Ymir

Twenty hours after the first sighting, the Beast Titan is climbing down the far side of the Wall while dozens of Titans press in on Utgard Castle. Nanaba and Gelgar carry the defense alone, felling Titan after Titan as their gas runs out and their blades dull to uselessness. Gelgar, bleeding from his head wound, apologizes for being unable to go on and releases his gear; Nanaba dives and kills the Titan that snatches him, but its falling corpse smashes him into the stonework, where he dies beside a wine bottle that turns out to be empty. Cornered against the Wall with nothing left, Nanaba is taken by the swarm, and both veterans are devoured while the trainees watch.

The unarmed recruits can do nothing but grieve. Krista pelts the Titans with stones, and Connie pounds the tower in frustration, accepting that his life had meaning yet mourning the unfinished mission. When Krista wishes aloud for a weapon of her own, Ymir rounds on her, refusing to let the veterans' deaths serve as cover for a noble suicide, and orders her to remember the promise from their training days.

The flashback lands on a snowbound mountain exercise. Krista hauls a dying Daz through the drifts while Ymir lays out the arithmetic: at this pace all three of them freeze, so either two survive or nobody does. She accuses Krista of engineering a hero's death, a legend for others to carry home, then reveals what she overheard from Wallists plotting against the girl, that Krista is the discarded illegitimate daughter of the Reiss house, and swears never to expose her. Calling the two of them opposites, one clinging to life and one hunting for permission to die, Ymir carries Daz over a cliff edge that should have killed them both. When Krista later finds the pair alive by a cabin, Ymir offers the explanation on one condition: the day her own secret comes to light, Krista returns to living under her true name.

Back at the collapsing tower, dawn breaks. Ymir asks Connie for his knife and announces she is going to fight. Her parting words to Krista are framed as a wish rather than a demand, that she live a life she can be proud of. She sprints off the roof, opens her hand on the blade in mid-air, and transforms, tearing into the Titans below. The recruits stare in shock, all except Reiner and Bertolt, who recognize this particular Titan as the one that devoured their childhood friend years before.

Nanaba and Gelgar are killed after exhausting their gas and blades, leaving Utgard's defenders with no working vertical maneuvering equipment.

A flashback establishes that Ymir has known Krista's real identity as a cast-off child of the Reiss line since their trainee years, and bound her to a promise about reclaiming her name.

Ymir transforms into a Titan in front of the surviving recruits, abandoning her cover to defend the tower.

Reiner and Bertolt privately identify Ymir's Titan as the creature that ate their friend, linking her to their concealed past.

Published in Japan on December 9, 2012 and in English on December 31, 2013, the chapter is the second of volume 10 and the fortieth overall, running between Soldier and Historia within the Clash of the Titans arc. The anime distributes its material across the episodes Soldier and Historia.

The chapter takes its name from the character at its center and shares it with her page, which is why the two carry a disambiguation notice. Its opening quote is Ymir's wish that Krista live with pride.