Anti-personnel vertical maneuvering equipment

The anti-personnel vertical maneuvering equipment (Taijin Rittai Kidō Sōchi) is a covert redesign of the standard vertical maneuvering equipment, produced for the Anti-Personnel Control Squad of the Military Police Brigade with a single purpose: fighting the Survey Corps. It keeps the three-dimensional mobility of the original gear while swapping blades for firearms, a trade that leaves it nearly useless against Titans and devastating against human opponents. The design favors urban combat and man-hunting inside the Walls, where anchor points are plentiful, though it works anywhere hooks can bite, including the crystal cave below the Reiss Chapel. Four years after its debut, a heavily upgraded version becomes standard combat issue for the Survey Corps in its war with Marley, pairing Thunder Spears with semiautomatic pistols so one soldier can engage infantry, fortifications, and Titans alike. Marleyan technology supplied by the Anti-Marleyan Volunteers feeds into that redesign.

Movement works on the same principles as the standard gear: fire a grappling hook into a surface, trigger the gas mechanism, and reel toward the anchor, chaining momentum into advanced maneuvers between objects. The layout is radically different, though. The device's body rides on the upper back rather than the hips, strapped down with harnesses across torso and arms, and houses its hooks on two independently firing axles. One wide compressed-gas cylinder on the upper back replaces the usual pair of small tanks. Pistol-style operating grips, holstered at the hips when idle, hold the triggers and levers for movement along with the guns themselves.

In place of blades, the grips take single-use cartridges, two rounds at a time, each carrying enough stopping power to burst a human head. Penetration is poor, however; a corpse or an ultrahard steel blade will stop a round, and once both shots are spent the entire barrel must be swapped for a spare, which operators keep strapped to their thighs. Whether the original rounds fired on gunpowder or compressed gas is never established. The gear inherits the standard equipment's weakness in open terrain, and because the hooks and guns both launch from the hands, a user cannot answer an attack coming from directly behind, a flaw Armin Arlert identifies. In desperate moments the hooks themselves become weapons, flying fast enough to punch through flesh or to fling an enemy into obstacles or off rooftops.

By the year 854 the Survey Corps has replaced the single-shot, shotgun-style weapons with Marleyan semiautomatic pistols, easing the reload problem, and fitted the gear to launch Thunder Spears, normally one per gun and up to four with extra modification. The improved pistols strongly resemble the German Mauser C96, the first truly successful self-loading pistol.

Kenny Ackerman supervised the Anti-Personnel Control Squad's training while drilling himself on the device. The exact regimen is unknown, but it presumably mirrors ordinary maneuvering-gear instruction redirected toward shooting on the move and hunting people rather than Titans. The gear first sees action when the squad ambushes Levi's Special Operations Squad during the operation to free Eren Yeager and Historia Reiss from a hearse, and it appears again in the cavern under the Reiss Chapel, where Levi's outnumbered soldiers survive the squad only through tricks like exploding barrels and signal flares.

The Survey Corps later becomes the equipment's most prominent operator. Its modernized version debuts at the Liberio festival, when the Corps launches its surprise assault on the Marleyan military; there Mikasa Ackerman fells the War Hammer Titan using a loadout of eight Thunder Spears, and because she also wears the traditional gear she can switch to blades for close combat against Porco Galliard.