Meeting

Hange, Levi, and Armin appear outside the cells holding Eren and Mikasa. Hange presses Eren about his strange muttering regarding the Attack Titan, but Levi cuts the interrogation short, and the pair learn their sentences have ended early. With morale to protect after the costly victory at Shiganshina, Darius Zackly has approved their release, and Queen Historia awaits them in Trost.

Historia, meanwhile, sits with the letter Ymir left her. In it, Ymir recounts a childhood spent begging until a cult leader renamed her after the legendary Ymir Fritz and built worship around her. When the authorities broke up the sect, its leader blamed her, and she kept the false identity anyway, hoping it might spare her followers. It did not. She and the cultists were paraded in chains, shipped to the edge of Paradis, and injected to become mindless Titans. Decades later, devouring Marcel Galliard restored her humanity, and she chose to live entirely on her own terms. Her single regret, the letter closes, is never marrying Historia.

At the military council, Zackly confirms that only those present know of the three volumes recovered from Grisha Yeager's basement. Hange then delivers the findings: the people inside the Walls are Subjects of Ymir, remnants of the old Eldian Empire, and the wider world wants that bloodline erased. The revelations stir Eren's inherited memories of Eren Kruger explaining the Founding Titan to Grisha, including how King Karl Fritz withdrew to the island and swore a vow renouncing war, leaving the threat of the Wall Titans as pure deterrence.

Several turning points land in quick succession. Eren and Mikasa walk free ahead of schedule and rejoin their comrades in Trost. Historia finishes Ymir's letter and tells Hange it contains no hidden intelligence, only a life story and a goodbye.

During the briefing, Hange links the First King's vow to the suicidal pacifism that gripped every Reiss inheritor of the Founder, then raises the unresolved puzzle of how Eren once commanded Titans despite lacking royal blood. Eren silently pieces it together: in that moment he had struck the Titan that ate his mother, the transformed Dina Fritz, a woman of royal descent. Contact with a royal-blooded Titan unlocked the Founder. He nearly blurts out the discovery, then swallows it, realizing that voicing it would paint a target on Historia. Armin catches his expression and understands something has changed.

The chapter also completes Kruger's story. Preparing the serum on the island's edge, he urges Grisha to build a family inside the Walls and finish the mission, invoking the names Armin and Mikasa, names neither man can place, hinting that memories flow backward through the Attack Titan's line.

The chapter appears in volume 22, released January 6, 2017 in Japan with the English edition following a day later. It falls within the Return to Shiganshina arc, sits between The Attack Titan and To the Other Side of the Wall, and its material was adapted across the anime episodes Children and Attack Titan.

In the magazine printing, Hajime Isayama wrote Eren's inner monologue as considering whether eating a royal Titan would awaken the Founder, when the intended idea was merely touching one. Isayama publicly corrected himself on his blog soon after release and promised the fix for the collected volume.

Sasha Blouse is shown recovering from her Shiganshina wounds elsewhere in Trost, and the closing quote belongs to Ymir, reflecting on the freedom she found after waking from her Titan years.