Delusions of Strength

In the year 849, two years into their training, the cadets drill hand-to-hand technique. Eren throws Reiner with surprising ease during a knife exercise, crediting a rough neighborhood kid he grew up scrapping with, though he privately questions the point of practicing against humans. The pair spot Annie drifting away from the drills to dodge the instructor's eye and press her into sparring. She dumps Eren face-first into the dirt, strips the wooden knife from him, and flattens Reiner even faster. Her father taught her, she explains. In her view the exercise is theater; final rankings ride on skill with vertical maneuvering equipment, and high marks merely buy a comfortable interior posting. To underline the point she blows through Eren's guard, reverses his attempted throw, and pins him with the blade at his throat before walking off, saying the soldier act stopped amusing her long ago.

That evening, Armin holds forth on Military Police privileges while Jean loudly advertises his own technique nearby. Eren needles him for perfecting Titan-killing skills whose reward is never seeing a Titan. The spat nearly cools until Jean notices Mikasa and seizes Eren's collar, at which point Eren drops him using the move Annie demonstrated earlier, startling her from across the room. He brands Jean a coward hiding behind a Military Police application. The crash draws instructor Shadis to the mess hall, but everyone scrambles back into their seats, and Mikasa deadpans that Sasha broke wind, mortifying her. Afterward, Eren points out that a caught fight could have wrecked Jean's Military Police chances and proposes settling their score during sanctioned combat drills.

The next morning Jean trains with new intensity, which Annie reads as pure rivalry with Eren and nothing more. She thinks briefly of the days her father drilled her back in her hometown. When Eren asks how his copied throw looked, she calls it awful, then smiles and offers genuine lessons. Wary of another beating, he declines at first, but she assures him he need not hold back against her, and he accepts.

Annie defeats both Eren and Reiner in sparring and voices her contempt for a system in which the strongest soldiers earn the right to avoid Titans entirely.

Eren flips Jean in the mess hall with Annie's technique and calls out his motives; Mikasa covers for the scuffle by blaming the noise on Sasha.

Annie offers to teach Eren her fighting style for real, and he agrees, beginning their training together.

The chapter's bonus page, Current Publicly Available Information #9, covers ultrahard steel: forged solely in factory cities where blast furnaces exist, requiring trace rare metals whose identities the towns guard as secrets, and the only substance able to cut Titan flesh, which makes the single-edged blade the standard anti-Titan weapon.

Delusions of Strength is the fourth chapter of volume 4 and 17th in the series, released in Japan in January 2011 within the 104th Training Corps arc. The anime adapts it in The Night of the Closing Ceremony: Humanity's Comeback, Part 2. Its central quote has Annie asking why those best equipped to fight Titans win the privilege of staying farthest from them.