Lost in the cruel world

Standing watch above a crevice where a Titan guillotine grinds through gathering Titans, Mikasa Ackermann turns a quiet fear over in her mind: once Wall Maria is reclaimed and every enemy destroyed, nothing will keep Eren beside her. Her thoughts drift back to Trost, to the moment a sobbing Armin told her Eren had been devoured saving him. Falling to the streets with empty gas canisters, staring at a passing butterfly while a Titan closed in, she began imagining a world built the way she wanted it.

In that imagined life her parents survive. Dr. Jaeger calls at the forest cabin with his son in tow, and the two children become fast friends, wandering the woods until they stumble on a camp where wild dogs have torn three travelers apart. Eren fills Mikasa's head with talk of the ocean, burning water, fields of sand, and his plan to join the Scout Regiment. When she visits Shiganshina, they watch a broken expedition limp home, and Eren is beaten bloody in an alley for striking a man who mocked the Scouts. The regiment is later disbanded and the outer gate sealed, so Eren reveals a secret project: he and Armin have built a hot air balloon and will fly over the Walls in three days. Winding his scarf around her neck, he names a forest path where she can return it, at night, when the bell rings a third time.

During the festival celebrating the sealed gate, a masked street performer seizes her. Calling himself no one and anyone, he hands her a knife and names the truth she is running from: this world exists because she cannot accept that Eren is dead. She appears to stab him before the crowd, though the act is only theater, and races to the meeting place. Only Armin waits there. The balloon never climbed high enough, and Eren threw his friend clear before it struck the Wall. Back in the waking present, Mikasa accepts that no one can hold Eren back from his fate and chooses instead to follow him wherever it leads.

Mikasa relives Armin's report of Eren's death during the struggle for Trost, the wound that spawns her imagined world.

Within the dream, the Ackermann household survives the attack that killed them in reality, and Mikasa's mother passes down the family embroidery pattern.

Eren dreams of the Scout Regiment, then pivots to a hot air balloon escape with Armin after the regiment is dissolved and the gate is sealed.

The Mirror Man's street performance forces Mikasa to confront the fiction she has built, and the third bell tolls before she can reach Eren.

Armin explains the balloon's crash into the Wall, mirroring the sacrifice Eren made for him at Trost; awake again, Mikasa resolves to remain beside Eren wherever his path leads.

This is the eighth Attack on Titan OVA, produced by Wit Studio and Production I.G, directed by Hiroyuki Tanaka and written by Hiroshi Seko. It adapts volume two of Ryosuke Fuji's spin-off manga Attack on Titan: Lost Girls, itself drawn from Seko's visual novel of the same name; the two Wall Sina, Goodbye OVAs cover the first volume.

Japan received the episode on August 9, 2018, bundled with the special edition of manga Volume 26, and NHK General TV later aired it on November 28, 2021 as an extra installment of Attack on Titan: Special Omnibus. The United States release followed on June 26, 2022. Streaming services list it under the title Lost Girls: Lost in the Cruel World, and a pre-release trailer called it the Mikasa Chapter. Early production materials numbered it 16.5C, continuing from its two predecessors. The ending theme is Utsukushiki Zankoku na Sekai.