TEN STEPS, The Kenny Ackerman Story BOOK THREE ~MAYBES by Melly O' Hara

SHINZOU

CHAPTER 1 SHINZOU

We gave our hearts.
We gave our courage. We gave our lives in the fight against the evil that threatened to destroy our world. Some said the evil was the Marleyans, some the Eldians, some the Titans.
But the real evil was humanity itself. The intolerance and fear that people held toward those that were different from themselves; for the neighbours they did not know nor understand.
And, the greed for resources that their fear engendered. So, in their quest for safety; war was declared, fought and eventually lost. Because war has no winners. Only an eventual surrender by those involved; when the destruction becomes too great, the loss of lives too overwhelming. And then peace seems to be the last resort. So the talking begins.

As I sat in the small, empty restaurant on that fine, blue skied, sunny morning; the sun creeping its way through the iron laticed windows, illuminating the gleaming pine tables and comfortable wooden, red cushioned chairs; making the delicate wrought iron chandelier lanterns obsolete, my mind wrestled with the puzzle of how this had all begun. I stared into the white, paper thin, china teacup that held my tea, tears pricking the corners of my eyes.
For those that I would never see again. For the sweet ignorance of what we'd lost. For what was to come.

Ten years. Without knowing it, we had been at war for ten years. With an enemy we didn't even know existed. Fighting for our freedom, our birthright to just go outside our walls, never dreaming that there existed an entire world that hated and feared us. That our nearest neighbours were responsible for the destruction of all we held dear. Who knew our own history, better than we did. Who knew the truth of who we are. And hated us for it.

The Marleyans, a race of people from across the sea, that looked like us, spoke like us, dreamed like us; had been warring with the world for many years, for the same reason that they had been warring with Paradise. Only we didn't know that, then.
It was the Marleyans that had sent the Colossal, the Armoured and the Female Titans to invade and destroy Paradise. These monsters that resembled humans in their appearance, fifteen metres tall and each with the strength of an army; infiltrated Paradise as little human children, where none knew that they were strangers with the ability to transform themselves into monsters and then back into human form, at will. They enlisted in Paradise's Survey Corp, while they gathered the information they'd been sent to retrieve and wreaked the havoc that would eventually destroy Paradise, when opportunities came for them to transform into their Titan forms. Irony of ironies, the very branch of the Military they'd decided to join and use as their cover; the Survey Corp, was  the Military branch who's soldiers left the safety of the walls in order to kill and study the titans  that roamed outside the three walls of the city of Paradise.

Paradise had been safe on its island home for one hundred years. The three concentric walls; Maria, Rose and Sina, were impenetrable to the mindless humanoid titans that roamed its outskirts. Their zombie-like clambering on the outer wall, Wall Maria, as they waited for humanity to leave the security of Paradise and enter no man's land; so that these zombie titans could devour them, as we now know, all in the hope that ingesting the right human would turn the titan back into its human form. For as we also now know, it was Marley that punished its dissidents by turning them into these same mindless titans and dumped them on the island of Paradise, to ensure that we on Paradise, stayed within our walls and became no threat to them.

For Marley had long since discovered the secrets of turning humans into Titans, which was why the world feared and hated them. For in the one hundred years that Paradise had been safe inside its walls, Marley had been waging its war for territory, for resources, for control; not with bombs and guns, but with the humans it turned into mindless titans that destroyed the cities they invaded and devoured its occupants quickly and indiscriminately.