From One Hand to Another

Years earlier on Paradis Island, Annie tails a Military Police soldier hoping he can lead her to the true monarch, but the man, Kenny Ackerman, sees through her cover story and she barely escapes into the sewers. When she reports the encounter, she urges Reiner and Bertolt to cut their losses and sail home with what little intelligence they have. Reiner will not accept returning with five years of nothing, so he lays out a new scheme: crack Wall Rose on graduation day in Trost, while the Survey Corps is away on an expedition, then slip into Wall Sheena among the refugees. Annie is repulsed when he claims their fellow trainees mean nothing to him. In another memory, Reiner steadies a frustrated Eren after a maneuvering-gear failure, telling him not to lose heart and that he is the one who could wipe the Titans out.

In present-day Liberio, those recollections drive Reiner to put a rifle to his own head. The sound of Falco training outside stops him, and watching the boy, he recognizes the young candidates as his reason to stay alive. Falco, dreading that Gabi will claim the Armored Titan, wanders to a hospital for shell-shocked Eldian veterans and sits with a bandaged soldier he once helped. The man confides that his trauma is an act to avoid returning to his family, and when Falco despairs that he will die having achieved nothing, the soldier reflects on why people walk into hell: only those who keep pressing forward ever learn what waits past it.

Meanwhile, Magath receives the Tybur family. Its head, Willy Tybur, admits privately that the Tyburs have been Marley's true rulers all along, letting the nation wage its wars as atonement for Eldia's old sins. Declaring that the world needs a new Helos, he announces he will expose everything at the coming festival and asks for Magath's cooperation. Falco, honoring the wounded soldier's request, drops a letter for the man's family into a postbox outside the internment zone.

A flashback shows Annie's near-disastrous brush with Kenny Ackerman, the failure that pushed the Warriors to abandon reconnaissance and plan the Wall Rose breach for their graduation day in Trost.

Reiner nearly ends his own life but chooses to live for the new Warrior candidates. Falco learns the hospitalized soldier known as Mister Kruger is faking his psychological wounds, and hears his philosophy that only those who keep moving forward find meaning beyond hell.

Willy Tybur confirms to Magath that the Tybur family secretly controls Marley and resolves to reveal the truth to the world at the upcoming festival. Falco unknowingly mails a letter on behalf of the disguised Eren Yeager.

The wounded soldier calling himself Mister Kruger is Eren Yeager operating undercover in Liberio, and the letter Falco posts is his covert message; the chapter's title points to that hand-off. The quote that opens the chapter, about the ones who keep moving forward, echoes Reiner's own advice to Eren during their trainee days.

This chapter is the third of volume 24 and was released simultaneously in Japan and the United States on September 8, 2017. Its events are adapted in the anime episodes "The Door of Hope" and "From One Hand to Another". It follows "The Door of Hope" and precedes "Good to See".