Reborn as Eren Yeager: The Gacha System

Annie Leonhart, Eren decided after two weeks of careful observation, was considerably harder to read than Reiner had been.

Where Reiner’s caution had cracked, however briefly, into something like honesty on that quiet supply road, Annie gave away nothing at all — trained silence, Eren was beginning to suspect, rather than simple shyness. She trained alone in the early mornings before formation, ate alone at the edge of the mess hall, and answered any question directed at her with the fewest words that could technically qualify as a response.

"She’s not unfriendly, exactly," Sasha observed one afternoon, watching Annie finish yet another solo drilling session with the same brutal efficiency she brought to everything. "She’s just... closed. Like a door that’s not locked, but nobody’s ever bothered to check if it opens."

"Have you tried?" Eren asked.

"Once. Asked if she wanted to sit with us at dinner." Sasha shrugged. "She said she preferred eating alone. Not rude about it. Just final. Like the conversation had already ended before I finished the question."

Mikasa, listening nearby while sharpening her blade with the same methodical care she gave everything, spoke without looking up. "I want to talk to her."

"Why?"

"Because two people circling each other with the same suspicion gets nowhere. Someone has to make the first move that isn’t watching from a distance." She set the blade down, decisive. "I fought her once already. I’d rather understand her than just keep cataloguing what I don’t know."

She found Annie at the practice yard’s edge the following dawn, well before formation, the smaller girl mid-stretch in the pale early light.

"You’re up early," Annie said, not turning around, clearly having heard Mikasa’s approach long before announcing it.

"So are you."

"I like training before anyone else is watching." A pause. "You’re not here to train."

"No." Mikasa settled onto the low fence a short distance away, giving Annie space without retreating entirely. "I wanted to ask you something. Directly, instead of just watching from across the yard the way we’ve both apparently been doing to each other."

Annie finally turned, expression carefully blank, though something wary flickered behind her pale eyes. "Ask, then."

"Where did you actually learn to fight like that?"

For a long moment, Annie said nothing, the question hanging in the cool morning air between them. When she finally answered, her voice had gone flatter than before, deliberately controlled.

"Does it matter? I fight well. That should be enough of an answer for anyone here."

"It would be, if you fought like an ordinary recruit who’d simply trained hard." Mikasa kept her voice even, no accusation in it, just plain observation. "You don’t. You fight like someone who was taught to kill efficiently, a long time before anyone here was old enough to understand what that meant. I recognize that kind of training, because I’ve watched Eren carry something similar — knowledge and skill that shouldn’t belong to someone his age, born where he was born."

Something shifted in Annie’s expression — not quite fear, but a wary calculation, like a person quickly recalculating how much ground had already been given away.

"You’re observant," she said finally.

"I’ve had practice."

Annie studied her a long moment, something almost like respect flickering behind the careful blankness. "I can’t tell you everything. Not today. Maybe not for a long time." Her voice dropped lower, genuine weight beneath the flat control. "But I’ll tell you this much: whatever you think you and Yeager are carrying — whatever burden makes him fight the way he does — you should both be careful who else notices it. Not everyone who sees that weight wants to help carry it. Some people see it as something to take, rather than something to understand."

"Is that a warning?"

"Take it as whatever you’d like." Annie turned back to her stretches, the conversation clearly closing on her terms rather than Mikasa’s. "I’ve said more than I intended to already."

Mikasa lingered a moment longer, weighing whether to push further, then decided against it — some information, she’d learned from watching Eren’s own careful revelations unfold over the past year, needed time and trust to fully surface, not force.

"Thank you," she said instead. "For saying even that much."

Annie didn’t respond, already lost in the disciplined rhythm of her drills, but something in her shoulders had eased, fractionally, the wariness of the conversation settling into something less guarded than before.

Eren listened to the account that evening with a mixture of unease and cautious relief.

"’Not everyone who sees that weight wants to help carry it,’" he repeated slowly. "That sounds like a warning about people specifically hunting for what I’m carrying. Which means she knows about that hunt. Which means—"

"Which means she’s probably from the same place Reiner might be from," Armin finished, already scribbling in his notebook with renewed urgency. "Marley, most likely, given everything else converging around this theory. Though her warning suggests she’s not entirely aligned with whoever’s doing the hunting, or she wouldn’t have bothered warning you at all, even indirectly."

"Or it’s exactly the kind of thing someone hunting me would say, to earn exactly the trust that makes hunting easier," Eren said, old caution creeping back in.

Mikasa considered this, weighing the possibility carefully rather than dismissing it. "That’s possible. I don’t think it’s likely, though. She could have simply stayed silent, the way she has with everyone else here. Choosing to say even that much, when staying quiet would have been easier and safer, suggests something more complicated than simple manipulation."

"So what do we do with ’complicated’?"

"The same thing we’ve done with every complicated piece of this puzzle so far." Mikasa’s hand found his, steady as ever. "We watch. We gather what pieces we can. And we stay careful without letting caution turn into paralysis, the same way we’ve managed everything else."

Later, alone together on their strip of ground behind the barracks, Eren found himself circling back to the conversation despite his best efforts to let it rest for the night.

"Do you think they’re like me?" he asked quietly. "Reiner. Annie. Carrying something similar, whatever it turns out to be?"

"I think it’s possible." Mikasa leaned into him, thoughtful. "And if they are, I think that makes them either potential allies or potential threats, and we won’t know which until more of the picture actually reveals itself. Same as everything else this year."

"That’s not very reassuring."

"I’m not trying to reassure you. I’m trying to be honest with you." She tilted her face up to look at him, moonlight catching the steady certainty that had carried them both through everything so far. "You’ve survived every uncertain thing this system and this world have thrown at you, Eren. Not because you had all the answers in advance, but because you kept moving forward anyway, with people who refused to let you face it alone. I don’t see why this should be any different."

He pulled her closer, some of the day’s unease finally settling into something more manageable at the familiar warmth of her, the compass steady in his pocket and the wristband worn soft on his wrist, both small reminders of exactly how far they’d already come together.

"Eighty days," he murmured into her hair.

"We’ll be ready," she said, the same unshakeable certainty she’d carried since the very first night he’d told her everything. "Whatever Reiner and Annie turn out to be. Whatever the Coordinate turns out to mean. Whatever’s still waiting beyond these walls for all of us."

He believed her, the way he’d come to believe her about everything — not because the road ahead had gotten any clearer, but because she’d never once promised an easy path, only a shared one, and that promise, across two years and a hundred small quiet moments, had never once failed to hold true.

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