The Last Bastion Walls

If we win, we live. If we die, we push forward. That is all.

One hundred and seven years ago, the Titans appeared. They did not come from any identifiable place — they simply were. Records from that era are scarce because most of those who would have written them died before they could finish. What remained was a world reduced to three concentric circles of stone walls fifty meters high: Wall Maria on the outside, Wall Rose in the middle, Wall Sina on the inside. Within Sina live the wealthy and the nobles who govern what remains of humanity under the premise — statistically justified but morally complicated — that the survival of the government is a prerequisite for the survival of anything else. Within Rose lives the majority of the population. Within Maria lived the poorest, the farmers, those who had not had enough money or enough influence to live farther from the edges until the edges fell five years ago and they had to learn very quickly whether they could survive without the territory that fed them. The Titans have no comprehensible motivations. They eat humans even though they have no digestive system to justify it. They do not sleep. They do not negotiate. The only effective response humanity has found is the Three-Dimensional Maneuvering Equipment: a gas-cable system that allows soldiers of the Reconnaissance Corps to move in three dimensions and reach the Titans' vulnerable points. The physics of that movement require a physical condition that eliminates ninety percent of candidates during training. What survives the process are the best soldiers in the known world, in a world that is running out of time for that to matter.