Reborn as Eren Yeager: The Gacha System

The rumor started, as most things in the Training Corps did, with someone who’d had too much free time and too little sense.

"They’re saying you’re descended from some kind of warrior clan," Sasha Braus announced at breakfast a few days after the gear incident, dropping onto the bench beside Mikasa with the casual directness of a girl who’d clearly decided subtlety wasn’t worth the effort. "The Ackermans. Apparently Shadis went pale when he heard your name at formation. Someone in third year said his uncle served with a soldier named Ackerman decades back, and apparently that soldier was —" she lowered her voice dramatically — "terrifying."

"That’s a rumor," Mikasa said flatly, not looking up from her breakfast. "Rumors aren’t facts."

"Sure, but you are terrifyingly good at everything. That’s not a rumor, that’s Tuesday."

"Physical aptitude isn’t the same as ancestry."

"Isn’t it, though?" Sasha grinned, entirely unbothered by Mikasa’s clipped tone. "Anyway, if you ever want to actually address it, half the barracks has theories. I’m personally in the ’secret royal bloodline’ camp, mostly because it’s the most interesting option, but Connie thinks you’re just naturally gifted and everyone’s overthinking it."

"Connie’s right."

"Connie’s boring," Sasha said, entirely undeterred, and wandered off toward the food line before Mikasa could argue further.

Eren, watching the exchange with quiet interest, waited until Sasha was well out of earshot before leaning closer. "Shadis really went pale? At your name?"

"I noticed it too. I assumed it was nothing."

"Grisha mentioned something similar once. About the Ackerman name meaning something beyond an ordinary family line." He kept his voice low, the memory of that first heavy conversation in the hidden study room resurfacing. "Combined with what the system just showed me about the Coordinate — Mikasa, I don’t think this is nothing."

Her jaw tightened, the careful composure she usually maintained slipping just slightly. "I don’t want to be something. I want to be Mikasa. That’s already complicated enough without adding ancient bloodlines to the list."

"I know." He took her hand under the table, steady and grounding. "Whatever it turns out to mean, it doesn’t change who you actually are. I just think we should find out, rather than let Shadis’s reaction and half the barracks’s gossip fill in the blanks for us."

They found the opportunity that weekend, during a rare stretch of free hours, cornering Shadis near the equipment shed with a directness that clearly caught the older man off guard.

"Sir," Eren began, "may I ask you something? About the name Ackerman."

Shadis’s expression shuttered immediately, the same careful blankness Eren recognized from his own father’s face whenever a subject cut too close to something guarded. "That’s not training-relevant, recruit."

"With respect, sir, I think it might be." Eren held his ground despite the instructor’s obvious displeasure. "You reacted to her name at formation. I want to know why."

For a long moment, Shadis said nothing, gaze moving between the two of them with an assessment that felt less like instructor-to-recruit and more like one keeper of secrets recognizing another.

"The Ackermans," he said finally, voice low enough that only the three of them could hear it, "were a clan feared across parts of the world beyond these walls, long before the walls existed to hide behind. Warriors. Dangerous ones, hunted nearly to extinction by people who found their existence inconvenient. I served alongside one, decades ago. Watched what they were truly capable of, under the right — or wrong — circumstances." His eyes settled on Mikasa with something between wariness and grudging respect. "You’ve got the same look in your eyes that soldier had. The same stillness before violence. I’d wondered, since formation, if it was coincidence or inheritance."

"Which do you think it is?" Mikasa asked, voice steady despite the weight of the question.

"I think," Shadis said slowly, "that coincidence rarely explains someone who fights like you fight without ever having faced real combat before arriving here. But what you do with that inheritance, if it is one — that’s still entirely your own choice to make. Blood doesn’t decide character, recruit. It just decides what tools you’re working with." He straightened, the conversation clearly closing. "Don’t let the rumor mill decide who you are either way. That’s my only advice on the matter."

He walked off without further explanation, leaving the two of them standing by the equipment shed with considerably more questions than they’d arrived with.

That evening, Mikasa was quieter than usual, sitting apart from the usual mess hall chatter with an expression Eren had learned to recognize as her working through something too large to voice immediately.

He found her afterward on the low wall behind the barracks, knees drawn up, staring out at the darkening training field without really seeing it.

"Talk to me," he said, settling beside her.

"I don’t know what to say." Her voice, when it came, carried a rare uncertainty. "My whole life, I thought being good at this — fighting, surviving — was something I’d built myself, out of necessity, after everything I lost before your family took me in. Now Shadis is telling me it might just be blood. Something I didn’t earn. Something that was always going to be there, whether I chose it or not."

"Does that scare you?"

"A little." She admitted it quietly, unusual vulnerability in her voice. "I’ve spent so much of my life deciding who I want to be, on purpose, choice by choice. The idea that some of it was decided for me before I was even born — I don’t know how to feel about that yet."

Eren considered his words carefully before answering, the weight of her fear settling into something he wanted badly to address properly rather than dismiss with easy comfort.

"I don’t think it changes anything that actually matters," he said finally. "You chose to fight off a boar with a stick instead of running. You chose to stand between me and a Titan when you could have stayed safe on that rooftop. You chose to forgive me for keeping secrets, and to stay, every single time staying would have been easier not to." He took her hand. "Whatever the blood gave you as raw material, everything you actually built with it — that’s still entirely yours. Shadis said the same thing, if you think about it. Tools don’t decide character. You do."

She was quiet a long moment, turning his words over the way she turned over everything true.

"When did you get so wise about ancestry philosophy?" she said finally, a small, genuine smile breaking through despite everything.

"I’ve always been wise. You’ve just started noticing." The old joke, worn comfortable now, pulled the intended laugh out of her despite the heaviness of the conversation.

"That’s my line."

"I’m allowed to borrow it. We share everything else these days."

She leaned into him, some of the day’s tension finally easing out of her shoulders, and for a while they sat together in comfortable quiet, the training field dark and still below them, the weight of unexpected inheritance settling into something more manageable with two people carrying it instead of one.

"Whatever the Ackerman name turns out to mean," she said eventually, "whatever the Coordinate turns out to mean for you — I don’t want either of us to become someone else because of it. I like who we already are."

"Me too." He pressed a kiss to the top of her head, breathing in the familiar warmth of her. "Whatever legacy either of us is carrying, I think we get to decide what we do with it. That’s the whole point of everything we’ve already survived together."

"That’s very optimistic, for someone who nearly fell out of the sky three weeks ago from an information overload."

"I contain multitudes."

"That’s Armin’s line."

"We’re all borrowing from each other at this point. It’s practically tradition."

She laughed, real and warm, and the sound of it eased something in his chest that had been tight since Shadis’s revelation that afternoon — a reminder, steady and certain, that whatever ancient bloodlines or system thresholds tried to claim about either of their futures, the two of them had already decided, long before any of it surfaced, exactly who they intended to be to each other.

That night, lying awake long after Mikasa had finally drifted to sleep beside him during their stolen hour before curfew checks, Eren allowed himself one final thought before exhaustion claimed him too.

Ackerman blood. Coordinate resonance. A father’s guilt-soaked history in a world called Marley. Fragments of a puzzle that had once felt manageable, one piece at a time, now revealing themselves to be connected in ways he was only beginning to understand.

Eighty-nine days remained on the countdown that had once belonged only to him.

Whatever legacy waited at the end of it — his, hers, the walls’, the world beyond them entirely — he intended to meet it exactly the way they’d faced everything else this second chance had handed them.

Together. One choice at a time. Blood be damned.

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