Brave Volunteers

Three years before the raid on Liberio, a Marleyan survey ship loses contact with its landing party, and before the captain can react, Eren's Attack Titan hoists the entire vessel out of the water. Hange offers a cheerful welcome that goes sideways when the captain draws on them; Yelena shoots him first, and half the crew reveals itself as defectors. She explains that she, Onyankopon, and the others are conscripts from nations Marley conquered, bound together by Zeke Jaeger, whom she describes in almost religious terms. Calling themselves the Anti-Marleyan Volunteers, they hand over intelligence on Marley's forces, stolen Titan serum, and engineering help that lets Paradis build its first real port.

Zeke's proposal reaches the island's leadership through Hange: he will reveal his plan to save the Eldian people only if given access to the Founding Titan and a Titan of royal blood. Eren vouches for the logic, finally admitting he could command Pure Titans the moment he touched Dina Fritz's Titan, a secret he kept to protect Historia. With that workaround to the founder's vow, the Rumbling becomes a usable threat.

The present-day half sits with the cost. Nicolo, the captured Marleyan cook whose food Sasha adored, is inconsolable at her grave and invites the Braus family to dine at his restaurant. Levi deposits Zeke within a forest of giant trees, terrain suited to blades and bare of throwable boulders, while Pyxis regretfully detains the Volunteers to keep Zeke leashed. Armin, unsure he still understands his best friend, tells Annie's crystal that destroying Liberio's port left no path to peace but also no alternative, and in his cell Eren repeats to himself that fighting is the only way to win.

The flashback establishes the Volunteers' origin: the seized survey ship, Yelena's mutiny, the briefing on Marley's aerial and naval strength, and the radio traps that let Armin's Colossal Titan sink later expeditions. Eren discloses the royal-blood contact rule to the military, retroactively explaining his secrecy since the medal ceremony.

In the present, Jean and Conny rescue Nicolo from a Military Police beating at Sasha's grave, and he connects with her family. Zeke is quartered under Levi's watch in the giant forest, the Volunteers land in custody despite years of service, Gabi bites her thumb in her cell vowing to kill Eren, and Armin's one-sided conversation with Annie frames the moral ledger of the raid.

MAPPA's 68th episode overall, ninth of season 4, directed by Kouki Aoshima and written by Hiroshi Seko, adapting the chapters Brave Volunteers and Visitor. Japan saw it on February 8, 2021; the US Toonami airing slipped a week to March 14 after the Texas snowstorm blackout delayed Funimation's dub work.

The lore panel documents Marley's scout fleet: roughly 4,600 soldiers on 32 ships sent to Paradis over three years starting in 851, none of whom ever returned. Armin's line to Annie about how things might have changed three years earlier supplies the episode's epigraph.