"So, Eren probably had the same idea as you. He had no choice but to do this to keep his friends from getting hurt," Mike said.
Chen Si neither agreed nor disagreed.
Hange gritted her teeth and said guiltily, "I'm sorry. We're the veterans of the Survey Corps, yet we never managed to give Eren any hope. This is our fault."
"So Eren went through with genocide... for us? We share some of the responsibility," Armin said, clenching his fists.
"Why does that guy always decide everything on his own...? Slaughtering all of humanity for me-even if my body is free, how could my mind ever be free knowing that?" Jean said.
"Maybe that's why he's been letting us come to stop him," Reiner said.
Chen Si's explanation suddenly made everything clear to them, and they began trying to understand Eren.
"Eren..." Mikasa murmured.
Seeing the family she had grown up with come to this naturally left Mikasa deeply distressed.
Chen Si looked out the window. The Founding Titan's skeleton was already in sight.
He had calculated the timing. By now, Eren had killed half the world's population. The major powers that posed the greatest threat to Paradis Island, such as Suros and Drus, should have been completely wiped off the face of the earth. The remaining smaller countries were no cause for concern. Order had said that if the entire world's population died, Grotesque would revive within fifty years.
The members of the 104th Cadet Corps would still be alive then, but they would be elderly, in their sixties and seventies. Thus, Chen Si wanted to delay Grotesque's revival until a hundred years later, after everyone close to him had lived out their old age in peace. Whatever Grotesque did then, whether reviving or destroying the world, would have