The warehouse was the only place Eren trusted enough for this.
No windows at eye level. One door, and he could hear it creak from thirty feet away. Carla thought he came out here to organize supplies. Mostly, that was even true.
He sat cross-legged between a stack of crates and let his eyes close.
"System."
[Yes, Host?]
The voice arrived the way it always did — not quite sound, not quite thought, sitting somewhere uncomfortably between the two. He’d stopped flinching at it months ago. Mostly.
"Daily draw."
[Daily draw available. Spinning...]
A wheel of light bloomed behind his closed eyes, spinning through categories too fast to read — COMBAT, VITALITY, KNOWLEDGE, ??? — before slowing, stuttering, and stopping.
[Result: Minor Reflex Enhancement (Tier 1). Reaction time improved by 12%. Permanent.]
Eren exhaled. Not nothing. Not much, either. He’d had worse days — the week he pulled three straight junk results still stung a little — but he’d also had the day he got Basic Hand-to-Hand Mastery and spent two weeks moving like he’d been born knowing how to fight, before Hannes cornered him about it and he’d had to fumble through a lie about copying moves from Survey Corps veterans passing through town.
Twelve percent wasn’t going to save anyone. But it stacked. Everything stacked, if he was patient, and patience was the one resource he actually had in surplus. Six months of daily draws, weekly draws, the occasional lucky pull from an event banner the system ran for reasons it never explained — it added up to a kid who could react faster, hit harder, and endure more than any nine-year-old had a right to.
The problem was that "faster than any nine-year-old had a right to" was exactly the kind of thing people noticed.
"Log today’s result. Same as before — don’t show it unless I ask."
[Logged.]
He sat there another minute, turning the number over. Twelve percent. He tried to picture it as something concrete — a second shaved off a step, a heartbeat’s worth of warning before a hand closed around his wrist — and found he couldn’t. It would just be there when he needed it, or it wouldn’t, and he wouldn’t know which until the moment demanded an answer.
That was the whole problem with the system, if he was honest with himself. It never told him if what he had would be enough. It only ever told him what he’d gotten.
He was halfway through refiling a crate of bandages when the door creaked.
Thirty feet of warning, and he still nearly dropped the crate.
"There you are." Mikasa stood in the doorway, rain-damp from an errand, scarf a little crooked. "Your mother’s been calling you for ten minutes."
"Sorry. Lost track of time."
She stepped inside instead of leaving, which he should have expected and somehow never did. Her eyes moved over the shelves — the neat rows of supplies, more of them than any household needed, arranged with a precision that didn’t belong to a child.
"You’ve reorganized this three times this month."
"It’s a system." The word came out before he could stop it, and he had to fight not to wince.
"A system." She said it slowly, testing the word like it didn’t quite fit what she was looking at. "For bandages."
"For everything." He gestured vaguely at the shelves, hoping vague would pass for casual. "Medicine here, food there, tools by the door in case you need them fast. It’s just — organized."
Mikasa didn’t answer right away. She had a way of going quiet that felt louder than most people’s shouting, like the silence itself was doing the work of a question.
"You’ve been different," she said finally. "Since winter. Maybe before that."
His pulse ticked up a fraction — not the reflex draw, just plain nerves — and he made himself keep stacking bandages instead of freezing.
"Different how?"
"You flinch less. You used to jump at loud noises. You don’t anymore." She tilted her head slightly, the way she did when she was working through a puzzle she didn’t have all the pieces for. "And you knew, last week, that the storm was coming before anyone else did. You told your mother to bring the wash in an hour before the sky even changed."
"Lucky guess."
"You don’t guess. Not about things like that." She wasn’t accusing him of anything — that wasn’t in her voice at all. If anything, it sounded more like worry. "You watch the walls like you’re waiting for them to do something."
Because I know what they’re going to do.
He didn’t say that. He set the last bandage roll down instead, careful with his hands, careful with his face.
"I just don’t like being caught off guard," he said. "Not since — " He stopped himself, because the sentence didn’t have a true ending that he could give her. Not since the wall fell and I watched you both die. Not since I lived through this once already and failed everyone I loved.
"Since what?"
"Since I got old enough to notice how big the world is." It wasn’t nothing. It also wasn’t the truth, and from the way her eyes stayed on him a moment too long, he thought she’d noticed that too — the same way she’d noticed the wall-staring, the same way she noticed everything.
She let it go. That was the thing about Mikasa that he was starting to understand wasn’t just quiet devotion — it was a kind of trust that scared him more than suspicion would have. She let things go because she believed that eventually he’d tell her. He wasn’t sure yet if that belief was going to save her or get her killed.
"Come inside," she said instead. "Before your mother sends Hannes to drag you back by the ear."
"That happened one time."
"It happened twice." She was already turning for the door. "I was there for both."
He watched her go, then looked back at the shelves — the food, the medicine, the maps folded into a drawer nobody else knew existed — and felt the countdown tick a little louder in his chest.
One hundred and seventy-nine days.
Whatever the system gave him between now and then, it was going to have to be enough. Because the people he was trying to save were starting to notice the shape of the thing he was hiding, and he only had so much time left to decide how much of the truth they could survive hearing.