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Survey Corps reports trace the Titan influx back to the breach at Shiganshina, confirming Trost as the front line. Atop the Wall, Dot Pixis, the eccentric Garrison commander who halted Eren's execution, jokes that being eaten would be acceptable if the Titan were a gorgeous woman, then gets to business. He agrees to protect the trio if the promised evidence in the Yeager basement pans out, and asks Armin whether his talk of Eren's usefulness was strategy or a bid to survive. Armin answers that it was both, and proposes that Eren's Titan haul a huge boulder near the gate into the hole, letting humanity reclaim the district. Eren commits, and Pixis calls his staff together.

Among the troops, the announcement lands badly. Daz panics openly, an officer threatens him with execution, and his retort that dying that way beats being eaten sparks a spreading refusal. As soldiers walk off the grounds and Captain Kitz Weilman moves to execute deserters, Pixis intervenes from the Wall: anyone who leaves is pardoned. Fear of Titans is natural, he says, but those who go will simply pass that terror on to the people they love. The crowd files back into formation. Pixis then reframes the disastrous Wall Maria reclamation of four years earlier as a culling the government disguised as an operation, a sin borne by all of humanity; if Wall Rose falls, Wall Sheena cannot feed even half the remaining population, so this time the territory must truly be won back. He introduces Eren as the product of secret experiments, a man able to inhabit and command a Titan's body, while Armin briefs Garrison officers on the details: mass concentrations of soldiers will bait the Titans away, Wall cannons will thin them out, and an elite squad will screen Eren as he moves the stone.

Privately, Eren doubts his Titan strength is up to the boulder, but accepts that an impostor or not, his role is to be everyone's hope. The escort team reaches the target unopposed, and Eren bites his hand and transforms. Then, instead of reaching for the rock, his Titan pivots and hurls a fist at Mikasa.

Armin's boulder strategy is adopted as the framework for the first operation in history to reclaim Titan-held territory. Pixis publicly reveals Eren's power to the assembled soldiers and quells a mass desertion by pardoning anyone who leaves while appealing to what they would be abandoning.

Pixis discloses the grim truth behind the Wall Maria reclamation: it was a population purge, and losing Trost would force a far worse reckoning within Wall Sheena.

Eren accepts his burden as humanity's symbol of hope, transforms beside the boulder, and immediately loses control, attacking Mikasa as the chapter ends.

The title, rendered from the Japanese for "idol" or "graven image", reflects Eren's own framing of himself as an impostor who must nonetheless embody hope for the army. A signboard beside the boulder, written in the Walls' katakana script, translates to a note that the rock predates the town's construction.

This is the third chapter of volume 3, released August 9, 2010 in Japan and December 4, 2012 in the United States during the Wall Sealing arc. The anime adapts it as "Idol: The Struggle for Trost, Part 7", and it falls between the chapters "Response" and "Wound".