Wall: Assault on Stohess, Part 3

Annie's Titan crashes down onto a church mid-service, crushing worshipers, and flees toward the Wall with Eren in pursuit through packed streets. Hange notes that Eren is keeping his mind this time; Armin cautions that willpower alone will not beat her. As civilians die in the chase, Eren recalls the girl who sneered at everything except her own fighting art and wonders what could justify this slaughter. The two Titans finally square off, hardened skin against raw ferocity, and Eren hurls her into a building, with watching soldiers muttering that the whole town may not survive Erwin's plan.

Nile Dawk, hearing the casualty reports, brands Erwin a traitor at gunpoint. Erwin calmly answers that everything serves humanity's victory and offers Nile command, and Nile settles for handcuffs and full deployment while Erwin orders Levi to hold back. In the fight, Annie shears off Eren's lower leg with a hardened kick and batters him into stillness, her father's voice echoing in her memory. Then something in Eren snaps: his Titan ignites in a berserk fury, runs her down, and crushes her face in his grip.

Annie breaks loose and climbs the Wall, sacrificing a leg to shake Eren's last lunge, but Mikasa rides her ODM gear up the stone and slices the fingers from both hands, telling Annie to fall as memories of her father's promise flood back. Eren pounces on the fallen Titan, tears it apart, and stops cold at the sight of the crying girl inside the nape. That hesitation gives Annie the moment to encase herself in crystal; Levi cuts Eren free of the merging Titan flesh before their key evidence is swallowed with him.

The crystal defeats every attempt at extraction, so Hange has it netted in wire and stored deep underground; the mission's price bought a prisoner who cannot be questioned. Facing the furious Stohess mayor, Erwin explains that possible Female Titan collaborators inside the military forced him to exclude the Military Police, and argues that letting her escape would eventually have brought the Walls down.

Eren confesses to Armin and Mikasa that he froze when he saw Annie; Armin openly says that hesitation caused the outcome. At the hearing, Erwin reframes the disaster as a turning point: humanity captured one of the enemy for the first time, there are more hiding among them, and the hunt inside the Walls now begins. The final shot lands the twist: crumbling masonry where Annie damaged Wall Sina exposes a colossal face embedded within the Wall itself.

The 25th episode and season one finale, produced by Wit Studio with Production I.G. Tetsurō Araki shares directing credit with Shintaro Itoga, Masashi Koizuka, and Daisuke Tokudo, over a Yasuko Kobayashi script; broadcast dates are September 29, 2013 in Japan and November 1, 2014 in the US. It adapts the chapters Wall and Soldiers Dance and closes the Assault on Stohess arc, running a modified animation of great escape over the credits.

An unusually long information segment tells of a miner in year 784 who tried tunneling beneath Wall Sina, struck an impenetrable underground continuation of the Wall, and vanished without a trace, followed soon after by the friend he told. The episode's closing image sets up the Wall Titan revelation that drives later seasons.