I'm Home

Word of Titans inside Wall Rose's southern territory sends four riders galloping toward Ehrmich, Yarckel, Krolva, and Trost. Thomas raises the alarm in Ehrmich before continuing on to Stohess to reach Commander Erwin, while another messenger reports the incursion to Pixis in Trost. Five hours after the sighting, the north team nears the end of its route, and Sasha splits off alone to warn Dauper, her village deep in the woods.

On the ride she recalls an old argument with her father. Caught eating the winter stores, young Sasha complained about the Wall Maria refugees crowding their shrinking forest and wished they would leave. Her father took the opposite view: the Blouse clan's hunting tradition might have to be surrendered, because adapting is what survival means. Sasha, who saw the tradition as their very identity, was appalled.

Fresh Titan footprints lead her to a young settlement outside Dauper, where a three-meter Titan is devouring a woman's leg while her daughter sits paralyzed across the room. Sasha buries a firewood axe in the creature's neck, but it heals too fast to finish, so she snatches the girl and flees, apologizing to the doomed mother. Her horse bolts. When the terrified child will not run, Sasha remembers Ymir mocking her stilted polite speech and telling her to talk like herself; dropping the act, she barks at the girl in her natural dialect to get moving. She then stands her ground with a bow, puts an arrow in one of the Titan's eyes, leaps in to drive her last shaft into the other, and slithers out of its blood-slicked grasp. Running blind, she collides with her father's search party, which has already found the girl. Mr. Blouse tells her she has grown into a fine woman, and Sasha smiles, home at last.

Messengers spread warning of the apparent Wall Rose breach to the major districts, reaching Erwin in Stohess and Pixis in Trost. The scale of the crisis becomes concrete as Titan tracks appear deep inside human territory.

Sasha single-handedly delays a three-meter Titan without maneuvering gear, blinding both its eyes with arrows to rescue the orphaned girl, the child later known as Kaya. She abandons her forced formal speech for good, embracing Ymir's advice to be herself.

Sasha reunites with her father, whose praise resolves their old quarrel about tradition versus adaptation, and the girl she saved is taken in safely.

The title is the greeting Sasha can finally say honestly, closing the chapter's twin threads of homecoming: returning to Dauper and returning to her true self. The rescued girl and her mother's death become significant much later, when Kaya resurfaces at the Blouse farm during the War for Paradis arc.

This is the second chapter of volume 9, released August 9, 2012 in Japan and November 26, 2013 in the United States as part of the Clash of the Titans arc. It is adapted directly in the anime episode "I'm Home" and runs between "The Beast Titan" and "Southwestward".