Borderline

The journals resume with Grisha castigating himself for treating Zeke as a tool of the Eldian cause. After the boy denounced his parents, Marleyan interrogators went to work on the captured Restorationists, taking Grisha's fingers one at a time while demanding a name for the spy called the Owl. He gave them nothing. The prisoners were blindfolded and shipped by steamboat toward the island, and through the voyage Grisha kept wondering where he had seen the overseeing officer, Kruger, before.

Lined up atop the thirty meter Wall at the island's shore, the condemned learned their sentence: mindless Titanhood, an endless hunger with no death to end it. Grisha placed Kruger at last as the officer who beat him as a child on the day Faye died. Grice, the man who had first recruited Grisha, screamed accusations at him over Zeke's betrayal until Sergeant Major Gross tired of the noise and booted him down to the sand, untransformed, as running bait to pull the new Titans away from the shoreline. In Gross, Grisha recognized someone worse: the official who, fifteen years earlier, threw his little sister Faye to the dogs.

Injections followed, and Grisha watched his comrades balloon into Titans and lumber after Grice. When the guards brought Dina forward, he shouted that her royal Fritz blood made her too valuable to waste, but Kruger cut him off sharply, and Grisha realized the officer was deliberately burying that fact. Dina's parting words were a promise to find him, whatever shape she was forced into. Then the needle went in, the kick came, and a grotesque grinning Titan rose from the sand where she landed.

A scream cuts to the present. Eren jolts awake in a cell with Mikasa locked up beside him and Armin keeping watch from the hall. The detention, Armin explains, is the sentence both Eren and Mikasa earned by breaking military law. Something in Eren's voice unsettles his friends; he speaks of a long dream, then names it for what it was, his father's memories, and with them the knowledge that Dina's smiling Titan is the creature that devoured Carla.

The flashback closes on Gross's philosophy. He likens Eldians to vermin, rats whose extermination the world quietly craves, and stages a private amusement by transforming another prisoner into a small Titan meant to eat Grisha. Kruger ends the game, hurling Gross from the Wall to the Titan below, then confessing that he himself is the Owl. Telling Grisha to watch and learn, he slices his own hand open, transforms, and pulps the Marleyan steamboat in his Titan's grip.

Torture yields no name for the Owl, and Marley ships the condemned Restorationists to the island for Titanization.

Gross turns Grice loose on the sand as bait for the newly made Titans, and Grisha places him as the man behind Faye's death.

Kruger buries the fact of Dina's royal lineage; her transformation into the grinning Titan follows her vow to find Grisha in any form.

Waking in his cell, Eren fits the inherited memories together and understands that his mother died in Dina's jaws.

Kruger feeds Gross to a Titan, admits to being the Owl, and demolishes the Marleyan steamboat after transforming.

Borderline leads off volume 22 as the 87th chapter, published in Japan and North America on the same day, November 8, 2016, within the Return to Shiganshina arc; it follows the chapter That Day and precedes The Attack Titan, and the anime adapts it in an episode also titled That Day. A trivia point ties the transformed Restorationists to specific Titans later seen invading Trost, apparently including the one that swallows Eren, the Abnormal that takes Thomas Wagner, and the Peering Titan that kills Mina Carolina.