"Levi?!"
Seeing the savior before him, Armin pushed himself up and wiped the blood from his face.
Then, all at once, he seemed to realize something. He snapped his head around and scanned the battlefield.
Sure enough—just as he suspected—the Scorpion Corps had joined the fight.
The soldiers founded by Roger and personally trained by Levi had always been the backbone in expeditions beyond the Walls and in battles against Titans.
More than that, they were the core of the armed strength inside the Walls.
And now… they were here, too.
"There's hope inside the Walls…" Armin murmured.
He watched Levi whip through the air with ODM gear, carving a path of slaughter through the artillery camp.
With his men at his back, Levi erased artillerymen one after another from the face of the earth—ruthless, precise, not a shred of mercy.
And not only that: everyone besides Levi had stopped carrying blades altogether. They'd switched to anti-personnel squad shotguns.
That way, one shot meant one kill.
No worrying about a blade missing its mark.
How did I not think of that… Armin thought.
This wasn't a Titan hunt.
This was a war against humans.
A shotgun was obviously more suitable than a blade.
With the Scorpion Corps joining in, the artillery position fell fast.
As the smoke thinned, Levi and the others stood atop the hill of the artillery camp, staring at bodies scattered across the ground—and at the cannons and shells right in front of them.
"Can we fire these and send the shells back into their camp?" Levi asked, planting the sole of his long boot on a cannon carriage as he looked at Nelly beside him.
Nelly shrugged.
"Don't look at me. This is my first time seeing one of these too," he said. "If we can grab a prisoner and ask, maybe we can try."
Hearing that, Levi started scanning around.
After searching with his eyes for a moment, he spotted an artilleryman lying face-down, pretending to be dead, his fingers trembling slightly with fear.
"Hey."
Levi walked over and nudged him with his boot.
The man still clung to his last scrap of hope, stubbornly playing corpse—
Until Levi picked up a rifle from the ground and worked the bolt.
"AHH! Don't shoot!!"
The man jolted "back to life," sitting straight up.
Levi had only been testing the rifle—but he hadn't expected it to work that well.
"Tell us how to fire the cannon," Levi said.
The man stammered and stalled.
Only after Levi chopped off one of his legs with a blade did he scream out the loading procedure, the firing steps, and the key precautions.
"Heh. So people off the island aren't all made of steel after all…" Levi sneered.
Nelly learned fast. Even while the man was still stuttering, Nelly had already grasped the gist.
He handled it himself—lifting a shell, loading, aligning, firing.
BOOM!!
A deafening blast. A shell launched—and landed with perfect accuracy right on a World Allied Forces command post.
"Haha!" Nelly burst out laughing. "This thing's actually pretty fun."
He reached for another shell—
But at that moment, multiple cannon reports suddenly rang out around them.
Levi caught the sharp bite of gunpowder, snapped his gaze outward, and saw that the hill had been completely surrounded.
"Withdraw!"
He ordered it and immediately activated his ODM gear.
But shells blocked their escape routes.
Grappling lines were blown apart. Many lost mobility and were seized by infantry swarming up the slope.
Seeing that, Levi pulled his remaining men away at once and plunged into the forest.
Once inside the trees, the Survey Corps moved like fish in water, giving the infantry no chance to push into the woods.
The instant the enemy reached the forest edge, they counterattacked—using cover to harass and strike, keeping the infantry disoriented and lost.
But at the same time, they were fully trapped in the forest as well, with no opening to break out.
At that very moment, inside the World Allied Forces command center—
One of their command branches had been obliterated by their own shell. It was completely beyond what they'd expected.
They never imagined the people inside the Walls would master artillery so quickly—let alone hit a command post with such precision.
If that shell had landed on the main command center, the consequences would have been unthinkable. The entire offensive plan would've been delayed by at least three days.
"We can't give them a single second to breathe," the commander-in-chief said.
Orders went out immediately: all tank companies advance. They would exploit the moment when the armed forces inside the Walls had poured out, and launch a full assault on the interior.
They would blow the gate wide open.
Then the army could surge straight in and carry out a sweeping massacre from street to street.
Levi stood on a branch and watched it unfold, panic tightening his chest.
But there was no chance to break out of the forest—flying or not.
Soldiers had ringed the outside. Not a single gap.
"What do we do now?" Nelly asked.
Levi looked at the men around him. They were perched on branches, urgently checking their wounds.
If they forced a breakout now, it would deal a catastrophic blow to the Scorpion Corps—maybe even wipe them out entirely.
But if they stayed in the forest, they could endure for a long time.
What now?
"I'll draw them off. You use the opening to survive," Levi said—and shot off in the opposite direction without a hint of hesitation.
In the past, Erwin might've stopped him.
But now, there was no one left to stop him.
Nelly watched Levi disappear, a storm of thoughts twisting in his chest.
"What do we do? Do we break out?" someone asked Nelly.
Nelly was in agony.
"I wanted to preserve our strength and not rush out again. But Levi just made that choice impossible. Now we have to do what he said."
With that, he led his men in a ferocious assault toward one side of the encirclement.
At that moment, beneath the gate of the Wall, tanks had already rolled into position. Soldiers climbed out, planting explosives against the gate.
The siege began.
After retreating to a safe distance, they detonated the charges.
The gate cracked with a thunderous snap, then shattered into a pile of rubble.
More dangerous than Titans… were humans.
Even a gate that had once held back Titans could not withstand human attack now.
With the tank companies as the spearhead, they shoved the debris aside completely.
Infantry and armor advanced together. The soldiers followed the tanks and surged into the Walls.
The people inside saw the gate blown open and enemies rushing in, and they panicked—thinking Titans had broken through again.
But when they realized the intruders were just ordinary humans, they let out a shaky breath of relief, as if spared by sheer luck.
And in the instant they relaxed—
Those men began torching houses, and with rifles in hand, executing civilians one by one along the streets.
Seeing the hatred twisting their faces, the people inside the Walls understood in a flash.
Compared to Titans…
Humans were the true demons.
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