Free Web NovelChapter 348: New Season
Haru had made specific preparations.
Convenience store snacks arranged on the coffee table. Phone on silent. Roommate warned not to call. He had even moved his chair slightly closer to the television than usual, which he would not admit to anyone.
He had been waiting for Season Four since the final line of Season Three.
On the other side of the sea are enemies.
Eight o’clock. The opening theme began.
Then stopped.
The familiar opening theme was gone. A different piece of music. Haru blinked at the screen.
A bird in flight. Desert terrain. A boy in an unfamiliar uniform lying on the ground with his hand raised toward the sky.
"Hey, you..."
Haru looked at the channel indicator in the corner of the screen to confirm he was watching Ion TV.
He was watching Ion TV.
"It’s dangerous here..." frёewebnoѵēl.com
The title card appeared. Attack on Titan. The logo was the same. Everything else was different.
The boy on the ground was named Falco. The person who found him was his older brother Colt. Around them: trenches, barbed wire, artillery, soldiers in uniforms Haru had never seen.
The aesthetic was not the walled cities and Survey Corps green capes he had been watching for three seasons. It was closer to historical war footage. World War One imagery. Mud and shells and the sound of sustained combat across an open battlefield.
Where are we.
The answer assembled itself across the next few minutes. They were on the other side of the sea. In Marley. In the middle of a four-year war between the Marley Empire and a coalition of Mid-East Allied nations.
The Survey Corps did not exist in this frame. Eren did not exist in this frame. The entire cast of three seasons had been replaced, in the first episode of the new season, by a group of children Haru had never seen.
He picked up a snack and put it back down without eating it.
The children were warrior cadets. Eldians. The same race as the people on Paradis, the race the walls had been built to contain, the race that Marley had enslaved and deployed as Titan weapons for generations.
These children wore armbands identifying their Eldian blood. They wore Marleyan military uniforms. They competed with each other for the right to inherit Titan powers in service of the empire that oppressed their people, because this was the only path to anything resembling dignity that the system offered them.
They had internalized it completely.
The girl named Gabi was the one Haru could not stop watching.
She was small. Energetic. Utterly certain of herself and her mission. She explained, without any apparent awareness of the contradiction, that the Eldians of Paradis were devils who deserved destruction, and that by fighting for Marley she would prove that Eldians like her were good ones, worthy of respect, not like those island devils.
Haru sat with his snack forgotten on the table.
She sounds exactly like Eren.
The Season One Eren. The boy who had screamed about killing every last Titan. The same absolute certainty about the identity of the enemy. The same willingness to sacrifice himself for the people he loved, and worldview assembled from what the people around him had taught him.
Except Gabi’s enemy was Eren’s people.
The battle for Fort Slava had a problem Haru understood immediately.
The armored train circling the fortress perimeter carried anti-Titan artillery. Until it was destroyed, the Marleyan Titans could not be deployed. The infantry could not destroy the tracks while the train was active. Deadlock.
Then Gabi took off her Eldian armband. freewebnoveℓ.com
Haru leaned forward slightly.
She walked across open ground toward the enemy trench with her hands raised. A wounded girl surrendering. The enemy soldiers hesitated. She was a child. She was clearly injured. She posed no threat.
She was carrying seven hand grenades hidden under her clothes.
The explosion that took out the armored train’s forward cars lit up the screen. Gabi stood in the smoke and laughed at the top of her lungs with the specific unhinged joy of someone who had just proven themselves by doing something that should not have been survivable.
She is insane, Haru thought. She is also extremely effective.
The Jaw Titan and Cart Titan deployed into the smoke she had created. Then the airship appeared above the fortress. Soldiers parachuted down. And the briefing voice:
"Reiner will be our shield. Zeke will be our spear. The airborne operation will now begin."
Reiner.
Haru sat up straighter.
He had not seen Reiner since the Season Two finale. Since the beach, since on the other side of the sea are enemies, since two seasons of understanding that Reiner was someone who had caused enormous harm and carried the weight of it in a way that had made him genuinely complicated to watch.
The Armored Titan entered Fort Slava through the walls.
Anti-Titan artillery shells hit it repeatedly. Each impact visibly sparked against the hardened surface. And Reiner’s internal voice:
"So they can even pierce my armor."
He kept moving anyway.
The one thing that was supposed to make him untouchable, Haru thought, and they already have a counter to it.
The Beast Titan appeared above the sea. Zeke formed boulders in his hands and threw them at the Mid-East fleet with the accuracy Haru remembered from the Survey Corps battlefield. Except this time the targets were warships. The fleet burned. Ships listed sideways and sank across the harbor.
After four years, the war ended with Marley victorious.
The episode’s final minutes were the ones Haru kept turning over afterward.
The warrior cadets watching from the trench as the ships burned. Falco’s face carrying something quieter and less certain than Gabi’s. Zeke’s voice from the airship, talking to Reiner in a tone that was not quite a speech.
"Our defeat caused this war. Our nine-year-long plan to regain the Founder will come to an end, and the tables will be turned on us."
"The power of the Titans is absolute."
A pause.
"Isn’t war a terrible thing?"
He said this while the fleet he had just destroyed was still on fire.
A Marleyan soldier nearby, looking at the Titans on the wall:
"They truly are... devils."
The episode’s final image was the Beast Titan standing on the fortress wall above the burning harbor, the destroyed fleet still smoking across the water below. Over that image, a narrator’s caption:
Yet they now knew that the age when all were ruled by the power of the Titans was coming to an end. Marley realized it needed to acquire the power of the Founding Titan as soon as possible.
The episode ended.
Haru stayed where he was for a moment.
The age of Titans was ending. Marley knew it. The anti-Titan artillery was proof. Industrial technology was catching up to supernatural power, and once it finished catching up, Paradis’s only real deterrent, the Founding Titan, the Wall Titans, Eren, would lose the leverage that made them worth negotiating with.
The clock was running. Haru had not known the clock was running until this episode told him.
He opened his phone and went directly to the forums.
The fan community had been going since the first frame of the episode.
"So we’re starting off with a 3 year time skip?"
"4 years since they reached the basement, 3 years since they reached the ocean."
"Yeah, it takes time for kids to move out of the basement."
"I opened the wrong channel. I must have opened the wrong channel. I watched for three minutes before I accepted I was watching the right show."
"No Eren. No Mikasa. No Armin. No Levi. No Survey Corps. Season Four Episode One of Attack on Titan. Nothing is the same and I am not okay."
"The perspective shift is the most disorienting thing this series has done since Reiner said ’I am the Armored Titan.’ We are now watching from Marley’s side. The enemies of three seasons are the protagonists."
"LMAO Reiner really said "I’m sick and tired of walls, and then proceeded to f the wall up good."
"The geopolitics of this situation is what I find most interesting.
Damn, this episode made me realize just what a humiliating embarrassment Marley’s loss on Paradis must be. They deployed 4 titan shifters on one tiny Island with Napoleonic technology with a huge intelligence disadvantage, with Paridisians not knowing about the outside world or titan shifters, and still lost. "
"It feels like I’m not even watching AoT anymore, holy hell."
"Reiner’s transformation was so damn hype."
"That and New Jaw Titan’s first appearance was cool as hell. Backpack/Cart Titan also looked dangerous with those 4 machine guns on its back. It looked so simple back in S3 and now it’s one of the more dangerous titans out there."
"All of you guys get off the streaming site, so I can watch the damn episode."
"I’ve finished, now it’s your turn."
"Thank you comrade."
"Gabi: I am gonna do what’s called a pro-gamer move."
"The premise of this season is so fucking clever and such an incredible swerve from the original. These unstoppable, terrifying Titans having a hell of a lot of trouble dealing with guns and battleships and almost dying, requiring 4 just to take a single fort."
"Titans are no longer absolute." Marley’s single advantage is gone.
"Holy crap, the trailer song used in that scene was so great."
"Yessss hearing it was so hype! When is the OST release?!"
"The op is what happens when you hire Michael Bay to direct your gender reveal party."
"Great first episode. It’s really interesting that the Eldian candidates view the Eldians in the walls of Paradis and the Eldians in the internment zone differently. It’s a kind of segregation within the same race, most likely due to the heavy anti Eldian propaganda in Marley."
"Alternate episode titles: Attack onT̶i̶t̶a̶n̶ Pearl Harbor
It’s raining m̶e̶n̶ titans
Saving Private R̶y̶a̶n̶ Gabi."
"Its more like WW1: Attack on Titan edition."
Rei watched the numbers climb through the night.
The discussion heat around the Season Four premiere was unlike anything Attack on Titan had generated in Japan before. Not just volume. The texture of it was different.
The confusion was genuine, widespread, and not dying down. People were trying to reconstruct the world around it. Timeline threads, geopolitical analysis, comparisons between Gabi and characters from the first season that Rei had not expected anime-only viewers to reach this quickly.
A portion of the audience was resistant. Too disorienting. Where are the characters we know.
Rei had anticipated this.
When he had first read these Chapters, he had felt the same friction. The shift in perspective was deliberate and it was uncomfortable by design.
Isayama had built three seasons of investment in one set of people and then asked the audience to extend that same investment to the people those characters had been taught to see as enemies.
Most of them would not be able to leave once the later episodes took hold.
...
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