THE FINAL CHAPTERS Special 2

The assault on Eren's Founding Titan goes wrong almost immediately. The Beast Titan the group destroys proves an empty shell, and before Armin can transform, a Titan with a prehensile tongue gags him, swallows him, and carries him off while gray copies of Nine Titans inheritors from earlier eras pour from the Founder's spine. Pieck loops the flying boat's explosives around the Founder's neck but loses the detonator when a War Hammer replica spears her Cart Titan, and a resurrected Colossal belonging to Bertholdt bites the head off Reiner's Armor. Rescue comes on wings: Falco's Jaw Titan, now capable of flight, arrives bearing Annie and Gabi.

Inside the Paths, Armin finds Zeke, resigned and philosophizing about life as mindless multiplication. Armin counters with a dried leaf and a memory of racing friends up a hill, arguing that meaningless moments are precious in themselves; the leaf becomes a baseball in Zeke's eyes, recalling afternoons of catch with Tom Xaver. Moved, Zeke rouses the spirits of past inheritors, whose Titans turn against Ymir's on the battlefield. Zeke then shows himself outside and lets Levi behead him, halting the Wall Titans. Jean detonates the charges, decapitating the Founder, but a glowing centipede-like creature crawls from the stump seeking to reconnect with Eren. Armin's transformation engulfs it, yet Eren rises again in a Colossal-scale Founding Titan, and the creature's mist turns Jean, Conny, and the Eldian refugees at Fort Salta into Titans.

While the transformed horde and the creature press Reiner, Annie, and Pieck, Mikasa drifts into a vision of the life she and Eren never lived, a quiet cabin where he asks her to throw away her scarf when he dies. She refuses to forget him. Guided by her, Levi blasts open the mouth of Eren's Titan, and Mikasa severs Eren's head inside, kissing him farewell as Ymir looks on. In the Paths, a restored conversation reveals Eren's whole design to Armin: the Rumbling reduced to eighty percent of humanity, his friends cast as heroes, his own confession that he wanted Mikasa to mourn him forever. The power of the Titans vanishes, every Eldian becomes human, and three years later the former enemies sail to Paradis as peace ambassadors while Mikasa keeps vigil at Eren's grave beneath the tree.

Ymir's forces capture Armin and field replicas of the historical Nine Titans, including Bertholdt's Colossal and Lara Tybur's War Hammer. Falco's flying Jaw Titan turns the battle, Zeke chooses death at Levi's hands after Armin reaches him in the Paths, and the severed Founding Titan releases the centipede identified with the source of all living matter. Its mist transforms Jean, Conny, and the Fort Salta refugees into Pure Titans.

Mikasa kills Eren inside his Titan's mouth, fulfilling the future he glimpsed and freeing Ymir Fritz, whose two-thousand-year servitude was rooted in love for King Fritz. Titan power leaves the world, restoring every transformed Eldian. The epilogue spans decades: Historia's belief that the future belonged to everyone's choices, the ambassadors' return voyage, Mikasa's long life and burial, and, in the far future, a boy and his dog finding a hollow at the base of Eren's tree.

MAPPA's ninety-minute special concludes the anime, directed by Yuichiro Hayashi and Kiou Igarashi with Hiroshi Seko writing. It covers the manga chapters In the Depths of Despair, The Battle of Heaven and Earth, Dedicate Your Heart, Titans, A Long Dream, and Toward the Tree on That Hill. Japan saw it on November 5, 2023; Toonami aired it as THE FINAL CHAPTERS Part 2 on January 6, 2024, with Ni-sen Nen... Moshiku wa... Ni-man Nen-go no Kimi e... as the ending theme.

Hajime Isayama personally supplied the anime staff with revisions to the last stretch of Eren and Armin's Paths conversation. The infant heard crying during the Rumbling evacuation was voiced, uncredited, by the newborn son of Eren's Japanese voice actor Yuki Kaji. A coloring error gave Rico Brzenska blonde hair and brown eyes, corrected for the Blu-ray. Japanese streaming later split the special into episodes 91 through 94.