Distress

The story opens in 848, with the 104th split into two mounted teams for a timed crossing of the wasteland, Marco Bodt heading one column and Thomas Wagner the other. Armin and Mikasa ride along as recorders grading each cadet, and Commandant Sadies has ordered a deliberate, unhurried pace. Boredom breeds friction: Eren fumes at the crawl, Jean announces that effort is pointless since it will not improve his shot at the Military Police, and a spat over Jean's attempt to hunt a lizard dissolves only when Sasha shrieks that the animal would have made a fine meal. Meanwhile Thomas's team discovers its ODM gear missing, and wagon tracks tell Reiner that thieves with a caravan are working the area.

Night brings masked raiders to Marco's camp. They strip the team of its gear, sneering that equipment wasted on Titans will fetch a fine price illegally, and they ride off holding Christa as insurance against pursuit. Eren seizes a rifle and calls for a fight, but nobody backs him; the gun discharges in the scuffle and grazes Jean's cheek, and a blow puts Eren in the dirt. Recriminations follow until Eren stalks off to get Christa back alone. Jean stops him only to join him, and the whole team commits to the rescue.

From a mountaintop the cadets pinpoint the bandit camp, and Armin reasons the caravan must take the road toward Odel to sell its haul. Conny and Sasha wall off the broader route with brush, squeezing the wagons onto a narrow track where Eren and Jean drop onto the gear cart and subdue its drivers. A stray round wrecks the second cart's wheel, and the survivors try to flee with Christa, only to be run down by cadets now flying on their recovered equipment. Mikasa and Annie disarm the last two men at the moment a knife reaches Christa's throat, and Christa, having heard that one thief has a daughter, asks that his life be spared. The Military Police hauls the gang away with nobody dead on either side. In his report session, Armin asks Sadies whether chasing the thieves was correct; the commandant answers that the right choice is whatever a soldier holds most important, and Armin wonders afterward whether the whole encounter was scripted into the exercise.

Two cadet teams cross the wasteland under orders to keep a slow, steady pace, with Armin and Mikasa grading individual performance.

Thieves lift the ODM gear from Thomas's team, then raid Marco's camp at night, seizing more equipment and abducting Christa.

Eren's refusal to abandon her shames the rest of the team into an unauthorized pursuit.

Scouting, a roadblock, and a two-stage ambush recover the gear and free Christa, with Mikasa and Annie ending the fight.

Sadies declines to grade the decision itself, and Armin suspects the bandits were a planted test.

Hiroyuki Tanaka directed the OVA from a script by Noboru Takagi, with Production I.G and Wit Studio sharing production. Japan received it on August 8, 2014, bundled with Volume 14's special edition of the manga; Funimation and Crunchyroll began streaming an English release on December 19, 2021, and the US date is listed as May 22, 2022.

Its numbering as Episode 3.75 slots it behind the second OVA, A Sudden Visitor, yet the events occur in 848, one year before that story. Uniquely among anime episodes, the narrator names himself here as Armin Arlelt. Jean also discovers Sasha's cooking ability in this episode, a thread picked up again in A Sudden Visitor.

An accompanying lore page explains the wasteland excursion itself: a two-team round trip through empty country, built to test how alert cadets stay through dull, low-danger duty.