The attack came during the joint exercise with the Garrison — recruits and soldiers combined for a supply escort along the outer wall near Trost, meant to be routine, meant to be safe, meant to be nothing more than practice for a threat everyone assumed was still months or years away.
It wasn’t routine. It wasn’t safe. And it wasn’t months away at all.
"Something’s wrong," Eren said, the flicker hitting hard enough that he staggered mid-stride, the supply wagon beside him creaking to a halt as Mikasa’s hand shot out to steady him.
"Eren?"
"Something’s coming. Big. Multiple—" The vision fractured before he could finish, too much information arriving too fast, but the shape of it was unmistakable. "Titans. More than one. Close."
The horn sounded three seconds later — not a drill signal, but the real alarm, the one Eren had only heard once before in his life, in the snow, with a Titan bearing down on a fallen child.
This time there wasn’t just one.
They came over a weakened stretch of outer wall in a cluster of five, smaller than the colossal horror Eren remembered from his first life but no less lethal for their size, moving with the same mindless, hungry purpose that had haunted his nightmares across two lifetimes.
"Formation!" Shadis’s voice cut through the rising panic, soldiers and recruits alike scrambling into defensive lines with training that suddenly felt terribly, urgently real instead of academic. "Gear up! Nape strikes only, don’t waste effort anywhere else!"
Eren’s hands moved on their own, gear clicking into place with the speed of a year and a half of stacked reflexes, Mikasa already airborne beside him before he’d finished his own launch, blade catching torchlight as she angled toward the nearest Titan with the same fearless precision she’d shown against the boar, except the stakes here dwarfed anything either of them had faced before.
"Left flank!" she called, and he adjusted without hesitation, trusting her instincts the way he’d learned to trust them across a year of training and something deeper besides.
The first strike came easier than he expected — a smaller Titan, distracted by a fleeing soldier, its nape exposed as it turned, and Eren’s blade found the mark with the clean, practiced certainty of fragments and drilling both finally converging into something that actually worked.
Steam erupted skyward. One down.
"Eren, behind you!"
He spun, gear firing instinctively, the flicker screaming warning half a second before a second Titan’s hand would have closed around him entirely, and he twisted clear with margin so narrow he felt the wind of its passing against his cheek.
"Thank you," he gasped, landing hard against a rooftop.
"Don’t thank me, focus!" Mikasa was already moving again, and he followed, the two of them falling into a rhythm neither had consciously chosen but that worked with terrifying efficiency — her drawing attention, him striking the openings she created, a partnership forged across two years of trust now proving itself in blood and steam and the desperate screaming of a district under siege.
Reiner found them twenty minutes into the chaos, blade already dark with steam-residue, expression carrying a wildness Eren hadn’t seen from him before.
"This isn’t natural," Reiner shouted over the chaos, falling into step beside them as they regrouped near a collapsed section of scaffolding. "Five Titans, this close to a controlled district, in a coordinated cluster? Ordinary Titans don’t move like this."
"You’re saying someone sent them."
"I’m saying it’s possible. I need to check something." Something tight and afraid crossed Reiner’s face, gone as fast as it appeared. "Get the recruits clear. I’ll handle the largest one."
"Alone? Reiner, that’s suicide—"
"Trust me." His eyes met Eren’s, heavy with unspoken weight. "Please. Just this once."
He was gone before Eren could argue further, sprinting toward the largest of the five Titans with a speed that defied ordinary human capability, and Eren watched, horror and understanding dawning together, as Reiner’s form began to shift — flesh and bone rearranging with a violence that should have killed any ordinary person, steam venting from his transforming body as he grew, and grew, until what stood where Reiner had been was no longer a boy at all, but something vast and armored, meeting the rampaging Titan head-on with brutal, decisive force.
"He’s—" Mikasa’s voice caught, disbelief and fear tangled together.
"A Titan-shifter. Like the system said." Eren watched, transfixed despite the danger, as Reiner’s armored form drove the rogue Titan back with raw, overwhelming strength, buying precious seconds for soldiers and recruits to pull wounded civilians clear of the collapsing street. "He’s protecting us. Whatever else he is, whatever orders he’s under — right now, he’s protecting us."
The remaining Titans fell within the next ten minutes, Garrison soldiers and recruits working in increasingly coordinated bursts as the initial panic gave way to disciplined action, until only the largest — locked in brutal combat with Reiner’s transformed shape — remained.
"We need to help him," Eren said, watching Reiner’s armored form take a vicious hit that sent him staggering.
"How? Neither of us can reach that high without—" Mikasa stopped, understanding dawning in her expression at the same moment it dawned in Eren’s own mind. "Eren, no. Whatever the system’s given you, we don’t know if you can control a transformation. Not like this, not without warning."
"I don’t think we have another option." He looked at her, the weight of the moment settling heavy despite the terror underneath it. "Mikasa, if this goes wrong—"
"It won’t." Her hand found his, fierce and certain even now. "Whatever happens, I’m not leaving this street without you. Do whatever you need to do. I’ll be right here."
He closed his eyes, reaching inward toward the fragments the system had stacked so carefully across a year and a half, toward the Coordinate resonance still settling in the depths of his understanding, and pushed, uncertain and terrified and desperate all at once.
[Emergency activation available. Proceed?]
"Yes."
The world went white, then dark, then agonizingly, violently vast, his own body reshaping with a pain that defied description, and when his vision cleared he stood — towered, rather — at a height that put him level with Reiner’s own transformed shape, steam venting from muscles that had never existed in his human form moments before.
"Eren?!" Mikasa’s voice, distant and disbelieving, carried up from the street below.
He couldn’t answer in words, not in this form, but he turned toward the rampaging Titan Reiner had been struggling against, and moved, the fragments of physiology knowledge suddenly, horribly useful in guiding limbs he’d never controlled before.
The fight that followed blurred into instinct and desperation — his new form clumsy but powerful, Reiner’s more practiced but exhausted from the earlier struggle, the two of them working in uneasy, unspoken coordination against a common enemy despite everything unresolved between them. The rogue Titan fell within minutes, Eren’s borrowed strength finally overwhelming its resistance, steam erupting skyward in a column that could probably be seen from Shiganshina itself.
Then, slowly, agonizingly, his own transformed body began to dissolve, control slipping away as exhaustion crashed over him in a wave that dropped him from Titan-height back to his ordinary human form, collapsing into the rubble below with barely enough awareness left to register Mikasa’s arms catching him before he hit the ground fully.
"Eren! Eren, stay with me—"
Her voice, raw with fear, cut through the fog of exhaustion dragging at his mind, and he forced his eyes open to find her face inches from his, tears cutting clean tracks through ash and dust.
"I’m okay," he managed, voice barely above a whisper. "Tired. Just — tired."
"You transformed. Into a Titan. You actually transformed—" Her voice cracked, relief and terror tangled together. "I thought I’d lost you. For a second there, watching you fall, I thought—"
"I’m here." He reached up, weak but certain, and brushed a tear from her cheek. "I’m not going anywhere. I promised you that already."
She let out a sound between a laugh and a sob, and pulled him close despite his exhaustion, holding him like she could physically anchor him against ever disappearing again.
"Don’t do that again without warning me first," she said fiercely, muffled against his shoulder. "I mean it, Eren. I can face anything beside you. I can’t face losing you without any warning at all."
"I didn’t know I could do it until I tried."
"Then we practice. Carefully. Together. Not—" she gestured helplessly at the smoking rubble around them, "not like this, in the middle of an actual battle, with no idea what it would actually cost you."
"Agreed," he murmured, too exhausted to argue further, content simply to lean into her warmth and let the adrenaline finally, slowly drain away.
Reiner found them twenty minutes later, back in human form, expression carrying an exhaustion that went far deeper than the physical toll of the fight.
"You’re a shifter," he said quietly, settling nearby with visible caution. "I didn’t know. I don’t think anyone back in Marley knows either, or things would already look very different for both of us."
"Neither did I, until about twenty minutes ago." Eren managed a weak, tired laugh. "Guess that complicates whatever plans you were under orders to eventually carry out."
"You have no idea." Something almost like relief flickered across Reiner’s exhausted face. "For what it’s worth — whatever happens between us eventually, whatever my orders eventually demand — tonight, we fought on the same side. I’d like to hold onto that, for as long as circumstances actually allow it."
"So would I," Eren admitted, and meant it, despite every warning Mikasa and Armin had carefully impressed upon him about the danger Reiner still represented.
Reiner nodded once, something unspoken passing between them, before rising and walking off to help with the ongoing rescue efforts, leaving Eren and Mikasa alone amid the settling dust and smoke.
Later that night, once the wounded had been tended and the district’s damage assessed, Eren found himself back on a rooftop with Mikasa — not their usual one, this one temporary and strange, but the familiar comfort of her presence beside him steadying him regardless of location.
"Seventy-four days," he murmured, staring up at a sky finally clearing of smoke. "Feels like a much larger number of things to prepare for than it did yesterday."
"It is." Mikasa leaned into him, exhausted but present. "But we’re facing it. All of it. Together, exactly the way we promised each other we would." She turned to look at him, moonlight catching the fierce love in her expression despite the day’s horror. "I watched you become something else entirely today, Eren. Something vast, and strange, and terrifying. And I still love you exactly the same as I did this morning. I need you to know that, especially after everything today revealed about what you’re actually capable of becoming."
He pulled her close, the simple truth of her unwavering presence settling into his exhausted chest like an anchor against the storm still building on the horizon. "I love you too. However strange this gets from here. However many more transformations or fragments or countdowns the system reveals. That part isn’t changing, whatever else does."
She kissed him then, slow and certain despite the day’s exhaustion, the kind of kiss that spoke more clearly than any promise could of a love that had survived boars and Titans and secrets and now, impossibly, a literal transformation into the very monsters they’d spent two lifetimes fighting against.
"Whatever comes next," she murmured against his lips, "we face it exactly like this. Together."
"Together," he agreed, and held her close beneath a sky finally, slowly clearing, the weight of the day’s revelations settling into something almost bearable with her steady warmth anchoring him against it.
Seventy-four days remained.
Whatever waited within them — Reiner’s uncertain loyalty, Annie’s careful warnings, his own newly discovered transformation, and whatever forces in Marley had sent five Titans against a district that should have been safe — Eren intended to meet every single day of it exactly the way he’d learned to meet everything else.
With Mikasa’s hand in his, and a love that had already proven it could survive far worse than an ordinary countdown ever threatened.
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