This is My Last War (Attack on Titan // LeviHan) - Part 3

The Final Sacrifice

Funny that Zoë had dealt with bullshit from nobles and noble bullshitters for the better part of her life and still, after so many years, could not even begin to understand how their minds worked.

"Over my dead body," she pressed out, balling her hands into tight fists. The urge to punch Willy Tybur straight into his ever-smiling blasé face was quite overwhelming.

"That can be arranged," he retorted, his lips turning upwards in arrogant amusement.

She was sure she could beat him in a fair fight. He looked lithe and fit, but he wasn't a soldier. He hadn't fought Titans. He had only lived the roaring good life among people who suppressed and tortured his own race. Freedom - at the cost of others - was the worst kind of betrayal.

Even after the revolution on Paradis, which had led to the exiling of most noble families, they still continued their underhanded dealings from wherever they had taken refuge and now that she thought about it, Willy Tybur might very well have had his hands in all kinds of shit from afar. She also remembered that Erwin had once told her (another lifetime ago, really) that 50% of the Commander's job consisted of bootlicking; only that she had never managed to bend her back like it was expected of the people in her position, not after everything they had been through. A mistake, because would she not have been privy to information about the forces at play if she had groveld even just a little?

Nah. It would just have increased the amount of bullshit from people who sought they could trample all over her. Most of them underestimated her. Their problem.

She let her eyes glide over the noble's body, his foppish, expensive clothes, his perfectly shined boots. Bloodlust overcame her. Hatred, burning brightly and hotly, for everything her people had had to endure at the hands of traitors like the Tyburs. It was not part of their orders, but what if she went ahead and killed Willy? Surely, nobody on Paradis would mind.

"Easy," Zeke's hand was heavy on her arm. Clearly a warning. Yes, she could take Willy, but probably not Zeke. His touch repulsed her and she shook it off quickly, realizing that she was quivering with rage.

"Both of you," she hissed, "shame on you. Shame on you and yours. The Ackermans are no puppets that you just shove around. They are people."

"Hardly," Willy shook his blonde, asymmetric hair so that it came to rest elegantly behind his shoulders. "Granted, they can put on a human face and be good lap dogs, but only up to a certain point - then, they snap. I'm sure you've seen them in one of their rages? The lack of anybody's control over them nearly got them extinct - hunting them down was the smartest thing your King Fritz actually did."

"We're at a point where it's this or we all perish," Zeke added. "We are lucky King Fritz failed. Who would have thought I'd ever say that."

He was watching her intensely through his fancy glasses, with an expression she had not seen on his face before. Zoë looked back at him in silence for a while, the burning rage in her turning into something more focused and razor sharp. He was dead serious, that much was clear - and she guessed it had a lot to do with his poor health.

So he was dying, huh. His Titan would be passed on, so why was his death a problem?

"Has Eren put you up to this?" She asked, but she already knew the answer.

Willy nodded in that simpering way of his: "Understanding how power works, the Founder has come to me willingly. He will do anything that is necessary to save the world. He knows the future. He knows what is going to happen."

"And he has found a way to go back in time," Zeke added.

Zoë stared at them in disbelief. A way to go back in time...? Like... Time travel? That was impossible!