"He's the Armored Titan!" Veta shrieks, breaking into the bubble of apparent calm Jean had been drawing the mayor into.
He turns to her. "Now that's just stupid."
"He is," Veta insist, furious. "He admitted to it!"
"Oh, sure. Reiner here is the current wielder of the Armored Titan, I'm not claiming otherwise." Jean takes another step forward, and the armed villagers surge forward, only interrupted when the mayor thrusts out a hand to stop them.
"Which is why this is profoundly stupid," Jean continues as if he hasn't noticed. "Last I read about the Armored Titan, it took the combined might of the Mid-East Allied Forces to fail to kill him. And you think your pitchforks will do you any good? Moreover, give him a papercut and a couple of seconds and he can turn into a fifteen meters tall titan that would take even less time to finish off those of you who didn't die from the transformation itself."
"He's not the Colossal!" someone claims from the relative safety of the back row.
Reiner doesn't need to see Jean's face to know he's rolling his eyes. "At this range it really wouldn't make a difference," he points out.
"Then it'll kill you too," Veta snarls.
"You know, I really thought you liked me." Jean sighs. "So I'm the leverage, then?"
"Before you arrived, he was about to agree to follow us as long as we left you alone," the mayor confirms.
"I'm sure he was," Jean dismisses. "So you people came here for a monster, counting on him being human enough to let you, ah, 'enact justice' as long as I was spared? That has to be the shittiest strategy I've ever heard, and I was in training with Connie Springer."
None of those people would know who Connie is; Reiner is the only one who has to stifle a snort.
"More importantly," Jean adds, all nonchalance -- and then he *moves.*
The cadet Reiner trained with never made more than the bare minimum effort in disciplines that didn't count for the final grades; this, of course, included hand-to-hand combat.
But the Scout Reiner barely knew had to fight other humans for survival. He trained. He learned. And in the blink of an eye he has the mayor pulled to his chest, a knife at her throat that he grabbed from her lax fingers. "He thinks I've forgotten, but some time ago, I promised him I'd be the one to kill him."
#wipWednesday #draekaki #ReiJean #assassinationRoommates