Hey everyone, Rhov here.
On April 30th, I got a call from my sister that our mother had suddenly passed away from a massive heart attack. I hopped on a plane as soon as I could and flew 2000 miles back to Arkansas. I've been helping my dad, who had a stroke a few years ago, and my little sister, who has cerebral palsy. My mother was their caretaker, so losing her is a huge blow to our family.
Between sorting through the "organized chaos" my mother had for all of her bills, calling insurances, lawyers, banks, and working with my siblings to plan the funeral, I truly have not had time to be on a computer for more than a few minutes. Even this note took me two weeks to write, getting little bits in at a time.
Dealing with all this right around Mother's Day is extra rough on one's emotions, getting bombarded with advertisements on sales, BUY THE PERFECT GIFT FOR YOUR MOTHER, all while trying to arrange when to pick up her ashes and arguing with people about creating a headstone so we can properly bury her. It's hard to focus on anything not related to my family right now. I know it's normal to not be in the right headspace at a time like this, but that doesn't mean the surreal feeling, shock, and disconnection between the strong person I need to be for my family's sake and the fragile person breaking down deep inside isn't very disconcerting.
So please, be patient with me.
I want all of you to call someone you haven't spoken to in a while. Just two days before that dreadful call, I was thinking, "I haven't talked to Mom in weeks. I should call her on Sunday and see if she needs anything for Mother's Day." I didn't get the chance, and not getting to hear her voice one last time really weighs heavy on me right now.
So please, go tell someone how much you love them. Then tell me in the comments who you spoke to. That will cheer me up, simply knowing that I could bring a bit of joy to both you and someone who means a lot to you. Never take your loved ones for granted, even those who seem so strong, because you truly never know when you'll lose them.
Take care, be safe, and stay healthy.
Now, onto the chapter.
Eren looked at the bloody paper filled with numbers like it was possessed with a ghost from his past.
His father's cipher!
Was his father alive?
No. One other person could possibly know about this cipher.
Zeke!
Magath looked intrigued. "Your father had his own cipher?"
"It wasn't much," Eren muttered, still in shock. "More like a game."
Memories of a happier past flooded into his mind: his mother's gentle smile as she handed over a letter addressed to Eren and postmarked in some British city, the eagerness as he got to solve one of these puzzles, his determination to write back using the same cipher, and how proud he felt when his father returned and praised him.
The struggle between memories of his father's kindness and the adulterous man he grew up to despise clashed in his heart.
"A game?" asked Magath.
"It was how we wrote back and forth when he was in England. He said, this way, Mother wouldn't know what I was saying."
Magath picked up his pen to jot this down and muttered, "More like, so his British family wouldn't know he was writing to an illegitimate son."
Fury flashed in Eren's eyes. Illegitimate? He was the one his father lived with! His father abandoned Zeke and only visited him a few times a year. He had more right to call that man my father than the son who did not grow up with him.
Then again, his father left him when he was ten. He didn't really get to grow up with his father around. His father went back to his British family, leaving him and his mother to the brutality of the Brownshirts.
Eren knew he had to bite back that anger for now. He glanced over at Levi again, naked and bruised. He needed to cooperate if they wanted to get out of this alive.
Perhaps if he worked with the Gestapo...
Did he really believe they would show him and Levi mercy?
There was no mercy in the hearts of the Gestapo.
"Can you solve it?"
Eren pulled his attention back over to the chief inspector. "It's quite simple, really. A basic number-to-letter substitution."
"If it was that simple, we would have been able to crack this."
"Well, you need to run it through three different ciphers. First a Caesar cipher, shifting letters. The coin is the key. You shift the letters based on the worth of the coin in the lowest denomination of the country's currency. In British money, there are twelve pence per shilling, so when writing out the cipher, you shift the letters by minus twelve—since, in a sense, you're losing a shilling—and the recipient adds twelve to solve it, since they are gaining a shilling. After shifting the letters, you run it through an Atbash cipher."
"I'm not familiar with that one."
"Alphabetical substitution. You write the alphabet backwards; the first letter in the alphabet becomes the last. My father said Jews used to write secret messages this way."
"Jews?" Magath questioned suspiciously.
"Well, it's one of the simplest ciphers out there, and one of the oldest in the world. Once you've substituted the letters, that's when you use the number substitution. A is one, B is two, etc. Like I said, it's pretty simple."
To the side, Koslow muttered, "He calls that simple?"
Magath finished writing his notes and looked over them. "Three layers of ciphers to decode it? Impressive. You were a child when you learned this, right?"
"Probably six or seven years old. As soon as I could write letters and do basic arithmetic, my father started to teach me. Simple ones at first, a Caesar cipher set to one letter, gradually adding more layers."
"Is that all there is to solving it?"
"No. He would also add safeguards, multiple null ciphers. I can tell just from looking at it, there are nulls written all over the place."
"Like what?" Magath asked, writing down what Eren said.
"You need the coin again. You take the last digit of the coin's year and count out that many spaces to add a null. The null number is the last two digits of the coin's year—25 in this case. Also, between every double letter within a single word, you add in another null. A null is also added to the beginning; my father started to do that after the coin was lost in the mail. Double zeros mark periods, 77 is used for question marks, 99 is a comma, and XOXO marks the end of the message."
"XOXO?" Magath asked in confusion.
Eren smiled softly to himself. "It means kisses and hugs. I can see already, right at the end: 15-24-15-24. Decoded, that's X-O-X-O." He muttered under his breath, "Father loved to use shillings because it would encode into OXOX, so he would tease it was kisses and hugs either way."
Magath showed no emotion to the adorable childhood memory. After he was done writing down notes, he showed what he had to Eren. "Read over that. Make sure I didn't leave anything out."
Eren hesitated as he realized the truth. "You have letters from Zeke, codes you can't break."
"Oh, we can break them, but that will take time, a luxury Germany doesn't have. Will you help Germany bring this British enemy to justice?"
Eren's mouth tightened. On one hand, this was family, but on the other hand, Zeke was a Brit, an enemy, seeking the downfall of Eren's homeland. With determination, he looked over the notes Magath wrote.
"Make sure to mention, the numbers are in two-digit form. This means when you're finding the nulls, you count the letters—every two digits—not the numbers themselves. I should have clarified that."
Magath pulled the paper back and added that. "Solve it."
Eren's eyes widened. "Pardon?"
"This message. Decode it."
Eren was stunned that they would allow him to read it. If this was a secret message from Zeke, it must be something the Gestapo would not want him to see.
Unless they planned to execute him anyway and wanted this mystery solved before then.
"It's not something I can do in my head. I'll need a pen and at least two pieces of paper."
Magath pulled out two blank pages from a folder, opened his briefcase, and pulled out another fountain pen. Eren hesitantly took the pen and set the two papers up. Then Magath opened up a silver case, pulled out a cigarette, and offered one to Eren. The lieutenant stared at the white sticks, craving one, especially being under so much pressure, but he was scared to actually accept such an offering.
"Take it. I know you smoke."
Eren timidly took a cigarette, Magath took one for himself, and he lit a match for both of them. Eren was glad for the bit of hospitality, and the cigarette helped him fight through the pain and fear.
Moving hurt his shoulder and sent waves of hot pain through his arm. Still, he wrote down numbers, 01 to 30, and below that each letter of the German alphabet from A to Eszett. Below that, he wrote the alphabet in reverse. Below that list, he wrote the alphabet again, but he lined up the letters twelve spaces over—A under the letter O, B under P, C under Q—until he reached the end, went back to the beginning of the alphabet, until he had written the whole thing.
"Well, the first number, 25, sets the null. Next is 05. The fifth letter of the alphabet is E. The fifth letter of the alphabet backwards, though: Eszett, U-Umlaut, O-Umlaut, A-Umlaut, Z. To solve with a shilling, you add twelve spaces, so it's an H. Next is 08, you substitute the number for the letter H, run it through Atbash and it becomes W, add 12 spots, counting beyond Eszett and back to the beginning of the alphabet, so it is the letter E. I see 01-25-01; that's obviously double-letters with a null between them, so you run the number 01 through the ciphers, it's an L. So these are double L's. After that one is 24, which..." Eren's finger ran from one cipher written on the piece of paper to the next. "It's an S. After the S is a null, since it's the 5th letter, and every fifth letter is followed by a null number, so ignore that. The 99 is a comma. Oh, also note that punctuation doesn't count when counting the nulls."
Magath jotted that down in his notes.
"So ... hells? Strange," he mumbled, arching an eyebrow. "08, 21, 08, 25 ... EVER? And then a period. Hells, ever. Huh? No, this is wrong."
Koslow scoffed. "Not as clever as you thought!"
Eren took a drag from his cigarette as he glared at the bloody paper. Hells? It would make more sense if it was in English and said Hello. His father had never written in English, but it would make sense if Zeke used his native tongue. For some reason, the math did not add up. S was four spaces more than O for hello.
Four spaces?
"Oh, you British bastard," he muttered, shaking his head. "Of course. My father would write to me in German with 30 letters in the alphabet, but Zeke is writing in English. There are only 26 letters in their alphabet."
Magath glanced up. "So, the language of the user must be known."
"That must be the case."
Eren scratched out the ciphers he had written and started over again, this time using English's 26-letter alphabet. Then he tried it again.
"Okay! So the first four letters are correct, H-E-L-L, but rather than counting all 30 letters, we use only 26. Which means the next letter is an O. Hello. That makes much more sense! Then the comma, and now, the next letters are E ... R ... another E ... N. And a period. Oh," he muttered in surprise.
Hello, Eren. What a casual, even familial, way to begin the letter.
"Continue," Magath ordered. "I want you to decode the entire thing."
Eren's head shot up in shock. "All of it? That can take a while."
"How long?"
Eren shrugged. "An hour?"
Magath let out a stream of smoke. "I've spent days trying to break this code. I can wait an hour. The SS and Heer captain may step out if they want to sit and rest. Jäger, get to work."
Eren hunched over the desk, rewriting the numbers over onto a fresh, unblooded piece of paper and sorting out the letters. Memories flowed in, getting letters from his father filled with this cipher. It truly had been nothing more than a game to Eren, but now he had to wonder:
Why did his father use a cipher anyway?
Was Magath right, and this was a way to hide his double life—a wife and child in Germany—from his British wife and son?
Or was there something more to it? Had he been grooming Eren to be a spy?
As minutes passed in silence with only the scratching of the pen, Kitz and Galliard drifted off to find something to drink, while Colt and Koslow remained by the door, silent and ready for anything. Eren went through the cigarette, ran his hand through his hair, and stretched out the ache in his injured shoulder.
"Are you okay?" asked Magath.
"Sorry, sir. I'm in quite a lot of pain, and Zeke did not make this easy. It's like he's purposely trying to throw me off, forcing me to second-guess myself. It's hard to focus."
Magath ordered, "Grice, make us both a cup of tea, and get him some painkillers. Koslow, remain here and keep an eye on the Jew."
"Shall I lock him back up?" asked the portly man.
"No. Let him sit where I can see him."
As Colt left, off to the side, sitting handcuffed in his chair, Levi's eyes zipped one way, then another, going from Magath looking relaxed behind his desk with a cigarette, over to Koslow.
There were only two of them now, but Levi was not close enough to reach a weapon. He was pretty sure, if he made a move, these two would shoot at him, and Eren could get injured in the crossfire. Just one crack in the defenses, and he would have sprung into action. For now, he sat silently and waited.
A few minutes later, Colt returned with another cup of tea and some pills. Eren took the medication and whispered thanks to the young detective. His arm really was a problem, part of it numb, the rest in fiery agony. Magath offered Eren another cigarette, and this time he gladly accepted it.
"Is it working?" the inspector asked as he held up another match.
Eren lit the cigarette and took the time to inhale slowly, feeling the smoke soothe his chaotic mind. "I see a few words. It's in English, but then there's this letter." He pointed to one of the numbers he had written on the clean sheet of paper. "Rather than one through twenty-six, here he wrote twenty-seven. English doesn't have a 27th letter, but German does: A-Umlaut. For that one letter, he rejected all other substitutions and used the German alphabet purely so he could spell Jäger. I am Zeke Jäger."
He looked down at the words taking shape. A letter from Zeke!
The last time he saw this code was back when he was in Napola. A letter had arrived for him, and when he opened it, he saw the familiar list of numbers. His father's cipher! Such a burst of hope had leaped up in him as he thought that this must mean his father was alive. Yet as he worked through the code, he realized it was definitely not from his father.
The encoded letter back then contained a horrific family secret, told to him by a man who claimed to be his half-brother. That letter, written in German, had also contained the sentence: I am Zeke Jäger. Only it had continued, "I am your brother, the firstborn son of the man you know as Grisha."
It was the day Eren grew to despise the British as he found out that his father had not been lost at sea as Eren believed. He abandoned them! He ran off! He left Eren as a child, had a whole other family in another country, and now he was dead, killed by German bombs.
This cipher, once a code that filled him with joy, had crushed Eren's heart.
As minutes passed, the painkillers kicked in, taking the burning edge off Eren's bandaged shoulder. His mind could finally focus. Numbers turned into letters, letters into words. Magath offered him yet another cigarette, and Eren took it, if only to help him to shove out all these painful memories of his childhood and focus on the task before him.
One thing Eren did not tell the Gestapo was that there was always a hidden message within the message. How to solve that issue always changed, and it kept Eren on his toes as a child. Sometimes, the code could be read by combining the first letters of every line. Sometimes it was counting out a certain number of words. If he found the hidden message and could reply, his father would buy him a special gift before returning from England.
Would Zeke also use a hidden message? What could be even more dangerous than getting a letter from a British Lord?
It was well over an hour and an ashtray full of cigarettes when Eren finally set down his pen and leaned back.
Hello, Eren. I am Zeke Jäger. You are in danger. The Gestapo knows we are related and about our father, the man you know as Grisha. Bringing you home was his dying wish. I can protect you here on British soil with citizenship for you and your friend, the Jew called Levi. I know you have no reason to trust me, but this is the truth. I sent this nobody to help. I hope I shall finally meet you, brother. XOXO
"Translate it," Magath ordered, and he handed Eren a fresh sheet of paper. "Koslow, call back the others."
Eren wrote out the message in German, but he kept looking over it.
Was there a hidden message? If Zeke knew about his father's cipher, surely he knew about the message-within-a-message as well. Or would he not bother to hide yet another secret message?
Wait ... Yes! He saw it now. And it made his heart sink.
"Shit."
Magath saw him pause with horror playing out on his face. "Jäger?"
"Sorry," he said, snapping out of his shock. "I'm just proofreading it. I want to be sure the translation is as accurate as possible. There's one word in here, I'm not sure what it means. He says, 'I sent this nobody to help.' In German, Ich habe diesen Niemand zur Hilfe geschickt. It doesn't make sense, unless maybe it's an English term for a spy."
"Translate it as accurately as you can. Leave the interpretation for others."
Eren nodded and continued with the translation. However, he kept glaring at the message.
That couldn't be the hidden message! Surely not!
Finally, he leaned back, his shoulders stiff, his hand cramping, ink smudged on the side of his fingers, but the letter from his brother, both in English and German, sat on the desk.
Magath picked it up and read through the German translation. "Then my theory was correct. He was offering you asylum. It seems he knew about the Jew as well. Very interesting."
"There's no way Zeke could know about Levi. He barely knows about me."
"Oh, you're wrong there! He has been following your career with quite some interest. There's one thing that amused me about Lord Zeke. More than once, he pulled strings within Germany itself that made no sense to anyone. He would block orders or change company platoons, seemingly at random. It wasn't until recently that I realized there was one common element, and he was doing all that to protect a single individual: you. It was all to make sure you stayed out of combat. It didn't always work. You were originally meant to be sent to the Eastern Front. Instead, you were reassigned to Italy. When that turned out to be almost as bad, you were relieved early, sent to Paris, and seemingly forgotten there. In reality, Lord Zeke blocked many orders that would have sent you back to the front lines."
Eren had never complained when their reprieve in Paris went on longer than anticipated. After the hellish Battle of Anzio, everyone in his platoon needed that break.
"Even your placement with Captain Kitz Woermann was Lord Zeke's doing."
Now, Kitz jolted. "I swear, I know nothing of this!"
Magath glared at him. "I have no doubts that you know nothing," he said coldly. "It was meant to be a simple assignment, getting you away from Paris, away from the coast where the Allies were planning an invasion, safely moved inland, and then once again seemingly forgotten. That simple assignment just so happened to put you in touch with this Jew."
"A coincidence," Eren snapped.
"Was it? A Jew who speaks English, with ties to London and the SIS. Were you aware of that?"
Eren shivered. He glanced at Levi again, who was watching the whole exchange quietly. Although he was unable to understand their language, Levi gleaned enough from their body language to know that they were discussing him, and things were not going well.
Magath pulled out a folder and flipped through some papers to find a report. "Back in early September, your company had communication problems that prevented you from getting the order to leave for Metz. This was traced to a spy on a Berlin switchboard who had ties to Lord Zeke Jäger. It was he who made sure you never got the message to leave, but also he made sure no Allies came to your village. The plan, we believe, was to cut you off, and once you were not a threat, there were former members of the Deuxième Bureau already planted in that village. It would not have been hard for them to abduct you, bring you safely to England, and slaughter the rest of your company."
Eren's brow tensed up. He had always wondered why anyone would go through the trouble of hacking their communication if not to attack them. Could it be, all of that was Zeke's doing?
"Now, it seems your brother is desperate to get you out of Metz before the Americans launch a full assault. He may even have had a hand in getting the petrol supplies rerouted from General Patton's army to Field Marshal Montgomery, all to slow down the American Third Army so he could have enough time to get you out."
Eren was stunned. Had Zeke really changed the entire course of the war, all to save him?
"Your brother cares for you very much, Eren Jäger. Not many siblings would go through so much just to keep their brother safe."
Eren sneered at the idea. He had hated Zeke ever since coming to realize that the man even existed. There was no way Zeke could care for him. He grumbled, "He doesn't know me."
"He is the sort of man who knows more than he should," Magath said with a slight glint of hate in his eyes. "Your brother was working with Nicolo de Marly, plotting to drug you in order to smuggle you out of France. Many bottles of Burgundy were found laced with various poisons. Some merely gave the drinker a severe case of diarrhea, and one was a potent drug to knock a person out for twenty-four hours. We had a rash of cases of intestinal problems from officers, not enough to warrant a search—they all seemed to recover in a day—but there's no telling how much damage Nicolo did while those officers were either sick or drugged unconscious."
Eren's mouth dropped. Had he truly been drugged on orders from Zeke? If Levi had not fought off the attacker, he might be a prisoner-of-war in England under the thumb of his brother.
"My suspicion is that Nicolo was trying to talk you into a different bottle of wine because he had one prepared just for you with a sedative. When you ordered the rare '29, that bottle was not laced. My theory is, he instead laced your food with the drug. That is why you were affected but your lover was not."
Eren furrowed his brow in confusion. "At the time, you said that Nicolo had been interrogated and found to be innocent."
"Not innocent; we simply could find no evidence of his guilt. That's a big difference in our line of work. After his death, we discovered a whole trove of evidence. Sadly, someone destroyed most of it before it could be processed."
Eren stared ahead, knowing it was Levi who had set fire to the restaurant to make sure there was no evidence linking Eren to Zeke.
"Tell me, who brought you to Nicolo on the day he died?"
Eren flinched. "What do you mean? We were going out for breakfast. We just happened to be there."
"Two days ago, I may have believed that. Now that we have confirmed that the letter Nicolo was carrying was, indeed, meant for you, that leads me to two conclusions. Either you knew Nicolo had a letter from your brother and you've been in secret communication with Lord Zeke this whole time—"
"No!" Eren snapped, disgusted at the idea of communicating with that British half-brother.
"—or someone brought you to Nicolo, someone who knew you well enough for you to follow their instructions. Tell me, what do you know about Nicolo's cousin, Yelena de Marly?"
Now Eren's stomach really did surge up. "Fuck," he whispered under his breath.
Levi caught the English curse and the name Yelena. He was not surprised that the Gestapo would have linked Nicolo and Yelena already, or question their connection to her. His eyes zipped around again. He had been sitting silently for over an hour, judging each moment, yet finding no openings, all while the situation seemed to be getting worse and worse.
Magath searched his folders, pulled out one, opened it, and glanced through the paperwork. "On the 25th of September, we questioned you regarding the incident where you were drugged after eating at Nicolo's restaurant. During our interrogation, you mentioned that you saw a person who matched the description of Mi-homme, a terrorist leader. Prior to that, on the 18th of September, you mentioned to Detective Grice that you saw this same figure and spoke to her. We now have a confession that the Resistance leader known as Mi-homme is Yelena de Marly. You admitted you spoke to Yelena. What did you two talk about?"
Eren shook his head. "This was so long ago, and it was a brief encounter. All I remember is the Alsatian accent and a very rude attitude."
"How many times have you spoken to Yelena?"
"Just once."
Magath's eyes narrowed. "You're lying."
"No offense, inspector, but I think I would remember speaking to a tall, rude Alsatian."
"I think you do remember. You're a good liar, Eren Jäger. If I were to merely listen to an audio recording of this interrogation, I would never suspect you of lying even once, yet you have been many times. Your face gives you away. So many tells, it's easy to know the truth from the lies."
Eren wanted to curse again. How many times had Levi teased him that he had a too-honest face?
"You knew Yelena. You told Grice that you and Yelena spoke together. Later, you quite successfully diverted my attention off your wife as being a suspect for who drugged you—a wife we now know was Levi Ackerman—by mentioning you had recently seen Yelena. The fact that you met her just before getting drugged is no coincidence. My theory is that something happened during your encounter which prompted Yelena to tell her cousin Nicolo that it was time to take action. It's also my theory that, last week, Yelena told you to go to that restaurant, likely so you could get Lord Zeke's letter, and she and Nicolo would have helped you to escape the city."
"I would never abandon my men!"
"Maybe you would have turned them down under normal circumstances—I do believe that you are loyal to the Reich—but with the British government offering Levi asylum, I suspect you might have gone, if only to save him."
Eren's fists tightened. "I would not. I hate the British. My loyalty is to my men and to Germany."
"If the conditions were 'come to England and Levi gets citizenship, or refuse and Levi gets turned over to the Gestapo,' would you have abandoned your men for your lover?"
Eren hated that the answer was an unhesitating yes. "A hypothetical. I told you, my loyalty is to my men."
Magath smirked. "And I told you, you're a good liar ... but not that good. What was your involvement with the French Resistance?"
"Nothing!"
"Oh? Yet here you are, lovers with the leader of a Resistance cell, having frequent meetings with the former leader, and even your wife was a former prostitute under the employment of Carly Stratmann, who we now know was sheltering the Resistance. Is Louise also a partisan?"
"No!" Eren snapped with a glower. "She is an innocent girl who needed help."
"I highly doubt that. What became of her, really? She seems to keep going back to her family's farm and popping up in Metz again and again. Only we now know, that wasn't her. It was Levi. For all we know, maybe it was him you married."
"Sick," Kitz whispered.
"Now, she's behind enemy lines, likely telling them everything she knows."
"She knew nothing," Eren insisted. "She and Levi never met, and Carly wasn't sheltering the French Resistance at that time."
Magath smirked triumphantly. "How do you know?"
Eren jolted. Oh shit! He said too much, and now he was caught in this man's trap.
"Did you know about them back when they were in the wine cellar?"
Eren felt himself flinch and immediately cursed his reaction. Surely, Magath saw it.
"You did," Magath stated. "How involved were you with the French Resistance?"
"I told you, I wasn't!"
"Oh, you're deeply involved, Oberleutnant Eren Jäger. That much is evident. Did you work with Yelena, like how you worked with Krista, Sasha, and Ymir? Are those names familiar?"
Eren gasped softly at the mention of Krista, and at the list of names, Levi sharply turned to look at him.
"The fact is, you have been working with the French Resistance for months."
"I wasn't working with them."
"As recently as yesterday, you were frequenting the brothel where the French Resistance was headquartered."
"I was only there to see Levi. I never saw a single Resistance person there."
"That may be true. The Frenchman who betrayed the Resistance told us that Levi had a male lover who was a German officer, but he did not know his face, rank, nor his full name. So I believe that Levi kept you away from them, for your safety as much as for theirs. Still, you were at that brothel the day the Resistance was arrested, and Levi was there, dressed in women's clothing. Now, a smart man would have seen the arrest happening and stayed hidden. I hadn't planned to massacre anyone that day; I would have brought fewer men. Right when our French turncoat was about to drop the name of Levi's lover, that was when he stepped out and began to shoot. He killed some of my officers and tried to shoot me. A man as smart as Levi would have known that we would retaliate in kind, and thus choosing to shoot at us was choosing collective punishment. He knew that, and he still made that choice. He sacrificed his own men to protect you. That's how much he loves you. Heartwarming, isn't it?" he said flatly.
Eren glanced over at Levi. No wonder he felt such intense self-hatred afterward.
"I've spent since yesterday trying to figure out who this mysterious officer-lover could be, looking over records of the debaucheries of hundreds of officers, only to come to this fort and see for myself: here's the Jew who escaped me, caught by multiple witnesses performing oral sex on a Wehrmacht officer. Not very smart of either of you, but in my experience, a person is most stupid when they are in love."
Eren dropped his head. It had been his idea to get intimate. It really had been foolish to do that in the open.
"I don't care about the Resistance," Eren muttered. "I never helped them. I just wanted to get Levi to safety. Yelena said she could help. That was all I cared about. I just wanted him to be free."
Magath scoffed softly. "Maybe you can tell yourself that you never helped them, but you knew where they were located for months, and you chose to protect them."
His eyes slammed shut. He wanted to deny it, but Magath was right. He had known about the wine cellar. He knew about Carly and Yelena's connection. He knew about the hidden room in the brothel. He knew all of this, and he had kept quiet, because protecting the Resistance meant protecting Levi.
"Meanwhile, Germans have been dying because of them. We saw a marked increase in deaths via slit throat as opposed to gunshot wounds. An interesting change in the weapon of choice and execution style. the coroner determined that the angle of the blade swipes were from an attacker who was much shorter." Magath's ice blue eyes flicked over to Levi. "How many brave German soldiers do you think your lover has killed?"
A tear slipped down Eren's cheek. He had been trying to ignore that truth, although late at night it sometimes bothered him.
"You turned against your country, your fatherland, your comrades, all to save a Jew. Although, I'm not surprised." Magath jotted down some notes. "Tell me, what do you know about your father?"
Eren jolted completely out of the moment of mental exhaustion. "My father? There's not much to say. He abandoned me when I was ten. Before that, he was a doctor in Cuxhaven."
"What was his name?"
"I told you before, Grisha Jäger."
Magath's eyes narrowed. "What was his real name?"
Eren stared at him in confusion. "That is his real name."
Magath was silent, staring hard at Eren for a few seconds before speaking again. "Before his death, your father was a major player in the German Resistance, aiding partisans right in the heart of the fatherland."
"What?" Eren gasped.
"He gave your brother many contacts within the government and even the Nazi hierarchy. For years, they've been giving us quite a headache back in Berlin."
"My father couldn't have been a spy!" Eren cried out. "He was quiet, and we lived in such a small town. When he wasn't tending to patients, he was reading books or writing to universities."
"Universities in England?"
Eren was about to insist yes, they were the universities where his father taught medical lessons, until the shocking reality hit him.
There had never been any universities. All of that had been lies.
"You really have no idea," Magath said with amusement. "Your family kept you ignorant your whole life. I wonder if you knew anything about the real man who sired you."
Eren felt a shiver down his arms. "Real man? What are you talking about?"
Magath pulled out a bulging, thick file and opened it. "Grisha Jäger, alias of Gabriel Jonathan Nathaniel Jäger, born the 10th of December, 1896, in Sussex, England."
"What? England?" Eren cried out. "N-No! He was born in Germany. And who is Gabriel? My father never went by Gabriel."
Magath ignored him. "Beginning in 1912, he studied medicine in Zürich. Two years later, he met fifteen-year-old Countess Dina Fritz of Alderley Edge, whose family were vacationing in Switzerland. Her family were distant cousins of King George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II. They had a fling, Dina got pregnant, and as she was the only child and heiress of the family's estate, they demanded that she get an abortion. Instead, she and Gabriel fled to Geneva, where they married. In 1915, they had a son, Ezekiel Jason Cheva Jäger, who goes by the name Zeke."
Eren's mouth dropped. "No. No, you have the wrong man. My father was not British. You can check my Ahnenpaß; he was German. His name was Grisha, not ... not Gabriel," he ended weakly.
A memory drifted through his mind, one he had suppressed for so long. When Zeke wrote to him in 1941 to tell him about their father's death, he had said, "I am your brother, the firstborn son of the man you know as Grisha, and who I know as my father, Gabriel Jäger." Eren had been so overwhelmed by the sheer audacity that his father had another family in England, he skipped that brief mention that Grisha was known by another name in England.
And now again in his letter, Zeke phrased it our father, the man you know as Grisha.
Magath ignored the outburst and continued on. "They remained in Geneva until the war ended. They returned to Alderley Edge after Dina's father was diagnosed with stomach cancer. After his death, Dina's mother attempted suicide. Dina wanted to move in with her mother to help her through the depression, but her cousins hated Gabriel. In 1922, Dina's cousin Charles Fritz, who had hoped to inherit the estate, attempted to shoot Gabriel. No arrests were made. Following that incident, Gabriel decided to leave his wife and child in England and moved to Hamburg for his own safety.
"Gabriel arrived in Hamburg and got forged documents, changing his name to Grisha. He met a local woman named Carla Becker, and he married yet again. Without divorcing his wife Dina, I might add.
"Gabriel—now Grisha—moved to Cuxhaven with his second wife Carla, opened up a medical clinic, and in 1925, they had a son named Eren Krüger Jäger." Magath's eyes flicking up to the confused and trembling lieutenant. "Then in 1927, five years after leaving, Grisha made his first trip back to Alderley Edge, planning to leave his second family. He first transferred a significant amount of money into his German bank account, enough for his wife and two-year-old son to live comfortable lives. However, Charles Fritz found out Gabriel was back in England, and he once again attacked with a pistol. Gabriel fled back to Germany and gave up the idea of moving back to England.
"After that, his trips were, admittedly, quite secretive, hiding from both the Fritz family and completely oblivious in nature to his German family. We have only scattered records of his travels, but we know that, a few times a year, he traveled to England, always for only a few weeks.
"In 1933, Grisha Jäger was reported to German authorities for refusing to follow the orders of the Hereditary Health Courts. In 1935, Dina's mother passed away. Grisha—or I should say, Gabriel—returned to England for the funeral. Freed from having to look after her mother, Dina and Gabriel moved to London. He opened up a new medical clinic, and he remained there, abandoning his German son and second wife." Magath paused again to look up at Eren. "I suppose he couldn't admit he had two wives without stirring up even more animosity with the British nobles."
Eren's jaw trembled in rage as he heard his father's whole adulterous history being read aloud.
"In the meantime, his eldest son, Zeke Jäger, used his mother's hereditary title to join the House of Lords, where he sits today. As the war started and we began to bomb London, Dina went to stay with family in Alderley Edge, but Gabriel insisted he should stay in London to attend to the wounded. In 1941, a bomb hit his clinic, killing him." He set the file aside.
Eren barely moved. All over again, he felt like that naive boy who got a mysterious letter, only to discover his family life had all been a lie.
This time, it was much, much worse.
"How often have you had contact with your British family?"
Eren sank, too stunned to even think of a lie even if he wanted to. "Once. Only that one time. Before that letter, I didn't even know my father was still alive. I thought his ship sank. Then I found out he had some other family this whole time. He never so much as wrote to tell me he was alive. If he really was born in England, then it makes sense. They're all lying, stealing, adulterous bastards! I wish Hitler would bomb the entire fucking island into the sea!"
Magath chuckled as he heard the animosity. "True rage. I believe you. Something else came up in your father's file that was interesting." Magath's eyes glinted. "The second woman he married: your mother. Particularly, her ancestry."
Eren flinched back hard. Shit!
"You said your mother was named Carla, correct? She was born in Hamburg and died in Cuxhaven in 1935, correct?"
"Yes, but—"
"The word you used to describe her death was murdered. Our records show she was executed for being a Mischling and in violation of multiple articles of the Nuremburg Laws."
Galliard jolted at the reveal. "What? You're a Jew?"
"Technically, he's not." Magath stood, walked around his desk, and leaned into Eren's face. "But only on the thinnest technicality. You were so young. It must have scarred you, watching your mother die in front of your eyes, no father there to protect you, too helpless to do anything to save her. How easy it would be to think she was innocent, to think all Jews are innocent, to think they must be equal to us, since you're considered an Aryan despite having their blood running through your veins. But you're not actually Aryan, are you?"
"What? Yes, I am!" he shouted. "Maybe my father was born in England—I don't know about that—but he was pure Aryan!"
Magath smiled as he peered straight into Eren's eyes. "You've never been able to look in a mirror and truly believe that, have you?"
"Yes! What are you talking about?" Eren's jaw twitched, not backing down from that icy glare.
"When Grisha immigrated to Germany, he came at a perfectly horrible time. The country was in ruins, millions dead, diseases running rampant, many records were lost in the war. No one would deny the help of a trained doctor, and a few might be so desperate for medical treatment, they would agree to anything, even faking documents for an illegal British immigrant named Gabriel. If it wasn't for his firstborn son rising to power, we might have never caught it. Not just a new name, but a perfect Aryan ancestry, as if he predicted this would be an issue. Or more likely, he already knew it was one, after his wife's cousin tried to shoot him. You see, we know now, the names he put down as his parents aren't the man and woman who gave birth to him. They were a dead German couple with the same last name. Would you like to know about your real grandparents?"
Real? He had been told that his grandparents had died in the Spanish Flu.
"Gabriel—the man you know as Grisha—was the eldest child of Barak and Deborah Jäger, two Germans who immigrated from Dresden to London in 1890."
"Then I am German," Eren insisted.
"Your family was from Germany, yes, but if you were to apply for an Ahnenpaß now, you wouldn't get it. Because, you see," he said, savoring this next part, "those two immigrants, your father's parents ... were Jews."
Eren's mouth dropped.
"Your father wasn't a terrible man because he was British. He was a terrible man, unfit to be a father, because he was a Jew!"
Eren's vision went blank. The other soldiers in the room made comments, but he heard none of it.
Zeke's code really did have a secret message. Take every tenth word, and it formed a message.
Danger Father Was British Jew Trust Nobody Brother
He thought that couldn't possibly be the secret message, only now Magath's declaration confirmed it.
His whole life was one giant lie. Everything he believed, even the reason why he joined the military, all of it was a lie.
He was Jewish!
To the side, Levi watched silently as he saw the moment when the Gestapo completely broke Eren.
# # #
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TONS OF FOOTNOTES!
In fact, I had so many footnotes, I split the chapter in half. Plus, what a cliffhanger! Earlier I said there were 10 chapters until the end of Book Two. It'll be one more extra chapter next week as we wrap up the interrogation.
XOXO – Meaning "kisses and hugs." The letter X was used in medieval Europe to symbolize Christ, because his Greek title is ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ. (This is also why Christmas is shortened to X-mas.) People would "kiss the Cross," so in the 1700s, the X also came to represent a kiss, and lovers might sign a letter XX meaning "kiss kiss." An O looked like someone's arms wrapped around them, and it was a less romantic ending to a letter ("hugs" instead of "kisses"). Soon XOXO came to mean "kisses and hugs." It was very popular to sign letters with this ending in the mid 20th century. My mother still does!
The fact that Magath smokes in canon, and Eren smokes in my story ... of course I would give them a cigarette moment, similar to Magath and Zeke's smoke break in the anime.
Ahnenpaß – I described this way back in Chapter 7. The "ancestor pass" was a document to prove one's "Aryan purity" going back three generations. Some clergy faked these documents to help racially persecuted people. Since Grisha already knew how bad antisemitism was in England, he made sure his German documents showed a pure Aryan ancestry. Because of that, when the Nazi Party rose to power, Eren was able to obtain an Ahnenpaß, but Carla could not because she had one Jewish grandparent.
"study medicine in Zürich" – Gabriel (Grisha) attended one of the many medical schools in Switzerland. ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) ranked #9 in QS World University Rankings 2023, and #6 for medical programs. Founded in 1856, 22 Nobel laureates, including Einstein, have been affiliated with the Institute.
Alderley Edge – A village in Chester, England, known for its affluence and expensive houses. It is one of the most expensive and sought-after places to live in the UK outside of central London.
"distant cousins of King George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II" – Like in the manga, Dina is royalty. King George V was King of England until 1936. Kaiser Wilhelm II was the last German Emperor, reigning from 1888-1918. Wilhelm's mother was British Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, also named Victoria. Thus, King George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II were cousins. Kind of crazy that they fought a World War against one another.
In my mind, Dina was a countess, although maybe a baroness? I really don't know what would work given England's rules on hereditary titles, royal lineage, how a title could pass from a female only-child to her son ... it's rather confusing to someone who lives in a country where we've never had royals.
Ezekiel Jason Cheva Jäger – "Zeke" is a common nickname for Ezekiel, so I'm making it his real name. "Jason" is in honor of Jason Liebrecht, the English voice actor of Zeke (his last name already got used for a random soldier). "Cheva" is Hebrew for "beast." Zeke is the Beast Titan in canon, after all. My idea: Dina got to pick one middle name, Gabriel picked the second middle name, opting to show his heritage by choosing a Hebrew word.
Carla Becker – In the manga, we never learn Carla's maiden name. I picked the German surname "Becker" because it means "baker of bread," a good name for such a caring mother.
"being a Mischling and in violation of multiple articles of the Nuremberg Laws" – The Nuremberg Laws were two laws passed in Nazi Germany in 1935. The first, the Reich Citizenship Law, set a distinction between a Reich citizen and a subject of the state; anyone "who enjoys the protection of the German Reich" could be a subject, but only those "of German or related blood" could be citizens. The second one, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, banned marriages between Jews and citizens of German blood, forbade extramarital affairs between Jews and citizens of German blood (which meant, even if you were married for 30 years before the law, you are legally now NOT married and having sex with your wife and mother of your children is illegal), Jews were not allowed to hire German females under the age of 45 to work around the house (presumably because the man of the house would coerce her into sex), forbade Jews from flying the Reich or national flags or display Reich colors, but ironically protected the right for Jews to display "the Jewish colors." After all, it is easier to know who are the Jews this way. A person violating these laws was punished with prison and hard labor, not executed like Eren's mother. So what were the multiple articles she broke? For one, it was known then that she was married to a man who (they thought) had pure German heritage, and Grisha had not divorced Carla like he was expected to. She may have also been flying a national flag. More than likely, the Brownshirts just made up excuses for going around beating up and killing Jews.
Barak and Deborah – Grisha/Gabriel's parents are named after biblical characters from the Book of Judges. Deborah was the fourth Supreme Judge of Israel during a time when they were ruled by the Canaanites. Seeing the Hebrews being oppressed, she called upon the military commander Barak to lead a force of ten thousand men against the Canaanite general, Sisera. Barak refused unless Deborah agreed to accompany him into battle. She agreed but prophesied that now the glory of victory would go to a woman.
Sure enough, Barak's army crushed the Canaanites, sending General Sisera fleeing on foot. Sisera ran to the tent of a man loyal to the Canaanite king; however, the housewife, Jael, wanted Sisera to pay for all the suffering of her people. She offered him milk so he would get drowsy, set up a place for him to sleep, and while Sisera took a nap, Jael drove a tent nail through his skull. Thus the glory of freeing the Israelites went to Jael. Deborah immortalized Barak's military prowess and Jael's bravery with a victory song.
The scene of Jael killing Sisera was a favorite among Renaissance painters.
Jael killing Sisera, by Artemisia Gentileschi (1620),
an Italian artist who painted heroic women of the Bible.
Please indulge me as I geek out about cryptography. If you have no interest, it's cool to skip this. If you're one of the people who actually spent hours trying to crack the code (and one person actually DID!) first off, you are AWESOME, and you are the sort of person who will love this.
Here we go!
Cryptography
Ciphers have existed since ancient times. Non-standard hieroglyphs, believed to be secret communications, have been found in Egyptian tombs, and the Mesopotamians used code in their cuneiform clay tablets to write down secret recipes. (Eleven herbs and spices!)
Julius Caesar invented what we now call the Caesar Cipher: he shifted each letter down three places within the alphabet; thus, LEVI becomes IBSF. Romans also came up with ROT13: due to there being 26 letters in the basic Latin alphabet, you could encode a message by moving up or down 13 spaces, and decode it by again moving 13 spaces; ROT13 is still used in some online forums to hide spoilers.
Hebrew scholars used Atbash ciphers, where the encoder writes with the alphabet flipped in reverse order. Because of its simplicity, it can be used with many writing systems, like Cyrillic alphabets, Japanese hiragana, Cherokee syllabary, and the Arabic alphabet (although you need to know if this is meant to be ʾabjadī order or hijāʾī order).
In India, the Kama Sutra speaks of lovers writing in cipher. In Ancient Greece, Spartans were known to use a scytale transposition cipher. Arabs in the 700s were the first to systematically document cryptanalytic methods, and in 800 AD, Arab mathematician Al-Kindi's book Manuscript for the Deciphering Cryptographic Messages became the single most significant cryptanalytic advance until World War II.
As political and religious revolutions abounded across Europe, people figured out ways to hide messages. America was a bit behind on that, but during the Civil War the Confederates used a Vigenère cipher from the 1500s, although the Union easily broke the code. Then in 1929, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson rather naïvely shut down the entire Cipher Bureau, seeing it as unethical and famously saying, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." He was War Secretary when WWII broke out, which saw the USA definitely needing to "read the mail" of the Nazis. (A side note: after General Patton slapped the face of an enlisted man suffering from PTSD, a public outcry arose and some Congressmen called for Patton to be recalled from duty; Stimson made the decision not to recall him, saying Patton's "aggressive, winning leadership in the bitter battles" would be needed if the Allies wanted a victory. So although he set America behind by a decade on cryptography, at least he kept Patton.)
World War II brought about the use of electromechanical cipher machines, like the famous Nazi ENIGMA machine. While Alan Turing is given credit for breaking that one, it was the hard work of 18,000 women who intercepted, processed, and translated codes in America and the UK which played a huge role in the Allies' victory. Germany and Japan excluded women from war work, and thus were at a strategic disadvantage.
These days, we rely heavily on ciphers for our day-to-day lives, and likely don't think about it that much. Every bill you pay online, every purchase you make with your phone, every time you have to type in a password, a computer is doing massive work with encryption to keep your identity safe and your money secure.
As wireless Internet connections became more common among households, the need for tougher encryption grew: UNIX hashing, AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), SSL certificates for websites (I just had to deal with that at work), VPN to safely surf the net, or the encryption that keeps your cellphone from being hacked every time you text a friend in public.
So long as humans write messages to one another, we will need to figure out newer, better, more secure ways to hide what we're saying from prying eyes.
Ciphers in the Bible
Atbash was so popular, it can even be found in the Bible. Jeremiah 25:26 says "...and the king of Sheshach shall drink after them." Sheshach is Atbash for the word Babylon (בבל bbl → ששך ššk). Jeremiah 51:1 talks about "the inhabitants of Leb-qamai" (or Leb-kamai), which was Atbash for Chaldeans (כשדים kšdym → לבקמי lbqmy).
Some Bibles translate the Atbash into the intended words: Babylon and Chaldea. The ones I really love are Bible translations that use the Atbash word and print the solved code in parentheses. Other translations kept the Atbash code in some places but decoded it in others, randomly.
The medieval translators of the King James Bible apparently didn't realize this was a Hebrew code, because they kept the word as it was spelled, no hints that it stood for something else, which led to centuries of Bible readers being confused about where Sheshach and Leb-kamai were located. (If only they didn't massacre Jews every Christmas Eve for Nittel Nacht, one could have explained the code.) - https://judaism.fandom.com/wiki/Nittel_Nacht
Then there's Young's Literal Translation which not only didn't decode "Leb-qamai," it shortened the word to "Leb" for absolutely no reason. ("Literal Translation" my ass!)
Another cipher found throughout the Bible is Gematria. This was extremely trendy, to the point where Gematria graffiti has been found in Roman ruins, like the walls of Pompeii. Early Christians would write "888" on letters, which was Gematria code for Iesous, the Latinized rendering of the Greek version of Jesus' name. Gematria is still popular in Jewish communities today, and there are online sites dedicated to the code.
Revelation 13:18 has the infamous "Number of the Beast." The oldest Bible manuscripts have this number as 616, but later manuscripts wrote it as 666. The Catholic Church—and by extension, most Protestant offshoots—eventually opted for 666, but it's curious why TWO numbers were used.
There's actually a good explanation.
In Hebrew, there are two ways to write the name Caesar Nero. The Greek spelling (like in original manuscripts) is "Neron Caesar" and is written with the Hebrew characters נרו קסר, which adds up to the number 616 in Gematria. However, later Bibles were written in Latin, and the Latin spelling "Nero Caesar" has a different Hebrew spelling, נרון קסר, which adds up to 666. So this is why the Number of the Beast changed over time. The Christians back then knew this was Gematria code for Emperor Nero, and they changed the number to reflect a different language.
Just like how ancient Hebrews couldn't talk about Babylon and the Chaldeans without risking being executed, first century Christians couldn't risk writing anything bad about Emperor Nero without chancing being throw to the lions, so they used a hidden code, one Hebrew-speaking Christians would know right away, but Latin speaking Romans would not understand.
However, after the Jewish Diaspora, Christians lost touch with the Gematria cipher, and it was eventually forgotten. Rather than an anti-imperial protest against Emperor Nero, the Roman Catholic Church began to believe that 666 applied to some future anti-Christ. Meanwhile, in that Gematria online community I mentioned, people have twisted themselves into pieces trying to get 666 to mean all sorts of things: "Lucifer Is A Hidden God," "The Gates of Hell Are Open," "Hitler Hitler Hitler," "Catholicism Is Satanic," "Incel Donald Trump," "Number of a Man Barack Obama," "Bill Gates Descended Into Hell," and someone comically pointed out 666 could also mean "This Is Nonsense."
So every times there's a weird number in the Bible (like John catching 153 fish and Jesus talking about "seventy times seven") it could be—and likely is—some sort of a code. This is why translations of the Bible cannot be fully trusted. You need to understand the original languages and all of their functions (including ancient codes like Atbash and Gematria) to properly understand what was written and what messages the reader was meant to understand.
Zeke's Message
Zeke's encoded letter is based on the Caesar cipher, the Atbash cipher, the A1Z26 cipher, and null ciphers. (I swear, this will be interesting to maybe ONE person reading this story, but I'm a total nerd about this stuff so let me geek out a little bit about my invented code.)
For the Caesar cipher, Zeke shifts -12 spots, rather than Julius Caesar's -3 spots. For Atbash, you simply write the letters in reverse order (Z to A). In A1Z26 ciphers, each letter is written with the number it lands on in the alphabet, so A=1, B=2, etc. Although it's called A1Z26, this number substitution can be used for any alphabet, even those with more or less than 26 letters, such as German's 30-letter alphabet.
Which is why Eren messes up at first.
Because these are three of the oldest, simplest, and most common ciphers, the Nazis definitely would have cracked Zeke's message with time. However, you have to know which order the ciphers are used.
Here are the steps he took to encode the message.
STEP 1: Write the alphabet out A to Z.
STEP 2: Take a coin and determine its worth based on the smallest coin in the country of origin. (American Dime = 10 pennies. British Shilling = 12 pence. 5 Reichspfennig = 5 pfennige.) So in this case, the number is 12.
STEP 3: Since you are "losing a coin," you shift the letters to the left (negative) based on the number from Step 2. So write the letter O under the letter A, B is now P, C is now Q, etc. Write out the alphabet accordingly. (AKA, Caesar cipher -12)
STEP 4: Under the Caesar cipher, write the alphabet backwards. Start at Z, write the letter A, Y becomes B, X becomes C, etc. (Atbash cipher)
STEP 5: Replace the letters with their equivalent two-digit numbers. (A=01, Z=26, etc.)
STEP 6: Take the last digit of the year on the coin and use that number to count letters (now sets of double digits). After the last counted set of numbers, insert the last two digits of the coin's year as a null. (i.e. 1925: after every 5th set of numbers, insert 25.)
STEP 7: Between every set of consecutive letters in a single word, insert the last two digits of the coin's year as a null. This includes if the null from Step 6 falls between the two consecutive letters. (i.e., if the word is book and the null 25 lands between the two O's, you would write 11-24-25-25-24-02.)
STEP 8: Replace periods with 00, question marks with 77, and commas with 99. (Note that Steps 7 and 8 are not counted when inserting nulls. That comes first!)
STEP 9: Inset the last two digits of the year of the coin to the beginning of the message. This helps if the coin has been lost. Add whatever conclusion you want, like XOXO, 0000, or 73 ("best regards" in HAM radio jargon). This ensures the decoder that they have reached the end.
STEP 10: Remove all spaces.
Hints for writing out the code:
Never used a coin from years where the last digit is a one or zero (so no coins from 2020 to 2021). Otherwise, the Step 6 null doesn't work.
Never use the smallest coin in the country's currency; that makes it super easy to break. Coins in base-10 (10-cent or 100-yen coins) are also easy to decode. Shillings work great due to being in base-12.
As you are working on Step 6, mark your nulls in some way. I use a different color. This makes Step 7 much easier. You will be rewriting the coded message later anyway, so it's okay to be creative.
Caesar, Atbash, and A1Z26 ciphers are some of the simplest out there, but if you use all three together, that can really throw people off. Toss in some null ciphers, and you can stump even professional code-breakers.
Give it a try! I have a juicy spoiler written in the cipher below. Just like with Eren, pretend it's a 1925 British shilling, worth 12 pence. Remember: you'll need to work through the steps IN REVERSE to solve the code.
If you can solve it, let me know in the comments, but DO NOT tell others what the spoiler is! You get to keep that secret to yourself.
2508210825122525
0901081725041604
0125012508170825
1925181201250114
2505121708202508
1599160419250511
2419052519120204
2525061918212525
2012201905250811
2419251925242612
1909250407250708
2125082519190425
2608200015241524