Gunshots

Levi and Kenny trade blows and bullets, each reading the other's moves. With Nifa's corpse fresh in his sight and his squad, Eren, and Historia all at risk, Levi breaks away exactly as Kenny anticipated, only to be ambushed by more soldiers. His face bloodied, he ducks into a saloon whose patrons recognize him just before Kenny strolls in announcing he has bad guys to shoot.

Crouched behind the counter, Levi banters with his pursuer, needling him about how a mass killer of Military Police ended up wearing their uniform. Kenny answers with something like kinship: both of them clawed their way out of the Underground, both were staggered by how vast the world turned out to be, and both found a cause worth chasing to the end. He claims to understand exactly why Levi chose the Survey Corps. Using a wine bottle's reflection to aim, Levi fires the saloon keeper's shotgun into Kenny's chest, hurls a chair through the window as a decoy, and cuts his way out through the soldiers waiting outside. Kenny, spared by the chair he happened to be holding, rises to his lieutenant's teasing and admires how his nephew exploited the law letting barkeepers keep guns for self-defense.

Sasha picks the gunfire out of the city noise, and the squad shifts to the fallback plan, trailing the hearse that carries Eren and Historia. Levi crashes down onto their wagon, warns that the operation was leaked, and issues a brutal order: the enemy are people, and the squad must be ready to kill them anyway. He and Mikasa take to their gear to cover the escape. When a soldier closes on Armin, Mikasa drops her with a kick, but Jean cannot bring himself to pull the trigger; the woman wrenches his gun away, and a shot rings out. Elsewhere, the kidnappers pry the coffin lids off their cargo. Eren braces to face Rod Reiss, humanity's supposed enemy, and instead watches the man embrace Historia and beg her forgiveness.

Kenny corners Levi in a saloon and hints at their shared Underground past and his own driving ambition. Levi shoots him with the owner's shotgun and escapes with a decoy, though Kenny survives thanks to the chair in his hands.

The extraction plan collapses after being leaked. Levi orders his squad to treat enemy soldiers as kill targets, and the young soldiers face taking human lives for the first time; Jean freezes at the decisive moment and a gunshot sounds as the chapter's cliffhanger.

Kenny and Rod Reiss unseal the coffins holding Eren and Historia. Rather than menace, Rod offers Historia an apology and an embrace, upending Eren's expectations of the man.

The saloon where Levi shelters carries a signboard in the Walls' script reading "Stohess Bar". Kenny's speech in the bar is the first real glimpse of the parallel lives the two Ackermans led, a thread the Royal Government arc later pays off in the chapter "Friends".

This chapter closes volume 14 and was released simultaneously in Japan and the United States on June 9, 2014. Its events span the anime episodes "Pain" and "Old Story", and it falls between "Kenny the Ripper" and "Soul of a Heretic".