Anti-Titan artillery

The anti-Titan artillery (Tai Kyojin-hō) is a heavy weapon the Mid-East Allied Forces engineered to fight the Titans serving Marley during the Marley Mid-East War. Commander Theo Magath reads its existence as the bill for Marley's complacency: while Marley leaned on Titan power to run its colonial ambitions, nations that could never field Titans built the tools to destroy them. Though presented as a new weapon, the gun appears in numbers and variants large enough to suggest the Allies had mass-produced it into their standard field artillery piece by the battle of Fort Slava.

The gun exists to destroy Titans of every variety with brutal efficiency. Its 100mm armor-piercing shell can put down even one of the Nine Titans, the Armored or the Beast among them, in a single hit, while fragmentation shells let the piece double as conventional bombardment artillery. Mountings vary: at Fort Slava four guns rode an armored train circling the fortress perimeter for mobility, while at least 28 more sat on field-gun carriages along the fort's wall as the backbone of the defensive ring. Even on a field mount the weapon handles well, a four-man crew able to spin it around quickly enough to score hits on a fast-moving Armored Titan and to engage mindless Titans landing inside the fort.

Limits remain. A kill still demands an accurate shot near the nape of the neck, and the barrel's restricted depression meant the fort's guns could not reach the Cart and Jaw Titans below the wall even as targets inside stayed in range. By the time of the retaliatory strike on Paradis, Marley's military had also produced a rifle-sized descendant, the anti-Titan rifle, able to defeat Titans the same way the artillery does.

The Allies debut the artillery at Fort Slava, where the armored train's guns lock Marley's Titan powers out of the battle until Warrior cadet Gabi Braun derails the lead car with bundled grenades, freeing Porco Galliard's Jaw Titan to strike the Allied defenses. When Titans are dropped into the fort from the air, the remaining field guns fight back but are swept apart by the Armored Titan wielding a watchtower as a club; even so, the damage Reiner sustains warns him how lethal the new weapon is. After the war Marley claims the guns for itself and turns them on Eren Yeager's Attack Titan during his fight with the War Hammer Titan, though the inexperienced crews soon fall to the Survey Corps and their repurposed Thunder Spears.

The rifle variant leaves the deepest mark. During Marley's revenge assault on Shiganshina, a tearful Gabi picks up the dead Colt Grice's anti-Titan rifle and, before anyone can react, decapitates Eren with a round through the neck as he and Zeke struggle to reach each other. Later in the battle she saves Kaya from one of the newly transformed Titans, shooting it through the mouth and then jamming the rifle down its throat to blow out the nape; Kaya and Niccolo then cover for her when an Eldian soldier grows suspicious of the Marleyan child with the gun.