A little-known Attack on Titan anthology story by Scott Snyder, Ray Fawkes and Rafael Albuquerque is back in focus because it seems to echo the manga’s ending in unsettling ways. The short piece, released in 2016, sends the fight for humanity into San Francisco in 2030 and closes with skinless Titans emerging from the ocean.

The story centers on Dr. Price and his assistant, who are trying to document whales returning to the surface before the sea turns into something far worse. That ending has made the story stand out inside the wider Attack on Titan body of work, not just because it is stranger than most tie-ins, but because it now reads as more than a one-off nightmare.

The anthology itself brought together a broad roster of comic book creators, including Evan Dorkin, Sam Humphries, Gail Simone, Paul Pope, Michael Avon Oeming, Scott Snyder, Ray Fawkes and Rafael Albuquerque. Snyder’s name is especially familiar to DC readers, where he is also one of the creators behind Absolute Batman, the comic that reimagines Bruce Wayne and Gotham City.

That matters because the short story has become part of a larger conversation about how far the Attack on Titan universe can be read after the fact. The source argues there are two possible ways to see it: as an alternate reality, or as something that could sit in the main universe after the series finale. That question is no longer abstract. The finale showed that humanity lost eighty percent of its population, Eren Jaeger died while fighting his former friends, and the final moments left a newcomer stumbling on Eren’s grave.

Read beside that ending, the anthology piece stops feeling like a curiosity and starts feeling like a possible afterimage of the same world. The San Francisco setting, the year 2030, and the image of Titans rising from the ocean all make it easy to imagine a future still haunted by what came before. Whether Snyder, Fawkes and Albuquerque meant it that way is not the point. The story now has a second life because the ending of Attack on Titan gave it one.

What was once a lesser-known anthology entry is now one of the strangest links between the franchise’s past and its end. The real answer is already on the page: the short story can be read either as a separate reality or as a post-finale continuation of the same devastated world.