Toward the Tree on That Hill

In the Paths, Eren lays his mind bare to Armin. Ymir Fritz stayed enslaved for two thousand years because she genuinely loved the king who broke her, and the person she waited for turned out to be Mikasa, for reasons Eren never learns. The Founding Titan's power collapses past and future into one moment, and Eren admits to engineering horrors, including steering Dina Fritz's Titan past Bertholdt and toward his own mother. When Armin presses him about Mikasa's future, Eren's feigned indifference cracks; he weeps that he wants her to love no one else for years after he dies, then begs Armin to keep that shameful wish secret because he truly does want her happy.

Eren cannot alter what he has seen. Every attempt to dodge the remembered future has only produced it, and he confesses the ugliest truth: some part of him always wanted to flatten the world. Flattening eighty percent of humanity will knock the outside world down to Paradis' technological level and buy his friends lives as heroes, yet he sees no end to conflict itself. Armin refuses despair; fishing the old seashell from the bloody water, he claims his own share of the guilt for pointing Eren beyond the Walls, promising they will be together in hell. Moved, Eren nonetheless seals the memory away until the fighting ends.

Armin wakes beside the battlefield with the conversation restored and sees Mikasa cradling Eren's severed head. Everywhere, Titans have returned to human form; the living glimpse the dead as families reunite. When Marleyan officers demand proof that Eldians are now harmless, Armin steps forward and introduces himself as the man who killed Eren Jaeger.

Mikasa carries Eren away for a burial the world would forbid, choosing the hilltop tree where he always dozed. On the road she meets Ymir Fritz, grown now instead of childlike, understands that Ymir had been watching through her eyes, and receives a fading vision of the life Ymir might have lived had she let King Fritz die.

Three years on from the Battle of Heaven and Earth, Paradis has militarized under the Jaegerists, bracing for revenge from abroad. Historia holds that the outcome grew from everyone's accumulated choices, not Eren's alone. Armin, Jean, Reiner, Annie, Conny, and Pieck sail for the island as peace envoys, half expecting to be fired on, trusting that Paradis will want to hear why former enemies now arrive preaching peace. At the grave, a bird sweeps down and tucks Mikasa's scarf around her shoulders, and she thanks Eren through her tears.

The 35th episode of season four and the 94th overall, closing the anime. MAPPA produced it, Yuichiro Hayashi directed, and Hiroshi Seko wrote the script; it streamed in Japan on November 19, 2023 as the last of the four episodes carved out of THE FINAL CHAPTERS Special 2, a cut exclusive to Japanese streaming platforms. It adapts the manga's final chapter, with dialogue changes to the Paths conversation supplied to the staff by Hajime Isayama himself.

The far-future scenes from Special 2, showing Paradis across the ages and a boy with his dog finding the tree again, were left out of this episodic version. Rico Brzenska appears with mistakenly colored hair and eyes. The closing information segment muses that fear and conflict will outlive the Titans, yet a future of mutual understanding waits somewhere ahead.