Smoke Signal (Chapter)

Eren's Titan collapses mid-experiment, unresponsive to Hange's shouted encouragement. When Mikasa and Hange pry him out, they find his body fused into the flesh far more deeply than before. Waking a day later with no memory of the session, Eren learns the results: no trace of the hardening ability, and each successive transformation produced a smaller, weaker, less intelligent Titan, shrinking from fifteen meters to thirteen and finally to an incomplete ten. During the tests his Titan abruptly lost coherence once it scrawled words concerning Grisha. Levi bluntly calls their prospects grim, and Hange decides the squad's next lead is the knowledge held by the Wallists and the Reiss family. Alone with his thoughts, Eren briefly sees a vision of a girl combing her hair inside an opulent bedroom, then loses the memory to a stab of pain.

In Mitras, Erwin shares a carriage with Nile Dok and asks whether Nile knew the Interior Military Police tortured and killed Minister Nick while hunting for Eren. A shaken Nile explains the Interior squad answers to no one in the regular chain of command. The two drift into old memories of the Training Corps and of Marie, the woman Nile married. Erwin admits he loved her too, yet chose the Titans over her, and Nile remarks that something must be broken in a man who could do that.

Squad Levi reads sealed orders from Erwin, and Levi says those gullible enough to trust the Commander may fall in behind him. In Trost District, hostile townspeople crowd Levi in the street, and during the commotion a carriage snatches Eren and Historia. The abduction is a setup: the real pair is hidden elsewhere, and the captives are Jean and Armin in disguise. Levi's squad tracks the kidnappers to a rooftop, where Levi flexes his injured leg and pronounces it ready.

The hardening experiments fail completely, with Eren's Titan degrading across three transformations and his body fusing deeper into the Titan flesh.

Eren experiences an unexplained memory flash of a girl in an ornate bedroom, later identifiable as Frieda Reiss, triggered alongside thoughts of his father.

Erwin learns the Interior Military Police operate outside Nile's authority, confirming a hidden power structure behind Nick's murder.

Erwin's staged kidnapping succeeds: Jean and Armin pose as Eren and Historia, letting Squad Levi trace the abductors to their hideout.

Before the volume release the chapter carried a different title, 信じるバカ (Shinjiru Baka), roughly "Stupid Enough to Believe," echoing Levi's words to his squad.

When Eren's Titan scrawls in the dirt during the tests, the marks match the kanji for "ate" (クッタ, kutta), written inverted, running right to left in the manner of the strange lettering on the herring can found at Utgard Castle; whether the two writings are connected has never been confirmed. The phrase ties to Hange's report that Eren wrote about what his father did to him.

The Japanese title 狼煙 (Noroshi) refers to a signal fire, and the anime adapts the chapter as the episode Smoke Signal.