The Rumbling (Chapter)

Outside a coastal town in Marley, Halil frets over the stolen coins his friend Ramzi keeps buried beneath a tree. Ramzi has already paid for thieving with his right hand, yet he refuses to stop while winter threatens the refugee camp, and he asks Halil to pass the money along to his family if he should die. Fleeing townsfolk and a trembling earth cut the conversation short; from a hilltop the boys watch enormous shapes advance on the horizon beneath a swarm of startled birds.

Eren Yeager's mind drifts back to his first days on the continent, when he walked among people he already understood he would one day kill. He questioned how his mother might judge him, and whether the King of the Walls was correct in deeming Eldians worthy of extinction. The arithmetic condemned him, since erasing the outside world would cost far more lives than letting the island perish, but he could not bring himself to accept that trade. When he saw merchants beating Ramzi over a theft, he intervened despite knowing how hollow the kindness was, carried the boy back to the camp, and tearfully begged forgiveness for a future he would not change. In his own estimation, that made him worse than Reiner Braun.

In the present, the Wall Titans grind the town into rubble. Refugees rushing for high ground find Titans climbing the mountain passes, and a shuttered gate seals the crowd inside the city. Halil dies when debris thrown up by a colossal footfall crushes his skull, and Ramzi, pinned in the wreckage, glimpses an apparition of Ymir Fritz just before a foot comes down on him.

Behind the marching line, Eren remembers Armin's childhood stories of flaming water and fields of ice, and a boyish version of himself exults in the destruction as the freedom the two of them always chased. The Armin he turns toward, though, is grown, standing in the paths with blood still on his shirt. Annie Leonhart's voice pulls Armin back to the ship bound for Odiha. She asks why he kept visiting her crystal during her captivity, and he answers plainly that he wanted to see her. When she chalks it up to him being a good person, he rejects the label, calling himself a monster with years of killing behind him, yet he still holds out hope that the better world he and Eren imagined exists somewhere past the Walls. Far away, Eren rests within the Founding Titan.

The Wall Titans annihilate a seaside Marleyan town, and climbing Titans cut off every escape route for its refugees.

Ramzi and Halil are both killed in the destruction; Ramzi sees a vision of Ymir Fritz in his final moments.

A flashback reveals that Eren rescued Ramzi from a beating roughly a year earlier and apologized to the boy for the massacre he already knew he would carry out.

Eren's memories frame the Rumbling as the childhood dream of freedom he shared with Armin, twisted into atrocity.

Aboard the ship to Odiha, Armin tells Annie he visited her crystal simply out of wanting to see her, admits he considers himself a monster, and voices his lingering hope for the world beyond the Walls.

The Rumbling is the opening chapter of volume 33 and the 131st chapter of the series overall, from writer and artist Hajime Isayama. It reached Japanese readers on August 7, 2020, one day after its August 6 English release, during the War for Paradis arc. Its title refers to the cataclysm itself, which has a separate wiki entry.

The anime adapts this material in THE FINAL CHAPTERS Special 1, in the segment titled The Rumbling. It follows The Dawn of Humanity and precedes The Wings of Freedom.

Although Armin's shirt still carries bloodstains from when Samuel shot him, the artwork shows no bullet holes in the fabric.