AN: From this chapter, the release schedule will change. I need more time to review and write new chapters. We got to the point where I have to keep track of a lot of things and I also have to try to fix issues you point out in the comments. So from now on, the release schedule will be 3 chapters a week guaranteed. There will be bonus chapters and I might release more; the next bonus one is on 200+ power stones.
I have extra chapters on [email protected]/skeri123 and those chapters can be influenced by you before they get here.
PS: In its item description Death Note was limited to L3 and below (price makes more sense now). It can't kill anyone above that. There was a plan for it in the future where I show it used on T8 explorer but people keep bringing it up as an issue so there you go.
Adam turned eighteen on a Tuesday.
Tomás made breakfast. This was unusual because Tomás typically didn't cook for anyone but himself, but he showed up in the shared kitchen at 0630 with eggs and toast and a protein shake that tasted like it had been designed by committee.
"Birthday boy," Tomás said, sliding the plate across the counter.
"Thanks."
"Eighteen. In Astren, that means you can vote."
"We're not in Astren."
"In Haldren it means you can..." He thought about it. "I actually don't know what it means in Haldren."
"Same as seventeen," Adam said. "Except with a different number."
Hana arrived ten minutes later and handed him a small wrapped box without ceremony. Inside was a field compass, analog, no electronics. The kind that worked in any world regardless of technology level.
"That's practical," Adam said.
"You're practical." She sat down and took a piece of Tomás's toast.
Ren came in, saw the box, and said, "Happy birthday." Then she poured coffee and sat down and that was the extent of it. Adam appreciated the economy.
Sera wasn't there. She was three weeks into her second L3 expedition, somewhere in a world that none of them would know about until she got back. Tomás had finished his second two months ago. Hana was due out any day from her third. The rotation kept moving, and the apartment felt different depending on who was deployed and who was home.
Adam's mandatory window didn't open for another four years, but Sera had put him in the active rotation before she'd left. "The first one matters most," she'd said. "Don't wait."
"You two could go together," Tomás said, looking between Adam and Ren. "Paired deployment. Touch hands, same world. Sera mentioned it before she shipped out."
Adam considered it. Ren was due for her first L3 as well, and a paired deployment had obvious advantages. Shared workload, someone to watch your back, combined tactical capacity. The smart choice, probably.
"I'll go solo," Adam said.
Tomás raised his eyebrows but didn't push it.
Ren looked at him over her coffee. She didn't seem surprised. "When?"
"End of week."
She nodded and drank her coffee and that was the end of the discussion. Ren understood the value of doing something alone the first time. She'd done her first two levels the same way.
Three days later, Adam stood in Deployment Bay 2 of the Kerenth Operations Center. The bay was spare. Concrete floor, overhead lights, a medical station along the far wall with two technicians on standby. No windows. The kind of room built for function.
He wore the Nanosuit with civilian clothes over it that he'd strip on arrival. The helmet was retracted. Spatial Pocket loaded: hemostatic compression bandage, replacement tourniquet, healing charge, Hana's compass, and the Dimensional Anchor he'd been carrying since the Predator expedition. His standard loadout. Light, practical, nothing that couldn't be accessed in under three seconds.
He didn't know where he was going. Nobody ever did. The Bazaar assigned the world at random and the only information you got was whatever you could figure out after you landed.
EXPEDITION DEPLOYMENT
Current Level: 3
World Assignment: Random (Level 3 classification)
Expeditions Completed at L3: 0/3 Deploy?
Adam confirmed.
DEPLOYMENT CONFIRMED
Level 3 Expedition Assigned
World: [REDACTED — revealed upon arrival]
Estimated Duration: Variable
Completion Rating: Pending
Deploying in: 3... 2... 1...
Adam closed his eyes and breathed. The breathing was automatic, had been since month eight, but he still noticed it in the moments before a deployment. The steady rhythm that kept everything running beneath the surface. The foundation that nobody could see.
The transfer hit.
Daylight. Open terrain. Grass underfoot, tall and dry, and a sky that was overcast and colorless. The air smelled like earth and old stone and something faintly acrid, like smoke that had been burning for a long time.
EXPEDITION ACTIVE — LEVEL 3
World: L3-0217 Classification: Siege Warfare / Regenerative Hostile Entities
Primary Objective: Neutralize the armored hostile entity operating within the southern walled district
Secondary Objective: Assist local military forces in securing the contested territory
Primary Completion: S-rank eligible
Secondary Completion: A-B rank (performance-dependent)
Time Limit: 1 year
Failure Condition: Explorer death / Armored hostile escapes the operational zone
Note: Multiple hostile entities of varying threat class detected in operational area. Exercise caution.
Adam read it twice. Armored hostile entity. Southern walled district. Regenerative. The pieces were already falling into place before he even looked up.
He opened his Observation Haki and pushed it outward.
The landscape was flat with low rolling hills. To the south, maybe four kilometers away, a structure that didn't belong in any natural landscape. A wall. Not a fence or a fortification but a WALL, fifty meters high, stretching in both directions until it curved beyond the horizon. Gray stone, impossibly massive, the kind of construction that shouldn't exist in any pre-industrial civilization.
Attack on Titan.
The recognition came fast because the walls were unmistakable. No other world in his memory had walls this size built to keep things out. He scanned the landscape for more detail, trying to place the timeline. The wall to the south was Wall Maria, the outermost ring. If he was standing outside it, he was in Titan territory.
His Haki picked up movement. Large presences scattered across the landscape to the east and north. Heavy, slow-moving, and with an energy signature that read as simple. Predatory but without complex intent. Animals, essentially. Very large animals.
Titans.
He started moving south toward the wall at a run.
The meta-knowledge came in broad strokes as he covered the distance. He'd watched the anime in his previous life and read parts of the manga. He remembered the shape of the world clearly enough. Three concentric walls, the outermost one Wall Maria, breached five years before the main story by the Colossal Titan. Humanity driven back to Wall Rose. The military factions, the Survey Corps, the ODM gear. Titans were mindless eating machines except for the shifters, who were humans that could transform into specialized Titan forms. The weak point on all of them was the nape. One meter tall, ten centimeters wide. Destroy that and they dropped. Everything else regenerated.
The specifics were fuzzier. He remembered the major plot beats but not every detail. Names escaped him in places. He couldn't remember every episode, every minor character, every tactical decision. But he remembered the arcs. Trost, the breach, the revelation that shifters hid among the military. And later, the operation to retake Shiganshina, where the Survey Corps went to seal Wall Maria and the enemy was waiting for them.
His Haki was painting a picture as he got closer to the wall. A large concentration of people along the top and inside a town built against the wall's southern face. Military formation. Horses, carts, soldiers. Something major was happening. And among the soldiers, three presences that were different from the rest. Structured intent. Purpose. Intelligence. Two were hidden and one was already positioned outside the wall.
If the Survey Corps was at Shiganshina trying to seal the breach, and the shifters were lying in wait, then this was the arc he thought it was. The battle where everything came out into the open.
Reiner Braun. Armored Titan. Blond, tall, muscular. Military uniform. Hiding among the soldiers.
If he could find Reiner before the fighting started, before the transformation happened, this could be clean. One target, one strike, maximum divergence. The Bazaar rewarded timeline alterations, and pulling the Armored Titan's pilot out of the picture before the battle even began would be the biggest alteration he could make.
He reached the base of Wall Maria. Fifty meters of stone rising straight up. He could hear it now, even without Haki. Distant shouting. The hiss of gas-powered gear. And something else, deeper. An impact that shook the stone under his hand.
The battle had already started.
Adam went up the wall. TK-assisted jumps combined with Nanosuit Power Mode bursts, eight meters at a time, finding handholds in the rough stone and launching again. He reached the top in under a minute.
The view from the wall showed everything.
Shiganshina District spread out below on the southern side. A ruined town, gray stone buildings half-collapsed, streets that had been empty for five years. The breach in the outer wall had already been sealed. A crystalline barrier covered where the gate had been, smooth and unnatural against the old stone. Eren's hardening. That part's done.
And in the center of the district, two Titans were fighting.
One was fifteen meters tall with armored plating covering its entire body, gold and angular, every surface designed to deflect impact. The Armored Titan. Reiner. Already transformed. Already in the fight. The other was the same height but leaner, with hardened fists that glinted in the overcast light. Eren's Attack Titan. They were trading blows that toppled the buildings around them.
On the far side of the wall, a much larger engagement was happening. A twenty-meter Titan, ape-like, stood in the open and hurled rocks at the Survey Corps soldiers with a throwing arm that turned boulders into artillery. Bodies were falling. The Beast Titan.
Too late for the clean approach.
Finding Reiner in his human body and putting him down quietly was off the table. He was already fifteen meters of armored muscle and locked in combat. Which meant the hard way. Break the armor at the nape, extract the pilot.
Adam studied the fight from the wall-top. Eren's Attack Titan was pressing an offensive, driving hardened punches into the Armored Titan's chest plate. The Armored Titan was absorbing the hits and pushing back. Neither was landing anything decisive.
His Haki read the Armored Titan's structure in real time. The armor was thick and covered everything, but it wasn't uniform. The density varied. The joints had to flex. The back of the knees, the inner elbows, and the nape all had sections where the armor overlapped rather than fused because the body needed to move. The nape section was less dense than the chest or shoulders. A structural compromise.
That's where I go in.
Adam jumped off the wall into the district.
Fifty meters. Nanosuit Power Mode absorbed the landing. He came up running through the ruined streets toward the two fighting Titans.
He activated Enhancement Ren as he ran. The Nen surge layered on top of the Nanosuit's default amplification and his Reinforced Physiology, and the multiplicative stacking was immediate. Muscles tightened. Reactions sharpened. Haki fed him continuous data on the Armored Titan's movements, its attack patterns, the rhythm of the fight.
Up close, the scale was staggering. Fifteen meters of plated muscle, filling the street like a walking building. When the Armored Titan threw a punch, the air displacement hit Adam from thirty meters away. Its footsteps cracked the stone.
One person against that.
But he wasn't just a normal person.
He positioned himself on a collapsed building at the Armored Titan's seven o'clock, two stories up. The Titan's back was partially turned. Eren's Attack Titan was keeping it focused forward with a barrage of hardened strikes. The nape was visible.
Now.
Adam launched from the rooftop. TK propulsion combined with Power Mode sent him on a rising arc toward the Armored Titan's upper back. He hit the armor plating at speed and the Nanosuit's grip systems locked onto the surface. He was on the Titan's back. The heat radiating through the armor was intense, steam hissing from every seam.
The Titan felt him. A hand the size of a truck came reaching back to swat him off.
Adam was already moving. He'd read the intent through Haki before the arm started and he shifted laterally across the Titan's back, climbing toward the nape. The hand swept through where he'd been standing a half-second earlier.
He drove an Enhancement-charged fist into the seam where the nape plate met the shoulder armor. Full Nen output through a single point of contact. Power Mode amplified the force by four. The armor cracked.
Not broke. Cracked.
The Titan bucked and twisted. Adam lost his grip and launched himself sideways with TK before the second sweep of the arm could catch him. He fell two stories, caught himself with a TK-cushioned landing on a rooftop, and was already assessing.
The crack in the nape armor was closing. Regeneration. The flesh underneath was knitting together and the armor was re-forming over it.
One hit isn't enough. I need to break through and reach the pilot before it heals. Which means I need a bigger window.
He watched the fight continue. Eren's Attack Titan was pressing hard, driving the Armored Titan backward with hardened punches that sent fracture lines spider-webbing across the chest plate. Every time the Armored Titan braced for Eren's attacks, its attention locked forward. Its back was exposed for seconds at a time.
Adam moved to a new position, higher, on a partially intact building that gave him a clear line to the Titan's upper back. He waited. Haki tracking, Accelerated Cognition processing the Titan's movement patterns, calculating the windows between its focus forward and its ability to reach behind itself.
Three seconds. Consistently three seconds between the moment it committed to blocking Eren and the moment it could reach its own nape. That was the window.
Eren landed a hardened punch that staggered the Armored Titan backward, its feet gouging furrows in the street. The Titan braced, weight forward, focused entirely on the threat in front of it.
Adam launched.
He covered the distance in under a second. Hit the Titan's upper back, scrambled to the nape. The previous crack had healed but the seam was still the weakest point. He shifted his Nen. All of it. Every thread of aura pulled from his limbs, his torso, his legs, concentrated into his right fist. Ko. Maximum output in a single striking point, and nothing left to protect the rest of his body.
Everything. Right here.
He drove the Ko-enhanced Power Mode strike into the nape seam.
The armor shattered. The half-healed crack blew open and his fist punched through the armor plating and into the flesh beneath. Hot, dense, steaming. His arm went in past the elbow. His fingers found something solid that wasn't Titan tissue. A body. The pilot's body, fused into the nape.
TK grabbed it. Twelve months of compounded physiology had pushed his telekinetic ceiling well past the 28-kilogram baseline he'd started with. He had the force for this. He pulled.
Reiner Braun came out of the nape in a burst of steam and connective tissue. Heavy. Eighty, ninety kilos of dead weight, and Adam felt the strain immediately, the familiar pressure behind his eyes that came with sustained TK exertion near his limits. But it held.
He fell away from the Titan's back with Reiner floating beside him, TK straining to keep the unconscious body stable during the descent. The landing was rough, Nanosuit absorbing the impact, and he set Reiner down on the street fast because holding that much weight while falling was pushing it.
Fifteen meters of armored flesh hit the ground and the steam started rising immediately. The body began dissolving, thick columns of vapor filling the streets and obscuring everything beyond ten meters. Without its pilot, the form couldn't sustain itself.
Through the steam, Eren's Attack Titan stood still, staring at the dissolving body with what even on a Titan's face was recognizable as confusion.
Adam stood over Reiner's unconscious body and caught his breath. His right arm ached from the impact and the skin beneath the Nanosuit sleeve was raw. Ko left nothing in reserve, and the strike had demanded everything his Enhancement could produce.
Done.
He used TK to bind Reiner's arms behind his back, pressing the wrists together and holding them there with sustained force. Not elegant, but it would hold until the local military arrived.
A short man with an undercut came through the steam ten minutes later, Survey Corps cloak, boots covered in whatever Shiganshina's streets were now. His energy signature through Haki was dense and efficient. It reminded Adam of Sera.
He stopped a few paces off and looked at Reiner's bound body, then at Adam, then at Reiner again.
"That one's breathing."
"He is."
"You did that."
"Yes."
Gray eyes came back to Adam. Flat, tired, not particularly friendly. Adam's meta-knowledge supplied the name. Levi Ackerman.
"The plate on that one chips our blades," Levi said.
"Seam at the shoulder. Where the armor overlaps instead of fusing. Hit it hard enough in one spot."
"Tch."
Levi crouched next to Reiner, checked his pulse with two fingers, straightened again. He didn't thank Adam. Didn't look surprised the pilot was alive, either. Somewhere behind the gray eyes he'd already moved past it and was thinking about the next thing.
"There was a second one. Bigger. Blew itself up."
"The pilot came out of that. Tall, thin, dark hair. Unconscious, most likely. Not far from where the body fell."
Levi studied him for a longer beat this time.
"You're not from here."
"No."
"You knew what both of them looked like."
"I know a little about a lot of places."
He didn't push on it. Whatever he'd decided about Adam, he'd decided it, and it wasn't going to come out of his face.
"Don't leave the district until we say. We'll want him." A flick of the chin toward Reiner. "And whoever the other one is, if he's still breathing."
He walked off before Adam could answer.
The Survey Corps found Bertolt Hoover in the ruins near where the Colossal Titan had detonated. Adam pointed them in the right direction based on Haki readings and what he remembered about the arc. Two shifters captured. The Beast Titan had retreated to the north during the battle, badly mauled by the Survey Corps' best fighter. The operation was being called a victory, though the cost written across the soldiers' faces made that word feel generous.
The extraction notification came four hours after the fighting ended. Adam was sitting on the wall-top, watching the Survey Corps begin the long process of clearing Titans from the perimeter.
MISSION ASSESSMENT
Primary Objective Status: COMPLETE
Armored hostile entity neutralized. Pilot extracted alive and secured by local forces. Armor breach method: concentrated aura strike to structural weak point at nape-shoulder junction.
Secondary Objective Status: COMPLETE
Local military operation successful. Contested district secured. Two hostile pilots captured. Third hostile entity (apex class) retreated from operational area following engagement with local forces.
Narrative Divergence Assessment: Two shifter-class entities removed from enemy control during critical military operation. Local military sustained significantly reduced casualties compared to projected baseline.
Timeline divergence rating: HIGH
EXPEDITION COMPLETE — LEVEL 3
RATING: S
BASE REWARD: 2,500 NP
FIRST L3 EXPEDITION BONUS: +200 NP
DIVERGENCE BONUS: +800 NP (HIGH TIMELINE ALTERATION — DUAL SHIFTER CAPTURE)
COMBAT BONUS: +400 NP (DIRECT ENGAGEMENT, L3 THREAT NEUTRALIZED)
INTELLIGENCE BONUS: +300 NP (CRITICAL KNOWLEDGE APPLICATION)
TOTAL: 4,200 NP
Completion Reward (S-RANK — LEGENDARY TIER) Force Join Token
Effect: Allows the Explorer to select a specific world for their next expedition at the current tier. Overrides random assignment. Single use. Cannot be traded.
4,200 NP. And a second Force Join Token.
His balance would jump from 2,570 to 6,770. The NP was significant, but the token was what caught his attention. He'd used his first one on Chronicle, burning the reward slot in exchange for choosing his world and walking out with telekinesis. That trade had been worth every point he'd forfeited.
A second token meant he could choose again. Pick the exact world he wanted, at the exact moment he wanted it. At L3, where the worlds were lethal and the wrong deployment could end everything, that kind of control was worth more than the NP.
He stored the token in his Spatial Pocket alongside the Dimensional Anchor.
The transfer pulled him back.
He debriefed at the Kerenth Operations Center with the duty officer, since Sera was still deployed. Standard procedure. World description, threat assessment, actions taken, injuries sustained. Adam kept it factual with slight alterations. He described the world's mechanics, the wall structure, the Titan physiology. No completion rating mentioned.
Ren was waiting in the apartment when he got home. She had coffee on and was sitting at the kitchen table with a book open in front of her.
"How was it?" she asked.
"Walled civilization. Humanity living inside three concentric walls, fifty meters high. Giant humanoid creatures outside that eat people. Regeneration on all of them. Weak point is the back of the neck."
Ren looked up from her book. "The Wall World."
Adam paused. "You know it?"
"Everyone knows it. It's one of the most deployed L3 worlds. Tomás went there on his first rotation." She set the book down. "Fifty-meter walls, regenerating giants, military with the gas-powered wire gear. It's well documented. Did you get a shifter?"
"The armored one. The natives helped."
Ren's eyebrows shifted by about a millimeter. "You extracted the armored shifter pilot?"
"The locals already had him pinned. I just helped them get him out."
Ren looked at him for a moment.
"What happend to your arm?"
"Got hurth when I pulled him out, its sore. Functional." He flexed his right hand. The knuckles were bruised beneath the Nanosuit but nothing was broken. Hamon was already working on the soft tissue, not that she'd know that. "I'll be fine by morning."
"Good." She picked her book back up. "My deployment is next week."
Adam poured himself coffee and sat down across from her. Eighteen years old. First L3 expedition. Six thousand seven hundred seventy NP in reserve.
The building had barely started.