Cardina Baumeister

Curly blond hair falls to Cardina's shoulders and frames a pair of striking blue eyes. Tall and slender at a glance, he hides real muscle in his arms, a detail that surprises anyone who judges him by his frame alone. Civilian life sees him in a dark vest and trousers worn over a plain white shirt. Once he enters the Survey Corps, he favors a turtleneck or buttoned white shirt beneath the standard corps uniform.

Sincerity defines Cardina more than his noble blood does. He greets strangers with easy warmth, speaks plainly, and holds to his convictions with a stubborn will. Though he stands as the last of the Baumeister line, arrogance never enters the picture; praise embarrasses him, and he waves off talk of being exceptional even while quietly working to honor the family name.

His loyalty runs deep. When Kuklo stayed behind to hold off a Titan so Cardina could reach Wall Maria, Cardina turned around, clambered onto the creature, and smashed a rock into its teeth to free his friend. Composure is another of his tools; being dismissed by the engineer Xenophon as a mere spare stings him, yet he answers with courtesy instead of temper. What sets him apart most is his mind. His memory is sharp enough to reconstruct an entire cadet training routine from months-old experience, and his gift for analysis lets him step up and lead when a situation demands it, talents he later pours into building a new instruction program for Survey Corps recruits alongside Carlo Pikale.

Family pressure aims Cardina at the Military Police, so he enrolls in the Training Corps, sharing a class with Xavi Inocencio, while his father arranges a marriage between him and Xavi's sister Sharle. Opposed to his father's wishes, he abandons his training, and when the Baumeister house stumbles into political scandal he lands in an underground cell. There he meets Kuklo, warns him against escape attempts, and shares the rumor of Naraka, a city of exiles said to exist beyond the Walls. Two weeks later both men are carted outside as Titan fodder. A knife slipped to Kuklo by a disguised soldier frees them, and after the pair bring down a pursuing Titan together, that same soldier, the former instructor Jorge Pikale, hauls them up Wall Maria.

Jorge escorts the two to the Industrial City, where the engineer Xenophon Harkimo sizes them up as candidates to test the experimental vertical maneuvering device. Moved by Jorge's account of a hidden Titan weak spot, Cardina pledges himself to the Survey Corps beside Kuklo and spends three months refining the equipment. A live trial at Shiganshina nearly kills him when the Titan Ogre charges, and only Carlo Pikale's timely rescue saves him. During the uprising in the Industrial City he lends Kuklo his sword, then waits in anguish when his friend goes missing and wounded.

Sent back to Survey Corps headquarters, Cardina designs a recruit training regimen with Carlo, earns formal membership in the corps, and devises the aptitude scheme that reserves the thirty available sets of equipment for the most promising trainees. After sabotaged gear injures Rosa Carlstead, his detective work helps expose jealous members of the general class as the culprits, and he admits that splitting the trainees into ranked groups fed that resentment. On the survival expedition his criminal record is wiped clean and he rides with team ten under Rosa, whom he and Kuklo had recommended as leader. Studying giant footprints beside a destroyed escort, he concludes that a Titan of roughly ten meters, possibly Ogre itself, annihilated teams seven and eight.