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Fort Salta (スラトア要塞 Suratoa-yōsai?)[1] is a Marleyan fortification and airship research base in the southern mountainous region of the continental mainland. It currently serves as a rallying point for the surviving remnants of the Marleyan military during the Rumbling.
Structure[]
Fort Salta was constructed into a mesa which towers over a wide, arid landscape of scattered buttes and rock formations. It is connected via railway, which weaves between the surrounding buttes before spiraling up the face of the mesa to the top of the hill.
The summit of the mesa possesses extensive facilities, including facilities to maintain a sizeable fleet of military airships and to develop and test new airship models. Some of the smaller hills surrounding Fort Salta also contain structures at their summit.
Story[]
War for Paradis arc[]
Upon arriving in Odiha, Yelena confesses to Armin Arlelt and Levi Ackermann about a strategic meeting she held with Eren Jaeger. She details a plan to cripple Marley's military forces with a partial Rumbling in order to secure Paradis Island's safety for several decades to come. When Eren expresses his uncertainty of her plan to attack the port city of Karifa to crush the Global Allied Fleet before it is ready, Yelena voices her concern about Fort Salta's airship base being a potential threat. She deduces that, with Eren unleashing the full force of the Rumbling to raze the world, he would next target Fort Salta to prevent any resistance against the Founding Titan and its Wall Titans.
Not long afterwards, a train carrying survivors from Liberio approaches Fort Salta, where Annie Leonhart's father hopes to find an airship that the refugees can use to evade the Rumbling. Shortly after, they spot the fleet of airships taking off, followed by the arrival of the Founder's Rumbling. Initially despairing that they have been left to die, the Marleyan conductor then realizes the airships took off in response to the Titans' arrival, and are in fact a military squadron about to bomb the incoming Titans from an unreachable height.
However, the airship squadron is swiftly annihilated when an apparition of the Beast Titan scatters projectiles towards the fleet. Afterwards, a flying boat approaches the Founding Titan and Eren is soon confronted by his former comrades alongside the Warriors.[1] Noticing a Titan flying overhead, the soldiers spot a group of people hanging on and they are given hope to continue firing the fort's cannons, despite them being largely ineffective against the approaching Titans. However, the soldiers notice a group of Eldian refugees arrive and immediately draw their guns on the citizens.[2] Müller then fires his pistol into the air to get both sides' attention and convinces them to work together to defend the fort from the Titans. As he helps one of the Eldians up, he asks the man to agree to work with him. The truce is short-lived, however, as a smoke is suddenly released into Fort Salta which causes all the Eldians present to transform into Titans.
After Eren is killed the Eldians all return to their human forms and Müller leads his forces out to meet them. The soldiers hold the Eldians at gunpoint and Müller demands that they prove they are no longer Titans. Leonhart tries to suggest using a blood test but Müller insists that he and his soldiers need immediate reassurance. Before he can give the order to kill the Eldians, one of them comes forward and points out that if they still had any Titan abilities they would have already used them to fend off the soldiers. Satisfied with the man's argument, Müller orders his soldiers to lower their guns.[2]
Trivia[]
- Unlike the majority of Marleyan location names which are based in Latin or Italian nomenclature, "Salta" simply appears to be "Atlas" spelled backwards. This is also applicable to the original katakana in which the characters for Atlas (アトラス Atorasu?) are reversed. This may refer to its location being, when vertically mirrored, analogous to the Atlas Mountains of northern Algeria.[1]
- Coincidentally, the name "Salta" still fits with the Latin and Italian nomenclature of Marleyan location names, as "salta" means "skip" in Italian, derived from the Latin "saltus".