Parallel world Manga Artist

Chapter 329: Freedom

The next scene showed Ymir’s Titan form wandering the wilderness.

Without guidance or intelligence, she had become something that acted only on instinct. The most devastating element of this was that having lost her mind, she could not even perceive the loneliness of what she had become.

She simply wandered, for years, for decades, with no awareness of the passage of time or the weight of what had been taken from her.

Then: a person curled up in a dirt pit, lying motionless like something planted rather than living.

After an unknown number of years, a sound reached her.

Four children appeared before Ymir’s Titan.

Reiner. Bertholdt. Annie. And a fourth, an unknown youth.

When Ymir’s Titan moved toward Reiner, it was the unknown youth who pushed Reiner aside and was consumed by Ymir instead.

Hana Kimura watched this sequence with complete attention.

The background music had shifted to Call of Silence, the melody that had appeared briefly in the first season’s final arc. Here it was given its full form, the piano notes moving through something soothing and sorrowful simultaneously, building toward the moment the camera pulled back.

Ymir, after decades of wandering without consciousness, looked up at the sky.

It was the sky of freedom.

Nobody was looking at her. Nobody needed her to perform anything, to be anything, to sacrifice anything for the benefit of a belief system that required her compliance. The sky above her was simply the sky. The Milky Way ran across it, a river of light that seemed, in this specific moment of the animation, to be pointing somewhere.

What Eren had been trying to articulate since the first episode, the thing he had never quite been able to put into words, was this. Not the fighting. Not the revenge. The simple experience of existing without someone else’s requirements pressing down from every direction.

Ymir, who had been lost for decades, felt it in this moment.

Tears ran down her face.

Hana’s eyes were wet.

The music was doing something she recognised as specific to exceptional animation: it was not accompanying the emotion, it was generating it, pulling forward feelings that had been sitting somewhere underneath the surface of watching this series across the year and a half since it had begun.

Ymir, lying in the open air, began to laugh.

"If there truly is such a thing as fate, I can only smile at how capricious it is."

"I swear to myself, I will never lie again. Never, ever lie to myself again."

"I want to live openly and honestly."

Hana understood it completely in this moment.

Ymir had spent years of renewed human life watching Krista, a girl who was doing exactly what Ymir had done as a child: performing a version of herself that other people needed, making choices based on what would earn approval, building toward a death she could frame as noble rather than a life she would have to claim as her own.

Ymir’s insistence on Krista was not external kindness. It was the most personal thing she could offer: the thing she had learned at enormous cost and could not make herself stop trying to give to someone who needed it.

For Ymir, helping Krista live honestly was the meaning of her reborn life. The purpose she had found for herself.

The ending theme began.

Hana sat for a moment in the quiet of it.

Attack on Titan was not operating at a philosophical or artistic level in the traditional sense. The claim would be too much. But the episode had done something real: it had used its plot to lead the audience toward questions about freedom and the meaning of life that the story itself could not answer, and the audience themselves might not be able to answer either.

The act of being pointed toward those questions was itself significant.

She opened her phone, went to Japan’s largest anime rating platform, registered with a secondary account she kept for situations like this, and gave the episode a perfect score.

She had never given a perfect score to any anime before. Her working principle was that no work was without flaw. But the score she was giving was not for Attack on Titan in its entirety. It was for this episode, this specific forty minutes, and Ymir’s character as it had been built and then finally fully revealed.

Whatever the subsequent plot did, it would not retroactively diminish what this episode had accomplished.

That night, Rei looked through the online response.

This was one of the rare weeks when the Attack on Titan fan community produced almost no criticism directed at him.

The episode had done several things simultaneously. It had clarified the existence of the world outside the walls. It had strongly implied that Titans were transformed humans. It had hinted that mindless Titans had a path back to human form under specific conditions.

Fans who followed the series for its worldbuilding revelations had enough new material to analyse for the week. Fans who followed it for character work had received one of the best-constructed character episodes the series had produced.

And across every platform, fans were asking the same question: what was the insert song, and where could they find it.

Rei thought about this for a moment, went to his room’s desk drawer, took out the sheet music for Call of Silence, photographed every page, and posted it through his account.

The song would eventually be available on streaming platforms. The business negotiations required for that were ongoing and would take time.

Until then, the fans who genuinely loved the insert songs would make do with recordings from people who could read sheet music and play instruments. Posting the score was the direct solution.

After doing this, he turned off the monitor.

Miyu was in the study as well, sitting at her side of the workspace in pajamas with her hair down, bent over her manuscript paper in the specific posture of someone who had fully entered production mode and was only intermittently aware of what was happening around them.

Both of them still worked by hand despite the industry’s movement toward digital tools. The finished texture was different in a way that mattered to them regardless of the slower pace.

Miyu’s new manga, Reincarnation, was beginning serialisation in Dream Comic Journal the following week. The contract and rights negotiations with Hoshimori Group had been handled. The past several days had been full serialisation preparation, which meant Miyu in a specific state of creative tension that Rei found quietly entertaining to observe.

One moment she was getting up for water. The next she was shifting in her chair. Then she was pulling a manga from the bookshelf for reference, and the volume she happened to pick was the ninth tankōbon of One-Punch Man, one of Rei’s.

She stared at a page. Then muttered to herself, in the completely unconscious way of someone who had forgotten anyone else was in the room:

"Why can he draw so fast and so well. It is so annoying."

"Didn’t you already draw the storyboards? And you discussed them with the editor. Just draw according to the storyboards!"

Rei had been watching her from behind for several minutes before speaking.

Miyu Yukishiro jumped in surprise and nearly fell off her chair. Rei steadied her with one hand before she could go over.

After settling herself, she turned to him.

"I always feel like something is not quite right."

"Not right?"

"The level of excitement. I have been looking at your Bleach anime storyboard drafts lately. Although they are just storyboards and character designs, when I looked at them I felt like my new manga was far less interesting than your Bleach." She said this without any embarrassment.

"I was quite confident about my new manga. Now I am only on the sixth Chapter and I am already doubting myself. Sigh."

"You would do best not to casually compare your work to Bleach," Rei said, after a pause.

"It is normal to doubt yourself."

For the work Bleach, in terms of the original manga, its flaws were genuinely minimal. The art style was distinctive, the character designs were fashionable in a way that held up across time, and it carried a specific literary quality in its better lines that few shonen manga produced. Rei’s drawing ability was fully showcased in Bleach in a way that his other works had not quite demanded from him.

"Of course I would be conflicted," Miyu said, glancing at him with an expression that was between speechless and resigned.

"In Dream Comic Journal, it will most likely be your Bleach and my Reincarnation competing for the top spot in the serialisation ranking. Although I have never won against you once, and my confidence is not high right now, I cannot lose too badly."

"You are quite confident," Rei said, with a quiet laugh. "You are not treating the authors of the other eighteen works in the journal as people at all. You are simply assuming your new manga will be second in the ranking."

"After all, thanks to your help," Miyu said, completely calmly. "You signed my manga under Shirogane Animation, and through Shirogane Animation’s cooperation with Hoshimori Group, my manga will be serialised there. Not only did you secure all the copyright for my work, you also had Shirogane Animation promote my new work alongside yours.

My previous work was already ranked third in the journal before it finished, and I have a decent established fan base. Now you are helping me this much. If I do not even have this much confidence, I might as well smash my head against a block of tofu and die."

She stood up, stretched, and her fair waist was briefly visible beneath her pajamas as she raised her arms.

"Forget it. I will not think about it anymore. Most likely it will be another crushing defeat. If I continue racking my brain tonight the plot I come up with might be worse than what I had originally. I am going to sleep. Tomorrow I draw according to the plot I initially planned."

Rei followed her toward the room.

"Oh, right. That thing I mentioned to you before. Have you thought about it yet?"

Miyu Yukishiro pulled open the door and looked back at him.

"Huh? What thing?"

"Marriage," Rei said. "You and I are both twenty-three. If we do not get married soon, we will become middle-aged."

Miyu was silent.

Rei waited, wondering if she was perhaps annoyed, for approximately a full minute. Then she spoke.

"When my manga’s performance reaches second place in the journal ranking. First would be best, of course, but I have already given up hoping to compete with you for first, so I will not insist on it.

On that day, remember to prepare the wedding ring. And then you be a bit forceful, drag me to the relevant department to handle the marriage registration. Just like that."

"Just like that?" Rei blinked.

"Just like that," Miyu said. "If you think the condition is not harsh enough and want me to make it more difficult for you, I am not against it."

"No, no, it is fine," Rei said quickly.

He thought for a moment.

"I just do not understand why your condition for agreeing to marry me is a journal ranking. What does this have to do with our feelings?"

"If my future husband is the number one mangaka in Japan, then I, at least... not necessarily number one in Japan, but definitely second place in Dream Comic Journal. I must achieve that. Otherwise I will feel very uncomfortable."

Rei did not fully understand where this particular obsession came from or why it had taken this specific shape. But the weight that had been sitting somewhere in his chest lifted at this moment.

"Remember what you said tonight. I will not give you a chance to go back on your word."

He stepped into the room, wrapped his arms around her, and pulled the door closed behind them.