Carlo Pikale

Silver hair tops a narrow, drawn-out face marked by high cheekbones and a lengthy nose, and Carlo carries it all on an above-average frame. His younger self wears the ordinary Survey Corps uniform without embellishment. Fifteen years on, the hair has grown out enough that he keeps it swept back from his eyes, a modest beard has come in, and a bolo tie now accents the same corps uniform he has worn his entire career.

Duty to humanity drives Carlo the way it drives every soldier who stays with the Survey Corps through its bleakest years. He extends trust readily; minutes after meeting a nameless stowaway, he listens to the boy's plan and stakes a Titan fight on it. Guilt shapes him just as much. Aware that his offhand nickname condemned an infant to years of abuse, he spends much of his adult life trying to balance that ledger, and doing right by strangers becomes something close to a compulsion.

As a young soldier Carlo works to close Wall Maria's breached gate once the Titan cult throws it open, and among the victims a Titan spits back up he finds the body of Elena, a woman who had recently married. Her belly still moves, so he cuts the unborn child free; the moniker he and his friend Sorum Humé coin, the Son of a Titan, dooms the boy to a childhood in chains. Soon afterward he rides in a sixty-man expedition that captures a live Titan for study, watching severed limbs grow back and learning how little conventional wounds accomplish. The mission collapses when more Titans swarm the group, and Sorum dies covering the retreat.

Fifteen years later, the thirty-three year old Carlo captains the corps when a stowaway surfaces during an expedition: Kuklo, the very child he once freed, though neither realizes it. Cornered by the Titan Ogre, Carlo directs cannon fire at its eyes and heels, pulls the boy onto his horse, and adopts Kuklo's scheme of luring the creature into a wagon packed with explosives. The blast buys their escape. Back inside the Walls, the Military Police claim Kuklo over the assault on the Inocencio estate, and Sharle Inocencio's testimony convinces Carlo the boy could not have been the killer, prompting him to conspire with his father Jorge on a rescue.

From there Carlo rebuilds the corps. He oversees the wall-top trials of the maneuvering device, welcomes Kuklo and Cardina Baumeister into the ranks, and constructs a recruit training program around Angel Aaltonen's completed vertical maneuvering equipment. He weathers Military Police oversight in the person of Xavi Inocencio, a sabotage scandal that injures Rosa Carlstead, and the storm-threatened survival expedition on which the corps' continued existence depends. When his rookies bring down several Titans in the field, he declares the venture a triumph; the Survey Corps endures, and Carlo rises from captain to commander.