Soldiers Dance

Armin pulls Eren from his Titan in the wreckage of Stohess, where Eren's first thought is Annie's fate. Hange stops the soldiers trying to crack her crystal shell and orders it bound and moved underground. Mikasa, clinging to the damaged Wall, stares into the breach at a colossal face embedded within it, and its eyelid moves. Before Hange can process the implications, Minister Nick appears in a panic, demanding the exposed Titan be shielded from sunlight at once.

Once the hole is covered, Nick refuses every question, so Hange hauls him over the Wall's edge by the collar and dangles him above the drop, pressing him on how much the Church of the Walls has always known while soldiers died searching for answers. Nick invites Hange to drop him, insisting his order will never speak. Hange yanks him back, passing the episode off as a joke, and privately admits to Moblit that nothing has inspired such dread since their first expedition beyond the Walls.

The next day, as Eren sleeps, Armin floats the idea that Titan hardening produced the Walls in the first place. At a military hearing, Erwin apologizes for the destruction in Stohess, notes that Annie has yielded no information, and asks for authority to hunt down every remaining enemy agent inside the Walls. The meeting is cut short when the soldier Thomas bursts in with catastrophic news out of Wall Rose. Half a day earlier, Connie, Sasha, Reiner, Bertolt, Krista, and Ymir sit stripped of their equipment at a post in southern Wall Rose when the ground begins to rumble. Mike Zacharias smells a massive wave of Titans pouring in from the south and dispatches Thomas to warn the commanders that Wall Rose has fallen. In the distance, a bestial silhouette leads the advancing horde.

Annie Leonhart is recovered inside her impenetrable crystal and placed under guard, ending the Female Titan operation without answers.

A living Titan is discovered inside the Wall itself, and Minister Nick's demand to keep sunlight off it exposes the Church of the Walls' hidden knowledge.

Hange dangles Nick above the drop from the Wall's rim, confirming the church will guard its secrets even at the cost of its ministers' lives.

Mike Zacharias detects a mass Titan incursion in southern Wall Rose, and the report of the breach interrupts Erwin's hearing in the capital.

The Japanese word 戦士 (senshi) in the title is the same term later reserved for the Eldian Warriors serving Marley. Since the soldier-versus-Warrior distinction had not yet been drawn at the time volume 8 was published, the title was rendered "soldier," and a truer reading would be Warriors Dance.

Read with that meaning, the title points at Reiner, Bertolt, and the Beast Titan's handler orchestrating the chapter's final movements rather than the military's soldiers.

The anime spreads this chapter across three episodes: Wall: Assault on Stohess, Part 3, Beast Titan, and I'm Home.