Viktor limped over. “What is that?”
“What are they doing?” he whispered to Mikasa.
The truth was Commander Erwin Smith, standing on Wall Rose at dawn before the Battle of Shiganshina, raising his fist not to his soldiers—but to the forest of jagged trees beyond the wall, to the green light of the sun rising over Titan territory, as if asking permission from the dead. “Don’t let them down,” he said. Then he turned. “PRESENT HEARTS!” attack on titan soldier salute
Mikasa stood apart from the others. She didn’t speak at the funeral. She waited until everyone else had left, their fading footsteps crunching on the gravel path.
Take it. Use it. Don’t let it be for nothing. Viktor limped over
The soldiers didn’t march in victory. They limped. Some wore blood-soaked bandages. One man’s left arm ended in a cauterized stump wrapped with dirty linen. But when Commander Shadis’s voice cracked across the square—"Present hearts!"—every single survivor raised a fist to their chest, then rotated it outward over their heart.
And at the bottom, freshly chiseled: Eren Yeager. Armin Arlert. “Don’t let them down,” he said
Viktor nodded. He looked at the smoke rising from the funeral pyre. Then he faced the remaining soldiers—twenty-three hollow-eyed men and women—and raised his own fist. “Present hearts.”