At least he can be assured that one of the trainees is still alive. and that he can be counted on to formulate some plan on the fly, because Levi soon gets his hands full hauling Hange off of the boy’s back and onto his own, barking at Armin to get into the wagon and help him come up with a way to save those trapped inside.

After all, if they don’t get a quick death via titan-bashing, suffocating underground isn’t going to be a pleasant end for anyone—least of all from the Survey Corps.

But with Armin thus freed of his burden both men still on their feet fire their anchors at the wagon’s general vicinity, their bodies snapping forward as Levi makes the jump into the back of the wagon, a slight grunt only betraying the fact that he hadn’t quite executed a perfect landing back there.

“Heavy-ass sack of shit,” he mutters, as Armin takes the reins and gets those horses moving.

“Eren’s not going to keep it back for long,” he replies, confident that the both of them can get the gist of what had happened down there.

“And quit moving around like that, Shit-Glasses,” he adds, careful as he sets her down on the base of the moving wagon despite the roughness of his language earlier. Armin’s probably done the requisite first aid already. Levi in the meantime has to look up, groping around for a spare rifle to hold off any stray MPs rushing their way.

“Rod Reiss.” His grip tightens on that rifle as he watches the aforesaid rise up out of the horizon. Up close, his titan form took up most of the cavern and almost incinerated them in the process. And despite the way they’re accelerating from it, the titan seems gigantic enough to block out the sun all on its own…

“Something worse than the Colossal Titan’s come out of there.” He frowns, gazing in the distance, before retracting that gun. “Shit, I almost wish the military police were after us again.”

She can happily put two and two together once they get out of this latest scuffle. Levi is after all only aware of a fraction of what’s going on, given that most of his time there has been spent keeping the MPs at bay. What he wouldn’t give for things to cool down so he can let Hange make sense of what had just happened there…

He squints in the distance.

“Rod is kicking up a lot of dust back there. Can’t see a fucking thing.” To say nothing of everything else that gets decimated in the wake of his attacks. He turns to Armin and barks an order at him to pull over behind some other abandoned building now that they’re a safe distance away. Normally, they’d go all the way back to headquarters for reinforcements, but well…it’s too risky to even approach the Garrison for some further assistance, not with what feels like the entirety of the population within the remaining walls out to get them.

They’ll have to come up with something on their own.

“Maybe,” Levi echoes, thinking back to that mysterious bottle Eren had taken in his mouth. Whatever it is, Levi’s only caught a glimpse of it before having to dodge those mystifying but ultimately aggravating glowing hunks of titan shit.

Because when the world literally takes a dump on you…

“Oi.” He turns his squinty-eyed glare at Hange instead of the balls-shriveling mass of titan out in the distance, possibly with their friends underfoot. “Get some rest. Armin and I can figure shit out from here.”

He’d half a mind to just leave Armin with her while he took one of the horses to check out the situation for himself.

In the end, however, as much as he craves some action they know too little about the situation to proceed. So he only murmurs another order to Hange to stay put and get some fucking rest while he confers with Armin on what little he’d seen, every now and again looking up for any sign of movement from Reiss.

They didn’t have to wait long. Though its massive size makes it appear stationary for the most part there’s a fair amount of violence that can be discerned from its monolith façade. The position of the titan’s head, its arms…that vague shape is barely visible under the shadow of that massive titan, but it could be someone—or several someones—scaling it via 3DMG, or it could be Eren in his titan form, clawing his way up toward Reiss’s spine.

So many questions, so many conjectures—and as always, nothing solid to work off on. He leaves Armin alone to get some rest and think things through, before once more approaching Hange.

“You heard all of that?” He doesn’t believe for a moment that she’s rested like he’d told her to.

Well resting would imply that she not overwork her overly active brain over so many details, but some things just can’t be helped, can it?

But he can be relieved in the fact that she’s accepted her own condition for the time being and hasn’t rushed out to study this latest abomination. It will probably take more than a lifetime to see it all given how massive it is, and that’s if anyone can get close enough without getting incinerated.

“I’m leaving the gun with you.” Armin can be counted upon that much, at least—and there’s pretty much no question as to who has to get back into the titan’s immediate vicinity. “If none of us make it back in half an hour, you guys take off—”

A sudden blast of heat interrupts his train of thought, and he looks up to see the titan finally move, tamping down the smoke in its wake, although there’s still far too much of that clogging up the horizon. From this distance he can barely even see what else might be burning there, although given how the general area is filled with flammable objects such as trees and houses, it’s a fair assumption to presume that the titan isn’t making all that smoke on its own.

Still, if it’s moving away… “Shit.” It doesn’t change any of their plans, after all—not to him, anyway. As much as it would benefit everyone if he’d hopped on a horse and outran the titan to its next destination, they all had to regroup first, and come up with a way to stop it before it even gets that far.

Well, at least Eren doesn’t seem liable to feed himself to Rod at this point. Not that it’s any comfort, considering that they can’t exactly say that they’ve completed their mission without having recovered either Eren or Historia.

Besides, at this rate that titan is likely headed somewhere populous—if not, well, it’s leaving enough of a mess that they have to take action anyway.

So as Armin gets the wagon going Levi hops onto a spare horse and plunges ahead of them at a quicker pace, leading the rest of their horses on. If nothing else, he has to go ahead and relay instructions with Eren—or at least check if he’s still himself.

Sure enough, he can see the others clinging to Eren’s back. After a hasty exchange of words all the trainees are safely on their mounts and Eren in the meantime has reverted to his human form. Now that they’re all recovered they head back toward the other two in the wagon, and take a detour to the Olbd District—likely Rod’s next destination.

As they make their way toward the wall Levi pulls up close to the wagon, if only to check on Hange.

“I’ve seen him up close.” Or close enough. “He’s not going to be easy to stop.”

He gazes at her for a good long time, the effect of which is no doubt marred by the fact that he’s bobbing up and down within her own view, but hell.

For a moment he doesn’t really reply. Anyone within earshot might have figured that he’d simply consented to that plan—and he has—it’s as good a plan as any, but more than that, well…

He finally turns away.

“We’re not chucking any of your oral shitbombs at it.”

The fact that she can so coolly say that those are only for him…well, it’s not as if they haven’t enjoyed a little stress relief in between missions, but…

Levi doesn’t even flinch. “Fuck, no. Yours was an even worse shitstorm than anything we’ve thrown at a titan.”

He doesn’t particularly notice whenever his vocabulary’s gone to shit whenever he’s talking to her, but they have been at it long enough that he’s already expecting some sort of smartass comeback.

Which, to be fair, she does deliver on, but not the kind he’d expected. Levi actually turns to her, with a cocked eyebrow betraying his surprise.

“What the fuck are you talking about, Shitty-Glasses?”

Well, given their recent history he’s got plenty to gripe about—but more than that, he really is curiously not observing proper form in the presence of their juniors…

Trying times, these. But at least the others have finally got the gist of the plan through all of that weird banter. No objections have been raised, though Levi is tempted to, just to get her off that manic episode before it gets out of hand. She’s supposed to be resting her fucking arm, dammit.

“We’ll handle that ourselves.” With a face that’s permanently glued to the ground, however, Levi wonders just what sort of mouth they’ll end up getting greeted with. But then, a giant moving as slowly as that, still emanating smoke as if he’s already halfway to dissipating into vapor…

That’s for her to figure out. Later.