Toward the Tree on That Hill

Within the Paths, a conversation unfolds that Eren has hidden from everyone. Armin presses him over the beating at Niccolo's restaurant, and Eren confesses that pushing his friends away was deliberate: by opposing the Rumbling, the Eldians of Paradis would stand before the world as humanity's saviors. The scale of his crime then lands. Eight of every ten people alive have been trampled, leaving no nation capable of striking back at the island for generations. Eren offers no defense when Armin asks whether it had to go that far.

The two drift through landscapes as they talk, a volcano, a snowfield, the sea. Eren explains what he learned of Ymir Fritz: two thousand years of obedience rooted not in the curse of her blood but in a love for King Fritz she could never escape, and a wait for the single person able to unchain her from it. That person, to Armin's disbelief, is Mikasa. Everything, the civil strife on Paradis, the flattened world, even Eren steering Dina's Titan toward his own mother on the day Wall Maria fell, happened so that Mikasa's choice could set Ymir free. When Armin needles him about Mikasa finding another man, Eren's composure shatters; he sobs that he wants her to love no one else, and that dying terrifies him. He erases Armin's memory of it all, promising it will return when the fighting ends, and Armin thanks him for shouldering the world's hatred.

At Fort Salta the memory comes back. Mikasa arrives cradling Eren's severed head, the Titan power is gone, and the shifters wake in bodies that are finally just human. Levi, resting against the rubble, receives a final salute from a vision of every comrade the Survey Corps lost, and returns it. Reiner's mother embraces him, overjoyed that his Armored Titan is no more. When Muller's soldiers demand proof that the Eldians are harmless, Armin points out that not one of them has transformed to defend themselves, then names himself as Eren Yeager's killer. Mikasa, departing with Eren's remains, meets Ymir's apparition in the drifting steam and thanks her for the life that made her own possible.

Three years on, the battle's survivors sail for Paradis as Marleyan peace envoys while Historia's letter warns that the Yeagerists have built the island an army. Beneath the tree where Eren once napped as a boy, Mikasa weeps at his grave until a bird tugs her scarf snug around her neck, and she thanks him for wrapping it around her one more time. Decades pass; she raises a family and dies an old woman, the scarf laid to rest alongside her. War eventually erases Paradis, forests swallow the ruins, and long afterward a boy and his dog stumble upon a colossal tree over Eren's resting place, its shape echoing the one Ymir Fritz found at the beginning of everything.

Eren's erased Paths conversation with Armin is revealed: the Rumbling has annihilated 80 percent of humanity, and Eren admits he engineered his friends' status as the world's heroes.

Ymir Fritz's bondage is explained as love for King Fritz, and Mikasa's choice is identified as the act that freed her and ended the Power of the Titans.

Eren confesses to directing Dina Fritz's Titan toward Carla Yeager, and breaks down admitting he wants to live and cannot bear Mikasa loving another.

At Fort Salta the shifters permanently lose their Titans, Levi salutes a vision of the fallen Survey Corps, and Armin defuses Muller's standoff by claiming Eren's death as his own doing.

Three years later the survivors return to Paradis as peace ambassadors; Mikasa lives out her life beside Eren's grave, and in the far future a child rediscovers the great tree that grew above it.

This chapter concludes both volume 34 and the entire series, standing 139th overall in Hajime Isayama's manga. Japan received it on April 9, 2021, with the English simulpub a day earlier. Its material spans the anime's THE FINAL CHAPTERS Special 2, covering the episodes A Long Dream and Toward the Tree on That Hill.

The magazine printing in Bessatsu Shonen Magazine lacked two passages added for volume 34: the epilogue tracing Paradis Island's distant future and Mikasa's parting words to Ymir. Isayama's preliminary draft pages from the magazine run later appeared in Attack on Titan: Ending and volume 35, annotated with his changes for the anime, and a high-fidelity reproduction of the tankobon working boards shipped with the art book Attack on Titan FLY.