There is a profound, deeply misunderstood art to being perfectly average.
Most people assume that being mediocre is simply a matter of not trying.
They think that if you just relax, let your arms hang loose, and stare blankly at the sky, you will naturally sink into the comfortable, unbothered middle of the pack.
Those people are idiots who have never had to manipulate a military grading curve.
To achieve true, mathematically precise mediocrity among a cohort of highly trained, hyper-competitive soldiers, you cannot simply be lazy.
You have to be a logistical genius.
You have to know the exact ceiling of the elite and the exact floor of the failures.
You must constantly, obsessively calculate your own cumulative performance metrics to ensure you never accidentally excel, while simultaneously ensuring you never fail so catastrophically that you draw disciplinary attention.
It was the summer of the year 849.
We were entering the final stretch of our three-year tenure in the 104th Cadet Corps, and I was currently waging the most difficult, exhausting psychological war of my entire life: the battle for Rank Eleven.
Rank One through Ten were guaranteed a comfortable, safe life in the Military Police.
Because of this, the top tier of our class was a bloodbath of try-hards, prodigies, and sociopaths all violently clawing over each other for a ticket to the interior.
I entirely refused to be in the Top Ten.
Being in the Top Ten meant standing on a podium.
It meant giving speeches.
It meant being assigned leadership roles, managing subordinate squads, and actively participating in the bureaucratic nightmare of military politics.
Rank Eleven, however, was the holy grail of existence.
Rank Eleven was the absolute highest position you could achieve while still remaining entirely invisible.
You were respected enough by the instructors to be left alone, but not ranked high enough to be given any actual responsibilities.
It was the sweet spot of survival and unbothered obscurity.
To maintain Rank Eleven, I had to actively micromanage the scores of everyone around me.
“Keep your intervals tight!” Eren hissed loudly, crouching low behind a thick wall of ferns.
“The objective is only four kilometers north.
If we push the pace, we can beat Reiner’s squad and secure the flag!”
It was midnight.
We were deep inside a dense, unforgiving stretch of the northern training forest.
Commandant Shadis had dropped us into the wilderness with zero rations, a completely blank map, and a simple objective: navigate the treacherous terrain in the pitch black, locate a heavily fortified supply cache, and extract the flag before dawn.
To make matters worse, the forest was crawling with senior instructors actively playing the role of hostile enemy combatants.
If an instructor caught you, they beat you senseless, stole your flare gun, and failed your entire squad.
“Eren, if we push the pace in zero-visibility conditions, we are going to walk directly into a tripwire,” Armin whispered nervously, his eyes darting through the impenetrable shadows of the massive pine trees.
“Armin is mathematically correct,” I stated, leaning back against the rough bark of a tree and crossing my arms.
“At our current velocity, our acoustic footprint is radiating exactly forty yards in every direction.
You are essentially screaming our coordinates to the instructors.”
My unified mind was currently processing the dark forest with terrifying, effortless clarity.
I didn’t need a map.
The moment we had entered the tree line, my brain had automatically calculated our exact topographical elevation, the ambient humidity, and the magnetic true north based entirely on the moss growth and the subtle, shifting direction of the midnight breeze.
Simultaneously, the combat survival programming hardwired directly into my central nervous system was painting the pitch-black forest in a high-contrast mental overlay.
I could hear the faint, rhythmic breathing of a hostile instructor hiding in the canopy exactly sixty-two yards to our left.
I could smell the faint tang of gun oil from a tripwire trap rigged across the narrow ravine ahead.
I was a walking, breathing tactical radar system.
And it was giving me a massive headache.
“We can’t just sit here, Kai!” Eren argued, gripping the handle of his wooden training blade.
“If we move slow, we lose!”
“If we move fast, we get ambushed, we get bruised, and I lose my temper,” I replied flatly, staring into the dark.
“Mikasa, you take point.
Your footfalls exert the least amount of kinetic pressure on the underbrush.
Eren, you cover the rear.
Armin, stay in the center and count our paces.
I will manage the logistical burden.”
I casually adjusted the heavy, eighty-pound canvas rucksack strapped to my shoulders.
I was carrying the entirety of our squad’s survival gear.
To a normal cadet, the weight would have been a crippling disadvantage.
To me, it was a carefully calculated handicap.
I had intentionally volunteered to carry the heavy pack because the physical strain effectively masked my unnatural speed and perfect center of gravity, making me look exactly as sluggish and exhausted as a Rank Eleven cadet should look.
Mikasa nodded silently, drawing her blades and slipping into the darkness with the absolute silence of a ghost.
We moved through the forest for two hours.
It was an agonizingly slow, deeply annoying process, primarily because I had to constantly, covertly manipulate my squad away from the traps I could clearly sense.
When my brain detected the faint, metallic hum of a high-tension snare rigged between two boulders, I would casually pretend to trip over a root, subtly bumping into Eren and entirely altering our trajectory to bypass the danger zone.
When my threat-assessment software pinged a squad of three instructors waiting in ambush near a river crossing, I simply complained loudly about a cramp in my calf, forcing our squad to take a five-minute detour upstream that completely bypassed the kill box.
I was playing a massive, exhausting game of four-dimensional chess in the dark, entirely just so I could avoid having to engage in physical combat.
“We’re close,” Armin whispered, checking his compass under the faint moonlight breaking through the canopy.
“The supply cache should be just over this ridge.”
We crept up the steep, muddy embankment, cresting the ridge and looking down into a small, moonlit clearing.
Sitting in the dead center of the clearing was a wooden crate painted bright red, a small blue flag planted firmly in its lid.
“There it is,” Eren grinned, his eyes lighting up with manic victory.
He immediately stood up, fully prepared to sprint down the hill like an unguided missile.
“Wait,” I snapped, my hand shooting out to grab the back of his jacket with a grip like a steel vice.
My paranoia was violently spiking.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, a cold, icy chill washing over my spine.
The clearing was entirely too perfect.
The moonlight was illuminating the red crate like a stage spotlight.
‘Tactical analysis,’ my brain processed in a fraction of a second.
‘The clearing is a geographical bowl.
Zero cover.
Only one viable entry point.
It is a textbook fatal funnel.
The objective is bait.’
Before I could physically pull Eren back into the heavy brush, the shadows in the canopy above us suddenly detached themselves from the trees.
“Ambush!” Mikasa hissed, her blades flashing as she instantly dropped into a defensive stance.
Four senior instructors dropped from the branches, completely surrounding our position on the ridge.
They were dressed in black tactical gear, wielding heavy wooden batons, their faces masked by bandanas.
“Give up the flares, cadets!” one of the instructors barked, lunging directly at Armin with terrifying speed.
Armin froze, his eyes going wide.
My mind didn’t hesitate.
The absolute, unyielding lethality of my survival programming violently hijacked my motor functions.
I didn’t draw my wooden blades.
Blades required entirely too much energy.
Instead, I dropped my heavy rucksack directly into the dirt, shifting my center of gravity down and forward.
I stepped perfectly into the instructor’s blind spot as he lunged for Armin.
I didn’t strike him.
I simply extended my right leg, hooking my boot behind his ankle, and simultaneously applied a precise, two-pound push to the center of his chest.
Using his own aggressive forward momentum against him, I effortlessly swept his legs out from under him.
The instructor flew through the air, completely separated from gravity, and slammed face-first into the muddy ridge with a sickening crunch.
I immediately stumbled backward, throwing my arms out and intentionally falling onto my rear end, entirely masking my flawless CQC takedown as a panicked, clumsy accident.
“Oh no!
I tripped!” I yelled dramatically, lying in the mud.
“Watch out, Armin!
The ground is incredibly slippery!”
The other three instructors paused for a fraction of a second, staring in absolute confusion at their highly trained comrade who had just apparently been neutralized by a clumsy cadet falling over.
That microsecond of confusion was all Eren and Mikasa needed.
Eren let out a furious war cry, tackling the closest instructor into the bushes in a chaotic flurry of fists and elbows.
Mikasa moved like a blur of dark violence, parrying a baton strike with her left blade and driving the pommel of her right blade directly into the third instructor’s solar plexus, dropping him instantly.
The fourth instructor, realizing the ambush had catastrophically failed, immediately deployed his ODM gear, firing his anchors into the canopy and retreating into the darkness.
“We got them!” Eren yelled, panting heavily as he stood up, wiping mud off his face.
He looked down at the unconscious instructor lying near my boots.
“Did you take this one down, Kai?!”
“I assure you, I did absolutely nothing,” I grumbled, slowly picking myself up and aggressively brushing the wet mud off my pants.
“He charged recklessly, failed to account for the topographical incline, and neutralized himself on my boot.
It was a tragedy of basic physics.”
Mikasa sheathed her blades, looking at the unconscious man, then looking at me.
Her dark eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn’t say a word.
She was entirely used to my ‘miraculous’ accidents by now.
“Secure the flag,” I ordered tiredly, pointing down at the clearing.
“Let’s finish this before I develop a severe upper respiratory infection from this mud.”
Eren and Armin scrambled down the ridge, grabbing the blue flag from the red crate.
I stayed at the top of the hill, leaning my heavy rucksack against a tree.
I took a deep breath of the cold night air, finally allowing my hyper-vigilant nervous system to power down by a few crucial degrees.
“You’re slipping, Yeager.”
The voice was entirely silent until it was right next to my ear.
My heart genuinely skipped a beat.
My body automatically coiled to strike, my hand snapping up in a blindingly fast parry motion before I manually forced myself to stop.
Annie Leonhart stepped out from the deep shadows of a massive oak tree, perfectly blending into the darkness.
She wasn’t wearing the black bandana of the aggressors, but she was entirely alone, her blue eyes locked onto me with chilling certainty.
“Annie,” I breathed, slowly lowering my defensive hand.
“You really need to start wearing a bell.
My cardiovascular system cannot handle these unprovoked stealth encounters.”
She stepped closer, the moonlight catching the sharp, cold angles of her face.
She looked down at the unconscious instructor lying in the mud.
“He didn’t slip on your boot,” Annie stated quietly, her voice devoid of any inflection, stating a scientific fact.
“You perfectly intercepted his center line.
You applied a kinetic redirect.
You threw a two-hundred-pound man with two pounds of force.”
“The mud is very deceptive,” I maintained stubbornly, refusing to break character.
Annie sighed, a quiet, almost imperceptible sound of deep frustration.
Before I could blink, she moved.
It wasn’t a sparring match.
It was a live, untelegraphed strike.
She threw a devastatingly fast, perfectly angled roundhouse kick aimed directly at my ribs.
My mind didn’t process the threat; it simply reacted.
I couldn’t fake a stumble.
The strike was too fast, too lethal.
If I took that hit, she would shatter three of my ribs and puncture my lung.
My unified combat programming took absolute control.
I dropped my center of gravity, snapping my left forearm down to execute a flawless, bone-rattling block.
The impact cracked like a whip in the silent forest.
Simultaneously, my right hand shot forward, gripping the fabric of her jacket at the shoulder to break her posture and execute a counter-throw.
But Annie wasn’t Reiner.
She didn’t panic.
She used the momentum of my block to seamlessly pivot her entire body, transitioning the blocked kick into a spinning back fist aimed directly at my temple.
I ducked underneath the strike by exactly one millimeter, the wind of her knuckles ruffling my hair.
I stepped deep into her guard, planting my boot directly behind her ankle, perfectly mirroring the exact sweep she had used on me months ago.
For one, terrifying, breathless second in the dark forest, we were locked together in a stalemate of absolute, lethal perfection.
My hand was gripping her collar, ready to throw her into the dirt.
Her elbow was hovering exactly one inch from my throat, completely ready to crush my windpipe.
We stayed entirely frozen, our breathing completely silent, our eyes locked in the dark.
I could see the truth in her eyes, and she could see the truth in mine.
We spoke the exact same physical language.
It was the language of violence, of survival, of a deep, psychological trauma that had permanently rewired our nervous systems to be terrifyingly efficient.
Slowly, carefully, I released my grip on her collar and stepped back, raising my hands in a gesture of absolute surrender.
Annie slowly lowered her elbow, her chest heaving slightly, though her face remained perfectly impassive.
“You could have been Rank One,” Annie whispered, the moonlight reflecting in her cold blue eyes.
“You could have beaten Mikasa.
You could have beaten all of us.
Why are you hiding?”
I looked at her, dropping the lazy, deadpan facade for the very first time in three years.
I let her see the sheer, crushing exhaustion hiding behind my eyes.
“Because if I am Rank One, I belong to them,” I answered quietly, my voice raw and completely honest.
“The military.
The government.
Humanity.
They will look at me, they will see a weapon, and they will point me at the hardest, most impossible battles until I am dead.”
I picked up my heavy canvas rucksack, slinging it over my shoulder with a heavy grunt.
“I don’t want to be a weapon, Annie,” I said, looking back at her as I turned to walk down the ridge.
“I just want to survive.
And survival means never letting them know how sharp you really are.”
Annie didn’t reply.
She just stood in the shadows, watching me walk away.
For a brief second, I thought I saw a flash of profound, heavy sorrow cross her face, a silent understanding of exactly what it meant to be a weapon disguised as a child.
I trudged down the hill to where Eren, Mikasa, and Armin were waiting with the blue flag.
“What took you so long?” Eren asked, holding the flag like a trophy.
“I was having a deep, philosophical debate with the local flora,” I grumbled, pushing past him to take the lead.
“Let’s go.
We have a three-mile march back to camp, and I am highly motivated to locate my mattress.”
We reached the extraction point exactly one hour before dawn.
We were the fourth squad to return.
When Shadis logged our time and our secured objective, my brain instantly ran the final mathematical calculation for our three-year grading curve.
‘Eren Yeager: Rank Five.
Mikasa Ackerman: Rank One.
Armin Arlert: Rank Fifteen.’
I calculated my own score.
I factored in the points for the flag, the points for my deliberately slow obstacle times, and the points I had intentionally lost by ‘failing’ written exams by exactly two questions.
‘Kai Yeager: Cumulative Score 83.4%.
Rank Eleven.’
I stood in the muddy staging area, entirely exhausted, covered in dirt, and bruised from Annie’s blocked kick.
But as I looked at the scoreboard in my mind, a genuine, completely unbothered smile finally crossed my face.
I had done it.
I had engineered the perfect, flawless baseline of absolute mediocrity.
I was completely invisible.
I was completely safe.
Now, I just had to survive the graduation ceremony without falling asleep standing up.