There are very few moments in this miserable, Titan-infested world that I would describe as genuinely spiritual experiences.
Surviving a biological apocalypse usually limits your access to the finer things in life.
But as I sat cross-legged on my thin, lumpy mattress in the pitch-black cadet barracks, holding my monthly system rewards, I felt a profound, overwhelming sense of inner peace.
It was the first of the month in the year 850.
Tomorrow was our official graduation ceremony.
I had spent my last hard-earned copper coins and my single free monthly draw to pull from the void, desperately hoping for a weapon or a medical breakthrough before we were deployed to the field.
Instead, the universe had handed me the two greatest quality-of-life upgrades a perpetually exhausted, highly stressed mechanic could ever ask for.
I held the first item up in the faint moonlight filtering through the window.
It was a pair of heavy-duty, industrial-grade noise-canceling earmuffs.
They were matte black, entirely analog, and possessed absolutely no electronic components.
But according to the system interface that had flashed in my mind, they were engineered with a hyper-dense acoustic foam that blocked out exactly one hundred percent of ambient sound.
I gently placed them over my ears.
Instantly, the world ceased to exist.
The loud, rhythmic snoring of fifty teenage boys vanished.
The howling wind outside the wooden barracks disappeared.
The faint, annoying creak of the floorboards was completely eradicated.
It was a vacuum of absolute, pristine silence.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced.
I pulled them down around my neck, letting the ambient noise rush back in just so I could appreciate the contrast, and turned my attention to the second item sitting on my blanket.
It was a sleek, stainless steel French press, accompanied by a small, unassuming burlap sack.
I opened the sack and inhaled deeply.
The rich, intoxicating aroma of freshly roasted, impossibly dark espresso beans hit my olfactory sensors like a physical punch of pure dopamine.
My brain—which constantly burned thousands of calories running complex topographical geometry and threat-assessment algorithms—practically wept with joy.
It was a bag of infinite coffee beans.
Every morning at sunrise, the burlap sack would magically replenish itself with exactly enough beans to brew one massive, lethally caffeinated cup of dark roast.
I didn’t have superhuman strength.
I didn’t have armor plating.
But as I sat in the dark, clutching my noise-canceling earmuffs and my infinite coffee, I truly felt invincible.
“I am going to survive this war,” I whispered to the burlap sack.
The next morning, the 104th Training Corps stood in perfect, rigid formation on the main parade grounds.
The summer sun was blindingly bright, beating down on our crisp, newly issued military jackets.
Commandant Keith Shadis stood on the raised wooden podium, his hands clasped behind his back, looking out over the sea of surviving recruits with his usual, terrifying scowl.
“Today, you graduate!” Shadis’s voice boomed across the dirt field.
“You are no longer useless, weeping children!
You are soldiers of humanity!
You will offer up your hearts, your blood, and your lives to ensure our survival!”
I stood in the third row, my posture perfectly locked into a flawless, energy-saving military stance.
My face was entirely deadpan, but internally, I was running the final calculations on my three-year academic and physical record.
‘Cumulative physical scores: deliberately tanked by eight percent.
Written exams: intentionally flubbed the final essay on logistical supply chains.
CQC record: successfully manipulated to appear wildly inconsistent,’ my mind reviewed the data.
“I will now announce the Top Ten graduates of the 104th Training Corps!” Shadis bellowed.
“These recruits have earned the right to apply for the Military Police Brigade in the interior!”
I held my breath.
If I heard my name, I was going to intentionally roll my ankle on the podium steps just to prove a point.
“Rank One: Mikasa Ackerman!”
Mikasa stepped forward, her face completely devoid of emotion, executing a flawless salute.
I let out a quiet breath of relief.
“Rank Two: Reiner Braun!
Rank Three: Bertholdt Hoover!
Rank Four: Annie Leonhart!”
Annie stepped out of the formation.
As she saluted, her cold blue eyes flicked over to my position in the crowd for exactly one tenth of a second.
It was a silent, entirely unamused acknowledgment of my successful, fraudulent campaign of mediocrity.
I didn’t react, keeping my eyes fixed firmly on Shadis’s bald head.
“Rank Five: Eren Yeager!”
Eren stepped forward, his green eyes burning with that familiar, manic intensity.
He looked like he wanted to jump off the podium and bite a Titan right in the neck.
Shadis continued down the line.
Jean Kirschtein took Rank Six.
Marco Bodt took Seven.
Connie Springer, miraculously, secured Eight.
Sasha Braus took Nine.
And Historia Reiss—thanks largely to her sudden, highly efficient lifting techniques and improved stamina—secured Rank Ten.
“The rest of you are hereby officially assigned to the Garrison or the Survey Corps!
Dismissed!” Shadis roared.
The formation broke into a massive, echoing cheer of relief and triumph.
Hats were thrown into the air.
Recruits hugged each other, crying and laughing.
I just stood there, a massive, genuine smile slowly creeping onto my face.
Rank Eleven.
I had perfectly, mathematically nailed it.
I was the absolute highest-ranking average soldier in the entire military.
I had no leadership responsibilities, no target on my back, and absolutely zero expectations placed upon my shoulders.
I was officially a background character.
That night, the military hosted a massive graduation banquet in the mess hall.
The room was packed with hundreds of rowdy, incredibly loud teenagers, all drinking cheap ale and aggressively celebrating the fact that they hadn’t died in training.
I was sitting in the darkest, most secluded corner of the room, executing the greatest tactical maneuver of my entire life.
I had my heavy, black earmuffs firmly secured over my ears.
The visual chaos of the mess hall was unfolding entirely in silence.
It was like watching a high-budget silent film.
Fifty feet away, I watched Eren stand up on a table, waving a wooden mug of ale, clearly giving one of his deeply exhausting, highly motivational speeches about joining the Survey Corps and slaughtering the enemy.
Jean Kirschtein stood up, his face red with anger, clearly arguing that the Military Police was the only sane choice.
Eren leaped off the table.
Jean shoved him.
Suddenly, they were engaged in a violent, chaotic fistfight, rolling across the wooden floorboards while the rest of the cadets cheered and placed bets.
I took a slow, highly sophisticated sip of my freshly brewed, pitch-black espresso from a stolen ceramic mug.
The coffee was incredible.
It was thick, bitter, and completely flooded my hyper-active brain with a beautiful, soothing layer of caffeine.
I watched Eren successfully put Jean into a highly illegal headlock.
I didn’t hear a single word of the argument.
I didn’t hear the cheering.
I just drank my coffee, entirely at peace with the universe.
Suddenly, a hand tapped my shoulder.
My combat instincts flared instantly.
My right hand dropped from my mug, moving to intercept a potential strike, before my visual cortex registered Armin’s concerned, entirely non-threatening face.
I pulled the left earmuff off, allowing the deafening roar of the mess hall to crash back into my reality.
“—are you even listening, Kai?” Armin was shouting over the noise.
“I was actively utilizing military hardware to prevent auditory fatigue,” I replied smoothly, taking another sip of my espresso.
“What’s the emergency?”
“It’s not an emergency, it’s just…
I’m submitting my application tomorrow,” Armin said, looking down at his hands, his knuckles white.
“I’m joining the Survey Corps with Eren and Mikasa.
Are you…
are you really coming with us?”
I looked at the blonde boy.
He was terrified.
He was brilliant, tactical, and incredibly brave, but he was physically fragile, and he knew exactly what the Survey Corps mortality rate was.
“I have to, Armin,” I sighed, setting my mug down.
“If I go to the Garrison, Eren will inevitably launch himself into a Titan’s mouth within forty-eight hours out of sheer, unadulterated spite.
Mikasa will follow him into the mouth to save him.
You will try to negotiate with the Titan.
It’s a logistical nightmare.”
I leaned back against the wooden wall, the caffeine buzzing pleasantly behind my eyes.
“Besides, the interior is a trap.
The Military Police are corrupt, their gear maintenance is statistically abysmal, and I absolutely refuse to deal with the bureaucratic paperwork of the inner walls.
The Survey Corps offers high mortality, but low supervision.
It’s the optimal environment for my specific skill set.”
Armin stared at me, trying to decipher my deeply cynical logic.
“So…
you’re joining the most dangerous branch of the military…
because you hate paperwork?”
“I hate a lot of things, Armin.
Paperwork is just in the top three,” I deadpanned.
I pulled the earmuff back down over my ear, plunging myself back into the blissful, silent void, and returned to my coffee while Eren and Jean continued to violently destroy the mess hall furniture.
The next morning, reality came crashing back with the subtlety of a falling brick.
We were deployed to Trost District.
It was a beautiful, painfully clear Tuesday.
The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and the sheer, idyllic normalcy of the atmosphere was making my paranoia violently short-circuit.
My squad had been assigned wall duty.
We were currently standing on top of the fifty-meter stone wall that separated Trost from the Titan-infested wilderness, tasked with the mind-numbing chore of cleaning and maintaining the heavy iron artillery cannons.
“I can’t believe we actually graduated,” Thomas Wagner sighed, leaning heavily against his mop.
“I can’t believe Sasha actually stole meat from the officers’ pantry,” Connie Springer laughed, pointing at the brunette girl who was currently drooling over a massive, incredibly illegal chunk of cured ham she had hidden in her jacket.
“We’ll share it later!” Sasha whispered fiercely, her eyes darting around for commanding officers.
“A celebratory feast!
Kai, do you want a piece?!”
I was sitting on the edge of the stone wall, entirely ignoring the cannons, my legs dangling casually over the fifty-meter drop.
“I am currently fasting to maintain my aerodynamic drag coefficient, Sasha,” I lied, my eyes rapidly scanning the horizon.
“Also, if Commandant Pixis catches you with that, he will physically throw you off this wall, and I am entirely too tired to catch you.”
My heart was hammering against my ribs.
My palms were sweating inside my leather gloves.
My brain was running a constant, terrifying calculation.
‘Year 845: Wall Maria falls.
Year 850: Graduation.
The chronological timeline dictates that the Colossal Titan’s secondary strike is statistically imminent.’
I wasn’t cleaning cannons.
I was obsessively checking the internal mechanisms of my heavily modified ODM gear.
I had removed the restrictor plate from my gas regulator.
My gear was fully unlocked, capable of deploying anchors in 0.4 seconds and generating enough kinetic thrust to snap a normal human’s neck.
I had layered my wire spools in WD-40.
My blades were perfectly sharpened.
I was as ready as a twelve-year-old mechanic could possibly be.
But the crushing, suffocating weight of impending doom was making it incredibly hard to breathe.
Eren stepped up to the edge of the wall next to me, resting his boot on the stone parapet, looking out over the town of Trost.
“It’s peaceful,” Eren noted, the wind ruffling his brown hair.
“But not for long.
Once we join the Scouts, we’re taking the fight to them.”
“Eren, please do not tempt the universe,” I muttered, aggressively tightening the leather straps on my thigh holsters.
“The universe is highly vindictive and possesses an incredibly dark sense of humor.”
“You worry too much, Kai,” Eren scoffed, crossing his arms.
Suddenly, the wind stopped.
The entire atmosphere instantly depressurized, creating a heavy, suffocating vacuum that popped my eardrums.
The birds in the town below instantly went completely, utterly silent.
My survival instincts didn’t just ping.
They violently detonated inside my skull, flooding my central nervous system with a lethal dose of pure, unadulterated adrenaline.
‘Catastrophic kinetic event detected.
Immediate evasion required,’ my brain roared, entirely bypassing my conscious thought.
Directly behind Eren, the air shattered.
A blinding, apocalyptic bolt of golden lightning struck the ground just outside the wall with a deafening, bone-rattling CRACK.
The sheer concussive force of the displacement shockwave hit the top of the wall like a physical freight train.
“EREN!” I roared, but my voice was completely swallowed by the sound of the explosion.
A massive, boiling cloud of pressurized steam erupted into the sky.
And rising slowly from the thick, suffocating smoke, completely towering over the fifty-meter wall, was a massive, skinless red head.
The Colossal Titan had returned.
The shockwave violently threw the entire squad off their feet.
Thomas and Mina were thrown backward onto the stone walkway.
Samuel was blasted completely over the edge, plummeting toward the town below.
I didn’t fall.
My combat programming took absolute, terrifying control.
In the fraction of a second the shockwave hit, I had already dropped my center of gravity, digging my heavy boots into the stone.
I snapped my right hand to my hip, squeezing the highly modified, hair-trigger copper coil of my ODM gear.
BANG.
The anchor fired with concussive velocity, biting six inches deep into the solid stone of the parapet in exactly 0.4 seconds.
The steel cable went instantly taut, flawlessly anchoring my body against the hurricane-force wind of the steam blast.
I stood my ground, my coat violently whipping in the wind, my eyes locked on the towering, grotesque face of the God of Destruction.
The Colossal Titan slowly raised its massive, skinless arm, pulling back for a sweeping strike to clear the cannons off the wall.
“Samuel!” Sasha screamed from the walkway, diving toward the edge as the boy plummeted toward his death.
“I’ve got him!” I barked, my voice entirely devoid of panic, dropping into a cold, lethal tactical register.
I didn’t hesitate.
I severed my anchor line, intentionally throwing myself backward off the fifty-meter wall.
The wind roared in my ears as I entered a fatal freefall.
My brain instantly calculated the trajectory of Samuel’s falling body, the drag coefficient of the air, and the tensile limit of my steel cables.
‘Velocity matching.
Trajectory optimal.
Executing intercept,’ my mind processed flawlessly.
I fired my left anchor directly into the stone face of the wall, using the pendulum momentum to violently violently swing my body in a massive, sweeping arc.
I shot through the air, catching Samuel by the collar of his jacket in mid-air, entirely arresting his downward momentum with a bone-jarring jerk.
I slammed my boots against the vertical face of the wall, carrying Samuel’s weight with effortless, mechanical leverage.
Above us, the Colossal Titan’s massive hand swept across the top of the wall, shattering the heavy iron cannons like they were cheap toys and sending massive chunks of stone raining down toward the town.
I hung on the side of the wall, holding the terrified, hyperventilating Samuel by his collar, staring up at the boiling steam and the chaotic, echoing screams of the citizens below.
The five years of peace were officially over.
“Well, system,” I muttered grimly, my grip tightening on the handles of my gear as I looked down at the inevitable breach of the Trost gate.
“I really hope you have some duct tape left.
Because we are going to need a lot of it.”
_______________________
Peels one heavy eyelid open and gestures weakly at the screen…
Typing_In_My_Sleep here!
First of all, a massive thank you for all the incredible support you guys have been showing!
It genuinely keeps this sleep-deprived zombie going, even when the endless exam preparation and chemistry reactions are actively trying to fry my few remaining brain cells.
Since you guys hit the halfway point on that last milestone, I am honoring the math.
Enjoy the update!
I am going to go pass out on top of my anatomy notes now…
snore.