Support

An explosion rolls over the countryside while the Yeagerists move Hange toward a forest of giant trees, and Hange names the sound instantly: a Thunder Spear. At its origin Zeke is barely a body anymore, a head and partial arm on a ruined torso, his hearing and sight shutting down. Memory floods the dark. Tom Ksaver once laid out the loophole in the first king's renunciation of war: contact between a royal blooded Titan and the Founder's holder unlocks the Founding Titan's full strength, though command of that power stays with the holder rather than with Zeke. Think of yourself as a key, Ksaver told him, and find someone worth trusting with it. In time Zeke consumed his mentor, took on the Beast Titan, settled the dead man's glasses onto his own face, and began addressing Ksaver as father.

The groundwork consumed years. Through Yelena and her Anti Marleyan Volunteers, Zeke learned that Eren Yeager held the Founder while Eren's father, a doctor, had vanished; from this he deduced that Grisha never died on the island, claimed the missing Attack Titan, and forced the Founder into his second son, the exact violation Zeke himself had suffered. Resolving to rescue his brother, Zeke met him in Marley, where Eren, posing as a wounded soldier, recounted inheriting Grisha's memories, including the slaughter of the Reiss children that kept the Founder out of royal reach. Eren rejected their father's ambitions, agreed that Eldian existence itself perpetuated the suffering, and accepted Zeke's baseball as the seal on the euthanasia pact.

On the edge of death, Zeke glimpses a ragged child with a bucket in her hands. Nearby, one of his own created Titans regenerates, crawls to his remains, splits open its own stomach, and packs what is left of him inside the wound. Meanwhile in Shiganshina, Yelena has Pixis and the rest of the dissenting officers herded together, colored armbands sorting out who drank the tainted wine, and hints that distrust of Zeke carries a price.

Floch's party reaches the wrecked wagon, and Hange spots a body at the river's edge: Levi, dead by every appearance after absorbing a Thunder Spear blast at point blank distance. Floch moves to make certain of the kill just as the nearby Titan starts steaming away and Zeke steps out whole, dazed. Hange seizes the moment, dives into the river with Levi's body, and is gone. Pressed to explain, Zeke describes the place he woke in as somewhere nameless: a young girl knelt there working the soil like clay, and with it she remade his ruined body over what felt like years compressed into an instant. He concludes the experience was the paths. In a prison cell, Eren confronts Gabi, offering Falco's survival in exchange for a distress signal to Marley, when one escorting soldier knifes the other through the throat. It is Pieck in disguise, and she levels her pistol at Eren while pulling the cell door shut.

A Thunder Spear detonation leaves Zeke a limbless ruin, clinging to life by the river.

Dying flashbacks trace Ksaver's royal blood loophole, Zeke's inheritance of the Beast, and the meeting in Marley where Eren accepted the euthanasia plan.

A Pure Titan entombs Zeke's remains in its own belly; he walks out restored and credits a mysterious girl who rebuilt him in the paths.

Hange discovers Levi's blast-torn body and escapes the Yeagerists through the river.

Yelena detains Pixis and the military dissenters, while a disguised Pieck corners Eren at gunpoint in Gabi's cell.

Support stands 115th overall and first in volume 29, reaching Japan on March 9, 2019 with the English release a day ahead. It sits in the War for Paradis arc after Sole Salvation and before Above and Below, and the anime distributes its content across the episodes Sole Salvation, Above and Below, and Judgment.

The barefoot girl Zeke sees is Ymir Fritz, and his rebuilding gives the manga its most direct look at the paths realm to that point. The chapter quote is Zeke's halting attempt to describe her kneading his body together in a place outside time.