Reborn as Eren Yeager: The Gacha System

Historia stayed three days before anyone trusted her enough to ask the real questions, and it was Armin, predictably, who finally cornered her with a notebook and no patience left for pleasantries.

"You said you’d heard what happened on the cliffs," he said, setting two cups of tea down between them in the borrowed sitting room. "Word doesn’t cross an ocean that fast. Not through any channel I’m aware of. So either you have a much better spy network than Marley ever managed, or you have your own version of what Eren carries."

Historia didn’t answer right away. She turned her cup slowly on its saucer, watching the tea settle.

"My grandmother was a vessel," she said finally. "Not the Founder. Something older, from before your Ymir Fritz ever existed — a fragment that split off two thousand years ago and crossed the sea with refugees nobody in these walls ever heard about. I inherited pieces of what she carried. Flashes. Warnings. Nothing as clean as memories of a full life, like Eren has. More like — static, with occasional clear signal."

"So you’re not omniscient either."

"No. I got exactly one clear signal in the last six months, and it scared me enough to sail here." She looked up, and for the first time her composure cracked slightly, tired and human underneath it. "I saw fire on this coastline. I saw someone who looked like you dying trying to stop it. I don’t know if that’s fixed or if it’s just the worst version of what might happen. I came because I’d rather be wrong for nothing than right and absent."

Armin wrote nothing down. He just watched her, weighing the difference between a woman telling the truth and a woman telling a convincing lie, and found he couldn’t yet tell which.

Eren caught up with the conversation secondhand, over dinner, Mikasa listening with the flat, assessing quiet she reserved for anything that might turn out to be a threat wearing a kind face.

"She’s not lying about the fear," Mikasa said, once Armin had finished. "I don’t know about the rest."

"Doesn’t matter if she’s lying about the details." Eren pushed food around his plate without much appetite. "A ship of raw, Titan-scale power heading this direction is a problem whether her vision is accurate or theatre. We plan for the threat either way."

"That’s not what I’m worried about." Mikasa set down her fork. "I’m worried about you deciding, again, that the only acceptable plan involves you personally standing between it and everyone else. You did that on the cliffs. It worked, barely, and it nearly killed you both."

"I know."

"Do you? Because you didn’t ask me before you drove Zeke off that ledge, Eren. You decided, and I found out when I was already climbing toward two dying Titans." Her voice didn’t rise, but something underneath it had gone very still, the particular stillness she wore right before she said something she’d clearly been sitting on for a long time. "I married someone who includes me. I need you to actually do that, this time. Before the ship arrives, not after you’ve already thrown yourself at whatever’s on it."

He reached for her hand across the table, and she let him take it, though her jaw stayed tight.

"You’re right," he said. "I’ll do better. I promise you that specifically, not just generally."

"I’ll hold you to it specifically." A small, unwilling softening at the corner of her mouth. "I mean that as a threat, for the record."

"Noted."

The gacha interface stirred that night for the first time in months — not a draw, not a reward, just a quiet notification Eren hadn’t seen the shape of before.

[Founder resonance detected: unbound entity, foreign origin. Recommend caution: this vessel’s power did not pass through the same covenant as your own. Behavior unpredictable. Draws currently unavailable — system dormant pending resolution of external threat.]

He read it twice, turning the strange, clipped honesty of it over in his mind. The system hadn’t spoken to him unprompted since the night he’d confronted it about the manipulation. This was different — not guidance dressed as chance, just information, offered flat and useful without any attempt to shape what he did with it.

"You’re not going to pretend this is a coincidence," he said silently. "That it happens to arrive right when I need information."

[Correct. This is not a randomized event. I am telling you plainly because you asked me to stop disguising intent as chance. I am attempting to honor that.]

It wasn’t trust, exactly, what settled in his chest reading that. But it was closer to something honest than anything the system had offered him in two years, and for now, that would have to be enough.

He found Mikasa on the roof afterward, the same tiles, the same cold autumn air, and told her everything — Historia’s fragment-memory, the ship’s estimated arrival, the system’s blunt new honesty.

"So we have a partial warning from a woman we don’t fully trust, a threat we don’t fully understand, and a system that’s finally decided to stop lying to us the same week an unbound version of its own power might be sailing toward the coast." Mikasa exhaled, half a laugh with no real humor in it. "That’s almost funny."

"It’s something." Eren sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched. "We have four months. That’s more warning than we had the last time."

"It is." She leaned into him, some of the day’s tension finally easing out of her shoulders. "Then we use it properly this time. Training. Planning. Actually telling each other things before we act on them." She glanced sideways at him. "Starting now. What’s your first instinct? Don’t act on it. Just tell me."

He considered the question honestly instead of rushing past it. "My first instinct is to go find this thing myself, before it reaches anyone else. Alone, if I have to."

"And your second instinct?"

"To remember I promised you I wouldn’t do that anymore." He turned to look at her properly. "So — second instinct. We tell Erwin everything tomorrow. We bring Historia in on planning instead of interrogating her. We build an actual strategy instead of me deciding alone what I’m willing to sacrifice."

Something in Mikasa’s expression eased fully at that, real warmth breaking through the earlier tension. "That’s a better instinct."

"I’m working on it."

She kissed him, brief and certain, the cold air fogging faintly between them when she pulled back. "Four months," she said. "We’ll be ready. Properly this time — together, from the start, not just at the end."

Below them, Shiganshina settled into its ordinary evening quiet, unaware yet of the ship cutting slowly closer through distant waters, carrying toward its shores a danger neither fully understood and a warning neither fully trusted.

But for the first time in longer than either of them could easily name, they faced it as partners from the very first hour, rather than a burden one of them carried alone until it broke.

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