Pain

Erwin Smith lays his case before Dot Pixis: dethrone the figurehead king and remove the Royal Government. Pixis confesses he always expected a day would come when his gun pointed inward, yet an aging soldier cannot rally troops to civil war lightly. He agrees to hear the full plan, promising loyalty if convinced and the gallows for Erwin if not. Pixis reasons that the monarchy survived even Wall Maria's fall because shared confinement bred shared fate, and that open bloodshed would shatter the crown's role as an emotional anchor. Erwin counters with a scheme to swap the king's head without armies or killing, though he admits its linchpin is information he does not yet possess.

While they wait, Erwin recounts his childhood. His father, a schoolteacher, privately explained that government textbooks were riddled with contradictions and that erasing all knowledge of the outside world should have been impossible for ordinary record-keeping. Young Erwin repeated the theory to other children, and his father soon died far from home in a staged accident, silenced by the state. Erwin now believes the government intends to seize Eren so his scream can guard royal privilege rather than humanity.

Hours earlier, Levi and Hange interrogate the captured Interior Squad officer Djel Sannes, tearing out fingernails while his screams carry to Levi's young squad below. Shaken, Armin muses aloud about manipulating public opinion, staging disasters, and pinning blame on the monarchy, then passes it off as a joke before conceding that none of them count as good people anymore. Sannes endures broken bones and a pulled tooth, defends the peace his squad enforced through assassination, including the killing of Historia's mother, and begs to be tortured to death. He finally shatters when a scripted conversation tricks him into believing his comrade Ralph sold him out. The secret spills: royal blood runs through the Reiss family, not the Fritz line on the throne. Nifa's message reaches Erwin, who declares the bloodless path open, so long as Historia Reiss can be crowned queen.

Erwin formally proposes overthrowing the Royal Government and stakes his life on persuading Pixis, whose judgment will decide whether the Garrison joins the coup. Erwin's backstory reveals that state assassins killed his father over a theory about falsified history, the wound driving his lifelong pursuit of the truth.

Under torture, Sannes admits the Interior Squad murdered anyone whose ideas threatened the order inside the Walls. A staged betrayal involving Ralph breaks his resistance, and he discloses that the Reiss family is the genuine royal line, giving Erwin the missing piece: enthrone Historia and replace the king without a drop of blood.

Armin's admission that the Survey Corps has crossed a moral line supplies the chapter's title and marks a turning point for the younger soldiers, who hear the torture rather than witness it. Sannes's mixture of pride, guilt, and pleading complicates the picture of the Interior Squad as simple villains; he insists his bloody work preserved the peace everyone enjoyed.

The chapter adapts into the anime episodes Pain and Old Story, and it opens volume 14 within the Royal Government arc, following Location of the Counterattack and preceding Actors.