Reborn as Eren Yeager: The Gacha System

Trost’s training grounds sprawled wider than anything Shiganshina had prepared them for — barracks in long gray rows, a mess hall big enough to swallow half their home district, and a training field churned to mud by three years of recruits before them.

"It’s bigger than I imagined," Armin said, standing at the gate with his bag slung over one shoulder, notebook already half out of his pocket like he intended to start cataloguing the place before he’d even properly arrived.

"Put the notebook away," Mikasa said, not unkindly. "Just look at it first. Write it down later."

"I can do both simultaneously. I have excellent multitasking skills."

"You walked into a fence post last week doing that."

"That was an isolated incident."

"It was the third isolated incident this month."

Eren, only half listening to the familiar rhythm of their bickering, found his attention caught instead by the sheer number of other recruits streaming through the gate around them — faces from every district he could name and several he couldn’t, all carrying the same mixture of nervous excitement and barely-hidden fear that he recognized from his own reflection that morning.

Some of these faces, he thought, an old, cold certainty settling into his chest, I already know. From before.

He didn’t say it out loud. Some knowledge, he’d learned, needed to be carried quietly until the moment actually demanded sharing it.

Formation on the first morning arrived with all the warmth of a winter wind — recruits lined up in uneven rows across the churned field, nervous energy crackling through three hundred bodies, until a single voice cut through all of it like a blade.

"You have three seconds," the instructor announced, striding down the line with the particular fury of a man who considered enthusiasm a personal insult, "to wipe those idiotic, hopeful expressions off your faces, or I will remove them myself."

Silence. Immediate and total.

"Better." He continued down the row, sharp eyes cataloguing every recruit like potential future corpses, which, Eren reflected grimly, was probably an accurate assessment for at least some of them. "My name is Keith Shadis. For the next three years, I am the closest thing to a god any of you will have in your miserable lives. When I say jump—"

"We ask how high, sir!" someone shouted from further down the line, eager and clearly regretting it the instant Shadis’s attention snapped toward them like a hawk spotting prey.

"Did I ask for a response?"

"N-no, sir!"

"Then why," Shadis said, voice dropping to something considerably more dangerous than his shouting had been, "are you still talking?"

The recruit wisely said nothing further, and Shadis resumed his walk down the line with grim satisfaction, pausing when he reached Eren, Mikasa, and Armin in quick succession.

"Name."

"Eren Yeager, sir."

"Yeager." Something flickered behind Shadis’s eyes — recognition, maybe, or simple assessment — before moving on. "Name."

"Mikasa Ackerman, sir."

A longer pause this time, Shadis’s gaze sharpening in a way that made Eren’s stomach tighten with old, instinctive dread. "Ackerman," he repeated, quiet enough that only their small cluster caught it, some weight in the name that clearly meant something to him beyond a simple surname. He said nothing further, moving on with visible effort, though the pause lingered strangely in Eren’s mind long after.

"Name."

"Armin Arlert, sir." Armin’s voice wavered only slightly, which Eren privately considered an impressive show of composure given how visibly Armin’s knees had been shaking a moment before.

"Arlert. You look like a stiff wind could end your career here early."

"I— yes, sir. Probably, sir."

Shadis’s mouth twitched, something almost like approval flickering across his stern expression at the honest answer. "At least you know your limitations, recruit. That’s more than I can say for half this formation." He moved on without further comment, and Armin exhaled slowly, clearly relieved to have survived the exchange with his dignity mostly intact.

The days that followed blurred into exhausting routine — the 3D maneuver gear that took most recruits weeks to master and took Eren, embarrassingly, only days, thanks to a stacked year of reflex draws he still couldn’t fully explain to anyone watching; hand-to-hand combat drills where Mikasa’s efficient, economical style quickly earned her a reputation that spread through the recruit ranks faster than gossip in Shiganshina ever had; endurance runs that had Armin, true to Hannes’s early assessment, gradually improving from "concerningly slow" to merely "slow" over the course of the first month.

"You’re a natural," said a recruit named Thomas one evening, watching Eren land his gear practice with clean, easy precision that had taken most of the barracks weeks longer to achieve. "How’d you get so good this fast?"

"Lots of practice," Eren said, which was true, if not remotely the complete truth.

"Must’ve been some practice." Thomas didn’t push further, thankfully, distracted instead by another recruit’s spectacularly failed landing attempt nearby that sent the whole group into laughter, tension of the day briefly forgotten in favor of easy camaraderie.

Mikasa’s reputation, meanwhile, grew along different lines entirely. She topped every physical assessment without apparent effort, and word spread quickly enough that by the second week, a small crowd had started gathering whenever she ran drills, watching with the particular fascination people reserved for something they’d never expected to see done quite so well.

"You’ve got an audience," Eren told her, nodding toward the small cluster of recruits watching her latest hand-to-hand demonstration with open awe.

"I’ve noticed."

"Bothers you?"

"Not really." She wiped sweat from her brow, entirely unbothered by the attention in the way she was unbothered by most things that didn’t directly threaten someone she loved. "Let them watch. I’d rather be underestimated by the enemy than by my own squad."

"That’s a very tactical way of accepting a fan club."

"It’s not a fan club."

"Thomas has started a betting pool on whether you’ll finish top of our year. I heard him discussing odds with Armin this morning."

Mikasa’s expression flattened. "Armin’s involved in another betting pool."

"He said, and I quote, ’some traditions are worth maintaining across all major life transitions.’"

She sighed, long-suffering, though the corner of her mouth twitched despite her best effort to maintain proper exasperation. "I’m going to have serious words with that boy eventually."

"You’ve said that about three separate betting pools now. I don’t think the words are landing."

"They will. Eventually. I’m building up to a truly memorable one."

The romance of it all — insofar as barracks life allowed for romance at all — mostly survived in stolen minutes: a shared meal at the mess hall corner table the three of them had unofficially claimed as their own, a rare free hour spent by the practice yard fence watching the sunset instead of drilling, small moments carved carefully out of an exhausting schedule that left little room for anything but survival and sleep.

"This isn’t exactly the roof back home," Eren said one evening, the two of them tucked into a quiet corner behind the barracks, the sounds of other recruits’ exhausted conversation drifting faintly from inside.

"No. But it’s still you and me, watching a sky get dark together. That’s the important part, not the location." Mikasa leaned into him, exhaustion evident in every line of her posture after a brutal day of drills. "I missed this. The quiet. Even a few minutes of it."

"Regretting coming?"

"Never." No hesitation at all. "I’d choose this exhaustion, every single day, over the alternative of not being here with you and Armin both. That’s not even a difficult choice."

He wrapped an arm around her, feeling some of the day’s tension bleed out of both of them at the simple contact. "A hundred days left. Give or take."

"We’re using them well." She tilted her face up toward his, tired but content. "Better than I imagined we could, honestly, given everything we’re preparing for."

He kissed her, slow and unhurried despite the exhaustion pulling at both of them, and for a few stolen minutes behind a gray barracks wall in Trost, the countdown in his chest went quiet enough to simply enjoy being exactly where he’d chosen to be — beside her, working toward a future he intended, this time, to actually see arrive.

That night, lying in his narrow barracks bunk long after the others had fallen asleep, Eren allowed himself the daily draw one more time, quiet enough not to wake anyone nearby.

[Daily draw available.]

"Spin it."

[Result: Titan Physiology — Fragment V (Tier 3, Rare). Coordinate resonance detected. 5 of an unknown total fragments collected. Warning: fragment threshold approaching. Full activation may occur without warning once threshold is reached.]

Eren stared at the ceiling a long moment, the warning settling heavy in his chest.

Full activation. Of what, exactly, the system still refused to say clearly — but the shape of it, gathering slowly across months of careful, incremental fragments, felt less like a gift now and more like a countdown running parallel to the one already ticking in his mind, one he hadn’t fully accounted for until this exact moment.

Ninety-nine days remained on the number he’d carried for nearly two years.

He didn’t know, yet, how many days remained on this new one — the one the system had just quietly started keeping alongside it.

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