Levi hated coming out into the field. He preferred his pristine lab where every surface was covered in plastic, dusty manuscripts were restored under microscopes, and no one was allowed to so much as breathe without decking out head to toe in protective gear. The Three Goddesses knew manuscripts from the old days were hard to come by, and no scientist or wealthy collector dared trust anyone else but the world expert with them.

Yet today, Levi was forced to don his hiking boots and come out to an old friend's excavation site, all because she couldn't explain what she had found to him on the phone. She said it had to be seen to be believed, and if it was truly the breakthrough she had made it out to be, Levi would have to agree.

Compared to Levi, Hanji was a different animal entirely. She thrived on dirt. Levi may have known more than anyone alive about every surviving text on Titans and the military of the old days, but Hanji could tell you anything you wanted to know about the earth and the remains inside. Without knowing the two of them went back to their undergraduate days, people would never have suspected she and Levi to be friends. They were even remarkably close for how much their two approaches disagreed on the history of the ancient settlement known today as Eden.

According to written records, there were fifty meter high concentric walls that according to some protected the people within from a race of man-eating giants. There were even remarkably detailed records of their biology, though the beasts seemed to have remained a mystery even to the writers themselves. It all seemed like something out of a fairy tale, and according to physical evidence, it was. The ground did show evidence of walls having stood in three concentric circles, but to date no one had ever found any remains of the giants themselves. According to literature there should be none, as the multi-ton monsters were allegedly said to evaporate postmortem, but most archaeologists merely scoffed at the convenience of such so-called evidence.

Nonetheless, it did seem very odd that although there had clearly been walls, no rubble remained except from the gates. Parts of the buildings within still stood, but the walls themselves had seemingly vanished. Some even thought to question why there would need to be walls in the first place. And then there were the occasional human remains that turned up where whole bones, sometimes even found in articulation, showed evidence of being partially digested. There were many possible explanations for all this, none of them satisfactory to Levi. He might not have been mad enough to buy what the ancient texts claimed wholesale, but he was also sharp enough to spot logical contradictions in modern theories when he saw them. Hanji was in a different boat entirely, falling into the extreme end of the continuum among archaeologists for her faith in the texts' validity.

A dig site stretched in the treeless landscape, but to find Hanji Levi had to go underground. Her dig site was separate because she was one of the few to take the precaution of denying her artifacts sunlight in situ. The extra effort had not paid off until recently. When Levi arrived to the entrance to the underground excavation cavern, he was told much to his vexation that he had to wait. Luckily, it was not long before a dirt-encrusted glove reached through the protective screens and motioned him inside. There was only one person it could belong to.

Zoe Hanji hadn't changed a bit since Levi had last seen her five years ago, dirt and all, but with the notable addition of a pair of night vision goggles pushed up on her forehead. She also wore a stethoscope around her neck, but Levi had the inkling that it was just to show off that she had received her doctorate. She took off her filthy glove to shake his hand, but it was equally as dirty and vibrating with too much caffeine. Levi gave the hand a look to communicate his distaste but shook it nonetheless.

"I'm so glad you could make it!" she chimed as he wiped off his fingers on his handkerchief. "This discovery is going to change ! Come on, come on, let me show you. Watch your step."

"We'll see about that," Levi replied as he followed her down a ramp toward the real excavation site. He wouldn't admit it, but the excitement was infectious. The first set of curtains blocked out most sunlight but there was still enough to make out vague shapes. Further ahead, a second set of curtains blocked out the rest.

"Wait here a minute for your eyes to adjust," Hanji instructed when they got to it. "I'll go find you a pair of specs." She tapped the night vision goggles on her head and scuttled off.

Levi watched her rummage through a storage crate. By the time she found him a pair that fit, his eyes had not yet adjusted fully. The goggles turned everything green but were a substantial improvement to the naked eye. Hanji ran back to grab a tablet off one of the tables.

"You ready?" she asked as her hand hovered over the curtain.

"Let's get it over with," Levi sighed. Hanji grinned, flipped down her goggles, and lead the way.

They passed by groups of researchers chipping away at some dirt. Hanji greeted them all by name but didn't stop to chat. Instead, she busied herself explaining to Levi everything he already knew.

"Right now we're about ten meters down, which was street level two thousand years ago. We're actually at the very southern-most point of Eden in one of the fringe districts of the first wall. The southern one, to be exact-"

"Shiganshina," Levi clarified for her.

"Yes, exactly!" Hanji clapped. "I knew inviting you here would be a good idea. Anyway, as you'd expect from anything past the second wall, everything was abandoned way before Eden itself was. The thing is, the pieces of the gate here are scattered all over the place. Nobody's ever bothered to calculate where the gate was supposed to be."

"And?"

"And we plotted all the pieces and crunched some numbers assuming the events here went down as the accounts say they did, and we found the original location!"

"And?"

"And this," Hanji said as they ducked under a low hanging ceiling into a small chamber. Inside was a boulder perhaps three or four meters in diameter.

"Wow," Levi responded with his usual level of enthusiasm. "It's a big-ass rock."

Hanji's enthusiasm was not deterred. "See, that's what I thought too, at first. We've actually found a similar setup in fringe distri-"

"Trost."

"Yes, Trost. Big boulder where the gate should be. But the difference is that that rock was actually of the same material that all the rest of the gates are made of. This one you couldn't crack with a steel pickaxe if you tried."

At this Levi raised an eyebrow. Now she had his attention.

"Same here," Hanji continued. "The stuff you see on the outside here isn't actually part of the rock itself, or should I say crystal. Hard rocky outside, harder clear crystal inside. We had to order sandpaper with chips of diamond in it to get this crust off. That's on its way now because I went ahead and scanned it with everything we had to see if there was anything inside. You'll never believe this."

She held out the tablet she had brought with her earlier. Levi tapped the screen to wake the device and was presented with a grainy picture of what could have been an x-ray. At the center of the boulder there was some kind of mass. He zoomed in closer and squinted. When the pixels loaded fully, Levi nearly dropped the tablet. He looked wide-eyed from the picture to the boulder itself to Hanji. She was beaming.

"We're pretty sure he's human," she said. "I mean, we can't be 100% since no one knows what a Titan looks like. It might be hard to tell with him curled up in the fetal position like that, but we know for sure he's under two meters. Pretty average morphology, generally speaking. We don't want to risk exposing him to the light just in case, though. We got the sex from the pelv-"

"So you're telling me that what you have in there is the remains of an Eden-era human?" It took a lot of control for Levi not to stammer. Crystal like this was rare, almost non-existent. It matched the description of the armor certain specialized types of Titans could produce. Few records spoke of it, but Levi nursed the pet theory that perhaps the walls were made of the stuff as well. It would explain why they were missing, evaporated like the titans themselves, but he had absolutely nothing to back it up. How a human could get inside would be an even greater mystery.

In response to his question, Hanji grinned and motioned Levi over to the stone itself. She held her stethoscope out to him and shushed him up when he tried to ask.

"Just listen," she said.

Levi put in the ear tips and pressed the diaphragm to the rock. At first silence, then a very quiet thump-thump. He gave Hanji a questioning look, but she held up a finger for him to wait. A couple seconds later, the same sound. A little later, again. Quiet. Regular. Levi tore the tubes out of his ears

"What am I listening to?" he demanded.

Hanji beamed like she had been waiting for him to ask.

"A heartbeat," she answered.