Images exploded behind his eyes: a key on a chain, a basement, a father’s desperate injection. “Their memories will teach you how to use this power…” The words of Grisha Yeager, buried deep in his subconscious, suddenly made horrific, crystalline sense. Eren wasn't just a soldier. He was a weapon.

Without a conscious command, a blinding flash of yellow light and heat exploded from his body. The soldiers shielded their eyes. When they looked again, the human Eren was gone. In his place stood a Titan—fifteen meters tall, with long black hair whipping in the heat, a mouth full of razor teeth, and eyes that blazed with the same feral green as his own.

A strange tremor ran through the ruined street. The massive 15-meter Titan that had swallowed Eren suddenly convulsed. Its eyes, usually vacant and hungry, went wide with something that looked like confusion—or terror. Black, boiling steam erupted from its joints. Its flesh began to slough off in wet, heavy chunks.

That hatred did not remain a feeling. It became flesh.

As he stood there, shivering and steaming in the open air, the primal part of his brain—the part inherited from a father he never truly understood—took over. He felt the world through new senses. The distant screams of the dying. The thud of Titan feet. The smell of human fear.

But in that suffocating, fleshy hell, something else awoke.

He had been swallowed whole. His leg, severed by a falling boulder, had left him helpless on a rooftop. With no other option, he had screamed at a 15-meter Titan to take him, buying his comrade Armin Arlert precious seconds to escape. The creature’s jaws closed around him. There was a sickening crack of bone, then darkness.