Attack on Titan: Unweaving

Alternate Ending · Immersive Novel Manuscript V3.0

Review draft. This unofficial fan-written alternate ending follows Chapter 138 of the manga, using an original narrative to reinterpret earlier foreshadowing. The ancient worm populations, the War Hammer Titan's construction of the Walls, Hange's old case, and some of the memory mechanisms are additions created for this work. The battles in Chapters 137–138 and the original epilogue are summarized only where necessary; the original dialogue and panels are not reproduced.

Narrative conventions. The “worm” has no inner monologue, divine revelations, moral judgments, or humanlike intentions. Its behavior is presented only through observable actions and sensory impressions reconstructed through Paths. Any explanation of its motives comes from the characters and may be mistaken. Paths is a system that Ymir continually sustains; the worm's physical body and Paths are not the same thing.

Prologue: At the Ocean's Edge

The ocean was quiet.

The tide washed gently over the feet of two boys, then withdrew toward the gray-blue horizon. There were no clouds in the sky, no ships in the distance. Armin held a book with worn corners. When the sea breeze lifted its pages, he reached to press them down and realized that he was still a child.

Eren sat beside him, fine sand covering his knees.

“Do you remember?” Armin asked. “We used to think everything was out there, beyond the Walls.”

Eren did not look at him.

“Snowfields. Water made of fire. Deserts…” Armin slowly closed the book. “It took us so long to reach the ocean. I thought you'd be happy.”

Waves broke at their feet. Eren stared into the distance, his expression as dark as it had been the first time he saw the sea.

“But you told me that everyone on the other side was an enemy,” Armin said. “Then you went to Marley and saw them for yourself. You knew there were children running through the streets beyond the Walls, ordinary people looking after their families.”

The sea suddenly grew murky. A child carrying a coin purse appeared on the shore, dust coating his thin ankles. He turned back and smiled.

Eren's shoulders went rigid.

Armin looked at him. “Ramzi. You even remember his name.”

The child vanished. In his place came collapsing houses and the enormous feet that crushed them. Eren lowered his head, as though he were standing once more on that street corner where no one understood his apology.

“If all you wanted was to protect the people on the island,” Armin said, “why trample eighty percent of the world's population? The survivors still have their technology and knowledge. They'll rebuild, and they may go on hating us. The time you bought was never going to mean safety forever.”

Eren dug his fingers deep into the sand.

“I know.”

“Then why?”

It was a long time before Eren spoke. “When I saw the cities disappear, when I saw those roads and houses and walls wiped away… I felt like that was the world I'd wanted.”

Armin watched him.

“Just forests, rivers, mountains. No one claiming the land as their own. No one telling me where I couldn't go.” Eren's voice grew quieter. “I know how absurd that is. I saved that boy, but I still…”

He did not finish.

For the first time, Armin felt that the person before him, who could see fragments of the future, did not understand the deepest desire in his own heart.

“Take me to see Ymir first,” Armin said.

The sea breeze stopped.

Chapter One: Two Weddings

The beach beneath their feet became soft grass.

It was a small village two thousand years ago. Grain hung drying beneath the eaves. Wooden tables had been joined into one long banquet table, and garlands filled the porches. The sound of a flute carried from nearby. Villagers crowded into a little clearing, cheering for a newly married couple.

At first, Armin could not find Ymir.

Then a girl slipped out of the crowd, holding a piece of pastry she had just been given, her eyes following the bride's flower crown. She had not yet worn a slave's shackles or borne the weight of any legend. She simply smiled, then crouched down, broke the pastry in half, and shared it with a younger child.

The flute fell silent.

Hoofbeats approached from the village entrance. A man holding a wine jug turned, and the jug slipped from his hands and shattered. A moment later, soldiers poured in, torches flying onto the roofs. Screams drowned out the music. The crowd scattered through the feast, and bread rolled from the table into the mud.

Ymir was knocked to the ground. She saw the bride's flower crown fall and be crushed beneath a horse's hooves. She saw the two people who had just been holding hands dragged roughly apart by soldiers. She reached out, but before she could touch the flowers on the ground, a hand with a leather wrist guard seized her.

The memory abruptly darkened.

When the girl appeared again, she was wearing a slave's ragged clothes. Carrying a heavy vessel through a courtyard, she suddenly slowed. At the far end of the courtyard, another wedding was taking place. The couple smiled as they drew close, and their guests applauded.

Ymir stopped.

For a moment, the celebration before her overlapped with the feast in her home village: the same flowers, similar laughter, but no one here knew her. She looked down at her scarred hands, then back at the couple, lingering for a long time.

“So she knew what it was,” Armin said softly. “She'd seen a world where no one ordered her to kneel.”

Eren watched the girl, a conflicted look on his face.

The scene shifted abruptly. A pigpen. An accusing finger. An enraged master. Pursuers carrying bows and arrows. Ymir stumbled through the forest, blood running down her legs into the muddy water. The baying of hounds drew closer.

She fell, braced her hands against the ground, and struggled to raise her head.

Suddenly, she went still.

A few paces ahead stood two strangers: Eren and Armin.

“…?” Armin was about to speak when he realized that Ymir's eyes seemed to be fixed on him. He took a small step sideways. Her gaze followed.

She looked back. Behind the trees, her pursuers were closing in.

When she turned again, her gaze passed over Eren's shoulder, and at last she saw the enormous tree that all but hid the sky. Between its roots was an opening so dark that its depths were impossible to see.

Ymir froze for a moment, then rushed forward, brushed past the two of them, and slipped into the hollow.

They heard a body sliding down inside the tree. Then there was only the distant barking of dogs.

Armin stood rooted to the spot.

“She… she can see us?”

He turned sharply toward Eren.

Eren had been watching the opening all along. He showed no surprise and offered no explanation.

That silence reminded Armin of Grisha reaching out to embrace Zeke inside a memory. What the father had seen then seemed to have been not the reality before him, but a viewpoint passed on by some future inheritor. Looking at Eren's profile, Armin suddenly wondered whether what Ymir had just seen might also have been only a brief memory Eren had deliberately shown her.

But Eren gave him no answer.

The surface of the water opened in the darkness below the tree. The girl fell into an underground lake and struggled in panic. A long, slender organism approached from the depths, its tendrils touching her back. White light swallowed everything.

Chapter Two: She Thought It Was Love

Ymir gained the power to change the course of a battle, yet she still knelt at King Fritz's feet.

Memories turned over one after another: she built roads, cleared land, stormed cities, like a tool taken up again and again. Whenever the king happened to glance at her, her eyes lit up. The moment he turned away, she hurried to carry out the next task.

She became pregnant and gave birth to three daughters. When the children reached for her, her smile was no longer forced. But a single summons from the king always made her leave their embrace and bow her head again.

Then a spear flew toward the throne. Ymir rushed forward and took the fatal blow meant for the king. Lying on the ground, she watched his lips move. He did not bend down to hold her. He only ordered her to get up.

She never rose again.

Armin remembered an interrogation record from the old royal government that Hange had once shown him.

It had been one night when the Scout Regiment was still inside the Walls. Hange spread the file beneath a lamp and told him about a woman who had endured years of confinement and beatings, yet had begged the officials to release her abuser when that person was put on trial.

“Why?” the younger Armin had asked.

Hange did not answer at once. A finger rested on a blurred line of testimony. “When someone has every choice taken away, an occasional moment of tenderness can become the proof they cling to that their life still has value. What she's defending may not be what that person has done. She may simply be afraid that, once she leaves, she won't even know who she is anymore.”

Armin looked back toward the dunes.

Ymir knelt there, shaping the bones of Titans little by little with her hands. Sand slipped through her fingers, and she gathered more.

“Eren, you told her she didn't have to obey the king,” Armin said. “That was why she defied an order from royal blood for the first time. But the shackles in her heart didn't disappear all at once.”

“…Then what else will it take?”

“For her to see that being needed isn't the same as being loved. The joy she felt caring for her children was real. So was the happiness she longed for when she watched those weddings. Her worth didn't come from the king.”

Armin went to Ymir and crouched before her. He did not reach out to take away her sand.

“You can miss someone. You can even remain attached to someone who hurt you,” he said softly. “But you don't owe him your obedience forever.”

Ymir's hands paused for a moment. Fine sand trickled slowly along the lines of her palms.

She still did not lift her head.

“It's been two thousand years,” Armin said to Eren. “Knowing the reason won't make the pain disappear right away.”

The dunes behind them suddenly trembled. Countless wall-like shadows rose along the horizon, blotting out the white sky.

It was another of Ymir's memories, not yet revealed.

Chapter Three: The Lucky Ones

On an ordinary morning, a small town of Eldians on the Marleyan mainland was just waking up.

Soup steamed in a pot. Craftspeople pushed open the wooden doors of their shops. A few children chased an uncooperative cat by the roadside. The streets were clean, wheel tracks lay in neat lines, and the sound of children reading came from a distant school.

Inside a small house, a father was repairing the family's farming tools. His son brandished a wooden sword while his younger sister laughed that he could not even beat a wooden barrel. Their mother set freshly baked bread on the table and told them to settle down. A tiny flower was embroidered on the hem of the daughter's clothes; the same pattern edged her mother's shawl.

The father bent to pick up his tools, and his belt came loose again.

“How do you always manage to loosen it?” His wife came over to tighten the dark cloth sash around his waist.

“Then you'll have to tie it for me every day,” he said with a smile.

“Even when you're too old to walk?”

“Especially then.”

The children doubled over with laughter. The father reached to catch his mischievous son, then suddenly felt dizzy.

Sounds grew muffled, as though covered by thick cloth. His wife's face blurred. The sunlight turned dark red, and his field of vision slowly narrowed. He tried to say he was all right, but even his tongue would not move.

The light dwindled to a thin line.

Darkness.

Seen from above the roof, the father lay collapsed beside the table, his wife and two children also fallen on the floor. In the shop next door, a merchant slumped over the counter. People in the street dropped one after another. Farther away, in villages, fields, and cities, the same scene repeated itself.

Dogs anxiously sniffed their owners. Horses tethered to trees went on grazing. Chickens hopped out of unattended baskets.

High in a tower, two people surveyed this life that had suddenly fallen still.

“Have you truly decided?” the inheritor of the War Hammer Titan asked.

Karl Fritz did not turn.

“I've seen a future humanity may be heading toward,” he said. “I can't protect everyone.”

He looked down at the town, as though he could not hear the dishes overturned by a child falling in the distance.

“Then let the lucky ones live.”

Later, the unconscious people stood and walked toward the coast like sleepwalkers. The War Hammer Titan turned earth and stone into broad hardened hulls and long oars. Each vessel could carry around two hundred people. The tightly packed fleet spread across the bay, looking from a distance like scales laid over the sea.

Several brief bursts of Titan transformation thundered along the shore. Small Titans three or four meters tall took their places at the oars and rowed in a single rhythm. The people sat aboard with their eyes open, their expressions unchanged. Wind and rain lashed the decks; no one sought shelter. Day followed night, and at last the fleet reached Paradis Island by different routes.

The people disembarked in silence. After the last small Titan stepped onto the beach, the vessels began to break apart along their original seams. Hardened material spread toward the shore. High piers and low defensive walls took shape in turn, while surplus earth and stone formed an incongruous little hill behind the harbor.

The sea was soon empty, as if that extraordinary migration had never happened.

The crowds continued inland, the small Titans among them. Countless columns of people finally came to a halt along three enormous rings. Every face was turned toward the inside of its ring.

The father and his wife and children were among them, only a short distance apart. His eyes were still open, but he could no longer speak a word.

Thunderous blasts erupted simultaneously along all three rings.

Human bodies swelled rapidly in dazzling flashes. The rowing Titans, once only three or four meters tall, kept growing too. The ground shook violently as the crowded Titans collided. Some fell to their knees; some toppled sideways; others were knocked away by the enormous bodies forming beside them. Shattered limbs slowly regenerated in the steam, and broken bones rejoined.

One by one, the immense bodies rose, turned, straightened, and fell into line.

No one looked toward their family. No one cried for help. Countless faces, each with a different expression, finally faced the same direction.

The War Hammer Titan came alongside the ranks of towering Titans and drove hardened structures deep underground. Rock split open, and deep trenches were cut for the foundations. The Titans' feet and part of their lower legs were set beneath the ground, keeping the Walls above the surface at roughly fifty meters high. Earth and stone were drawn from the strata and reassembled into a sturdy outer shell, leaving vast, interconnected cavities deep below.

Layer after layer of wall grew up around the Titans' bodies, hiding their legs, then sealing away their chests, and finally covering their faces.

Armin looked up and understood at last: these Walls, said to protect the people, were made both from human flesh and from the land hollowed out beneath their feet.

Not long afterward, the king altered the memories of those who remained inside the Walls. A new history began to be written, and the people who had become the Walls were forgotten.

For the father, the final moment was still that morning when his wife had tied his sash.

He did not know that he would be forced to sleep for more than a hundred years.

Chapter Four: Older Than Gods

When they returned to the hollow in Ymir's tree, Armin suddenly stopped.

“We've been watching her all this time,” he said. “But what about the thing that fused with her?”

Eren looked toward the slender shape in the lake.

“It's alive too,” Armin said. “Can we look at its past?”

Eren reached out and touched the water. The roots, the stone walls, and the girl around them disappeared.

First came water.

In a deep blue prehistoric ocean, countless unfamiliar forms of life drifted and swam. Some opened their mouthparts and pursued prey; others hid in cracks in the seabed. A group of soft, slender, wormlike organisms moved with the current. Every so often, one was swallowed by a larger predator.

The seabed shuddered. Surging water swept many of the worms into the shallows, then pushed them onto dry land.

They were much slower than the small reptiles on land. Snakes slid from crevices, little gecko-like creatures flicked out their tongues, and other animals came to feed. Of the large group of worms just washed ashore, only a scattered few were soon left writhing.

The one closest to the observers of the memory was caught in a creature's jaws.

The reptile shook its head, preparing to swallow it. The worm's body was almost torn in two. Its tendrils clung at random, several sliding toward the back of the creature's neck in its final struggle. Suddenly, one fine filament pierced the area beside the spine.

Everything went quiet, as though droplets of water had stopped in midair.

The next instant, a tremendous blast tore open the ground.

Rocks shattered. The snakes and small creatures nearby were engulfed by the shock wave, and the other worms that had not escaped died with them. Amid the dust, a creature many times larger than the original reptile slowly rose, lowered its head to sniff its surroundings, then lunged at a fleeing animal.

The view seemed to lift high into the air. Across distant swamps, shallow seas, and forest edges, scattered new flashes appeared. Most of the worms did not survive. A few hosts that had fused with them by chance entered the struggle for life in enormous bodies.

Long ages passed like turning pages. Giant reptiles crossed woodlands, whale-shaped beasts surged through the sea, and pterosaur-like creatures swept across the sky. They hunted, bred, protected their young, and were devoured by other creatures. Their immense size did not end the struggle between life and death.

One day, a point of fire appeared in the sky.

The fire grew until it blotted out the sun. The impact shattered the earth, tides surged toward the mountains, and forests burned. Hunger and cold followed, claiming the great beasts that had survived the disaster for a time.

The spine of one fallen beast broke open. A worm slid from the wound and followed underground water deep into the rock. A few of its kind escaped toward other water-filled cavities. Many more died with their hosts.

The underground lake grew colder. Ice spread inward from its shores. The worm curled into a crevice, its movements gradually stopping. The frozen lake sank into a long darkness.

On the surface, the climate changed again and again. Glaciers advanced and retreated. Trees grew and died. During one warm period, cracks finally opened in the underground ice, and water flowed through the gaps in the stone once more.

One of the worm's tendrils stirred faintly. After a long pause, it stirred again. The worm slowly swam free of the melting ice.

The view rose along the tree roots. A dense forest now covered the land, and an immense tree hid the sky. The hollow at its base led straight down to the underground water.

An injured girl fell into the lake.

Armin suddenly understood that all the lives and deaths they had just witnessed converged, in the end, on the moment Ymir fell into the water.

There had been no ritual, no promise from a god.

Only survival, almost by chance, again and again.

Chapter Five: The One with No Will of His Own

The prehistoric forest faded before Eren's eyes, but he kept looking toward where the trees had been.

Armin noticed an almost imperceptible softening at the corner of his mouth.

It was not fear. It almost looked like a reunion after a long separation.

Armin suddenly remembered Eren during the Rumbling. He had worn that same expression while looking out over the trampled earth.

“Eren,” Armin asked slowly, “why do you look as though you've come home?”

Eren started.

“That world had no walls and no cities.” Armin watched him intently. “But you never lived there. How can you miss somewhere you've never been?”

Eren tried to answer, but suddenly remembered another room.

It was the restaurant. Mikasa sat at the table, and Armin rose to his feet. Eren had coldly accused them of being ruled by their blood and other people's memories, of having no will of their own.

Armin remembered that day too.

“You said my thoughts were being influenced by Bertholdt,” he said quietly. “And that Mikasa only obeyed her instincts.”

Eren's breathing quickened.

“Have you ever considered,” Armin went on, “that when you inherited the Founder's power, human memories might not have been the only things that entered your body?”

The primeval forest, the wasteland after the Rumbling, and the young Eren reading by the sea kept overlapping before his eyes.

“That urge to turn the world into a place with no people may have combined with the anger and fear you already had,” Armin said. “It knows nothing of Marley, nothing of Eldia's history, and nothing of justice. In those memories, it kept approaching hosts that could allow it to survive. Now modern weapons are taking away the Titans' advantage, while Paradis Island happens to retain a population of hosts connected to Paths.”

Armin paused. He did not disguise his conjecture as a certainty.

“I can't prove what it wants. But your longing for that world may not be entirely your own.”

Eren's hands slowly closed into fists.

He remembered Ramzi's face. He remembered sobbing as he apologized to a child who could not understand him. He remembered that, even so, he had chosen to let the Rumbling continue.

“I once said the people I hated most were those with no will of their own,” he said softly.

The sea breeze passed. Armin said nothing.

“In the end…”

Eren looked at his hands.

“I was the slave.”

His voice was so quiet that the waves almost swallowed it.

Armin crouched in front of him. “That doesn't erase what you've done.”

Eren raised his head.

“Ramzi won't come back just because we've found a reason. Neither will the others.” Armin's eyes reddened. “Being influenced doesn't mean you didn't make a choice.”

Eren nodded, tears falling into the sand.

“I know.”

Armin did not offer forgiveness or tell him to pull himself together. They sat for a long time, watching the tide wash the footprints from the beach again and again.

At last, Armin spoke. “But now you finally know. You still have one more chance to decide what happens next.”

Chapter Six: One Last Act of Trust

“As long as that thing can reconnect with a host,” Armin said, “even your death might not end the Power of the Titans.”

Eren remembered broken images of the future: a Titan's neck, the white light of an explosion, Reiner blocking a stretching organism, Mikasa raising her blade through tears.

“We have to separate it from me first,” he said.

“But we aren't strong enough. You can still summon so many Titans from the past.”

They turned toward Ymir. The sand in her hands had stopped flowing. Farther away, the dead inheritors stood like sleepers in the white expanse.

“She may be able to loosen her hold on them,” Armin said. “But whether they're willing to help us has to be their decision.”

Eren nodded.

“And you can't tell us beforehand.” Armin suddenly understood. “Otherwise I'll find some way to save you, and Mikasa could never…”

He could not go on.

Eren looked toward the sea, his voice hoarse. “She can't know.”

“That's too cruel to her.”

“…I know.”

Armin clenched his fists. “What if we can't beat those Titans? What if the explosion doesn't separate it from you? What if Mikasa can't bring herself to do it in the end?”

“Then we fail.”

“You never used to be like this!” Armin shouted. “Didn't you always think you had to seize the future yourself?”

The Forest of Giant Trees flashed before Eren's eyes.

Levi Squad had told him to trust his comrades and keep moving. Eren had listened. Later, the Female Titan appeared again, and familiar figures fell one after another. Petra lay at the foot of a tree. The others could not be saved either.

The memory shifted to other battlefields. He charged out alone and was injured; his friends risked their lives to rescue him. He had lost opportunities because he had not dared to trust, and he had endured irrevocable deaths because he had trusted.

No choice had ever come with a guarantee beforehand that it was right.

Levi's words about choices and regret seemed to echo in his ears again.

“I thought that if I became strong enough, I'd never have to put my life in anyone else's hands,” Eren said. “Later, I even gained the Founder's power.”

He gave a bitter smile.

“But I still don't know which choice is certain to be right.”

Armin slowly unclenched his fists.

Eren held out his hand. “This time, I want to trust you.”

Armin looked at that hand for a long time before taking it.

They both knew it was no guarantee. They might fail. Their friends might die. Ymir might not be able to let go of two thousand years of attachment. Even so, Eren had decided to stop determining the ending for everyone else.

“I'm afraid,” Eren said suddenly. “I don't want to die. There are still so many places I want to go with you.”

Armin bit his lip hard.

“But I don't want to let that thing keep living through me.” Eren looked into the distance. “I can't take back what I've already done. This time, at least let me know that I took this last step myself.”

The sea gradually brightened to white.

Eren sealed away Armin's memory of their conversation and returned him to the battle, where he would have to judge for himself once more.

The sea breeze blew through Paths one last time.

Chapter Seven: Letting Go

In the real world, Titans obscured the sky.

When Armin spoke with Zeke in Paths, he had not yet remembered their earlier conversation. He knew only that life should not exist solely to perpetuate itself. He remembered running with his friends as a child, and the days that, however brief, made him want to go on living.

Zeke remembered playing catch with Ksaver.

In the distance, Ymir's fingers loosened slightly.

The inheritors who had died, and whom she still used to create Titans, seemed able for the first time to lift their heads after their long bondage. Armin and Zeke asked them for help. Each made their own choice.

On the battlefield in the real world, some of the Titans from the past that had been attacking the Alliance suddenly hesitated. Some turned to help the survivors. But not all the Titans stopped attacking. The danger remained real.

Eren did not suppress those awakened wills again.

Levi seized the opening and killed Zeke. Jean detonated the explosives around the Founding Titan's neck, exposing the wormlike organism hidden deep inside. Reiner fought to stop it from reconnecting, and the explosion of Armin's Colossal Titan destroyed the enormous host structure.

The worm did not stop struggling.

It stretched out its body, searching for a new connection. When blocked, it released gas capable of turning Eldians into Titans. Amid the chaos, Eren continued to fight in a gigantic body. The Alliance could not afford to hold back.

Mikasa watched her comrades hover on the edge of death.

She did not know what Eren had decided in Paths. She did not know that Ymir had loosened her hold. She knew only that, if Eren still could not be stopped, more people would die.

She still held the dream in her heart of going far away with Eren and living in a secluded cabin.

But she did not choose to remain in that dream forever.

She tightened her grip on her blade and rushed toward where Eren now was.

Afterward, the world before her fell silent.

She had ended Eren's life with her own hands.

Ymir saw her choice.

The girl suddenly remembered the weddings long ago, the crushed flowers, the warmth of holding her daughters. She also remembered herself falling before the king. She had once believed that loving someone meant having to sacrifice everything for him.

Now, at last, she could imagine a different past: when the spear came, she did not rush toward the king, but turned and ran to her children.

The past had not changed. Nor could she undo two thousand years of Titan warfare.

But she could stop.

Ymir set down the last handful of sand. Through the connections that remained in Paths, she gradually restored the living Titan hosts to human form. Titan bodies broke apart in steam. The dunes and the tree of light began to crumble.

Paths had been sustained by her. As her figure disappeared, that space spanning bloodlines, memories, and Titan bodies finally ceased to exist.

On the battlefield, the worm lost the immense bodily structure it had occupied. Its remaining tissue slowly grew still among the ruins.

There was no declaration of victory, no final voice from the worm.

The view returned to Eren in Mikasa's arms. Deep within the fine nerve tissue, a short, unusual filament stirred faintly.

Then everything was still.

Chapter Eight: A Hundred Years Too Late

A man opened his eyes.

He heard crying and smelled scorched earth, smoke, and dust. Beneath him was cold mud, not the floor of his home. He pushed himself upright and found that he was almost naked, with only a damaged cloth sash around his waist.

Instinctively, he touched its knot.

His wife had tied it for him just that morning.

But where was the house?

The bread on the table?

His child's wooden sword?

All around lay rubble and the remains of unfamiliar buildings. Many others, like him, stumbled out of the fading steam. Naked or covered only in torn scraps of cloth, they stared at one another. Some dropped to their knees. Some searched for loved ones. Some looked up at the unfamiliar sky and wept.

The man spotted a small patch of familiar embroidery in the crowd.

“…?”

A woman in a torn shawl turned.

He froze for a moment, then rushed to her. Two young people came running from elsewhere. Though the embroidery on his daughter's hem was damaged, he still recognized it.

“Dad!”

The family of four clung to one another. The man touched his children's heads, trying to make sure they were unhurt.

“As long as you're all right,” he said. “As long as you're all right.”

“Where are we?” his son asked.

The man looked toward the utterly unfamiliar distance.

“I don't know.” He tried to smile. “Let's go home first.”

He did not know that more than a hundred years had passed since the morning he remembered. Their home was long gone. He did not know that he had been made into part of a Wall and had later trampled countless people's homes without knowing it.

Suddenly, shouting came from far away.

A group of people in unfamiliar clothes ran through the ruins, carrying guns, knives, and wooden clubs. Thinking he could finally ask someone for directions, the man let go of his wife's hand and took two steps toward them.

Their expressions stopped him.

The people stared at the Wall Titans who had just returned to human form, their eyes filled with nothing but fear and rage. Some had lost children. Some had only just escaped alive from the shadow of the Rumbling.

“It's them!”

Someone shouted words the man could not understand.

A stone flew through the air and struck down the person beside him. Screams broke out.

“Run!” Instinctively, the man grabbed his wife and children.

They ran through collapsed streets, broken stones cutting their feet. His wife held tightly to their daughter's hand; their son ran ahead. An unfamiliar weapon cracked, and the boy suddenly fell forward onto the ground.

The man knelt and gathered him into his arms. The child did not answer.

Their pursuers drew closer. The mother held her son and wept. Their daughter hid behind her father, trembling all over.

“Why?” The man raised his head and shouted at those furious faces. “What did we do?”

No one understood.

Nor could he understand their accusations.

All he could do was spread his arms and stand in front of his wife and daughter.

The view no longer followed the weapons. Instead, it settled on a cloth sash slowly coming loose. The knot unraveled, and the sash slipped into the rubble. The wind carried over an old scrap of cloth with a little flower embroidered in one corner and left it beside the sash.

Even in the final moment of their lives, the family never understood why they were being killed.

Across the vast front of the Rumbling, this was not the only such scene. Many Wall Titans restored to human form were attacked by survivors. Others died of injuries, illness, hunger, or the absence of anyone to help. A very few were rescued or managed to escape.

Suffering did not simply disappear because the Power of the Titans was gone.

Epilogue: The Tree on the Hill

After Eren's death, Armin recovered the memories of Paths that had been sealed away. He remembered the sea, Ymir's gaze, the worms struggling on the ancient shore, and the hand Eren had finally held out.

He understood many things at last, but understanding brought no relief. The dead would not return. The living still had to face hatred and an unknown future.

Armin and his companions kept seeking opportunities for dialogue. Mikasa returned to Eren's grave again and again. Years passed. The island changed, the world changed, and new wars and ruins appeared.

The tree kept growing.

Its trunk grew wider and wider. Its roots reached deep into the soil, forming a dark hollow over the long years.

Later, a child came to the tree with a dog.

The child looked up at the towering crown, then down into the darkness between the roots.

The story stops here.

There was no clear answer to that faint movement, long since vanished within Eren's head. No one knew whether the ancient life had truly ended, or what the child would see next.

Only the wind passed through the woods.

The leaves rustled softly.

The End.

Afterword: Review Boundaries for This Version

1. This novel does not reenact the specific moves, dialogue, or panel-by-panel sequence of the original battles in Chapters 137–138. Source references will be handled in a reference table during comic production.
2. The family of four in “The Lucky Ones,” the War Hammer Titan's shipbuilding and construction of the Walls, the worm populations and the age of giant creatures, and Ymir's two weddings are original expansions.
3. The influence on Eren's will does not absolve him. Armin's explanation is an inference based on memories.
4. Eren allowing Ymir to perceive a future viewpoint is a new mechanism introduced in this work; it is not presented as a fact confirmed by the original.
5. The ending preserves the original's openness: Paths disappears and the worm's main body ceases to function, but the permanent extinction of every remnant of life is not confirmed.