"Aaaaaah! You little brat!" The middle-parted man, unable to land a single hit on Chen Si, clutched his head and roared in fury.
The man lunged straight at Chen Si. Chen Si watched calmly without moving. A moment later, the man went flying and landed face-first, his teeth driven into the dirt.
Beside him, Mikasa silently withdrew her outstretched foot, ran over to Chen Si, and fixed the other soldier with a sharp glare.
The middle-parted man clutched his bloodied crotch in agony. Chen Si held a hand across his forehead, glanced at the loose stones on the ground, then looked at a refugee child and his family nearby.
"Keke! You mustn't throw stones around." A woman sternly scolded the child beside her.
"Okay, Mom," the child replied.
Chen Si slowly walked over to the suffering man, crouched down, and shook his head. "Tsk, tsk, tsk. Now you really are impotent."
"Chen Si, isn't this a bit much?" Armin asked worriedly.
"We didn't do anything. He injured himself falling over." The corners of Chen Si's mouth curled slightly.
"Oh, right! He injured himself!" Armin immediately changed his wording.
"How dare you attack a soldier!" the other soldier shouted.
"Have you no shame? That kid was minding his own business, playing with stones, and this guy just had to ram his delicate little buddy into one. The kid hasn't even accused you of damaging his property!" Chen Si declared indignantly.
"Pfft! Hahahahahahaha!" Eren lay on the ground, laughing without restraint.
Mikasa snickered at his words too.
"Hahaha, our Chen Si certainly has a way with words." Carla felt it was a little inappropriate, but she still couldn't help covering her mouth and laughing.
"You've committed the crime of assaulting the military! You deserve immediate execution! Die!" Seething with rage, the soldier drew his blade and prepared to charge.
When the watching refugees saw him draw his blade, seven or eight men rushed out of the crowd. They piled onto the soldier, pinning him beneath them and pummeling him with fists and feet.
"Get him!" Eren cheered excitedly from the side. He wanted to run over and throw a punch himself, but Mikasa held him back.
"You animal! You were even going to attack a little girl!"
"You damned bastard! Are all soldiers trash like you?"
"Every soldier except the Survey Corps should be thrown in prison!"
The men beating the soldier hurled abuse at him. Pinned beneath them with his face swollen and bruised, he couldn't get a word out.
Annie passed by just then after collecting her bread. She glanced at Chen Si and Mikasa, let her gaze linger on Eren a little longer, then left without paying them much attention.
Chen Si suddenly noticed a blonde girl with a high ponytail. Hmm, that should be Annie Leonhart. She certainly stood out.
Huh? Chen Si watched Annie carry two pieces of bread and hand one to a boy with messy, swept-back hair. His face was almost as square as Reiner's, though his eyes were a little bigger.
Who was that?
Chen Si thought it over briefly, but he had no strong impression of the boy. He was probably just some nobody. Annie was quite kind to strangers, so fetching someone a piece of bread was nothing unusual. He even remembered her giving her own bread to refugee children.
"We have to accept charity from those bastards! I'm going back to Maria! I'll fight my way back and eat our own food!" Eren shouted angrily.
"No! How could humans possibly defeat the Titans? We can only survive inside the walls! Acting recklessly will just get you killed, like my mom and dad!" Armin pleaded anxiously, his voice much louder than usual.
"So we have to grovel before those people for scraps? I don't want food like that!" Eren hurled the bread Armin had just given him into the distance.
"Eren! What do you think you're doing? How could you treat the food Armin's grandfather worked so hard to get like that? Apologize to Armin right now!" Carla's anger flared at Eren's irrational behavior.
"Eren, we don't have a choice. We need food to stay alive!" Armin kept trying to reason with him.
"You're just a coward! Go on living like livestock!" Eren yelled at Armin.
"You little-!" Carla stepped forward and slapped him. She truly hadn't expected Eren to be so immature, unable to understand their situation.
Chen Si was speechless. Both soldiers had already taken a beating, yet Eren still wasn't satisfied and kept shouting. Apparently, Carla's survival hadn't done much to dampen his drive.
Chen Si pushed off with both legs, leaped effortlessly into the air, and caught the flying bread with one hand. Holding it, he rushed toward Eren, grabbed him by the collar, and tossed him onto the ground.
Eren landed on his backside. Holding his cheek, he gritted his teeth in pain and said:
"Chen Si, what are you doing?"
"What am I doing? Dealing with you." With that, Chen Si forcefully stuffed the bread into Eren's mouth. The oversized chunk plugged his endlessly running mouth.
"Wasting food is shameful. If you won't eat it, I'll have to let Aunt Carla discipline you. How about a spanking?" Chen Si threatened with a wicked grin.
Eren had been struggling desperately, but when he heard that Carla would spank him in public, he immediately gulped down the bread in his mouth.
Seeing that, Chen Si released him and said:
"If you're unhappy, pick up a stone and throw it at your enemy. Don't take your anger out on the people who care about you."
"Eren, you can't keep relying on Chen Si and Mikasa to solve your problems. You keep calling people cowards.
"Are you saying Mikasa, Armin, Chen Si, you, me, and everyone standing here trying to survive are cowards? Sometimes, struggling to stay alive takes even greater courage."
As Carla spoke, she thought of Grisha. Tears glimmered in her eyes, but she quickly held them back and bent down to cup Eren's face.
"We didn't make it here today through our own strength. Even our food was given to us. As we are now, we couldn't defeat a single Titan," Mikasa added.
Sitting on the ground, Eren gritted his teeth and stubbornly looked away.
"Mikasa's right. Our goal right now is to survive." Carla picked up the bread Eren had bitten and pushed it into his mouth.
Eren shed tears of humiliation, but under Mikasa's threatening gaze, he finally finished eating.
Beside him, Chen Si took a bite of his own bread and immediately shed tears too. It tasted so, so, so fucking awful!
The Royal Government soon issued an order sending the refugees from Wall Maria to reclaim wasteland. Since Carla was still alive, help from Grisha's old connections spared Eren's family much trouble. They were assigned relatively easy work at a horse farm and given a room to live in.
Year 846 of the King's Calendar. Overcast.
In the stable, Eren fed homemade fodder to the horses merchants used for travel. He stood on tiptoe to offer feed to a horse in its stall. After taking a bite, the horse pawed at the dirt, snorted, and sprayed saliva all over him.
Startled, Eren stumbled back two steps and fell. He wiped the saliva from his face with his clothes.
"You damned horse! There's a famine! Where am I supposed to get enough fodder for you?" Eren cursed at it.
The famine had become so severe that refugees had even stripped the horse fodder bare. It might not sound fit for human consumption, but at least it contained nutrients. What Eren was feeding the horse was actually a mush of rotten vegetable leaves and soaked rice.
As though angered by Eren's curses, the horse charged at the stall barrier, slamming into it repeatedly. The barrier looked ready to break. Frightened, Eren grabbed his feed basket and ran, shouting as he went:
"See if I feed you tomorrow! Damn it!"
Mikasa was washing vegetables beside a river when a corpse suddenly floated into view. She frowned. She had already grown used to it. These days, all kinds of corpses appeared on the water-people who had starved, people who had killed themselves...
Mikasa sighed and hurriedly lifted the vegetables out. Each day, they had to wait for the dirty water to flow downstream before they could use the river. There was nothing she could do about the situation. These days had shown her the world's cruelty more clearly, and she silently vowed never to let her family suffer such despair.
Meanwhile, Carla wove cloth inside their room to make winter clothes for the children. Every so often, neighbors came to lament that they didn't have enough food for winter. She had no idea how many of them would make it through.
Carla's expression was bleak too. She wondered how many familiar faces would remain among their neighbors after this winter. These days, she carefully rationed every meal and drink, living on a painfully tight budget.
She ate only half as much as Eren and the others. With the food sent by members of the Military Police Brigade who had once received Grisha's help, the family barely had enough to stay fed and warm.
Chen Si worried her most. To save the family money, he sometimes went a day or two without eating and would only eat when she forced him. It left Carla wracked with guilt.
Carla didn't know that saving money was only part of Chen Si's reason. Ever since they had come to the reclamation area, the food had grown worse by the day and was truly hard to swallow. At least the Military Police Brigade still brought their family some salt. What other families ate was downright appalling.
At that moment, Chen Si was chopping firewood. He had made a major discovery recently. One day, while catching fish, he had wondered whether he could use metal to conduct electricity and shock a whole patch of them.
He had put his dagger into the water and released an electric current. He barely killed any fish and fell into the lake more than once himself. Eventually, both Mikasa and Carla forbade him from catching fish by the river, mainly because nearly all the fish there were already dead anyway.
Chen Si had finally faced reality. To electrocute a large patch of fish, he would need at least dozens of blades placed across the water, and he simply didn't have that much lightning in reserve. Until he killed a Pure Titan on his own, he could forget about it.
But Chen Si discovered that the dagger he frequently shocked was growing harder and sharper. His lightning could temper metal! Of course, he had far too little mana and could only temper a little each day. He also had to sleep after every session.
After a month of tempering, the dagger in Chen Si's hand couldn't quite slice iron like butter, but it could at least cut an untempered version of itself clean in half without taking any damage.
Chen Si hadn't wasted too much electricity on the dagger. He planned to temper a Survey Corps blade later. A dagger was too short. To cut a Titan with it, he would practically have to cling to its body, so there wasn't much point in tempering it.
Chen Si returned to their room carrying firewood and saw Eren covered in grime and Mikasa returning with a basket of vegetables. Armin and his grandfather stood at the door.
"Armin, Grandpa, you're here." Chen Si put down the firewood and greeted them.
Armin looked at Chen Si and forced a smile that looked worse than crying.
"Chen Si, I came to say goodbye. Here's the fishing rod you gave me. I'm returning it." Armin's grandfather took off his hat and smiled.
"What's going on?" After spending a year here, Chen Si had become a little hazy on what was supposed to happen next. In the original story, the entire year had passed in a single sentence.
"The Royal Government said they're going to retake Wall Maria, so they're sending two hundred thousand refugees back. My grandpa is one of them," Armin said through his tears.
Chen Si fell silent. He remembered how he had been researching ways to get more food lately. He had made simple fishing rods from sticks and branches, while the people on this island still caught fish with their hands or nets.
The nobles of Paradis Island might have fishing equipment, but it apparently hadn't spread among the people inside the walls.
So he had given Armin's grandfather a rod too. At first, the old man had assumed it was expensive and firmly refused. Only after Chen Si explained how it could be made for almost nothing did he accept it, though he remained deeply grateful.
The two had gone fishing together. Fishing was an excellent hobby for an elderly man, and Armin's grandfather treasured that rod. It had also greatly eased the strain on their food supply.
Armin's grandfather patted Armin's head and placed his hat on it.
"Stay alive, Armin. Chen Si, catch a few more fish for this old man, and burn some as an offering to me someday. Hahaha." Armin's grandfather was remarkably accepting.
"I'll go too!" Chen Si said. He believed that once he killed a Pure Titan alone and unlocked his full strength, he would have plenty of ways to survive. He might even be able to bring Armin's grandfather back.
"No!"
"Chen Si!"
"Don't be ridiculous!"
Mikasa, Carla, and Armin's grandfather spoke at once.
Even Chen Si was momentarily startled.
"I'll be fine. I'm actually very strong." Chen Si flexed his muscles.
Hearing that, Eren immediately volunteered:
"I'll go too! Don't worry, Mom. Chen Si is really strong. The two of us will definitely retake Wall Maria!" Eren raised his arm and shouted.