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Hello! I wanted to create a story that started where a lot of others leave off. Hope you enjoy. 

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"Keep your voices down. We're here. Intelligence doesn't know where this island came from or if there are titans here. Stay on your guard."

Captain Levi Ackermann was the first off their vessel, alighting on the ruddy shore and eyeing their surroundings with intense suspicion.

After him came Sasha Braus, smacking her lips as she nervously downed a hunk of biscuit.

"I said shut up." Captain Levi cast her a cold glance and she popped the rest of the bread in her mouth.

"Mmhm yeshir," she mumbled.

The next off the boat was Eren Jaeger, bewildered eyes frowning at the uncanny landscape, and beside him was Armin Arlelt, the smartest of the group. Finally, Mikasa Ackermann followed up the rear, hands on her twin blades, ready for everything. Her body was a rope pulled taut.

They were older now, these veteran members of the Scouting Regiment. A lot of time had passed since the Colossal Titan had first kicked in the wall but through many adventures, they'd stuck together. Together, they were a well-oiled machine. They'd killed many titans before, seemingly an unstoppable force. Of course they'd be chosen to investigate the mysterious island.

"What kind of place is this?" Eren muttered.

They took in the rounded island rising out of the murky, misty sea. It was hard to identify anything in the overcast gray of the hour. They couldn't make out where the shore bended on either side, but they had been told the island was estimated at a few kilometers long. Oddly, it's length was about the same as its width. Approximately, at least.

"There are no trees," Armin whispered. "I can't see anything."

"I hate it," Eren replied, "We could be ambushed. There's hiding places everywhere."

"And look at this." Mikasa stepped in front of the group and swiped her foot across the ground. A light layer of sand and dirt and dust parted, baring a compacted earth the likes of which none of them had seen before. It looked perfectly solid and not at all porous, like some kind of solid golden-brown marble. A tight set of parallel grooves ran through the ground toward the interior of the island. "It's hard." Mikasa stamped her foot and got nothing but an ache in her bones. "Like metal."

"Whoa! Very hard!" Sasha bent at the waist and poked at the ground, unable to even make the smallest dent in the banded, stone-like layer.

The Captain reminded them: "It doesn't matter what it is. You have a job to do, I suggest you do it. We'll split into two camps." He pointed at each of them. "Mikasa. Eren. You take the shoreline south. Sasha, Armin, and myself will follow it north. We'll rendezvous on the other side of the island. Do not explore the interior of the island unless absolutely necessary. There could be lesser titans hiding in caves. Take turns keeping watch."

His green cape waved as he turned and began his march up the shore. Sasha and Armin had no choice but to follow. Armin glanced back and waved at Eren.

When Eren turned around, his adoptive sister was already headed down the shore.

"You coming?" Mikasa said to Eren when he caught up with her.

"Like you'd just leave me behind," he retorted. "...What do you think that smell is?"

"I don't know. It's not unpleasant, but it is unusual."

Eren looked behind them, the boat was already almost gone in the mist where they'd left it. If it even was a mist. It felt thicker than a mist or ocean spray, than even a regular fog, and it smelled sweet with just a hint of sourness to it. Not so much that something had gone stale but that something had remained here for a long time. Eren inhaled deeply and let out a long, slow breath.

"What, you like it?" Mikasa looked at him.

"I don't know," Eren responded, "It kind of makes me..."



"...hungry," Sasha complained under her breath, "sooo hungry. Why am I so hungry?"
Besides for her bellyaching, she and Armin and Levi marched on in relative silence, keeping up a good pace. The Captain had reminded them that there was a lot of ground to cover. Armin kept glancing back over his shoulder. Eren and Mikasa were long gone. Nothing but that oppressing fog.

"What is it, Armin?" Levi said.

"Nothing, Captain."

A pregnant pause.

"Ok it's just, I'm a little confused about what I'm supposed to be doing right now. If Intelligence needed somebody to go for a hike, then any able-bodied scout would do. I was told to secure specimens of local flora and fauna for study."

"And?"

"And look around. We haven't sighted a single tree. That in itself isn't wholly remarkable," Armin said, "but then, I haven't seen a single fern or blade of grass, either. There's no vegetation anywhere, just this layer of sand and dust over everything, and whatever that is underneath."

"There's no fauna, either," Levi agreed.

"Exactly. No vegetation means nothing to eat. There are no mammals or reptiles here. I'm willing to bet even the water around here has no fish. Have you seen a single bird, any seagulls at all since we landed? I haven't." Armin pressed his lips together as a huge dark cliff jutted out ahead into their path. It was a gigantic imposing shadow, not unlike a titan itself, buried at a bizarre angle in the ground, covered in deep cuts and rifts--where wind and rain eroded the surface? Armin wondered.

He went on, "There's nothing here. Not a single mouse or bird making their nest, not a single leaf or vine... It's like nothing can live on this island, like..." he shuddered, clutching his cloak tight around his chest, "...like the whole place is dead."

"Heeeeeeey!" Sasha's voice rang loudly through the air, even though she wasn't that far away, "I got your vine right here!"

Levi rushed to her side and began reprimanding her about her volume, until he stopped short. Armin rushed up puffing behind him. None of them spoke a word after that.

There, at the base of the gigantic cliff, grew some kind of vine, or something that oddly resembled a vine. It pierced out of the sandy earth, bending at cruel, excruciating angles as it crawled up the surface of the precipice. It hugged the stone, it seemed almost fused to it. The "vine" threw its tendrils or branches out in a jagged, random nonsense-pattern like the broken legs of a centipede. A very, very big centipede. At its widest point, it was wider around than the three of them standing together. They could walk side by side inside of it, if they could get inside.

"What is it...?" Levi hissed, pressed his hand against the organic thing splayed out on stone before him. It wasn't soft but it wasn't as hard as the ground, either. Then he said decisively: "It's alive."

"What?!" Armin and Sasha both gasped.

"See for yourself," Levi answered. He retracted his hand and looked at it. It wasn't dirty or slimy.

Sasha touched it next, then Armin, hesitantly. They could both feel it. Under the membranous surface of their "vine", it felt like there was something rushing, flowing.

"Is it water?" Sasha mused.

Armin thought of something much worse. "This island is cursed..."

Then they felt it. The ground beneath them began to shift, almost like it was made of separate plates, like they were giants standing over the plates that moved the continents. A sound like a thunderstorm roared louder and louder underground, followed by a noise like steel grinding against steel, followed by a dull groaning noise that seemed to come from everywhere. The cliff above them shifted to the rocky, mountainous chorus.

"Look out!" Levi led them down the slope and up the shoreline, racing behind them to ensure they kept up their speed. They stopped a short ways up ahead where a space cleared.
Behind them, the cliff wobbled and seemed to stick out further over the ocean, but it didn't fall. Its strange movement carried along by the sudden earthquake, which had since diminished, seemed to cut through the intense fog. Armin peered up to the top of the cliff where it met another cliff and still another, and upward and upward until the side of the mountain disappeared in the clouds. Armin took in the vista, the sharp valleys cut deep into the rock, like a titan had carved them with massive hands. He scowled at the prospect of an island crawling with titans bearing huge claws and teeth that could tear open whole mountainsides.

Sasha's stomach growled painfully. She doubled over and sunk to her knees, wrapping her arms around her waist.

"Ugh... why am I getting so..."



"...hot?" Eren took off his green cape and brown jacket. "Aren't you getting hot?"

"Yes." Mikasa replied. "Just don't go in the water."

She was standing at the water's edge, still as a statue, peering down into water that turned deep blue and then black almost immediately. There were almost no waves, no sandbank or anything. Somebody could get pushed under the island by an undertow, into an underwater fissure. Mikasa winced at the morbid thought.

"I didn't plan on it," Eren said, then: "Look, there it is again!"

He and Mikasa turned their faces inland. A hissing geyser of pent up pressure erupted into a cloud of steam from a deep rent in the earth. They didn't have to say it; the blast put them both in mind of titans.

"They must be down there," Eren muttered, feeling his blood boil at the thought of them. "There must be some kind of underground lair."

"Or..." Mikasa left the water and came up beside him, "it could be volcanic."

Her brother sniffed the air. "I don't smell sulfur. But that odor is stronger now."

"You felt that tremor earlier?" Mikasa insisted. "If the island is violently active, that could explain the lack of any life. This stuff might be volcanic ash for all we know." She kicked the dirt again. It went up around her feet in a puff of fine particles.

Almost in response, another blast of hot steam issued from the ground to the sound of rocks splitting in two. A deep gurgling noise followed, like a huge aquifer shifting just under the earth.

"I hate this place. Let's go." Mikasa turned and started walking again. Eren followed and they went on for a ways.

Ahead of them in the distance, barely discernible, a long, rounded ridge stuck out from the main island, climbing to a huge beveled, tapered, narrow peak before diving again into the water. It had no shore, its sides marked with dense grooves and a huge garish rent, again pointing back to the island, even as the cliffs themselves went straight down into the water.

"What could cause a rock formation like that?" Eren asked as they kept stride together.

"If we knew, it might not be the mysterious island we were sent out to investigate."

"Nothing in nature, I'd bet."

"I guess so."

"Do you think the titans realistically have anything to do with this place?" Eren grunted as he stepped up a huge plate of the same golden-brown stone bulging from the ground.

"Realistically? What doesn't have to do with the titans," Mikasa intoned. "All our lives have been about them. That's why we're here."

"Yeah but how long have we been doing this? You and I haven't come across anything like this place. Usually titans are on land, not stuck out here on some damned weird island. And if they are here, there's not much we could do about it. We're out in the open."

Mikasa knew he was right. She scanned the horizon of the island: besides for the ridge going out over the ocean, there was no high point nearby. They had passed a few outcropping an hour or so ago, each of them like massive buttes rising almost straight out of the ground, peculiar in how they seemed organized, nearly regimental in their placement.

She sighed. "There's still so much we don't really know about the titans. It's not unreasonable that we could discover a new strain of them here. If that happens... we'll need you to assume your form."

"I know," Eren said, and then as he clambered over another ledge, he gasped. "Wow, come look at this!"

Mikasa began climbing the natural steps, like huge wrinkles of solid steel, but then her brother yelled. "Lookout!"

She leaped away just in time as a globulous white substance came flowing over the upper ledge like a flood. Standing aside, she watched it pass, holding her nose. It stank. It quickly slid over the surface of dirt like a massive bead of water, leaving a slick trail behind it, and then when it hit the water. It hissed, letting out its heat in sharp gasps of steamy agony. In moments, it was gone, leaving nothing but a thin, glistening slime trail.

"Faster than a lava flow, and not quite as hot, I'd guess, if the geography books are at all accurate," Eren was saying.

Mikasa came up behind him, mounting the upper ledge, glancing back at the black water, "And it didn't cool into rock. It sort of just melted into the sea."

"And there's more where that came from."

Mikasa turned and saw what Eren had initially called her up here for. She held her nose again. Before them, half concealed in the thick fog and billowing gouts of steam was a huge, white, viscous lake of some kind. Instead of a shore, the liquid bowled and beveled at its edges, again like a bead or droplet of water. It trembled like a pool of fat with every slight tremor and geyser nearby.

"What the hell is that?" Mikasa finally managed.

Eren took in a sharp breath through is nose. "I have no idea. As you were coming up, the ground shifted and a part of it dumped over the edge like a waterfall."

"What are you doing?" Mikasa frowned at him.

"Huh?"

"...The smell!"

"I don't mind it." He sniffed again. She frowned even more.

"I think it's disgusting. We need to get moving and make some progress before--"

The earth rippled under their feet. The rocks themselves seemed to groan aloud. The ledge under them were on bucked, throwing them into the air. Nothing they couldn't normally handle, except with the local topography, there wasn't much their harnesses could do for them. Still, they managed to jet through the air and utilize their wires in such a way to land somewhat safely--Eren fell on his shoulder and Mikasa on her hip. Neither of them appreciated just how hard the ground was, and it was still moving.

The earthquake quickly dialed up its intensity. Underground there was a horrible noise like huge grinding molars. The crash of it filled their ears. The ground bucked again and again. It seemed to crack open as vines like giant writhing snakes erupted from blistering fissures, writhing over the landscape.

They had to use their wires to remain safely attached to the floor. All around them, as the earth heaved, massive drops of the white liquid spattered. Mikasa's disgust was lost in the noise of the earthquake. She prayed none of it would fall on her.

She should've prayed for Eren.

Mikasa looked up in time to see a glob the size of a redwood fall out of the sky and cover her brother. Her first thought was that he'd be smothered, or drowned. She screamed his name but couldn't be heard. The glob hit the floor and splashed outward, leaving Eren absolutely drenched in the stuff. He looked horrified, revolted, until his expression suddenly changed.
She saw his breathing quicken, grow heavier. His hair stood on end. His skin pricked with gooseflesh. His face went pale as his eyes filled with a wild lust. He crinkled his nose, taking in the scent that bombarded his senses.

Mikasa wanted to puke but Eren gazed down at his body and the slime around him, looking as if he wanted to lick it up. He raised his hand and looked at the threads of sticky white ooze between his fingers. He moved it closer to his face!

"Eren, no!" Mikasa deactivated her harness and ran toward him as the earthquake subsided. "Stop it! What are you doing!"

He bared his teeth, turned his hand to bite down on his own flesh.

"Get a hold of yourself! Stop! You're going to..."



"...head inland. We have to! There it is again!" Armin put a hand over his own mouth and the three of them listened. The sound hit their ears, full of emotion, poignant, lonesome, longing, passionate. It was vaguely human.

Levi's eyes seemed to follow the echoes reverberating off of the golden-brown cliffs. "It could be a titan," he said, once the sound died down.

"It could be someone crying for help," Sasha admitted.

Levi nodded. "You're right." He pointed up the steep, convex cliffside almost directly above them. The had walked for hours and what they thought had been an isolated cliff had turned out to be one of the jagged foothills of an immense mountain. "We go straight up the side of the mountain, head to the peak, and make a survey of the surroundings if we can. Along the way, we'll take turns pausing to scout for any sign of titans..." and he added: "or anybody needing our help. Understood?"

They followed him up through the air, their harnesses whining as their bodies flipped elegantly. Ascending the mountain proved somewhat difficult: their wires couldn't pierce the extremely hard stone, so they had to pick their way a little more slowly, keen eyes sharpened for sharp grooves and rents. Still higher and higher they went until they reached the low-hanging clouds. The smell of the fog was sharper up here.

Where is the damned peak? Levi's mind wandered, but just then the peak seemed to flatten out. Alongside it, chasms separated similar peaks just like it, all of them scarred by immense rents that pointed toward the island's interior. The top presented itself, a bare space of solid rock without the sand and dust of the beach far below them.

Levi set down first and then Armin and Sasha behind him. They could hardly make out anything above them but a swirl of thick gray clouds. The peak itself seemed more like a plateau or mesa.

Does it still go higher? Levi thought.

An obelisk presented itself as a wind passed through the haze, clearing it just enough to reveal the object. It was as wide around as the turret of a castle.

"What is that?" Armin asked aloud, "Some kind of natural formation? A geyser, maybe?"

"Hmmm too big to be an anthill," Sasha stated, if only to mask the sound of her stomach growling.

The vines crawled toward its base, or away from it, where golden-brown faded into dark brown, then red, then pink up toward the tip of the formation.

"Doesn't matter," the Captain said, "Do you hear anything?"

They strained their ears. The wind howled sharply against the stones in that desolate place, but behind it, they heard the voice again. It started in low and then built to a crescendo, seeming to cause the mesa under their feet to shiver. The climax of the voice cut off decisively, ending in what sounded like a whimper.

"Somebody's there! They're in trouble!" Armin shouted. "Down there in that valley!" He ran and jumped into thin air, activating his harness to descend across the far end of the mesa.

"Armin! Wait!" Levi yelled in pursuit, and he and Sasha descended after him. Hundreds and hundreds of meters of corrugated stone fell upward behind them. As it whipped past in immeasurable striated heaps, its constant quaking and quivering shifts disoriented them. What they thought was a beach awaiting them below by the water was just more vine-encrusted rock.

They breathlessly lighted on the ground. There were more vines here than ever, bigger than ever, seeming to issue from a colossal cave, the only cave they'd seen on the entire trip. The voice moaned out of the dark pit, undeniably human.

To Sasha's ears, it sounded hungry.

"There could be titans. Stay close and be ready." Levi led the way, climbing the grotesque bulges of golden-brown stone. As they neared the entrance of the cave, a black orifice nearly serrated with tears and splits in the stone, the entrance pulsated. The voice moaned, louder than ever. It was a primal, guttural, wild call that seemed to issue up from the very earth itself, but with the unmistakable traits of a feminine voice...



"Eren... Eren... Don't..." her voice called to him through the swampy trance. He answered.

"Mikasa...? W-what happened?" any sign of anger or rage was gone from his tone, as was the hypnotic state the glob had left him in. His eyes were full of a sorrowful yearning, nearly stinging with tears.

"You almost turned," Mikasa said, her tone full of concern.

Eren put his hand down. "I won't. I'm fine... I promise you..."

"Good. We have to keep moving. Find some higher ground before another quake like that hits. We're lucky we didn't fall into the water."

"Yeah... you're right." He wanted to wash himself, the smell was still intoxicating, but she was right. They couldn't risk going into the sea.

"Let's see what happened to that lake," Mikasa was climbing the ledges again, Eren just behind her. "Maybe there will be a path forward. Maybe that giant pool or whatever it was is gone."

As they reached the top, the ground began to tremble again, pulling apart at the most bizarre of angles, the grooves in the earth flexing and unflexing. Their fears soon turned to terror. Where the "lake" used to be, a barren plain of undulating rock sunk down toward a canyon at their right. The ridge they'd spotted earlier formed one side of the canyon, but in the middle of it, at its head, and horrifyingly nearby, a grotesque chasm gushed forth torrents of thick white liquid, which splattered in globs and threads upon the far slopes of the ridge and poured down into the black water below where it boiled and fizzled as it mixed with the sea.

Eren was running towards it.

Mikasa screamed after him. He dashed like a madman, his sister falling behind, until he suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. They were at the base of the chasm at the edge of the canyon. They could both hear the violent noises of spurt after spurt of ooze issuing from the gaping slash in the rock, easily big enough to fit a smaller titan. Hot steam and vapor smoked out of the chasm, which suddenly trembled and contracted, two muscular lips enclosing, raising, covered in layers of slime, unfolding like a massive city-sized flower of pink, greasy, fibrous petals.



"Like the siren calling sailors to their deaths..." Sasha broke the silence of the cave and they all shuddered except for the Captain. He marched on under the crushing weight of duty, through the terror that the cave might just crush them.

They had gone on a ways and it was pitch black and full of moisture, the only light a small lantern Levi had been wise enough to bring with him. They had to get down almost on their hands knees at one point, the oppressive ceiling and encroaching walls seeming to bulge down at them. The woman's voice called them onward. What could any human being experience to make such an awful cry?

As the voice grew clearer, the cave suddenly opened up just a little and Levi at the front of the group froze. Sasha and Armin came up behind, peeking over his shoulders. They froze, too.

"NO DON'T LEAVE ME BE I NEED IT I WANT IT IT'S MINE MINE NO I NEED MORE MORE MORE I CAN'T HAVE ENOUGH NEVER ENOUGH I NEED MORE YES YES I NEED MORE YES MORE--" the woman's voice gushed, ceaselessly. Her face toward them, her head was wedged into the rock, which bunched up with coiling vines... no, veins... around her chin. A single, long, brown, frayed and braided ponytail rolled out along the floor. Not floor. Her body. Her head hung upside-down on the wall, saliva coating her beautiful feminine mouth and face, her bared, gnashing teeth. Her eyes were wide with the tiniest pupils, insane with greed and pleasure and power as she ranted and screamed out a tremendous moan that forced them to cover their ears.

That's when the worst possible suspicion came crashing down with the weight of reality.

Levi stammered: "It's not an island... It's a titan!"



Mikasa put her hand over her mouth, sucked in her breath and refused to breathe, even though her heart raced. Eren was hyperventilating, salivating uncontrollably. He turned around and looked at her, soaked with sweat and spit, a stark image on that immense landscape of pure, raw, impossibly shredded, inhuman muscle.

His eyes were full of desire, hypnotized by powerful pheromones and scents and odors. A lust unlike anything he'd ever felt before seized up his whole body. A throbbing shape rose behind him out of the top of the guttering chasm: red hot and pink and glistening, a clitoris bigger than any tower.


(end of part 1)
(read more at patreon.com/pumpculture)

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