Royal Capital, Hawthorne Family Merchants' Guild.
This was a chamber of commerce founded by Gale using his influence as a member of parliament and leader of the Hawthorne family. It bore Gale's surname and was mainly engaged in the trade of steel and glass.
The number of people was small, and most of the members were refugees recruited from the colonization zones.
Today, the Chamber of Commerce carriage passed through the gates of the special district and entered the capital.
The coachman stopped the carriage in front of the merchants' guild stables. Several girls wearing linen coats stepped down from the carriage.
They appeared to be around ten years old, and all of them were pretty, with unblemished faces and skin without scars.
The girls were led into the Chamber of Commerce, where they bathed, were assigned lodging and new clothes, and were finally gathered in a room.
A middle-aged woman gave them a lesson: "You are very fortunate to have the opportunity to serve Her Highness the Princess. It is an honor for you."
The girls seemed somewhat uneasy, except for a blonde girl who remained expressionless.
The middle-aged woman taught her maids the rules of etiquette, how to maintain proper decorum in the princess's palace, and instructed the girls to stand against the wall with wooden basins filled with water balanced on their heads.
Someone got drenched because she moved while standing. It was like being splashed with a bucket of cold water in the middle of March, making it hard to breathe.
But the middle-aged woman scolded her harshly and took out a wooden board to strike the girl's palm hard.
The middle-aged woman scolded all the girls except the blonde one with a small upturned nose, who stood against the wall like a wooden post.
The middle-aged woman approached her, staring at her with a stern gaze, as if she wanted to devour her.
Even so, the blonde girl remained impassive, staring straight ahead in silence.
The wooden basin on her head had a surface as smooth as a mirror, without a single ripple.
"Could you tell me your name?"
"Annie Leonhart."
"Your movements are good, but your expression is too stiff. You need more practice."
"Yes."
"Everyone, put down your basins. That's all for today's lesson." The middle-aged woman clapped once, signaling that they could rest.
Gale opened the classroom door and entered, carrying a bamboo basket filled with freshly baked white bread. The crispy crust of the bread was sprinkled with a layer of white sugar and had a faint aroma of wheat.
Gale handed out bread to the girls, with Annie being the last.
"Aren't you even going to thank me?" Gale asked with a smile.
"Thank you," Annie replied in a low voice.
"You're quite cold." Gale scratched his head. "Why did you come here?"
"Because there is food here."
"Where are your parents?"
"They were devoured by a Titan."
"Really… are you a refugee from Wall Maria?" Gale asked, patting her on the shoulder and smiling. "Work hard. When you become a servant of the royal family, you won't go hungry anymore."
With that, Gale turned around and left.
The smile disappeared from his face the moment the door closed.
Annie Leonhart, the inheritor of the Female Titan—so it was.
Gale let out a sigh of relief, got into the carriage, and left the merchants' guild.
Gale knew where Annie,
Reiner, and Bertolt had been during the winter. They were in a settlement near Wall Rose and, like him, had likely infiltrated during the destruction of the wall.
Last winter, that group of three went to the greenhouse to receive food subsidies for potatoes and sweet potatoes, and Gale found their names in the subsidy records.
Warriors who came from far away, from across the sea: Annie, Reiner, Bertolt.
Their objective was to seize the power of the Founding Titan. Marley did not know what was happening inside the walls, so in order not to alert the Founding Titan, they sent a team of four to infiltrate and steal its power.
All four were warriors who could transform into Titans: the Armored Titan, whose body has a hardened outer shell; the Colossal Titan, which stands 60 meters tall; the Jaw Titan, highly mobile and aggressive; and the Female Titan, which can summon Pure Titans.
All four were children, because once someone inherits the power of a Titan, their lifespan is reduced to only thirteen years.
To ensure that the holders of Titan power remained in peak condition during those thirteen years, Marley selected children under the age of ten for training.
The best were chosen, and the Marleyan government injected them with cerebrospinal fluid, transforming them into Titans in a secret location, where they would devour the successors of the previous generation, whose lives were about to end.
Gale knew he should not underestimate them because of their young age. If these four transformed into Titans, they could devastate a small country in a short time.
In particular, the Colossal Titan—if it transformed in a city—would possess destructive power comparable to that of a high-yield bomb.
However, in the end, children are still children. Before reaching the wall, one of the four was devoured by a Pure Titan. Panic paralyzed them, and they forgot to use their Titan powers, helplessly watching their comrade being swallowed.
The one who was devoured was the leader of the group of four, leaving the remaining three without leadership.
Their goal was to seize the power of the Founding Titan. According to their original plan, their mission was to infiltrate the walls, find the King of the Walls, have one of them transform into a Titan to devour him, return to Marley, and thus complete the mission.
However, due to the loss of their captain on the way to the wall, they resorted to a more radical method: Reiner and Bertolt transformed and broke through Wall Maria.
They wanted to take advantage of the chaos to observe the movements of the King of the Walls. It was said that the Founding Titan was the pinnacle of all Titans and could control them all.
They wanted to see how the King of the Walls would react to such chaos, and perhaps they could use this opportunity to locate him and quickly complete their mission of returning to Marley.
However, they did not know that almost at the same time the wall was breached, Eren's father had taken the power from its predecessor.
All those three did was senselessly kill thousands upon thousands of inhabitants of Wall Rose.
Whether they acted intentionally or not, whether they were brainwashed or had a distorted understanding of reality, what they did was essentially murder: deliberate and premeditated killing.
Therefore, Gale would feel no pity for these three.
These three people are extremist terrorists, the kind who would drive a van into a crowd and detonate it.
That is why Gale, using the pretext of the princess recruiting servants, sent a caravan to the frontier lands where the three were located to promote the recruitment of Annie Leonhart.
From Annie's perspective, this was a golden opportunity to enter the center of the walls, come into contact with high-ranking government officials, and perhaps even discover the location of the King of the Walls.
But she had no idea that it was a trap—a trap designed specifically for her. The reason all the servants he recruited were women was to separate the Female Titan from her male companions.
The net had already been cast in secret; all that remained was to wait for it to be drawn in.