The world 60 years after the MC's final act in the Paths, presented in stark vignettes:
**Chapter 11: Echoes of Silence (60 Years Later)**
**Vignette 1: Liberio Internment Zone - Marley**
The Eldian ghetto felt like a tomb slowly collapsing. Buildings, once crammed with desperate life, stood half-empty, windows boarded. Weeds pushed through cracked pavement. An old woman, Marta, shuffled past a faded, peeling propaganda poster: *"Eldian Devils - Contained for Your Safety!"* She spat weakly at it. The fear was gone, replaced by a hollow exhaustion. Marleyan guards still patrolled, but their vigilance had slackened decades ago. What was the point? The Eldians weren't breeding. They weren't transforming. They were just... dying out. Slowly. Quietly. The "Devil's Blood" was simply clotting, leaving behind brittle, aging vessels. Marta reached her tiny apartment – empty except for dust and the portrait of children she'd never had. The silence was the loudest sound.
**Vignette 2: Mitras Royal Palace - Paradis**
King Fritz XXIV (a distant cousin hastily crowned after the Reiss line vanished) stared at reports. Grain yields. Trade disputes with the newly formed Hizuru-Paradis Alliance. Infrastructure projects. Mundane. *Human*. The Wall Cult had dissolved into obscure sects, their Titan-based theology rendered nonsensical. The Survey Corps? A historical footnote, a curiosity studied by scholars. Some still patrolled outside the Walls, finding only overgrown ruins and the massive, vitrified canyon – the only testament to the "Cosmic Titan" that had shattered the Colossal and sealed Maria's breach before vanishing. The Titans were gone. Truly gone. Yet, the King felt no triumph, only a profound unease. *What do we fear now?* he thought. *Each other? Ourselves?* The silence left by the Titans was vast, and humanity was still learning how to fill it, often poorly.
**Vignette 3: Shiganshina District - Paradis**
The hole in Wall Maria had been patched decades ago, a jagged scar filled with modern concrete and steel. Near the rebuilt outer gate, a monument stood: a simple, abstract shape vaguely resembling a colossal figure, inscribed "Against the Unthinkable". Few remembered the specifics. Grisha Yeager's clinic was a museum. Carla Yeager's heroic death during the original breach was legendary. Her son, Eren, was noted as a respected, if ordinary, historian who died young of illness. No mention of Titans within him. Armin Arlert (grandson of the original) guided a tour group of schoolchildren. "And this," he said, pointing to the monument, "commemorates the event that ended the Titan threat forever. The details are lost, but it marked the dawn of our modern age." The children fidgeted, more interested in the sweets stall nearby. The horror was history. Bland, distant history. The silence of forgotten trauma.
**Vignette 4: A Cabin, Northern Wilderness - Paradis**
He sat by the fire. Human form. Older, lines etched deep, but eyes still holding the cold light of cosmic power. Ultimate Waybig slept within him, fused with the dormant essences of the Nine Titans. He felt the world through it. The dwindling sparks of Eldian life – fewer every year. The bustling, chaotic energy of a humanity unchained from its ancient terror, building, fighting, loving, destroying in smaller, more human ways. He watched through enhanced senses as the last known Subject of Ymir on the continent – a 92-year-old woman in a Liberio hospice – took her final, rattling breath. The Paths, already silent, didn't even flicker. *Gone.*
He felt nothing resembling regret. Only confirmation. His solution had worked. No Titan would ever terrorize a village again. No child would be fed to a mindless horror. No shifter would rip families apart for ideology or nation. The cycle was broken. Utterly. Permanently. The cost? A people fading quietly into oblivion. To him, it remained arithmetic: the infinite suffering of the Titan cycle versus the finite, quiet end of a bloodline. The answer was clear. The silence was the proof of his success.
**Vignette 5: Historian's Office, Stohess District - Paradis**
Historian Lena pored over fragmented texts and eyewitness accounts (mostly from people long dead). The "Year Zero Event" was her life's work. The Colossal Titan appearing. The impossible *thing* that destroyed it. The subsequent disappearance of all Titan powers. The strange, universal sterility only affecting Eldians. The Marleyan Empire's collapse into civil war once its Warrior program became obsolete. She had theories, wild ones. An alien intervention? A Founder's final, desperate act? A natural extinction event targeting Titan biology? She found a faded sketch, smuggled out of Liberio years ago. It depicted a massive, horned figure of light consuming a giant made of steam. She shivered. Not with the terror her ancestors felt for Titans, but with a deeper, more existential dread. *Something did this. Something with power beyond comprehension decided our fate. And we never even knew its name.* The silence of unanswered questions was the loudest of all.
**Vignette 6: Marta's Apartment - Liberio**
Marta hummed a lullaby her mother once sang. A song for children who would never exist. Outside, a Marleyan youth band played a marching song for Recruitment Day. The sound was tinny, hollow. Marta closed her eyes. She wasn't sad, not anymore. Just tired. Tired of the empty rooms, the empty future, the weight of a dying bloodline. In the quiet of her final years, the silence wasn't about the Titans, or the fear, or even the loss. It was the silence of an ending. Not a bang, not a whimper, but a long, slow exhalation. The last breath of a people cursed, then unchosen, then simply... finished. She drifted to sleep. The silence deepened.
**The World After:**
* **Eldians:** A dying race. Scattered, aging communities exist within Marleyan successor states and on Paradis, treated with a mix of lingering distrust, pity, and irrelevance. Their culture is fading. No new generations. The Curse of Ymir is replaced by the Curse of Finality.
* **Paradis:** Thriving technologically and economically, leveraging its resources and isolation. A constitutional monarchy. The Walls are national parks. Titans are mythologized, studied academically, but the visceral fear is gone. Internal conflicts and external diplomacy are their new challenges. The "Cosmic Titan" is a debated legend.
* **Marley:** Fractured after losing its Titan WMDs. Riven by internal conflicts and wars with former client states. The Eldian "threat" is gone, leaving only societal rot and the scramble for power in a post-Titan world. Liberio is a decaying relic.
* **Global Politics:** A reshuffled deck. Hizuru holds significant influence through its alliance with Paradis. Other nations are free from the Marleyan Titan yoke but face new power struggles. The concept of "Titan power" is historical curiosity.
* **The MC:** A ghost. A cosmic engine of extinction walking the fringes of the world he irrevocably changed. He watches the last Eldians fade. He sees humanity stumble forward without Titans. He feels no guilt, only the cold satisfaction of a problem solved. The silence he wrought is absolute. His greater good, achieved through absolute finality, is the quiet hum of a universe where no Titan will ever roar again. He remains, a monument to morally grey annihilation, waiting for his own end in the vast, uncaring silence. The Titan's End was not just an event; it became the defining characteristic of an era – the Era of Quiet Extinction.