Location of the Counterattack

In a dream drawn from buried memory, a young Historia sits beside a dark-haired woman she calls her big sister, the same figure from Eren's recovered visions. The woman reads to her from an illustrated book, teases her about being ladylike, and urges her to earn the love of those around her. When Historia says she wants to grow up to be just like her, the woman panics, presses their foreheads together, and asks the girl to forget her. Historia's memory of her vanishes on the spot. Waking with a jolt, Historia can recall nothing except that the dream mattered.

Waiting with Eren for Squad Levi's operation to play out, Historia admits she no longer knows who she is. With Ymir gone, she has only a family she knows nothing about, and she envies how Eren always seems certain of his path. He shrugs that certainty was never part of it; inaction simply meant watching everyone he loved get eaten. When Historia calls her old Krista persona a fictional girl from a storybook and describes her true self as empty, Eren dismisses the worry, saying he always found Krista fake, while the honest, ordinary Historia suits him far better.

At a Trost warehouse, Reeves Company men come to inspect their captured prizes, unaware the real Eren and Historia were swapped for decoys. Levi, Mikasa, and the squad subdue them in seconds, with Sasha's arrow pinning a hidden pistol. The chauffeur turns out to be Dimo Reeves himself, and Levi takes him to the top of the Wall for a negotiation. He offers to hand over Eren and Historia if the company backs the Survey Corps, trusts it completely, and opens its stock of goods to the soldiers. Reeves, impressed, shakes on it.

That night, a staged carriage accident on a cliff road lets the Corps abduct two Interior officers, and Levi and Hange lay out torture tools for Djel Sannes. Meanwhile, Erwin returns from Mitras and sits down with Pixis, proposing that the Survey Corps use its strength to topple the Royal Government and claim authority over humanity inside the Walls.

Historia's dream reveals that a woman, later identified as Frieda Reiss, taught her as a child and wiped herself from Historia's memory.

Historia confesses her emptiness after losing Ymir, and Eren tells her he prefers the real her to the fabricated Krista Lenz.

Squad Levi ambushes the Reeves Company men sent to verify their captives and unmasks the company president posing as a chauffeur.

Levi wins Dimo Reeves over with a three-part bargain: support, trust, and access to the company's goods in exchange for Eren and Historia.

The Corps captures Djel Sannes for interrogation, and Erwin proposes to Pixis that the Survey Corps overthrow the Royal Government.

Location of the Counterattack closes volume 13 as the 54th chapter of Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan, released in Japan and the United States on February 9, 2014. It belongs to the Royal Government arc, between Smoke Signal and Pain, with anime material spread across the episodes Smoke Signal, Pain, Old Story, and Sin.

The book Frieda reads to Historia hides a real-world easter egg: its Walls-script katakana spells out the blog and pixiv URLs of Arisa Yamamoto, one of Isayama's assistants.

Frieda's illustrated page showing a girl offering an apple to a hooded figure is an early visual reference to Ymir Fritz and the Devil of All Earth, mythology that stays unexplained until much later in the series.