Psychological fragmentation is a terrifying concept.
The system had warned me about it on the very first day I pulled the Peter Parker template, but I hadn’t truly understood what it meant.
I thought it meant I would develop multiple personalities.
I expected to have a nerdy teenager from Queens and a gravelly-voiced government agent actively arguing inside my head, like two annoying roommates fighting over the thermostat.
But as the weeks in the 104th Training Corps dragged on, I realized the integration process was much more insidious.
It wasn’t a sudden, violent explosion of different voices.
It was a slow, quiet bleed.
At five percent integration, I could clearly distinguish my own lazy, average-guy thoughts from the sudden spikes of Peter Parker’s mechanical genius or Leon Kennedy’s intense tactical paranoia.
I could point to a thought and say, ‘That’s not me.
That’s the template.’
But now?
With the Parker template sitting at thirty-five percent and the Leon template resting at twenty percent?
The boundaries were completely dissolving.
I was no longer a normal boy piloting two separate, overpowered personas.
The thoughts were fusing.
The mental Venn diagram was collapsing into a single, highly stressed, mathematically precise, paranoid circle.
When I woke up in the wooden cadet barracks at dawn, I didn’t consciously think, ‘Leon’s instincts suggest I check the perimeter.’
I simply woke up already knowing that the third floorboard near the door was loose, that Reiner’s breathing was too rhythmic to be a deep sleep, and that the fastest exit was through the eastern window.
It was just a fact of life, as natural as knowing my own name.
When I looked at the crude iron stove in the mess hall, I didn’t think, ‘Peter Parker could fix that.’ I just looked at it and instantly understood the thermal dynamics of the cast iron, the inefficiency of the exhaust pipe, and exactly how many turns of a wrench it would take to optimize the airflow.
I wasn’t Kai Yeager, normal guy, anymore.
I was Kai Yeager: a profoundly exhausted twelve-year-old who simultaneously wanted to take a nap, build a combustion engine, and aggressively clear the room of invisible bio-weapons.
It was a terrible, suffocating burden.
And it was about to make my grand plan for absolute mediocrity entirely impossible.
“Listen up, you useless sacks of Titan bait!” Commandant Keith Shadis roared, pacing in front of the wooden suspension rigs.
It was our first day of ODM gear aptitude testing.
The sun was beating down on the training yard.
In front of us were a series of wooden frames with steel cables, designed to hoist cadets into the air by their waists to test their natural balance.
“If you cannot master the basic fundamentals of spatial balance, you are completely worthless to humanity!
You will be stripped of your gear and sent to the fields to pick rocks until you die!” Shadis bellowed, his eyes bulging.
I stood in line, my hat pulled low over my eyes, casually ignoring his dramatic threats.
‘The plan is simple,’ I reminded myself.
‘Get strapped in.
Lean slightly too far forward.
Fall upside down.
Look embarrassed.
Shadis writes me off as a lost cause.
I coast through the next three years in the glorious, unbothered middle of the pack.’
I watched the other cadets go first.
Mikasa, predictably, was hoisted into the air and hung there with absolute, terrifying stillness.
She looked like a marble statue suspended by wires.
Then it was Eren’s turn.
He stepped up, his green eyes burning with the usual manic determination.
He strapped into the leather harness, gave the signal, and was immediately hoisted off the ground.
He instantly flipped upside down, flailing wildly and smashing his forehead against the wooden post.
The cadets snickered.
Shadis looked down at him with an expression of pure, unadulterated disgust.
“What is your major malfunction, Yeager?!
Raise your upper body!”
“I…
I can do it, sir!” Eren yelled, his face turning purple as he struggled against the leather straps.
I leaned forward slightly, my eyes narrowing.
My integrated mind automatically bypassed the comedy of the situation and immediately zeroed in on the mechanics of his failure.
I wasn’t looking at my brother; I was looking at the leather harness.
‘The left lateral strap,’ my brain highlighted instantly.
‘The brass buckle is defective.
The locking pin is worn down by exactly two millimeters, causing a severe asymmetrical weight distribution.
No amount of core strength can compensate for a hardware failure.’
I sighed, shaking my head.
I would have to fix his belt tonight with my WD-40 and some duct tape before he accidentally snapped his own neck.
“Next!
The other Yeager!” Shadis barked, pointing a thick finger at me.
“Let’s see if uselessness is a genetic trait!”
I lazily walked to the wooden frame, stepping into the heavy leather harness.
The supervising cadet tightened the straps around my thighs and waist, locking the carabiners into place.
‘Okay,’ I thought, taking a deep breath.
‘Just fail.
It’s easy.
Just be a potato.’
“Hoist him!” Shadis ordered.
The crank turned.
The steel cables went taut.
My boots left the dirt.
I was hovering three feet in the air.
‘Execute intentional failure,’ I commanded my body.
I purposely tried to lean my upper body forward to replicate Eren’s embarrassing faceplant.
But the moment my center of gravity shifted past the optimal axis, my integrated mind violently rebelled.
My Leon S.
Kennedy spatial awareness instantly detected the catastrophic loss of balance.
It screamed at my nervous system, entirely bypassing my conscious will.
Simultaneously, my Peter Parker intellect calculated the exact vector of gravity, the tension of the cables, and the precise muscular contraction required to counter the shift.
My core muscles locked into place like solid steel.
My spine straightened automatically.
My inner ear shifted my equilibrium with terrifying precision.
I tried to wobble.
I genuinely, physically tried to throw myself off balance.
I couldn’t.
My body simply refused to let me fall.
The survival instincts embedded in my DNA by the templates viewed ‘falling on purpose’ as a lethal biological threat and immediately auto-corrected my posture.
I hung in the air, completely and utterly motionless.
I wasn’t just balanced.
I was balanced with an insulting level of casual perfection.
My arms were resting lazily by my sides.
I hadn’t even bothered to take my hands out of my jacket pockets.
My hat was still tilted perfectly over my eyes.
I looked less like a cadet performing a rigorous military test, and more like a guy waiting for a bus in mid-air.
The training yard went dead silent.
Even Mikasa hadn’t looked this bored while suspended.
Shadis slowly walked over to me, stopping just inches from my dangling boots.
He stared up at me, his face turning a dangerous shade of crimson.
“Are you…
taking a nap, Yeager?” Shadis asked, his voice deathly quiet.
“No, sir,” I replied honestly, maintaining my perfectly relaxed, hands-in-pockets posture.
“I am just highly susceptible to the laws of physics, and currently, physics dictate that I remain upright.”
A few cadets in the back row choked on stifled laughter.
Reiner and Annie were staring at me with laser-focused intensity.
Shadis’s eye twitched violently.
He didn’t yell.
He didn’t scream.
He just stared at my infuriatingly flawless balance, realized he couldn’t actually punish me for doing the exercise perfectly, and spun around.
“Lower him!” Shadis barked at the supervisor.
“Next!”
My boots hit the dirt.
I unclipped the harness, letting out a long, depressed sigh.
‘So much for flying under the radar,’ I thought miserably, walking back to the crowd.
‘My own nervous system is a traitor.’
That night, after lights out, the sheer frustration of my own competence drove me out of bed.
The wooden barracks were filled with the sounds of snoring cadets.
I slipped out from under my thin blanket, dressed in silence, and grabbed my bright red Master Mechanic’s toolbox and my heavy barrel of WD-40.
I snuck across the dark training yard, my Leon instincts making me completely invisible to the roaming Garrison guards.
I moved from shadow to shadow, my footsteps utterly silent on the dirt, until I reached the equipment shed.
I picked the crude iron lock in exactly four seconds using a tension wrench and a small pick.
I slipped inside, closing the door behind me and lighting a small, shielded lantern.
The shed was filled with racks of training ODM gear.
It was the standard, clunky, military-issue equipment.
I walked up to my assigned gear, running a hand over the heavy iron gas canisters and the thick steel wire spools.
The separation between Peter Parker, Leon Kennedy, and Kai Yeager didn’t exist in this room.
As I looked at the ODM gear, my mind completely unified into a single, terrifyingly efficient entity.
‘It’s a grappling hook system based on pressurized gas displacement,’ my mind analyzed, my hands already flying open the red toolbox.
‘The deployment time is currently 1.2 seconds.
That is unacceptable in a hostile CQC environment.
I need a deployment time of 0.4 seconds to guarantee survival.’
I grabbed a socket wrench and began dismantling the primary housing of my gear.
The thoughts flowed seamlessly.
‘The wire tension is too rigid.
If I adjust the spool bearings and apply synthetic lubrication to the coil, I can increase the cable’s flexibility.
It mimics a web-shooter’s pendulum momentum.’
I reached for the WD-40, applying precise drops to the internal gears.
‘But I need tactical lethality,’ the thought continued, seamlessly blending Peter’s physics with Leon’s combat pragmatism.
‘I’ll replace the standard trigger springs with high-tension wire from the supply closet.
It will require more grip strength to fire, but it will increase the gas pressure velocity by forty percent.’
I worked for three hours in the dim lantern light.
I didn’t just fix my gear.
I completely overhauled it.
I stripped away the useless military redundancies.
I reinforced the stress points with hidden layers of Duck Tales tape, painting over the silver adhesive with black boot polish so it wouldn’t be noticed.
I recalibrated the gyroscopic balance mechanisms, tuning them specifically to my own weight and center of gravity.
When I was finally finished, I stepped back, wiping grease off my forehead with the back of my hand.
My assigned ODM gear looked identical to every other rig on the rack.
But internally?
It was a masterpiece of lethal, high-velocity engineering.
It was a terrifying fusion of a comic-book genius’s mobility and a survival horror agent’s deadly efficiency.
I packed up my red toolbox and the WD-40, extinguishing the lantern.
As I stood in the dark, looking at the rack of gear, a quiet sense of acceptance finally settled over me.
I couldn’t fake being a normal potato anymore.
My brain simply wouldn’t allow it.
The system had rewritten my baseline reality.
If I tried to fail, I would accidentally excel.
If I tried to hide, I would end up dismantling the strongest guy in the yard.
‘Fine,’ I whispered into the empty shed, resting my hand on the cold iron of my modified gear.
‘I won’t try to be mediocre anymore.
But I am still absolutely refusing to do any extra chores.’
I slipped back out into the night, my unified mind already calculating the exact optimal trajectory for tomorrow’s cable swinging exercises.
‘[Integration Stabilized.
Host’s cognitive synchronization successful.]’
For the first time since I reincarnated into this hellscape, the blue system text didn’t annoy me.
It just felt l
ike a fact.
I was Kai Yeager.
And the Titans were about to have a very, very bad time.
_________________________________
Stares in absolute horror at the completely empty ‘Drafts’ folder…
Typing_In_My_Sleep here!
I have some bad news, folks: my emergency stash of pre-written chapters has officially run dry.
The well is empty.
From here on out, I am flying by the seat of my pants.
I will be writing and pushing out updates as fast as humanly possible, but between drowning in my anatomy textbooks and my terminal need for a nap, the next few chapters might drop a little late.
But here is the trade-off!
To make up for the chaotic schedule, I am actively increasing the length of these new chapters.
So, while you might have to wait a bit longer between updates, you will be getting a lot more story to chew on when they do go live.
Please bear with me and my fried, sleep-deprived brain while I navigate this new pace.
I hope you enjoy the supersized chapters!
Alright, my coffee cup is empty and my eyelids are heavy.
Time to squeeze in a quick nap before the next writing session…
catch you later!