Reborn as Eren Yeager: The Gacha System

The trouble started with a dare, the way trouble usually did around Armin.

"I’m just saying," Armin said, trailing behind them with the particular energy of a boy trying to sound casual about something he’d clearly been building up to all week, "the old logging trail past the north fence is supposed to have wolves."

"It doesn’t have wolves."

"That’s exactly what someone whose theory is wrong would say."

"Nobody’s seen a wolf near Shiganshina in ten years."

"That doesn’t mean there aren’t any. It means they’re being patient."

Mikasa, walking a step ahead with a coil of rope slung over one shoulder — because apparently no outing with these two happened without her quietly preparing for contingencies neither of them had thought of — didn’t even turn around. "There are no wolves, Armin."

"You don’t know that."

"I do, actually. I checked the traplines with Hannes last month. Nothing but foxes and one extremely offended badger."

"...An offended badger is somehow worse."

They’d come out past the north fence to look for the kind of oddly shaped roots Armin insisted were good for carving, a habit he’d picked up from watching Mikasa work on the bird and immediately deciding he, too, could be a woodcarver, despite having demonstrated zero applicable skill so far. The forest here grew thick and old, sunlight breaking through in uneven gold patches, the kind of quiet that made every snapped twig sound enormous.

It was, Eren would think later, exactly the kind of peaceful afternoon that always seemed to happen right before something went wrong.

The something arrived without warning — a low growl, close, followed by the crash of underbrush.

Not a wolf.

A boar. A big one, tusks catching the light, clearly startled out of wherever it had been sleeping and immediately deciding the intruders were the problem.

"That is not a wolf," Armin said, in the strangled voice of a boy realizing being right about something is sometimes much worse than being wrong.

"Move!" Eren grabbed Armin’s collar and hauled him sideways as the boar charged, tusks low, straight through the space where Armin had been standing a half-second earlier.

Everything narrowed.

The flicker hit — not a full vision, just a stutter of wrong — a flash of the boar veering left instead of right, faster than it should. Eren’s body reacted before his mind finished the thought, throwing himself and Armin behind the trunk of a fallen tree just as the boar’s charge tore past close enough that he felt the wind of it against his arm.

"Eren—" Armin’s voice, thin with panic.

"I’ve got you. Stay down."

The boar wheeled around at the base of a slope, snorting, working itself up for a second run. Eren’s heart hammered — not with the calm certainty of the reflex draws he’d banked for months, but with real, unfiltered fear, because a boar this size could genuinely kill a child, system or no system, and every stacked improvement in the world didn’t make him bulletproof.

"Mikasa, get back—"

She was already moving. Not away. Toward it.

"Mikasa!"

She’d grabbed a fallen branch, thick as her arm, and planted herself directly between the boar and where Eren and Armin crouched, feet set, utterly unafraid in a way that terrified Eren far more than the animal did.

"Mikasa, move—"

"Get Armin further back." Her voice didn’t shake at all. "I’ve got this."

"You don’t have this, it’s a boar, not a training dummy—"

The boar charged again. Mikasa didn’t run. She waited — one heartbeat, two — and at the last possible second stepped sideways and swung the branch down hard across its shoulder, redirecting its momentum instead of meeting it head-on, the way she’d redirected a hundred practice strikes on the training field without anyone ever quite noticing how naturally it came to her.

The boar stumbled, squealed, and this time — winded, confused, deciding the fight wasn’t worth it — crashed off into the underbrush and didn’t come back.

Silence fell, heavy and ringing, broken only by everyone’s breathing.

"...That," Armin said faintly, from somewhere near Eren’s feet, "was the wolves. I was right about the wolves. Different animal, same energy."

Nobody had the heart to argue with him.

Eren was at Mikasa’s side before he’d consciously decided to move, hands on her shoulders, checking her over with a kind of frantic thoroughness that surprised even him.

"Are you hurt? Did it get you? Mikasa—"

"I’m fine."

"You stepped in front of a boar."

"It worked."

"That’s not the point—" His voice cracked, higher and rawer than he meant it to, and he heard himself say the next part before he’d decided to. "You could have died. You just — walked toward it. Like it was nothing."

"It wasn’t nothing. I had a plan."

"You had a stick, Mikasa."

"A good stick."

He wanted to be angry. He’d meant to be angry, in the half-second before he’d reached her, some furious lecture about recklessness already forming. Instead what came out was smaller, and much closer to the truth of it.

"I can’t—" He stopped, throat tight, hands still gripping her shoulders like letting go might prove the last minute had actually happened. "I can’t lose you. Do you understand that? Not you. Not like this. Not to something as stupid as a boar in the woods on some afternoon that was supposed to be nothing."

Mikasa went still under his hands, something shifting in her expression — not the careful cataloguing look she usually wore, but something rawer, caught off guard.

"You wouldn’t lose me," she said quietly. "I wasn’t going to let it get that far."

"You don’t get to promise that. Nobody gets to promise that."

"I’m promising it anyway."

"Mikasa—"

"I told you already." Her voice was steady, but her hand came up to cover his where it still rested on her shoulder, holding it there instead of pulling away. "I’ll always come back to you. You said something like it yourself, once. On the roof."

He remembered. Of course he remembered — he remembered everything she’d ever said to him, filed away the same careful way she filed away everything about him.

"That’s different. I meant—" He faltered, the words suddenly harder to find than he expected, his chest tight with something that wasn’t fear anymore, or wasn’t only fear. "I meant I need you to still be here. When all of this is over. Whatever this ends up being. I need you to be part of what’s on the other side of it."

Something in her face softened all the way through, the guarded distance she kept around most people gone entirely, just for him, just for this moment in a quiet forest with a fallen tree and a stick that had saved all three of their lives.

"I will be," she said. "I told you I’d wait. That’s not just for evenings on the roof, Eren. That’s for all of it. Whatever all of it turns out to mean."

He didn’t know which of them moved first — maybe neither of them did — but somehow the space between them had closed to almost nothing, her hand still over his, her eyes steady on his in a way that made the whole forest go quiet and far away.

"Mikasa, I—"

"Ahem."

They broke apart so fast Eren nearly tripped backward over the fallen tree. Armin, sitting exactly where they’d left him, was watching the two of them with the wide, delighted eyes of a boy who had just witnessed something he intended to bring up for the rest of both their lives.

"Please," Armin said, "don’t let me interrupt. I’ll just sit here. With the boar-adjacent trauma. Alone."

"Armin—"

"No, really, take your time, I have nowhere to be."

Mikasa’s ears had gone faintly pink, and she recovered her composure with visible effort, stepping back and retrieving her stick with far more focus than the task required. "We should get back before something else decides to try its luck."

"Right," Eren said, voice not entirely steady. "Back. Yes."

Armin, hauled to his feet, immediately fell into step beside them with the smug satisfaction of a boy who knew exactly what he’d interrupted and had no intention of ever letting it go. "So. When you two get married, can I be the one who tells this story at the wedding? Because I think ’they almost kissed after she fought off a boar’ is genuinely unbeatable material."

"Nobody’s getting married, Armin—"

"That’s not a no from either of you, I notice."

"Armin."

He held both hands up, grinning, and mercifully let the subject drop — though the grin didn’t fade the entire walk home, and neither, Eren noticed, did the warmth still lingering where Mikasa’s hand had rested over his.

That night, alone in the warehouse, Eren sat with the compass in one hand and let himself think, properly, about what had happened in the woods — not the boar, but the moment after it.

I can’t lose you.

He’d said it before he could stop himself, and meant it more than he’d meant almost anything else in either of his lives. The system could hand him reflexes, fragments of Titan biology, whatever pieces it decided to dole out on its own schedule — but none of that had thrown itself between a charging animal and two frightened boys with nothing but a stick and absolute certainty.

That part hadn’t come from any gacha pull. That part was just her.

[Daily draw available.]

He almost ignored it. For once, the countdown in his chest wasn’t about walls or Titans or fragments of understanding he didn’t yet have.

"Spin it," he said anyway, because the walls were still coming whether his heart was ready or not.

[Result: Combat Reflex Synchronization (Tier 2). Improved coordination under high-stress combat conditions.]

Useful. Not what he wanted to be thinking about.

He closed his hand around the compass instead, needle settling steady toward true north, and thought about a girl with a stick standing unafraid between him and something twice her size.

One hundred and fifty-two days.

Whatever was coming, he thought, he wasn’t facing it alone. He never really had been.

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