The revelation hit Davion like a bucket of ice water. For a long heartbeat he simply stared, as if the air itself had turned to stone.
Erwin, too, fell silent for a moment, eyes fixed on Zeke; then he swallowed and resumed, steadying his voice as he explained the implications.
"The failures become like Zeke's mother—mindless, a Titan with no reason, driven only to devour." He kept his tone clinical, but it trembled at the edges. "They lose their humanity."
Zeke's face contorted with rage beneath the sedation. "Don't move!" Davion pressed down harder on him, forcing the medic's needle to hold. The restrained man writhed, teeth bared at the sound of the name.
Erwin continued, measured and relentless. "Right now, we don't know the scale of the experiments.
We don't know how many humans were used as subjects, how many tests succeeded, and how many failed. Without that knowledge, we face not only the Titans outside the walls, but potential enemies within—humans who can transform into Titans at any moment. We must know everything to protect the people inside the Walls."
Murmurs swelled into a roar. Faces turned pale in stages—first disbelief, then horror.
"Someone inside the Walls can turn into a Titan?"
"There's more than one?"
"This—this is unbearable."
Zachary's brows knitted. "What do you mean by 'failed product'?" he demanded.
Erwin lifted a hand to quiet the chamber. "On the day we recovered the Titan's corpse in Shiganshina, we discovered something odd. A dead Titan normally dissipates—smoke and ash, no trace.
But this one left remains. Its head did not vanish. So we took it back for research. We ran the tests. We've identified that Titan: Dina Fritz."
A gasp like a struck bell went through the hall. Conversations stopped mid-breath. Two men on the witness stand went utterly still; their faces drained of color.
"That Titan… is Zeke's mother?" Hannes whispered, disbelief cracking his voice. He had been there that day—he remembered the shots, the abruptness. He remembered Zeke's composure, the way Zeke had pivoted and left without looking back. The memory didn't match this new accusation.
No—no, that can't be. Zeke didn't miss. He was certain then…
Carla, who had survived being nearly swallowed by a Titan, clutched at the edge of her seat as if it could anchor her.
She replayed that night over and over: Zeke's steady rifle, the terse command, the casual "Let's go" as they departed. She had praised his bravery then—had even admired how he didn't look back.
To hear that the thing they'd killed might be the woman her husband had been seeing—no, the woman Grisha was later associated with—left her reeling.
"Dina or Carla—who do you choose?" The question gnawed at her, an echo of half-remembered words. Did it mean anything? She had known names, hints of relationships, whispers, but never imagined them tangled with monsters in this way.
"Impossible," Carla muttered. "Absolutely impossible." She tried to squeeze the thought away, but Annie—standing beside her—pointed at the evidence with a cold, clear voice.
"That Titan… it resembled him," Annie said. "The features—the way it moved. Like it remembered something human."
Carla's knees buckled inward for an instant.
The facts were ironclad, laid before them by the Survey Corps and Erwin's assays. Even though Zeke lay sedated and gagged, his eyes flared with an inferno of hatred and shame at the accusation. The memory of his breakdown in the street—his brief, terrifying madness—folded back onto the present and made the revelation visceral.
Dina and Carla. Who will you choose? The question looped in Carla's mind like a drip of cold water. Each image of that Titan's face crashed against her thoughts, leaving only confusion and a raw, aching fear. The one small comfort was bitter and selfish: she had made her choice that night. She had chosen survival.
Erwin bent slightly toward the sedated Zeke. "You don't know everything about my father," he murmured—then, louder, to the assembly, "Do not imagine I utter this lightly. I must say it: we must understand what happened inside and outside the walls."
The Left Minister, seizing the moment like a vulture, jabbed a finger and spat his judgment. "Did you hear? He not only killed his father—he killed his mother as a Titan! Can we entrust the future of humanity to someone with such a past?" His voice was lacquered with outrage and suspicion.
Erwin did not yield. "If your loved one turned into a mindless Titan bent on eating people, what would you choose? Would you stand aside, or would you fight? The reality is merciless. When loved ones become threats, we must do what must be done."
The Left Minister's face reddened, and for once he found no ready reply. Around the hall, people began to argue in earnest, wrestling with a moral dilemma none of them had expected to face.
Should one fight relatives who had become mindless Titans or spare them, refusing to strike down what was once human? The question cut them all to the bone.
Erwin's voice rose. "Zeke has already given us the answer by deed—he killed the Titan. If that Titan had been our friend, our kin, and it attacked, we would be forced to fight. We cannot allow sentiment to cost lives. It is better to face the truth and fight than to hide from it and perish."
A chorus of assent built, uneasy but growing. "That's right," people murmured. "When it happens, we must fight." Others trembled, whispering that the news was too much to swallow, that civilization itself seemed to tilt beneath their feet.
"Let Zeke explain!" someone shouted. "Who else among us might be Titans in disguise? Let him tell! Only by knowing can we cleanse our ranks and live in safety again."
"Let him speak!" came another voice.
"Tell us everything!" a third demanded.
From every corner, the same cry rose. Regardless of fear or loathing, the assembly reached a single, brittle consensus: Zeke must be made to tell the truth.
Zeke, bound and sedated, thrashed again in a futile, animal protest. His eyes, bright and terrible, searched the chamber as if begging someone—anyone—to understand. But the dam had already broken.
The revelation of Dina Fritz's identity as that Titan had shifted the debate from the king's authority to the core of human survival: knowledge, however awful, would be their weapon.
Outside the halls, the world seemed to pause—waiting for the next move in a game whose rules had been rewritten that day.