, and tried to imagine a day when he wasn't running or hiding.
Below, the city woke. Vendors lifted stall shutters; toucans of steam whistled from workshop chimneys. Leon listened, cataloguing every voice, every boot scrape—Agility ×100 sharpened more than muscle; it sharpened attention. He liked that. Attention was a weapon sharper than any knife.
He rose only when church bells tolled seven. The surface sun meant cadet registration day, and Leon wanted ODM gear more than he wanted safety. ODM gear meant speed; speed meant freedom beyond walls.
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The training yard outside Trost—weeks later—looked like a griddle, heat shimmering above churned dust. Scores of recruits fidgeted while Sergeant Keith Shadis paced. Leon stood in the back row, arms folded, trying to appear less than monumental. It never worked; his uniform blouse clung to a torso that would shame marble statues, and every breeze pasted fabric to definition the others could only dream of attaining.
Shadis barked, "Knife assessment. First blood ends the bout." He pointed at Leon and another recruit, Kleber Braun, a hulking farm-boy whose grin oozed confidence.
They squared up inside a chalk circle. Leon turned the knife once in his palm. It felt weightless.
Kleber lunged.
Leon decided—almost lazily—to step aside. Agility erupted; the world blurred. He drifted one pace left, tapped a single finger against Kleber's forehead, and felt the metal helm give like clay. The shockwave that followed was just displaced air, but it sounded like thunder. Kleber flew backward, skidding across dust. A hush fell so complete Leon could hear sparrows on the wall.
The sergeant's whistle never even reached his lips. He stared, jaw slack. Around them recruits gaped; some recoiled, others leaned in, eyes shining—especially the girls. One blonde—Christa? No, Historia, Leon corrected, remembering rumors—pressed knuckles to her lips. Ymir beside her muttered a curse. Mikasa Ackerman regarded him with a look half kinship, half challenge. Annie Leonhart's blue eyes narrowed, measuring angles. And from the officers' porch, glasses glittered—Hange Zoë recording observations before her hand even finished scribbling.
Leon helped Kleber sit, murmured an apology he doubted the boy heard over ringing ears, and returned the knife. Shadis finally spoke, voice thin: "Ackerman… winner." Then to the rest: "Reset!" He sounded relieved to look elsewhere.
The bout should have felt triumphant; instead it felt dangerous. Every eye lingered. Charisma ×100 was a magnet he could not dim. He slipped away at lunch, climbing the inner curtain wall until Trost sprawled below him like a toy city. Hot wind whipped his hair; gulls screeched. He pulled a notebook and charcoal stub from his jacket.
If he was cursed to power, he would forge the world's benefit. He drew cables as thin as spider silk but strong as Titan bone, forged from alloyed sinew—a design only someone who could test ten-ton tension lines barehanded could even imagine. Lines became diagrams; diagrams became equations he half-remembered from books stolen out of Mitras libraries.
A rhythmic clack announced company. Hange Zoë appeared, hair frazzled, eyes fever-bright. "What marvelous nonsense are you scribbling?"
Leon showed her a page. She read, lips moving, then made a noise between a laugh and a gasp. "If this functions, we could loop a Titan's neck and pull until the head pops—like cheese on hot bread!"
He smiled despite himself. "Needs material science I don't have."
"You have me," she declared. "And a workshop that squeals for impossible projects." She rolled up the pages, tucking them beneath her jacket. "Dinner tomorrow. You'll explain every line." She left as quickly as she came, almost skipping.
Leon watched her go, warmth blooming alongside caution. The Hundredfold Core multiplied not only brawn—it multiplied consequences. Each interaction could spiral. But perhaps spiraling upward was better than hiding in tunnels.
Sunset smeared the sky blood-orange. Far to the southwest, chimneys smoldered above Shiganshina District. Leon studied the horizon, unaware that memory from a world not his own whispered warnings he could not yet parse.
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He could not sleep that night. Muscles buzzed with residual energy; thoughts looped. At eleven he finally lay in the barracks loft, arms behind his head, letting the rhythm of bunk-house breathing lull him. The Hundredfold System ticked at the edge of consciousness, tallying the day: sixteen roof-jumps, one impossible finger-strike, half an hour of engineering, twenty-six involuntary heart flutters his face had caused in bystanders (it tracked that too, apparently). All magnified, banked as permanent progress—and all due to rebound at midnight unless he achieved Recovery.
Recovery meant stillness., so Leon slowed his breaths, sank, let the mattress cradle him. Soft hay scent replaced gunmetal. Somewhere outside a dog barked twice and fell silent.
The church bell began its twelve strokes.
With the twelfth, soothing coolness flowed from scalp to heel; aches evaporated. The notification window bloomed green: Recovery Success—Strain Cleared. Leon exhaled. The gift always felt like forgiveness.
Then came the boom.
A concussion rolled across Trost, rattling windows, jarring bunks. Recruits jerked awake, shouting. Leon sat up, vision adjusting through slats toward the outside. The southern sky glowed lurid red, vein-lit by lightning. Steam plumes towered like dying campfires—too large, too distant. His borrowed memories snapped into clarity: Shiganshina's gate… the Colossal…
Sirens wailed. Boots pounded the corridor; Keith Shadis' roar echoed: "Cadets, muster!"
Leon was already moving, yanking trousers over nightclothes, lacing boots in a blur. When he burst outside, Mikasa was there, scarf whipping. Their eyes met—silent pact between warriors. Around them chaos churned: instructors shouting, horses screaming, refugees staggering through midnight gates.
Leon's Core pinged a scarlet alert:
> Crisis Branch Point
Recommendation: All attributes continue accumulating. Warning: tomorrow's output will exceed safe physiological limits without staggered rest.
Override? Y/N
He stabbed a yes with his mind. Safe limits were luxuries for other people.
Lightning flashed again, reflecting in Historia's wide eyes as she helped a toddler climb from a wagon. Ymir swore, ripping her cloak to bandage a bleeding man. Hange thundered past with a coil of measuring chain and a grin ill-suited to the horror.
Leon reached for a chunk of fallen masonry, hefting it one-handed; the slab weighed as much as an ox cart, yet his fingers merely tingled. Charisma surged when he called, "Clear a corridor! Wagons to the grain store. Medics near the well where water is close." Panic contracted, refocused into purpose; even instructors obeyed, too shocked to argue with the beautiful titan-boy whose voice cracked like cannon fire.
For two hours they moved rubble, carried stretchers, cooled burns. Leon's muscles sang, each effort feeding the furnace that would burn him tomorrow, but right now—right now he was unstoppable. Once, lifting a collapsed beam, he caught Annie staring. She looked away fast, but he saw calculation in her gaze, as though she weighed odds of a fight neither of them wanted yet.
Just past three, the flood of refugees thinned. Fires at last came under control. Leon felt tremors in his arms—sign that the Core's gift had limits even before rebound. He slipped into an empty stable, pushed hay into a corner, and collapsed. Steam rose from his shoulders where shirtsleeves had burned away. Straw pricked skin that might as well have been iron.
He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes, but the alarm bells still tolled in distant intervals, and the sky still pulsed fiery beyond the inner walls. Tomorrow—no, today, because dawn's grey already seeped under doors—would demand everything from him. Strength multiplied a hundredfold, he thought, but courage is still just courage. You spend it or you hide it.
He would spend it.
Leon forced himself upright, inhaled, and began the breathing pattern that summoned Recovery. It came slower this time; strain clung like wet cloth. Minutes stretched. Finally the System's cool mercy slid through his nerves, dulling pain though not erasing it.
When he opened his eyes, a sliver of sunlight found a crack in the stable wall and painted his hands gold. Those hands, strong enough to crush stone, closed gently around the beam of light as if pledging to guard it.
"Tomorrow," he whispered to the horses dozing nearby, "I'll show the Titans what a real monster looks like."
Outside, Trost's bells changed cadence—a summons to formation. Leon rose, rolled stiff shoulders, and walked toward the noise, leaving perfect fingerprints pressed into the wood where he'd been sitting.
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End of Chapter 1
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If you like it and I know you do drop a stone it won't kill you