I Can Hear His Heartbeat: The Struggle for Trost, Part 4

Armin begs Mikasa and Conny to leave him behind, but instead of listening they weigh a bolder idea he proposes: bait the strange Titan that hunts other Titans toward the supply headquarters, where the heaviest cluster of monsters has pinned down the trapped cadets. Meanwhile Jean, doubting his own fitness to lead after watching a failed rescue, spots the Titans massing in one spot and routes the survivors through the emptied streets. He barely survives being grabbed himself, and Marco tells him afterward that his knack for reading a situation is exactly what a leader needs.

Most of the cadets crash through the depot's upper windows to safety, where Jean punches a supply soldier for abandoning them. Despair sets in as Titans break through the walls, until the rogue Titan arrives outside, flattening attackers with its fists and roaring. Mikasa points out that its instincts, ignoring humans while savaging Titans, can carry everyone out alive. With the giant brawling as cover, Armin lays out a scheme to clear the seven small Titans infesting the ground-floor supply room: a lift packed with cadets firing muskets into their eyes at point-blank range, then seven of the corps' best dropping from the rafters to slice every nape at once. Sasha and Conny miss their marks, but Mikasa and Annie cover the failures, and the room is secured. Everyone refills their gas tanks.

As the cadets prepare to flee over the Wall, they see the rogue Titan pinned and being eaten by its own kind. Debating whether to save it as a research asset becomes moot when it spots the Abnormal that swallowed Thomas Wagner, tears free at the cost of both arms, and kills it with a bite to the neck before swinging a Titan corpse like a club to crush the rest. Spent, it collapses. From its nape emerges an unconscious, unharmed Eren Jaeger, his lost limbs regrown. Mikasa clutches him and sobs when she hears his heartbeat, Armin breaks down over his friend's impossible survival, and Jean, staring at the dissolving Titan corpses across the district, grasps that Eren did all of it.

Armin devises the plan to lure the Titan-killing rogue Titan toward headquarters, thinning the swarm and opening a path for the stranded cadets to resupply.

Jean improvises a route through the cleared streets, saving most of the cadets and drawing Marco's assessment that his awareness of weakness is what makes him leadership material.

The supply room ambush succeeds: blinded by massed musket fire from the lift, all seven Titans inside are cut down simultaneously, with Mikasa and Annie rescuing the two missed kills.

The rogue Titan destroys the Abnormal that killed Thomas Wagner, then collapses, and Eren emerges alive from its nape with his limbs restored, revealing him as the mysterious Titan.

This installment adapts the chapters Roar and The Beating of a Heart Can Be Heard from the Struggle for Trost arc. Japanese broadcast came on May 26, 2013, with the English airing on June 21, 2014. Shinpei Ezaki, Satonobu Kikuchi, and Tatsuma Minamikawa directed, Noboru Takagi wrote the script, and Wit Studio with Production I.G produced.

Crunchyroll carries the episode under the alternate title "Hearing the Heartbeat - The Battle for Trost (4)." The in-universe segment diagrams the ODM gear's fan mechanism, which spins on blown gas and adjusts output through compression control.