Reborn as Eren Yeager: The Gacha System

Sleep, when it finally came that night, didn’t last long.

Eren woke before dawn to the quiet creak of the study door down the hall, and found his father there alone, the lamp burned low, an old photograph held carefully in both hands like something that might crumble if he gripped it wrong.

"Dad?"

Grisha didn’t startle this time. He’d clearly been expecting company, or hoping for it. "Couldn’t sleep either?"

"No." Eren stepped inside, closing the door softly behind him. "Is that her? Dina?"

A long pause. Then Grisha turned the photograph around.

A young woman, dark-haired, smiling at whoever held the camera with an ease that suggested she’d trusted them completely. Something about her expression struck Eren as familiar in a way he couldn’t immediately place — not her face, exactly, but the quality of her smile, guarded warmth given freely to exactly one person.

"She was kind," Grisha said quietly. "Kinder than the world she was born into deserved. I met her in Marley, before everything that brought me here. She had a son. I cared for both of them more than I had any right to, given what I was actually doing there."

"What were you doing there?"

Grisha was quiet a long moment, and Eren thought, briefly, that the answer would retreat back behind another someday. Instead, his father set the photograph down with careful, deliberate hands.

"I was sent to steal something," he said. "A power. The same kind of power that runs through you now, though it arrived in me very differently than it arrived in you — earned through violence, not granted through some system I still don’t fully understand. I took it from someone who trusted me. It cost Dina and her son everything, in the end, because of choices I made and couldn’t take back."

The words landed heavy, and Eren felt Mikasa’s absence in that moment more sharply than he expected — some instinct telling him this conversation needed her steadiness too, except this one, he understood without being told, was one his father needed to give to him alone first.

"Is that why you never wanted to explain any of this? Because you’re afraid I’ll judge you for it?"

"I’m afraid," Grisha said slowly, "that I already made the mistake once of thinking power was worth any cost to obtain, and I don’t know how to warn you against that mistake without you thinking I’m ashamed of surviving it. I’m not ashamed of surviving, Eren. I’m ashamed of what surviving cost people who deserved better from me."

Eren sat with that a long moment, the weight of it settling into a shape he recognized uncomfortably well — a man carrying guilt across an ocean and a wall, trying desperately not to let his son inherit the same mistakes.

"I’m not you," Eren said finally. "Whatever the system gives me, I’m not taking it from anyone who trusts me. I’m not leaving anyone behind to pay for what I gain."

"I know." Grisha’s voice cracked, just slightly. "That’s exactly why I finally told you. Because you’ve already proven, in one night with a Titan and a stranger’s warning, that you’re better at this than I ever was. I just needed you to understand why I’ve been so afraid of you repeating history I never wanted you to know existed."

Mikasa found him an hour later, back on the porch, still turning the conversation over in his mind, the winter cold barely registering against the weight of what he’d learned.

"Your mother told me where you’d gone," she said, sitting beside him without needing an invitation. "You look like you’ve aged a decade overnight."

"Feels like it." He leaned into her automatically, the way he’d started doing without thinking. "My father took something from someone who trusted him. A power. It cost people he loved everything. That’s the shape of the mistake he’s spent years terrified I’d repeat."

"Are you going to?"

"No." The answer came immediate and certain. "Whatever the system gives me, I earn it through draws, not through betraying anyone’s trust to get it. That’s not the same thing."

"I know that." She took his hand. "I’m asking because I think you need to hear yourself say it out loud, not because I doubted the answer."

He looked at her, something in his chest loosening at how well she’d learned to read exactly what he needed, even in moments neither of them had words prepared for.

"How do you always know exactly what to say?"

"I don’t, always. I just pay attention to what you’re not saying, and try to fill in the gap." She squeezed his hand. "You’ve been doing the same for me since we were small. I’m only returning what I’ve been given."

They sat together as the sky slowly lightened from black to gray to the pale gold of a winter dawn, and Eren thought, not for the first time, that whatever waited for them beyond the walls — Marley, Kessler’s warnings, the ghost of a woman named Dina whose loss had shaped his father’s every careful choice — he intended to make sure the people he loved never became casualties of his own becoming, the way Dina and her son had become casualties of his father’s.

"A hundred and twenty days," he said quietly.

"We’ll be ready." No hesitation in her voice at all. "All of us. Together."

He believed her, the way he’d come to believe her about everything — not because she promised easy things, but because she’d never once promised something and failed to make it true.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!