Chapter Text
./.
The existence of Child Number Two had, from the very beginning, been a destiny steeped in irony. A cruel joke that Nature hurled straight into the flawless blueprint of Genesis.
Instead of becoming the forerunner of a superior species - one in which physical power would be driven to its absolute peak, the body hardened to iron, and the mind left blank - Oracle had been assembled according to principles that ran entirely in reverse.
That strong, emotionless body was replaced with a frail frame, all energy diverted into the nourishment of a single thing: the nervous system.
A child whose physical body had never fully formed, yet who possessed a vast and chaotic reservoir of consciousness, where will and pain had no barriers to contain them. A raw emotional bomb. A variable beyond the calculations of either God or Devil.
Like an Icarus bearing the wings of ambition, only to find them cast in soft wax. A beautiful but mistaken life, bearing a fire too immense for its fragile clay vessel, destined only to burn itself alive and shatter in the void.
.
.
“I fear we are going to lose that child... Oracle...”
Althea Marin’s voice sank low, dissolving into the wind shrieking beyond the sheer rock face of Tholus Fortress. In the dim yellow half-light of the room, where only three people sat, she removed her glasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose, revealing the dark hollows beneath her eyes - the helplessness of someone who had stared too long into the price of knowledge.
Levi and Mikasa sat across from her, silent and grave. The air thickened as Althea slid an X-ray plate of a child’s full body across the tabletop.
“Oracle’s birth was the cruelest punishment God ever handed Genesis,” Althea said with a bitter curl of the mouth, her gaze turning inward, toward the past. “We poured everything into that creation, only to receive a curse that betrayed every one of our ambitions. A being that rejected every law of survival, too weak to have lived even a moment outside the incubation cradle, and yet gifted with a mental power that even we - its creators - dared not comprehend.”
She paused, and her voice dropped further.
“The first time that power erupted in Utopia... the entire research sector shook with a kind of earthquake called... fear. For one moment, dozens of scientists - Magna and I included - dropped to our knees at once. It felt as though all our minds had been crushed inward, shoved to the brink of madness. We saw hallucinations, heard screams that did not exist, and felt a loneliness so vast it could have caved in the chest. It could only have been the authority of a god...”
Althea pointed at the dense scattering of dark spots across the X-ray film.
“Genesis - and Schatten most of all - saw opportunity inside that catastrophe. We built an entire life-support system around Oracle, simply to keep him in this world a little longer. Schatten wanted to wring dry that treasury of precognition. He drove the boy to his extremes, forced him to connect, forced him to see... and each time, Oracle’s cells burned themselves alive.”
She lifted her eyes to the two Ackermans, and there was very little light left in them.
“And after everything that happened in Mitras, Oracle’s biological collapse reached a point beyond reversal. By every medical standard, the boy should have already drawn his last breath. But...”
Althea frowned, her gaze wavering as if she were trying to seize hold of invisible smoke amid the dry certainty of numbers.
“...There was something else there... something deeper than survival instinct, and more desperate than the fear of death, keeping him here.”
...
“In the last few close examinations, I could feel it through the glass of the incubation chamber. That child’s aching resolve, every second, every minute... waiting only for one thing... or someone...”
.
.
.
Althea’s prophecy at Tholus still seemed to be hanging in the air, drifting through the silences of memory...
...until it was torn apart by the shriek of wind and electrical pressure in the Kill Box.
UTOPIA ELEVATOR SHAFT - DEPTH: 95 METERS
Against the vertical metal wall, two black figures that should have been unstoppable arrows had now stalled, hanging there like marionettes with their strings cut. Levi had driven a blade into a seam in the steel cladding, his chest heaving violently, cold sweat soaking through the lining beneath his helmet. On the opposite wall, Mikasa was clutching her head, her whole body trembling uncontrollably, her eyes wide and empty as if facing an invisible beast.
“Hey! What’s wrong with you two?!”
Jean’s shout came echoing down from above, edged with a panic he rarely betrayed. He and Kael were sliding down along the spiral rail, rifles ready, but with no earthly idea what they were meant to shoot at.
“A magnetic trap? Sonic interference?” Kael bellowed, scanning environmental readings so absurdly normal they made no sense. “Why did they stop?!”
“It’s not a trap...”
Althea Marin’s voice came through the internal comms, cold and taut. She was wedged between Jean and Kael, her eyes locked behind her visor on the crimson warning signals flashing across the display on her wrist.
“Do not go down there. Hold your position!” Althea ordered, her tone snapping hard. “They’ve entered the Storm.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Jean growled, but instinctively braked anyway.
“Parallel Resonance,” Althea said quickly. “We predicted this possibility. Alpha down there is the Body - and Oracle, coming at them through the mind, is the Brain. So long as those two defective halves were separated to keep them restrained, they remained safe. But in a confined space like this, once they draw near each other, they create an endless feedback loop.”
She pointed into the black abyss below, where the cold currents were beginning to churn in unnatural patterns.
“Their emotions are no longer just neural signals. They are being amplified into physical force - enough to rupture the matter around them. That is why we split them apart in the first place: Oracle at Mitras, Alpha at Utopia. It has always been dangerous to let them come too close.”
“Captain and Mikasa are being affected because they’re the prime specimen?” Kael demanded.
“Yes. Complete Ackermans.” Althea wheeled around. “Inside this storm of chaotic data, their shared genome is acting like a pair of colossal lightning rods. They’re being pulled into it.”
She looked down at the two figures writhing against the wall.
“Oracle has entered a state of Ascended Consciousness. His body collapsed from multi-organ failure long ago. What remains is the final blaze of his life force, transcending into an overwhelming wave of psionic activity.”
Althea swallowed. A tremor ran down her spine.
“What’s down there... is no longer a child made of flesh and bone. It is a malignant mass of pure sorrow spreading outward.”
.
Althea’s warning - once only a cold hypothesis spoken over papers at Tholus - had now taken shape as an invisible monster, gnawing through every muscle and nerve in Levi’s body.
He ground his teeth until he could taste blood, using the pain to keep himself conscious.
They had known. They had prepared. But no one - not even Althea - could have foreseen that the storm would strike at this precise, catastrophic instant, when they were suspended in midair, deprived of any physical footing, and only one breath away from the bottom.
This assault - a brutal excavation of the mind - was the first thing Levi had ever faced that stripped him wholly of his armor, leaving him bare and defenseless before his own self. He could not swing his blades. The enemy was not in front of him. It was sprouting from inside.
The memories Levi had buried beneath the cold gravestones of history were now being dragged up with merciless clarity. The faces of dead comrades, the wrong choices, the deaths he had stood powerless to stop - all of it came roaring back as though unfolding in a second reality.
But inside that cyclone of old ghosts, Levi’s instinct still howled one command louder than pain itself:
Protect Mikasa.
Across the shaft, Mikasa was starting to slip. Her eyes were vacant, unmoored, her grip loosening on her sword hilt as if she were already surrendering herself to the pull of the phantoms below.
With the last sliver of iron will left to him, Levi triggered his thrusters and hurled himself across that emotion-thick air straight toward her.
He seized both her shoulders and yanked her into him. The brutal physical impact jolted her, but her eyes remained lost and wild, as though they were looking through him toward some shadow from long ago. Her body was shaking violently, cold as a slab of ice.
Levi pressed his forehead to hers.
The instant skin met skin, an invisible spark tore between them. The collision of two Ackerman bloodlines igniting at once.
He knew what she was seeing - because he was seeing it too. The clairvoyant child’s emotional amplification was using their memories to build a prison of feeling. If they did not cool their minds, if they let emotion swallow reason for too long, they would be synchronized forever into that realm of ruin.
At zero distance, Mikasa’s ragged breathing gradually fell into sync with Levi’s calm, stubborn rhythm. It was as if what they were saying to each other traveled directly through blood instead of words:
Wake up. We are not allowed to fall here.
Oracle’s deranged resonance struck the wall of will forged inside the two Ackermans, now anchoring themselves through each other. Like waves smashing against a cliff, it shattered. The crushing pressure in their chests loosened. The mournful screams inside their heads dwindled, then vanished, leaving only the shriek of wind in their ears.
Mikasa let out a long breath. Her pupils focused again, finding her own reflection in Levi’s silver-gray eye. They were back. Their heads still felt heavy as lead, but their hands no longer shook.
There was no time to hesitate.
The moment Levi felt Mikasa steadying, he turned toward the abyss again. Instinct came surging back, washing clean the remains of the pain.
The target was still there: the tungsten steel mesh blocking the way.
Levi tightened his reverse grip on the hilt. His muscles drew taut. He engaged the compressed-air turbines, preparing to unleash a full-force strike and tear the final obstacle apart.
But his sword never came down.
Click.
A tiny, sharp mechanical clack rang out - in the stillness, deafening as a gunshot.
The mesh... opened on its own.
The blue current racing over the surface of the lattice went dead in an instant. The huge hydraulic locks on either side of the shaft released together with a soft, elegant hiss. The dense steel net - built to withstand even heavy explosives - slid smoothly and silently into the walls on both sides.
The path to the bottom lay unobstructed. The black pit below lay exposed, still and endless - a gigantic maw yawning wide to swallow its prey.
Its quietness was more terrifying than a thousand gun barrels.
Levi froze in midair, sword still raised, but with nothing left to cut. He narrowed his eyes into that darkness, a deeper chill crawling up his spine than anything from moments before.
Above, Althea Marin frowned and pressed her fingers to her earpiece. The returning data showed that the highest-level security system had just been disengaged from within.
“Elara,” Althea said at once, suspicion hardening her voice. “Did you just interfere with the tungsten net?”
“No,” Elara answered immediately, confusion plain in her tone. “I can’t. The lower-level encryption is isolated; I have no access from the outside. I thought... you used an emergency override?”
“I did nothing,” Althea replied, staring into the black maw now spreading beneath Levi’s feet.
Silence swallowed the channel.
If Elara had not done it, and Althea had not done it, and Levi had not yet made the cut...
...then there was only one being left who could have opened that gate.
The one waiting for them at the bottom.
./.
While Levi and Mikasa were straining to anchor their wills against the black abyss of Utopia, more than ten miles away as the crow flies, on a wind-lashed hilltop, Gabi’s team had nearly reached the end of their journey through the blizzard, two thousand meters above sea level.
The armored vehicle roared, its treads crushing the ancient permafrost as it clawed its way over the last slope. Relay Station Number 7 rose before them, looming and solitary like the fossilized skeleton of a forgotten era. The central antenna tower speared into the sky, its frame eaten through by salt wind, its peeling red-and-white paint exposing rust-bled steel, like a fresh scar slashed across the pallid dawn.
On official military maps, this place was nothing more than an anonymous black dot with the notation: Inactive infrastructure. And yet that very anonymity was the perfect shield Armin Arlert had chosen. Signal sweepers with hawk-sharp eyes and dense intelligence nets alike were forever occupied scanning the modern relay stations in the capital, while this dead carcass of obsolete technology lay ignored in the mountains, forsaken and invisible.
“We’re here!”
Rikard slammed on the brakes. The vehicle skidded, then came to a stop before a sagging chain-link gate.
The hulking man leapt from the cab, the gale lashing his face like physical blows. Without hesitation, he pulled heavy-duty bolt cutters from his back and strode toward a padlock rusted entirely out of shape.
CRACK.
The dry sound of snapping metal cut through the storm. Rikard followed it with a kick. The gate groaned, then collapsed into the snow.
“Move! Gabi! Falco!” Rikard shouted, his voice shredded to ribbons by the wind. “I’m not freezing to death in this godforsaken wasteland!”
Gabi and Falco jumped out after him, clutching the case with the hard drive as if it mattered more than life itself. Bent low against the gale, they ran for the central operations building, fighting to keep their footing.
The heavy iron door slammed shut behind them, cutting off the savage howl of the storm outside.
Inside, the air was still and bitterly cold, with that damp, stale chill particular to places abandoned for decades. Dust, old paper, and the reek of obsolete machine oil crowded the lungs. Dim light filtered through broken windows, laying bare the spiderwebs draped across the high corners and the rows of gutted server cabinets lying in disarray like tombs.
But in the deepest corner of the room, where the shelter was strongest...
...something was still alive.
Gabi stood panting, white breath spilling from her mouth. She stared at an old server cabinet reinforced with newer steel plates. There, in the middle of a tangle of dusty cables, a tiny blue power light was blinking steadily.
Beep... Beep...
A frail sound, but stubborn. The hidden server Armin had secretly restored was still running in standby mode, like a beast in hibernation waiting to be awakened.
“It’s still working,” Falco whispered, pulling off his snow-caked goggles, his eyes brightening. “Armin wasn’t lying.”
“Falco! Can you handle this heap of junk?” Gabi asked, her voice ragged from cold, already moving to the control desk with the hard drive hugged tight to her chest.
“Leave it to me,” Falco answered at once, not waiting for her to say more. He dropped his toolkit onto the floor and swept away the thick layer of dust covering the keyboard.
Rikard did not waste breath. He understood his role immediately. He kicked a broken wooden chair into place against the door, then chose a shadowed position near a shattered window, rifle trained outward.
Falco, meanwhile, had his own battlefield.
After the Titan Age ended, Falco had chosen the path of reconstruction. The years he spent studying at the Radio Engineering Academy in Liberio had given him the hands of a skilled mechanic in place of a warrior’s.
His eyes swept rapidly over the oxidized connectors. He drew the dagger from his belt, scraped away the rust from the main data port, then expertly spliced the severed cables into the emergency starter relay
“The cooling system’s dead, but at this temperature overheating isn’t a risk,” Falco muttered, cranking the lever of the backup generator beneath the desk.
The machine choked out a dry, miserable cough before roaring to life, shaking violently and belching black smoke. A heartbeat later, the rows of indicator lights on the server rack all shifted from amber standby to a fierce, vivid red.
“Gabi! Data port’s open!” Falco shouted over the engine noise, pointing to the glowing slot. “Plug it in! This machine won’t hold much longer!”
Gabi nodded, cold sweat already breaking over her forehead despite the subzero air. She pulled the hard drive from its shockproof case and shoved it into the port.
On the convex old CRT monitor, a green cursor blinked, waiting.
Gabi drew in a deep breath, trying to steady her trembling hands, then rattled across the keyboard, entering the activation string Armin had given them.
ENTER.
The screen went black for a second, then populated with a cascading list of extracting files.
These were the bullets they had wagered their lives to seize in Rose Canyon: secret transit data, illegal communications logs, and most importantly, the high-resolution photographs Jean had taken of the cargo crates stamped with the Aeterna Pharma logo.
A progress bar appeared in the center of the screen. The words Uploading data flickered with quiet menace.
10%...
The bar inched forward with agonizing slowness.
“Damn it,” Rikard cursed under his breath, eye still pressed to the scope, finger tapping impatiently against the trigger guard. “What kind of rotten connection crawls this slow?”
“The blizzard’s disrupting the ionosphere!” Falco shot back, eyes locked on the signal readings bucking wildly like a patient’s failing pulse. “The wind’s shaking the antenna outside. Packets keep dropping - it has to resend them!”
30%...
Time seemed to crystallize in the freezing room. Every ticking percent twisted the knot in their chests. Gabi stood motionless before the screen, pistol clenched in her right hand, her left braced on the desk so hard her knuckles had turned white. It felt as though she were standing in the middle of a battlefield without gunfire, where the enemy was made of numbers.
If the connection dropped now, everything would be for nothing. Armin wouldn't have the weapon he needed to drag Schatten entirely into the light. Levi and Mikasa would be fighting at greater risk.
68%...
Outside, the wind screamed and battered the concrete walls as if it wanted to tear the whole station apart. The lights inside flickered in rhythm with the backup generator straining against overload.
85%...
“Come on...” Gabi whispered through clenched teeth, as though praying to the machine itself. “Go... Fly...”
99%...
The progress bar stopped.
The cursor blinked and blinked at the final line.
One second.
Two.
Three.
It felt like an entire century.
Then a clear electronic chime rang out, shattering the suffocating tension.
TRANSMISSION COMPLETE flashed bright across the screen, with a confirmation code returned from Chief of Staff Armin Arlert’s private server in Mitras.
“Yes!” Falco punched the air.
Gabi let out a long, shuddering breath and at last released the stiffness in her shoulders, so suddenly relieved she almost buckled. She yanked the hard drive free and stared at the green text one last time, just to make sure she wasn’t imagining it.
The impossible mission Captain Levi had entrusted to them was complete.
“We did it.” Gabi turned toward Rikard, a rare, relieved smile touching her lips. “Armin has his weapon.”
“Then move,” Rikard barked, kicking the chair away from the door. “Mission’s done. We regroup with the convoy carrying the evidence.”
Gabi nodded and reached for the hard drive again.
But just as she turned to leave, a hand caught her wrist.
“Wait,” Falco said, his tone suddenly wrong, unnaturally taut.
He wasn’t looking at Gabi. His eyes were fixed on the passive radar display - an old, dust-caked unit in the corner they had assumed was long dead.
In the stillness, broken only by the storm outside, a strange, intermittent sound was spilling from its speaker.
“What is that?” Rikard frowned. “Static from the storm?”
“No.” Falco shook his head, fingers flying over the tuning dial, his eyes narrowing with professional focus. “It’s passive radar. It only receives - it doesn’t transmit. It just caught an extremely powerful signal sweeping over this area.”
He pointed to the waveform shuddering violently in the red range of the oscilloscope.
“Look at the amplitude. Double-encrypted shortwave, running on the K-band. Paradis military uses VHF or UHF bands for ground communications. This type of frequency...” Falco swallowed, cold sweat beading across his brow. “...is only used for aerial navigation or, more exactly... high-altitude aircraft.”
“High altitude?” Gabi repeated, her pulse beginning to hammer.
“Above fifteen thousand meters,” Falco murmured, doing the calculation in his head. “It isn’t transmitting from the ground. It’s coming from above us. And it’s descending.”
He cranked the audio filter to maximum. The crackle of static was pushed back, revealing a sequence of metallic, cold, and razor-sharp audio. It was human speech, but it wasn't the language of Paradis, nor was it Marleyan.
The language was clipped, decisive, with hard aspirated syllables and a haughty cadence - it sounded like blades striking together.
Rikard, standing guard at the shattered window facing East - where the sun had just crested the snow-capped peaks - suddenly let out a breathless curse.
"Son of a bitch... Falco! Gabi! Get out here and look at this!"
The two children rushed to his side.
In the pallid dawn sky, where weak light was fighting through the dense cloud cover, strange scars had appeared.
Three brilliant orange-red streaks - thin as thread but razor-sharp - were slashing across the sky from Northeast to Southwest. They looked like fresh blood dripping across a gray canvas.
"Shooting stars?" Rikard asked, gripping his rifle tighter, knowing full well it was useless against something at that altitude.
"No," Falco whispered, his face ashen. "Those are hypersonic jet contrails reflecting the sun at high altitude. They’re diving."
While Falco was absorbed in the technical side of it, Gabi went perfectly still.
Her eyes widened. Her ears rang, sealing her off from the howling wind and Rikard’s cursing.
All her attention was caught by the sound coming from that crackling speaker.
That language...
That clipped, cold, superior cadence...
It was like a rusted key being shoved into a lock inside her memory that she had not even known she had buried.
The memory came back at once - vivid, cold, intact - as though she were standing again in that corridor lined with silver doors in the detention sector of Mitras.
...
The reflection in the polished steel door.
Schatten and the stranger.
The silver metal case exhaling a sub-zero vapor.
And the single short word that visitor had spoken in the very same language now coming through the radar speaker.
“Argentum.”
...
Gabi shuddered. A shuddering chill swept through her body, colder than the storm outside. She took one step backward and bumped into the edge of the desk.
“Argentum...” she breathed, barely aware she had spoken aloud.
“What did you say?” Falco spun around.
Gabi looked up at her two companions, and her eyes were full of naked terror.
“I know that language,” she said, breath coming hard and fast. “It’s the same one the men at G-3 used when they met with Schatten. The same men who handed him the case containing the Genesis serum... The ones behind all of this.”
She looked up at the three red streaks now diving toward the northern valley. Silence swallowed the little room. That feeling only soldiers know - the one born of too much war - fell over them all at once and tightened around their throats.
The final sentence did not seem to belong to any one of them, and yet all three had already reached the same conclusion.
“They’re closing on Paradis. Their target is Utopia.”
The vault of the sky had torn open, and the vultures from across the ocean had caught the scent of blood.
./.
At that very moment - like souls imprisoned in the depths of Tartarus, unaware that calamity was already poised to descend from the sky - within the “Heart” of Utopia, when the doors of Sector Omega swung fully open, reality had become nothing but a cold, sepulchral stillness, like the threshold of a tomb where dead stars were laid to rest.
The sharp clack of boot soles against metal flooring rang out dry and hollow. Jean and Kael had just helped Althea Marin down onto the lowest level after the long slide, their breaths streaming white into the bitter air. Ahead of them, Levi and Mikasa - who had landed first when the steel grid had opened of its own accord - stood motionless. Their blades were still in their hands, but lowered, as though swallowed by the grandeur of the place.
Sector Omega opened before them in a spectacle so immense and unreal it resembled a cathedral built for gods of technology.
The chamber stretched so vast that the shoulder lamps they carried were devoured by the darkness high in the vaulted ceiling. The whole floor had been designed like a colossal circular motherboard, nearly a hundred meters across, suspended above a bottomless abyss. The ground itself was not concrete, but a single seamless slab of polished black quartz, gleaming and cold as the void itself.
Beneath that thick armored glass, millions of optical “nerves” pulsed faintly. Rivers of silver-white energy drifted beneath their feet like schools of fish moving through a glacial sea, all of them converging toward a single point at the center, weaving a luminous network that was both beautiful and deeply horrifying.
At the heart of that giant “brain,” the space had been split in two by opposing extremes, each rising toward the unseen ceiling like twin towers.
On the left stood Epsilon. A vast cylindrical water column glowed with a soft cobalt light, serene and mournful as the floor of a midnight ocean. Within its clear fluid, tiny streams of bubbles ascended in slow spirals, surrounding a small body suspended in the depths.
On the right stood Omega. A biological reactor blazed with a harsh scarlet light, hot and savage. The fluid inside was dense and boiling, churning like primordial magma. Thick tungsten chains, each as broad as a grown man’s thigh, black and heavy, crossed over one another to shackle a form floating within that crimson inferno.
And in the center, standing between both extremes like an indifferent arbiter binding them together, was the Mother Server.
It was a black obelisk, seamless and monolithic, without visible controls, its surface alive only with lines of luminous code flowing across a skin of liquid metal. From it came a low, ceaseless hum - a deep, subsonic thrum - a rhythmic pulse that made the listener’s chest vibrate, as though the building itself were breathing.
“What the hell...”
Jean’s voice escaped him almost involuntarily, but it fell flat and broke apart in the immensity of that place.
He stepped toward the edge of the glass floor and stared down at the energy currents racing beneath his boots like rivers of light, then raised his head to the towering server columns above, all of them functioning in the absolute silence of vacuum.
“In my imagination... this place was just some upgraded lab. A few test tubes. A few operating tables...” Jean shook his head, his eyes wide, wavering between utter amazement and a dim, mounting terror at the smallness of humankind.
He lifted a hand and touched the frigid air, feeling the terrible gulf in understanding.
“But this... this is a century ahead of Mitras. While people out there are still shoveling coal into steam engines and chambering rifle rounds by hand, you people built an entire civilization down here?”
Althea Marin walked past Jean and approached the base of the Mother Server. She set down her heavy metal case on the black glass floor with a crisp metallic clack that echoed across the chamber. Her voice was glacial.
“Everything comes at a price, Kirschtein.”
She knelt. Her long, bony fingers moved quickly and expertly, flipping open the clasps to reveal a hardware intervention kit of unnerving complexity - fiber-optic leads, raw processing boards, and half a dozen tools designed for violating the sanctity of machines.
“Do you know the story of Odin and Mimir’s well?” Althea asked, her voice low and even, almost meditative in this sanctuary of technology, while her hands continued peeling open bundles of cable. “To drink from the sacred well and gain sight into all the knowledge of the universe, the All-Father had to tear out one of his own eyes and cast it into the depths as an offering.”
She paused, then lifted her gaze toward the towering Blue and Red tanks in the distance - where two children hung captive within their merciless fates.
“To possess the eyes of God, one must pay with mortal flesh. No gift is ever free. The greatness of this place was built from pieces of the body that were lost forever. And perhaps...” Her voice grew quieter. “...the sacrifices have not ended yet.”
Then she drew out a silver fiber-optic cable and plugged it decisively into a physical access port buried beneath the Mother Server’s armored base. A tiny spark snapped. At once, the indicators on the wrist console strapped to her arm flared to life, confirming successful intrusion.
“Elara, can you hear me?” Althea pressed two fingers to her earpiece. “I’ve bridged the Janus firewall by direct physical endpoint access. Internal communications in Sector Omega are now open. Run me a live scan of cerebral pressure in the Epsilon tank and inhibitor-solvent concentration in Omega. I want the real figures running in the core - not the fabricated numbers Schatten’s feeding the displays.”
“Signal received, Althea,” Elara’s voice came back through the comms, slightly distorted but clear enough. “I’m getting real-time data from Sector Omega now. Inhibitor valves are all in the red. Epsilon’s heartbeat... is extremely weak. Vital signs are under fifteen percent.”
As Althea turned away to work with Elara and the circuitry, the space behind her filled with another kind of silence - the silence of recognition, of absorption, of things slowly sinking in.
Levi and Mikasa moved toward Epsilon, where the pale blue light washed over the chamber with the melancholy of a drowned sea.
Before Mikasa stood the enormous biological cradle.
And inside it... was Oracle.
The child floated in transparent nutrient fluid, his body so thin that every rib showed clearly. Hundreds of neural cables, fine as spider silk, had been inserted into his skull and along the length of his spine, making that tiny being part of the great machine surrounding him.
It was the first time Mikasa had ever seen him.
Unlike Yui - the little girl with black hair and eyes that bore unmistakable traces of Eastern blood, like her own - Oracle had hair that curled slightly, pale as dry sand, drifting weightless in the water. Perhaps it was an accidental mutation in the Ackerman gene line, churned and scrambled by Genesis. A bitter sleight of hand by Nature, making him look more like a stranger to his biological parents. He had the body of a boy of four or five, though his actual biological age was barely two - the price of forced cellular acceleration.
Mikasa placed her hand against the cold glass.
She seemed to be waiting.
She waited for some flood of feeling to strike her, the way Levi had described - even if it was only the same headache she had felt in the Kill Box. As if she were willing to pay the price for any kind of communion with the child she was seeing for the first time. But nothing came. Oracle lay there, eyes closed, perfectly still and silent, like a wax effigy at the bottom of the sea. His silence carried the chill of surrender, of an oil lamp burned to its final drop and waiting for darkness to consume it.
Something tightened in Mikasa’s throat. A grief rose in her - intimate, unbearable, and strangely unfamiliar.
“He...” Mikasa began, her voice small and unsteady beneath the constant murmur of the pumps. She could not take her eyes from the child’s fine, bloodless face. “Back in Mitras... when you were surrounded...”
She turned to Levi.
“...was that him? Was he the one who... pushed all of my emotions to you?”
Levi stood beside her, arms crossed over his chest, his face lit by the blue glow of the incubation tank. The memory of Mitras came back to him in a rush - the room drowned in red light, the blare of alarms, the moment when space itself seemed to freeze and the enemy’s laser sights were shattered by an invisible storm.
“Yeah,” Levi answered, his voice low, carrying in the hollow chamber. “And somehow... he became a shield for me, Mikasa.”
He stepped closer, looking directly at Oracle’s sleeping face.
“At the time, it felt as if you were standing in front of me. Physically. Solid. Unbreakable. The kid probably wasn’t just relaying emotion... Later, when I had time to think through what happened, I came to believe he crystallized your absolute will to protect into a kinetic shockwave that stopped everything.”
Levi raised a hand and touched the glass lightly, right where Oracle’s tiny hand hung suspended and limp.
“He showed me another side of the Ackerman blood. Something more intense than anything I’d ever known...”
Then he turned to Mikasa and looked into her gray eyes, full now of sorrow and steadfastness.
“Maybe Ackerman strength was never something as simple as violence - not the way Genesis or the Fritz royals wanted it to be. Maybe... its true nature is connection. And Genesis unlocked an instinct to protect that goes far beyond what physical law can measure.”
Mikasa froze and looked back at Oracle - this child with the broken body and foreign blond hair, who had somehow become the most beautiful and painful proof of the bond between her and Levi.
Into that brief, heavy stillness, Kael’s voice cut sharply:
“Empty. Completely empty.”
The old soldier had just finished making a circuit around the perimeter of the core. He moved lightly, eyes alert, hands drawn close to his body, unwilling to touch any of the gleaming metal surfaces or interactive panels in this alien sanctuary.
“No guards. No sign of combat. Not a single fingerprint or disturbed mote of dust to suggest anybody’s been here in the last twenty-four hours,” Kael said, his brow furrowing in suspicion. He looked up into the high domed ceiling, where the dense steel grid they had just passed through still stood open.
“If there’s nobody here controlling anything, and Elara confirms there was no remote override signal... then why did the electric grid shut down and open for us?”
Kael’s question hung in the freezing air. It was the kind of contradiction no soldier alive could ignore. If it was a trap, it was too quiet.
For a moment, everyone fell silent, following the paths of their own thoughts. The only sound was the regular metallic clicking from the base of the Mother Server.
“It wasn’t a system fault. And it wasn’t a security lapse.”
Althea Marin spoke without looking up. She was still crouched over the console, fingers moving over cable and chip, her voice cool and resonant.
“Oracle let us in.”
She stopped for a moment and glanced toward the blue tank.
“I already told you. That child is not merely a brain inside a glass coffin. His resonance is powerful enough to manipulate nearby electronic impulses. We are standing inside his broadcast field.”
Althea slotted a chip into the circuit board. A hard click sounded in the air.
“The fact that the grid opened while every other system in here remains fully functional means only one thing: Oracle wanted it. Or more precisely...” She turned and looked at Levi and Mikasa. “He wanted to bring you two closer to him. High-order genetic resonance. Remember?”
Neither Levi nor Mikasa answered. They simply stood there beneath the sorrowful blue light. No one denied it, and no one dared affirm it.
Then, quietly, Levi reached out and found Mikasa’s hanging hand. He gave it a small squeeze. A hidden, gentle pressure - reassuring, grounding.
“So the kid’s helping us?”
Jean spoke as he came closer, stopping on the far side of the incubator. His gaze fixed on the small body inside. The memory of the boy convulsing in that crimson-lit room in G-7 at Mitras was still burned into him.
Jean pointed to the nutrient tubes and the web of cables that maintained every weak beat of Oracle’s heart.
“That doctor... Magna... he said things like if we pull him out of there...” Jean swallowed. “His lungs would collapse the second they hit normal air. His heart would stop before we could carry him ten steps...”
He looked from Levi to Mikasa, his eyes clouded with strain.
“Taking him out of here means killing him. I know you two had your own plan, and now we’re finally here. So then... what was the final option you decided on?”
At once the whole room seemed to grow heavier. Their shoulders stiffened as a cold current ran along their spines, as though the air itself had shifted, as though the bubbles in Oracle’s tank had begun rising a little faster. It felt as if the child were listening to this conversation through some invisible form of presence.
Levi remained silent, his jaw locked. Mikasa lowered her head, and the hand she had placed on the glass began to tremble.
“He’s right,” Althea’s voice cut through from behind them, sharp and cold. She rose, brushing dust from her knees, expression perfectly controlled.
“Taking Oracle’s body out of the incubator now is a death sentence. His physical system has already failed beyond recovery. There is no repairing it.”
She walked forward, one hand settling on the central system lever. Her gaze - and then Levi’s and Mikasa’s - slid to the far side of the room, where red light burned with savage intensity around the second tank.
“The plan was never to take Oracle out.”
She pointed at the huge mass of muscle suspended in the crimson fluid, bound in chains.
“The one we’re taking out... is Alpha.”
.
.
.
In the dim yellow half-light of the room at Tholus, the old clock on the wall had just struck midnight. The only sounds were the wind scraping at the windows and Yui’s quiet sleeping breaths. The little girl was curled in Mikasa’s arms, her tiny fingers clutching Mikasa’s shirt as if seeking safety.
“So that’s it...” Levi had asked then, in much the same way Jean had asked now. “There’s really no way to save him? We break into that hell just to watch the kid die?”
At the time, Althea Marin had been leaning against the edge of the table, arms folded, her eyes on some distant point in space. The silence had dragged on long and heavy, like molten lead.
“In pure medical terms...” Althea began slowly, her voice low, “Oracle died a long time ago. The only thing preserving him now is that cradle. Removing him would be no different from disconnecting a terminal patient from life support.”
Mikasa lowered her face into shadow, her hand tightening gently around Yui.
“However...” Althea narrowed her eyes. “The arrival of you two may change that.”
“How?” Levi asked.
“As I said, Oracle’s brainwave patterns are currently highly unusual,” she explained. “He is emitting a sustained delta-wave frequency - sorrowful, searching, longing. He is looking for a compatible signal. We already saw one instance of ‘high-order genetic resonance’ in Mitras. And when you two - the original genetic source - appear before him again, there is a strong possibility that the resonance will generate a temporary burst of bioenergetic output. Something like an extreme surge of adrenaline, enough to keep him alive for a little longer...”
Levi looked up sharply, his gaze cutting into Althea’s.
“Stop talking in circles, Doctor,” Levi said, his voice rough. “What’s the Plan B you're hiding up your sleeve?”
Althea exhaled and slid the medical files for Alpha and Oracle across the table.
“The core issue - the thing we can still exploit - lies in the asymmetry of Nature, Captain.”
She tapped the image of Alpha’s massive body.
“Subject One has too much hardware and not enough software. Ninety percent of his structure comes from your L-gene profile, and it produced a near-perfect biological war engine. Musculature, reflexes, recovery speed - everything far beyond human limits. But...” Her finger moved to the red-lit image of the brain. “...his frontal lobe is catastrophically flawed. The region responsible for behavior, inhibition, judgment. He’s a magnificent fortress with a madman locked inside, tearing it apart from within. All his bioenergy gets fed straight into raw muscular ignition, while consciousness itself remains trapped in permanent chaos.”
Then she shifted to the withered image of Oracle.
“Subject Two is the opposite. Too much software in a failing machine. The 50-50 gene war destroyed his body, but drove his brain into hyper-development. His consciousness is powerful, logically structured, and psychically gifted. A prodigious ‘mind’ trapped inside a collapsing ‘house.’”
Althea turned back to Levi and Mikasa, and for the first time there had been something in her eyes that looked like the disciplined madness of a scientist prepared to challenge death itself.
“If we try to save both children by conventional means, we lose them both. Oracle dies of respiratory collapse the moment he leaves the incubator. Alpha wakes, loses control, and there will be no stopping him except by destroying him.”
“So you mean...” Mikasa had looked up, her gray eyes widening in shock.
“I have reviewed every possibility, and this is the only narrow door left,” Althea had said, each word falling into the midnight stillness like iron nails.
“It is insane. It is extraordinarily dangerous. I know that. But it is the only opening we have.”
She had braced both hands on the table and looked directly at Levi.
“We cannot save two separate children. But we may still be able to create one whole human being.”
Her voice had dropped lower.
“We transfer Oracle’s consciousness... into Alpha’s body.”
./.
It seemed that the turbulent history of this world had never been written by the sane alone.
From Ymir Fritz touching the source of life, to Marleyan scientists injecting spinal fluid into human bodies, to those who forged the Ackerman bloodline in laboratories centuries ago... all of it had been a wager against Nature. The boundary between science and sorcery, between genius and madness, was as thin here as a strand of spider silk.
It was as though some invisible hand of cruel gods was forever guiding mankind, driving them toward forbidden limits, compelling them to reach for Prometheus’s flame even while knowing it might burn them to ash.
And now Althea Marin stood at the gates of hell with the torch in her hand, preparing to perform a sacrament in the language of code and neural pulses.
This was a one-time experiment in survival. There would be no draft version, no rehearsal, no “undo” button waiting halfway through.
“Stop standing there like statues,” Althea said, her voice glacial, cutting through the dense fog of everyone’s thoughts. From the metal case at her feet, she pulled out two thick fiber-optic cables sheathed in lead anti-interference casing, their ends bristling with gold-plated contact pins.
“We have to perform this ‘joining’ now. Before I cut deeply enough into the Mother Server to seize control of the facility.”
“Why?” Jean asked, still visibly shaken. “Why not take control first and secure everything?”
“Because do you want to fight a monster?” Althea answered coldly, hands already moving, plugging one cable into a connection port beneath Oracle’s tank. “The moment I break the Janus firewall and restore the system, the server will automatically interpret it as an intrusion. It will initiate the emergency venting sequence.”
She dragged the other end of the cable toward the Mother Server.
“When that happens, Alpha will wake immediately because the suppressive gas will be cut off. And Oracle...” She glanced toward the blue tank. “...his life-support system will be shut down so power can be rerouted into defense protocols. If Oracle’s consciousness is still trapped in that dying shell when Alpha wakes with an empty mind...” She looked up, her eyes razor-bright. “...then we will end up with one brain-dead child and one monster running loose. Game over.”
“So I have to reverse the order,” Althea said, driving the cable into the central interface board. “I have to get the ‘driver’ into the ‘cockpit’ before I start the engine. Oracle’s consciousness has to be transferred and waiting inside Alpha’s brain before that monster opens its eyes.”
Then she gestured for Kael to haul the second cable toward Alpha’s red-lit tank.
Althea was turning the Mother Server into an artificial bridge. She was preparing to hardwire the nervous systems of the two children directly into one another, using this cold machine as a giant umbilical cord to transmit the most complicated data in the universe: a human soul.
While Kael and Jean dragged the heavy cables into place, Levi and Mikasa had gone still before Omega’s tank.
The five-layer armored glass separated them from a sight that made Levi’s stomach clench.
Inside the dense amber fluid, Alpha floated.
The system imprisoning this child was no gentle cocoon like Oracle’s. It was a maximum-security containment vault. Massive metal restraints clamped his wrists, ankles, and waist in place. Dozens of automatic injectors were buried deep in the muscle groups, continually pumping in a cloudy violet substance to force the body into suspended hibernation. High-pressure pumps thundered nonstop like the growl of a chained beast, revealing just how violent the energy was inside that small body. Merely keeping him from waking consumed as much power as an entire district of a city.
Levi looked at the child.
And it was as though he were staring into a warped mirror of time.
This was a boy barely three in biological age, but his body had grown broad and powerful like that of a ten-year-old, all corded muscle and inhuman strength.
Yet what froze Levi was not the strength.
It was the face.
The dark hair falling across the brow. The stubborn high forehead. The straight nose. The sharp, angular line of the jaw.
There was no room left for doubt.
Ninety percent of Levi’s genetic profile had rendered this child his exact replica, cast from the identical mold.
A twisted, bitter feeling surged through Levi’s chest. He was looking at the first living crystallization of the cells between himself and the only woman he had ever loved. In a normal world - in some ordinary life, in some parallel universe - this child might have been the purest kind of joy, the continuation of a bloodline, a future Levi had never even dared to dream of.
But here, in the dungeon-dark underworld of Utopia, he was “the failed specimen.”
A monster made from the arrogance of science, from bottomless greed, from filthy political calculations.
The silent darkness inside Levi threatened to overflow, thickening like tar, cold and black, filling the hollowed spaces in his soul that had long since begun to rot.
He saw himself again, from the old years in the stinking underground. A starved little skeleton curled beside his mother’s corpse, waiting for death in the world’s indifference. But at least that dried-up body had once been born into the warmth of a mother who loved him.
And this child?
He had opened his eyes to the roar of machinery. He had no childhood, no sky, only needles and nightmares prewritten for him.
An irrational but suffocating guilt latched onto Levi with claws. It seemed to him, suddenly, that his very existence had always been a seed of disaster. Was the Ackerman blood in his veins, from the very beginning, a slow poison waiting only for a chance to be reborn as another tool of slaughter?
He saw the burden of his own damnation reflected in the child’s form. A naked copy that accused the spirit within him - a spirit corroded by rust from too many graves. The child looked like the cruel distillation of every blade Levi had ever swung, the embodiment of every life he had taken, now gathered and returned through the body of his own biological son to demand repayment for this human debt.
Levi found it suddenly hard to breathe. Cold sweat flooded his palms. And before his eyes, the ghosts of the past began to assemble around the glass prison, standing there like mute witnesses. The machinery droned on like fate itself, laughing at him.
History had never moved forward at all.
It was only an enormous meat grinder spinning in place, crushing noble ideals into fresh forms of atrocity. Titans vanished, only for test tubes to spring up in their place. Soldiers died, only for their blood to water the next crop of hatred.
The ancient Eldian Empire had used blood to conquer and subjugate. Marley used thousand-year hatred to chain the weak. And then Eren - that boy - swallowed it all, turning ultimate rage into a storm that flattened the world. The weak were crushed, and the strong rose only to build another hell even crueler than the last.
Was that the final destination of all supreme power in this world?
Slaughter?
The right to decide who lived and who died inside an endless cycle with no exit?
Eren... so freedom had only ever been a brief pause between two nightmares.
And Levi Ackerman - this exhausted survivor dragging behind him a soul already half-collapsed - was still nothing more than an old hunting dog leashed once more by the world. Only this time, the prey he had to face was a distorted incarnation of himself.
Levi glanced down at the hands that had held blades all his life. A bitter irony clawed at his insides. He despised brutality. He loathed the way the world turned people into weapons. And yet now, coursing through his own veins, was Argentum Sigma - concentrated matter distilled from the highest form of destructive power. He himself was surviving by means of something unnatural. He too was only a sharp fragment jammed into the gears of that same giant grinder.
What right did he have to judge the thing in that glass tank when his own hands would never, ever be clean of the death clinging to them?
Levi stood there, sinking into the bottom of a silent despair where no light could reach.
And then a warm hand slipped into his and clasped it tightly.
Levi did not have to turn to know it was Mikasa. She was trembling, but her grip was unwavering. She was anchoring him, sharing the invisible ache burning in his chest.
Levi slowly turned his wrist, threading his rough fingers through hers. He did not look at her. He only kept his eyes fixed stubbornly on the cold glass, putting up a false wall of composure to hide the interior of himself fracturing into splinters.
Behind that mute curtain, he wished - fiercely, painfully - that he deserved the warmth she had given him without hesitation. He wished he could stand before her as a whole human being, with fewer twisted scars from grief and loss, so that the protection he gave her would not always wear so bitter and desperate a shape.
“It isn’t your fault,” Mikasa whispered, as if she had understood everything.
Her voice was slight, but sharp enough to cut clean through the thick fog coiling around his throat. Her thumb brushed lightly over the callused ridges on the back of Levi’s hand. Her gaze moved past the cruel restraints and the murky solution, and came to rest on the child’s face.
“Don’t blame yourself anymore,” she said, softer now. “Look at him... he really does look like you.”
Levi narrowed his eyes at Alpha’s tense, stubborn face, scowling even in sleep, then slowly shifted his gaze to Mikasa.
Under the dim light cast from the tank, her gray eyes shimmered as they remained fixed on him - unblinking, careful, quietly searching every ripple of expression in his face as though watching a cliff on the verge of collapse. In that still gaze, faintly blurred with unshed moisture, Levi saw the ruined image of himself reflected back, held gently inside the twin currents of her pity and her unwavering tenderness. It hurt his chest to look at it.
Levi exhaled softly, shaking off the dark haze and letting his familiar roughness return as a shield. One corner of his mouth lifted.
“So out of everything he could’ve inherited,” Levi jerked his chin toward Alpha, “he chose the worst habit I had. Looks like he wants to kick someone in the ass even in his sleep.”
Mikasa did not laugh aloud, but her eyes curved into soft crescents, lit with a smile that was both sad and understanding. She knew that was how Levi met pain - always wrapping his most fragile feelings in bluntness and dry cruelty. A particular kind of roughness that belonged only to him, whether he was drinking tea or standing at the edge of death.
She tightened her grip on his hand just a fraction more.
Across the chamber, the clicking of metal and the hiss of compressed valves began to intensify. Althea Marin had finished connecting the thick transmission cables into the open ports along the Mother Server’s frame.
“Dr. Marin,” Elara’s voice came over the speakers, carrying concern. “I’m reading the live values from Node-B12. You’re rerouting the entire Neural Bridge system through the two children? Their biological structures are too complex. What if Alpha’s hyper-reactive immune system identifies Oracle’s signal as a foreign body and rejects it immediately? The risk of systemic shock is extremely high.”
“You’re worried about the right thing, Elara. With any other pair of individuals in the world, the answer would be: certain death,” Althea replied. Her hand slammed the activation lever.
The machines around the room - which until then had been nothing more than silent instruments - shuddered to life. Warning lamps flared amber. Althea moved briskly between the panels, fingers flying as she synchronized wave frequencies.
“But here,” she said, eyes fixed on the display where two DNA helices twisted toward one another, “we have a biological exception.”
She pointed the screen toward Jean and Kael, who stood guard nearby.
“Absolute compatibility. Both were built from the same original gene pairing - Levi and Mikasa - differing only in expression ratio. Their source code is fundamentally one and the same. Alpha’s body will not read Oracle’s signal as an invader. It will recognize it as a missing piece. It is the equivalent of plugging a backup drive into the native port of the host system. No rejection. No systemic collapse.”
Jean stared at the screen and swallowed hard. “So... his body will accept it?”
“The host will grant access,” Althea said. Then she leaned over another console and twisted a dial, raising neural-wave pressure. “But the real problem lies in the brain. How do we prevent one consciousness from being swallowed by the other’s chaos?”
She pointed to the two parallel brainwave patterns running across the monitor. One side was jagged, erratic, broken. The other was smooth, powerful, sine-like, precise.
“At this point,” she said, “I am gambling on the second principle: the stronger wave consumes the weaker.”
As she spoke, she inserted the final safety key into the Mother Server’s pedestal. A clean metallic click rang out.
“Alpha’s brain is currently in a state of white noise. Its neural output is powerful, but fragmented - chaotic, disordered. It is a scream without meaning.”
Then she tapped Oracle’s waveform.
“Oracle, by contrast... his brainwaves are orchestral. Extremely high alpha and gamma intensity. Ordered. Logical.”
Althea turned and looked straight at Levi and Mikasa.
“The mechanism here is not possession. It is not theft. It is an overwrite and a realignment. When I open the gate, Oracle’s ordered consciousness will flood across like a tidal wave, and according to physical law, a stable wave with consistent amplitude suppresses and nullifies disordered interference. Oracle will not kill Alpha. He will step into him, quiet the noise inside his brother’s mind... and take hold of the wheel.”
She placed one hand on the main lever and drew in a breath.
“That is the best-case scenario we are allowed to hope for. Because it is the only way in which both can continue to exist.”
Before her thin hand pulled down the cold brass activation arm, Althea Marin paused once more, lost for a moment in thought.
“For the last six years, ever since the Rumbling ended... while studying the Ackerman gene in depth - the artificial derivative of Titan power - I began to brush against that concept. The Coordinate. The place where all Subjects of Ymir were once connected.”
Jean shivered. The memory of that white desert and the star-filled sky rose in him all at once.
Althea lifted her head and swept her gaze across the Eldians standing in the chamber: Jean, Levi, Mikasa.
“The concept of the Paths and the Coordinate reads like sorcery in the old records. But under my microscope, it appears as something else: a vast quantum-biological information network. More precisely, what the Ackerman bloodline draws upon - ancestral combat memory and inherited experience - to achieve its superhuman adaptations... science has another term for that mode of spiritual persistence. The Akashic Record of latent consciousness.”
She pointed upward into empty air.
“When the Titans vanished from this world, the Paths - that collective reservoir - closed. But...” Althea’s eyes settled on Levi and Mikasa. “...the Ackerman bloodline still retained its biological advantage. Which means some branch route was never severed. Some hidden frequency still exists somewhere in your genetic structure.”
She turned and struck the black body of the Mother Server with an open palm.
“I am not Founder Ymir. I cannot shape flesh from sand or move souls with miracle. So I have gambled on science to imitate that mechanism.”
She indicated the dense network of fiber-optic cables running from Oracle’s incubator to Alpha’s tank through the Mother Server.
“You see it now, don’t you? The Artificial Path. If Nature no longer provides a road, then we must build a bridge ourselves. This Mother Server will serve as the Coordinate. These neural fiber conduits will be the physical medium in place of those invisible links that once existed.”
...
“To make this jump across the Artificial Path, I need an enormous initial force. I will stimulate Oracle’s brain into producing a maximum neural discharge - the equivalent of burning through everything that remains of his life in a single instant. It will compress the totality of his conscious data - memory, identity, executive control - into a single neurological data packet and fire it directly into Alpha’s brain.”
...
“When I pull this lever, the light in Epsilon will extinguish. And if everything goes well... the light in Omega will come on with a new soul.”
./.