The Colossal Titans' footsteps did not stop for anyone's crying or screaming. Along the way, they had heard far, far too many desperate wails.
As the vanguard of the Titan legion—the Colossal Titans that had once been confined inside the Walls and used as the Walls themselves—those Titans had long since lost any sense of self. Guided by Roger Eikam, they marched forward without pause.
But behind them were other Colossal Titans—ones formed from Eldians who still existed in the present day. They watched with their own eyes as everything in their wake was flattened into lifeless ruin, and they felt crushing guilt and fear.
Even though they had become Titans, at their core they were still human. Humans still empathized. They still couldn't help imagining: what if their own family—what if their own children—were trampled like this? What would they do?
They felt despair. They felt sorrow.
And so, their pace began to slow—until some of them nearly stopped.
Seeing the hesitation spreading through the Titans behind him, Roger Eikam understood. This was normal.
He had hesitated like that at the beginning too.
But now, his mind had no room for anything else.
On the battlefield, even after he had become a Titan that dwarfed mountains—nearly a kilometer tall—he still never let his guard down. He never assumed that just because humans now crouched before him like ants, they no longer posed any threat.
Roger Eikam treated all humans as threats.
All of them—except himself.
And sometimes, even he would treat himself as a hypothetical enemy, pushing to surpass who he was yesterday, to do what yesterday's self could not.
Following the faltering pace behind him, Roger Eikam ordered the vanguard to slow down as well.
He didn't want to urge these people too harshly—these Eldians who had been trapped within the Walls for centuries.
Deep inside them still lived something the very first generation imprisoned within the Walls no longer had:
Compassion.
And with that compassion came a kind of goodness.
They had guarded their last remaining virtues until the very end.
Yet now, the side that had once been the world's victims had become the despised presence—the invaders of war.
Roger Eikam remembered someone once saying something like this:
A war's aggressor—no matter how righteous their earlier defensive wars may have been—once they stray onto the wrong path, the outcome becomes an evil fruit. They become guilty, and that guilt cannot be washed clean by anything. Even if you do countless good deeds after killing, it changes nothing.
So Roger Eikam had understood a truth since he was very young:
No one in this world is clean. Everyone is stained, more or less.
Put them in water and wash them, and they'll still darken the water.
That didn't mean everyone was evil.
It was simply what humanity was.
Roger Eikam had never held any hope for humans.
Not before.
And even less now.
Back inside the Walls, he had once believed the people inside and the people outside were different—because they had been confined for a hundred years.
In those hundred years, there had been no outside forces interfering. They should have grown healthy and strong.
But during Roger Eikam's days within the Walls, he saw clearly just how rotten it really was. The oppression of the royal family and the nobles ultimately turned into a poisonous force within society, giving birth to darkness.
Drug trafficking.
The Underground.
Because he came from the underworld himself, Roger Eikam knew those dealings better than anyone.
Back then, Nelly Quick had even suggested he get into those trades—because the money came fast.
But whether it was cowardice or a conscience, he knew that once drugs got into someone's body, they were hard to quit. If they spread widely, everyone inside the Walls would suffer from the disaster drugs brought. So while people still hadn't fully recognized them as "drugs," while they were still being passed off as "medicine," they had to be banned outright—no one allowed to touch them.
It was like that then.
It was like that now.
Roger Eikam had never once allowed the Scorpion Trading Company to do anything illegal. He had even gradually cleaned himself up, washed himself "white."
At first, he ran errands for the government.
Later, he handled certain thorny problems for them—earning extra money that way, without doing evil.
That was Roger Eikam's kindness.
Now, even though he was a demon nearly a kilometer tall—pressing his terror down upon the entire world, making everyone fear him, dread him, tremble from head to toe, unable to even form the thought of resistance—
He was still the same Roger Eikam.
Not changed in the slightest.
He had arrived in Marley.
Roger Eikam looked down at the land beneath his feet.
Yes—this was the place he had once been unable to endure, the homeland he had ultimately fled in helplessness:
Marley.
It was his homeland, yes. He truly had been born and raised here.
But from the very beginning he had been imprisoned in this place, crushed under oppression, never given a single breath of freedom.
His mother had died in some unknown place, murdered without mercy.
The reason was nothing more than political necessity.
His father had died at the hands of a mysterious power—forces that were still waiting for Roger Eikam to defeat them.
Before setting out, Roger Eikam had thought: if Dior and the others intercepted him on the way, he would fight with everything he had and deal them a fatal blow.
But if he successfully reached Marley—if he set foot on this soil—then stopping Dior would no longer be the first priority.
Destroying Marley would.
Marley.
Marley's monarchist nationalism.
Roger Eikam didn't know how many times he had thought about Marley's system. On the surface, it seemed like there was nothing wrong with it—yet somehow, it always drove this country onto the road of invasion and crime.
He had studied Marley's history. Through those fabricated records, he roughly understood why Marley developed such a hunger for expansion.
It was simple:
A lack of security.
When you feel insecure, you want more.
And if you want more, you have to seize someone else's land.
It wasn't a good thing.
But Marleyans never realized it.
At first there were still voices of opposition.
In the end, they all vanished. No one dared to say "no" anymore—because those who did were executed.
A country having only one voice wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
After Marley discarded all other dissenting opinions, it successfully stepped onto a **** path, and its development surged forward, leaving other nations in the dust.
Even without Titans, Marley could still stand toe-to-toe with other countries.
But in the end, they still relied on Titans. And because of the hatred born from war, other nations were driven to exploit their own resources and develop a series of new weapons.
Roger Eikam hadn't personally tested those new weapons—
—but he had personally experienced what it felt like to be struck by those shells.
It was like being ended.
Like everything was about to reach its conclusion.
Yet he endured.
And he brought the Rumbling onto Marley's soil.
Onto this land of sin.
//Check out my P@tre0n for 20 extra chapters on all my fanfics //[email protected]/Razeil0810.