A Long Dream

Falco's flying Titan sets down on the cliffs edging Fort Salta, carrying the survivors of the final battle. Below them Eren's Founding Titan lies in ruin and the Rumbling has stopped, yet relief dies quickly: the luminous centipede that crawled from Eren's remains still moves, and a flash of light raises a fresh giant, skinless and rivaling the Colossus in height. Reunions between the Warriors and their families are cut short. Reiner moves to grapple the creature while Armin's Colossus intercepts Eren, and the centipede answers by venting gas across the fort. Connie recognizes it as the same agent that transformed Ragako. Everyone lacking Ackerman blood or a shifter's power becomes a Titan, Jean and Connie among them, and the new horde careens down the cliff to defend the crawling thing.

Levi gets Mikasa and Pieck onto Falco's back before the cloud arrives. Pieck and Annie join Reiner against the centipede and the transformed while Falco carries Mikasa and Levi toward Eren. Mikasa's skull pounds the whole way, and inside the pain she lives a different life: a quiet cabin, a couple who fled the war with Marley, and Eren asking her to discard her scarf and forget him once his remaining four years run out. She wakes weeping, draws the scarf from inside her shirt, winds it back around her neck, and apologizes to him for being unable to keep that promise.

She tells Levi and Falco that Eren waits inside his Titan's mouth. Levi's Thunder Spear blasts a gap through its teeth, barely wide enough for one person, and Mikasa flies through with blade drawn. Finding Eren's head at the end of a long spine, she severs it. In some gentler place he seems only to be sleeping on a bench; she cradles his head, tells him she will see him later, and kisses him farewell while Ymir Fritz looks on and smiles.

Falco delivers the surviving Scouts and Warriors to Fort Salta as the Rumbling ends.

The centipede survives, Eren reappears in a skinless Titan the size of the Colossus, and the creature's gas turns the Eldians at the fort into Titans.

Reiner, Pieck, and Annie hold the centipede back while Falco flies Mikasa and Levi toward Eren.

Within the paths, Mikasa experiences an alternate life with Eren and rejects his plea to forget him.

Levi breaches the Titan's mouth with a Thunder Spear, and Mikasa beheads Eren and bids him farewell with a kiss.

The 138th chapter, fourth in volume 34, ran March 9, 2021 in Japan and March 8 in English as the penultimate installment of Hajime Isayama's manga. Draft pages for it were later reproduced in Attack on Titan: Ending.

Its adaptation spans THE FINAL CHAPTERS Special 2 and the anime episode carrying the same name. The title refers to Mikasa's words upon waking beside Eren in the paths, where she believes the entire war was a long dream, and the chapter resolves the series' central relationship one chapter before the finale.