Soul of a Heretic

After the clash in Stohess, Nile Dok pressures the Berg Newspapers to bury any reporting on the First Interior Squad and its anti-personnel vertical maneuvering equipment. The assistant Peaure notes that the Interior unit stands apart from the regular Military Police, and Nile leaves wondering whether that same equipment might someday be aimed at him.

In the countryside, Armin retches beside a tree, haunted by the woman he shot to save Jean during the carriage ambush. Mikasa comforts him while Sasha stitches the shoulder wound Levi took in the attack. That evening Levi addresses Armin's guilt directly: the attacker hesitated and Armin did not, and only because of that is Jean still breathing. His hands are dirty now, Levi tells him, and the person he used to be is gone; what remains is to accept it.

The next day Hitch Dreyse and Marlowe Freudenberg, patrolling for the wanted Survey Corps fugitives, spot Armin drawing water at a river and walk straight into a trap sprung by Mikasa and Levi. Interrogated and stripped of their gear, Hitch rages over Annie's supposed death in Stohess until she learns Annie was the Female Titan and lies crystallized in custody. Marlowe offers the fugitives his help, but Levi stays skeptical, so Jean escorts the pair into the woods at knifepoint. Claiming a private decision to silence them, he raises the blade, fumbles it, and wrestles Marlowe for it until Hitch clubs him with a stick. Marlowe realizes the whole display was a loyalty test. Asked why he trusts him, Jean answers that Marlowe brings to mind a man he once hated. With the two recruits vouched for, they guide Squad Levi to the First Interior Squad's compound, the suspected holding site for Eren and Historia, and the unit readies its strike.

Nile Dok suppresses press coverage of the First Interior Squad while privately fearing its independence from his own command.

Armin struggles with the trauma of his first kill, and Levi tells him to accept the person he has become, since the deed saved Jean's life.

Squad Levi ambushes and captures Hitch and Marlowe, who learn Annie is alive inside her crystal.

Jean's mock execution proves the captives' sincerity, and the pair steer the squad toward the compound thought to hold Eren and Historia.

The Japanese title is 外道の魂 (Gedō no Tamashī). The anime distributes this chapter across the episodes Pain and Trust.

Levi's admonition that Armin can never return to who he was supplies the chapter's epigraph and marks a turning point in Armin's characterization.

The unnamed person Jean says Marlowe resembles is implied to be the same idealist Annie once described, an unspoken nod to Marlowe's kinship with Jean's own younger self.