Reborn as Eren Yeager: The Gacha System

Getting an audience with Shadis alone took less effort than Eren expected — the man, it turned out, had his own instincts about the past month’s strangeness, and met their request with more weary resignation than surprise.

"You three have been circling something for weeks," he said, closing his office door behind them without ceremony. "I’m not a fool, whatever my methods of instruction suggest otherwise. Talk."

Eren told him — carefully, leaving out the system, leaving out the Coordinate by name, framing it instead as intelligence gathered from a source with connections to whatever had sent the rogue Titans at Trost. A larger attack was coming. Soon. Possibly aimed at Shiganshina itself, given its position and its long, unresolved vulnerability at the southern wall.

Shadis listened without interrupting, his expression unreadable throughout, and when Eren finished, he sat back slowly, weighing something behind his sharp, tired eyes.

"You’re not telling me everything," he said finally. Not an accusation. Just fact.

"No, sir."

"I didn’t expect you would." Shadis rubbed a hand across his jaw. "I’ve served long enough to recognize when someone’s protecting information for good reason rather than malice. I won’t press you on the parts you’re not ready to give up." He stood, moving to the window, staring out at the darkened training yard. "But I’ll tell you this — Wall Maria’s southern defenses have been under strength for years. Budget cuts, political nonsense, the usual peacetime rot that convinces people danger is always someone else’s problem until it isn’t." His jaw tightened. "If you’re telling me the danger’s real and it’s close, I believe you enough to act on it, even without the full picture. That’s more trust than most recruits would get from me. Don’t waste it."

"We won’t, sir."

"See that you don’t." He turned back to face them, something almost gentle beneath the gruffness. "I’ll push for reinforcement requests to the southern garrison. I can’t promise it’ll be enough, or that it’ll arrive in time. Bureaucracy moves slower than Titans, unfortunately. But I’ll do what I can with what you’ve given me."

They left his office with something between relief and renewed dread — a small crack of preparation bought against an enemy still mostly hidden in shadow, but a crack nonetheless.

Word reached Shiganshina three days later through official Garrison channels, dressed up in enough bureaucratic language to avoid outright panic — a "routine strengthening of southern defenses," ordered without much public explanation, that had the district’s older residents muttering about wasted resources and its younger ones simply grateful for the extra visible soldiers patrolling the wall.

Grisha, informed properly this time by Eren’s own letter rather than secondhand rumor, responded with a level of quiet, focused preparation that surprised even his own family.

"I’ve been stockpiling for two years, expecting this eventually," he wrote back. "But knowing it’s close changes what we prioritize. I’m moving your mother’s usual market day to mornings only, keeping her closer to the house. I’ve spoken to Hannes about evacuation routes, dressed up as ordinary safety planning so as not to alarm the neighbors unnecessarily. Whatever you learn next, tell me immediately. We’re not wasting a single day of the time your source gave us."

Eren read the letter twice, something in his chest easing slightly at the evidence of his father actually, finally, treating him as a partner in this fight rather than a child to be protected from its shape.

Reiner cornered him three days after that, expression carrying a new, tighter urgency than Eren had seen from him even during the attack at Trost.

"Something’s changed," Reiner said without preamble, voice low. "Command’s gotten more careful. More secretive. I think someone noticed the Garrison’s sudden interest in southern wall reinforcement, and I think they’re recalculating their own timeline in response."

"Meaning what? They speed up, or slow down?"

"I don’t know yet. Could go either way." Reiner’s jaw tightened. "I need you to understand something, Eren. If they speed up because of this, if the attack comes sooner because your warning tipped them off that you know more than they’d like — that’s partially on me. Bertholt’s the one who reported the reinforcement activity up the chain. He didn’t have a choice. Neither did I, when they asked me to confirm it."

"You’re telling me you might have accelerated the exact thing we were trying to prevent."

"I’m telling you I don’t know, and I hate that I don’t know, and I hate more that I’m complicit in not knowing even that much." Reiner’s voice cracked, raw guilt bleeding through his usual controlled exterior. "I’m trying, Eren. I promise you I’m trying to walk a line here that doesn’t actually exist, between the orders I’m still technically under and the people I’ve started actually caring about despite every warning I was given not to."

Eren studied him for a long moment, the weight of the confession settling heavy alongside everything else this year had demanded he carry.

"Then keep trying," he said finally. "That’s all any of us can actually do at this point. Keep walking the line as carefully as you can, and tell me when it moves, so we can adjust before it’s too late to matter."

Reiner nodded, something fractionally lighter in his exhausted expression, and walked off without further words, leaving Eren once again with more uncertainty than answers, but also, strangely, more trust than he probably should have extended to someone still capable of eventually becoming his enemy.

That night, Mikasa found him staring at the ceiling of the barracks long after lights-out, sleep clearly refusing to cooperate.

"Can’t sleep?" she murmured, settling close.

"Too much to think about. Reiner thinks our warning to Shadis might have accelerated the attack instead of preventing it." He exhaled slowly, exhaustion and dread tangled together. "I don’t know anymore if trying to prepare is helping or just changing the shape of the danger into something we understand even less."

"Maybe it’s both." She laced her fingers through his in the dark. "Maybe every choice we make shifts the danger instead of eliminating it, and the only real question is whether we’re shifting it toward something we can actually survive, or away from it entirely, which was probably never possible to begin with."

"That’s not very comforting."

"I’m not trying to comfort you with false certainty, Eren. I’m trying to be honest with you, the same as always." She pressed closer, warm against the cold barracks air. "But I believe we’re better prepared now than we were a month ago. Shadis knows. Your father’s preparing. Reiner and Bertholt are giving us what warning they safely can. That’s not nothing, whatever shape the danger ultimately takes."

He turned to face her in the dark, some of the day’s weight easing at her steady presence beside him. "Sixty days," he murmured. "Give or take, according to Kessler’s original letter. I don’t know anymore if that number even means anything, given how fast everything’s accelerating."

"Then stop counting the number," she said softly, "and start counting the days we actually have left to spend properly. However many there are." She pressed a kiss to his temple, warm and certain despite the mounting dread. "Whatever’s coming, however soon it arrives — I intend to spend every one of them exactly like this. With you. However the count actually runs out."

He pulled her close, letting her steady presence anchor him against the storm gathering somewhere just past the horizon, uncertain in its timing but no longer uncertain in its inevitability.

Whatever days remained, he intended to spend every single one of them exactly the way she’d described — together, unflinching, and never, ever facing the ending alone.

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