The first thing I noticed was the smell. Smoke, damp earth, and a rancid mix of sweat and unwashed clothes made my stomach turn before I even opened my eyes. It wasn't the stale, familiar air of my bedroom. This was far worse, the suffocating stench of hundreds of people packed into a tight space, stripped of even the simplest chance to clean themselves.
I opened my eyes slowly, finding myself staring up at a grayish tarp stretched over several crudely cut wooden posts. It was stained with dark blotches, riddled with small holes, and frayed to the point of tearing. For a few seconds, I just stared at it, completely blank. I waited for my brain to shake off the grogginess and explain why on earth I was sleeping under a makeshift tent. The last thing I remembered was being in my bed, so I figured this had to be an unusually vivid dream.
But then I turned my head.
Just inches away, a black-haired girl lay curled into a ball, clutching a red scarf around her neck. On my other side, a blonde boy shivered beneath a threadbare blanket covered in rough patches.
I pushed myself up slightly, frowning as I looked at them. They both looked strikingly familiar, though I couldn't wrap my head around why. A girl with black hair and a blonde boy meant nothing; there were thousands of kids who fit that description. Besides, my mind was a total mess. Where was I? Who were these kids? Why was I sleeping next to them in a filthy tent? I desperately searched for a logical explanation, wondering if my friends had pulled a massive prank on me or if I'd passed out in some random place after a night out, but none of it added up.
Then, I lifted my hands in front of my face, and my stomach plummeted.
They looked exactly as they did when I was a kid. I turned them over and over, half-expecting them to change back at any second, before frantically touching my arms, my chest, and my face. Even my clothes were wrong, made of a coarse, scratchy fabric that chafed against my skin. It took me several long seconds to accept what I was seeing, my first instinct being that I was losing my mind. The body I knew was gone; it was as if I had been forcibly reset back to my childhood.
"No, no, no... Hold on, this can't be happening" I muttered.
I ran my hands through my hair and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to force myself to wake up. God knew I had spent too many nights running on two hours of sleep, scrolling through internet videos instead of studying. It wouldn't have surprised me if my brain was throwing a bizarre nightmare at me. I just needed to wake up in my own bed, find my phone plugged into the wall, and face the pile of tasks I'd procrastinated on the day before. I took a deep breath and waited.
But when I opened my eyes again, the same filthy canvas and the same two sleeping children were still there.
"Come on, pull yourself together... Wake up..."
I tried to stand, but a brutal, blinding flash of pain shot through my skull before I could even find my footing. I collapsed back onto my knees, burying my face in my hands and clenching my teeth to choke back a scream. This wasn't a normal headache. It felt like someone was violently ramming hundreds of foreign memories straight into my brain, images flashing and collapsing into each other so fast I couldn't tell where one horror ended and the next began.
First, I felt the warmth of a large hand ruffling my hair, accompanied by the distant laugh of a woman cooking. Then came a wooden house, the sound of rhythmic footsteps, and a massive city shadowed by towering stone walls. It felt peaceful, almost nostalgic, until the ground violently shuddered and the air split open with human screams.
I saw houses crumbling into splinters, civilians trampling each other in the streets, and soldiers desperately trying to organize an evacuation that was doomed from the start. A woman was trapped beneath the wreckage of her own home, reaching out her hand while screaming for us to run. I wanted to move, to help her, but I was entirely paralyzed. Then, a towering monster appeared. It wore a sickening, wide grin that had nothing human about it. Its teeth clamped down on the woman's body. The sound was sickening, a wet, crushing snap. I felt that child's terror as if it were my own, a wave of despair so heavy it suffocated me even after the vision faded. I wasn't watching a scene play out on a screen anymore. I was experiencing it first-hand, feeling the exact terror of someone who had just watched his world burn.
But the nightmare wasn't over.
The vision shifted to a dark, rain-slicked forest. A man with glasses was kneeling in front of me, sobbing hysterically as he tried to explain something I couldn't comprehend. His face was contorted with absolute despair, and his hands shook violently as he pulled out a syringe. I felt the sharp prick in my arm, followed by an agonizing heat that tore through my veins, breaking and remolding my very bones. The man kept begging for forgiveness, but my throat was frozen. Then came the overwhelming stench of blood, the sickening warmth of raw flesh between my teeth, and the horrific dawning realization that I had just devoured the man in front of me.
As the violence of those memories began to settle, a different layer of information filled the gaps. Memories of a childhood that didn't belong to me: a quaint house in Shiganshina, petty arguments with my parents, and two friends who had anchored my entire existence. I looked at the black-haired girl and the blonde boy again, but this time, their faces weren't a mystery.
Mikasa. Armin.They were the exact same children sleeping beside me, except now I was seeing them through the eyes of someone who had bled, laughed, and cried with them for a years.
I snapped my eyes open and scrambled backward, tearing myself away from the dirt floor as if it had burned me. My breath hitched, my chest heaving, and my entire body drenched in cold sweat despite the morning chill. For a long minute, I couldn't think. The fall of Shiganshina, Carla's death, the forest, and the crushing guilt of consuming Grisha replayed in my mind with terrifying clarity. But the sheer weight of what this meant hit me harder than the trauma. I hadn't just woken up in some random kid's body.
I was in the body of Eren Yeager. I was in the world of Attack on Titan and his memories were now mine.
The realization struck me with the force of a physical blow, leaving me entirely numb. In my previous life, I had watched the show. I knew the lore, the plot points, and the fates of every single player on this board. But it was one thing to see them drawn on a flat canvas, and a completely different thing to have them right in front of you, rendered in three dimensions, breathing the same stale air just inches away. That's why I hadn't recognized them at first; my brain simply couldn't bridge the gap between real, flesh-and-blood people and the 2D versions I knew. Besides, I'd been a bit too occupied panicking over my sudden shrinkage to analyze their facial structures. It was Eren's memories that finally forced the pieces into place.
"Eren..."
The voice snapped me out of my trance. Mikasa had stirred, her dark eyes locking onto me with immediate concern. The iconic red scarf was wrapped snugly around her neck, her hair slightly tangled from sleeping on the hard ground. Beside her, Armin began to sit up, rubbing his puffy eyes as he tried to figure out what was wrong. With Eren's memories firmly rooted in my mind, there was no longer any room for doubt. These were Mikasa Ackerman and Armin Arlert, my childhood friends.
And then, the exact context of my surroundings clicked. Keith Shadis had dropped me off at this refugee camp after finding me wandering alone and catatonic in the woods following Shiganshina's fall. Grisha had already injected me with the serum. He had already passed the torch.
At that moment, the Attack Titan and the Founding Titan resided inside of me, though I still had no idea what to do with them. Everything I had once debated as mere fiction had just become my absolute reality. And as the terrifying scope of what lay ahead loomed over me, a cold, deep-seated fear took root, a fear that no online theory or ending discussion could have ever prepared me to face.