Murakumo

Black hair hangs to his shoulders, the bangs drooping across his eyes. Uniform, weapons, and gear amount to a second skin; he almost never appears without them. His face defaults to blankness, animated only when he fights Titans or when something genuinely startles him.

Transformed, he resembles an ordinary Titan crowned with long dark hair. The body recalls Eren Yeager's Titan form while running thinner, without the divided jaw, and its eyes hold no pupils.

Returning to an outpost at the town's edge, Murakumo ignores the residents who watch him and keep their distance. Tsubaki greets him there and begs for training, having heard that he alone among experienced soldiers survived fighting the Titans. He asks whether the town's rumor naming him a Titan has reached her; she waves it off, reasoning that a real Titan would have devoured everyone long ago, and he hurriedly agrees. Though he rebuffs her pleas, he relents enough to prescribe a hundred practice swings a day for anyone serious about joining the Vanguard. Her follow-up question, whether revenge for his dead parents drives him, angers him: protecting his comrades is why he serves, and he orders her to remember it.

In town, the Vanguard's 5th unit surrounds him. His superior Takanami has denounced him as a Titan, and the soldiers demand his weapons. Stunned by the accusation, he complies, until he recognizes one of the soldiers as his father, dead for ten years, and attacks to the horror of the onlookers. The impostor transforms, and the entire 5th unit follows. From the rooftops he and Takanami watch the false father cannibalized by the other Titans. Takanami argues for abandoning the city; Murakumo flatly refuses. Tsubaki's arrival forces the fight, and when a Titan lunges at her he severs its hand, tells her she has done her part, and wades in. Beside Takanami he brings one Titan down, but a second leaps clean over him, devours his commander, and catches Murakumo in its grip. Unable to break loose, he is bitten in half.

The mutilation triggers his change. Rising in Titan form, he crushes the skull of the Titan menacing Tsubaki and hurls the corpse into the rest. He recalls his first transformation, waking inside a Titan that had eaten him and destroying it from within. Ordering Tsubaki back, he slaughters the remaining Titans until one tears open his shoulder from behind, exposing his weak point; that one loses its face to his fist. The last Titan aims straight for the opening and he cannot stop its leap, but his final strength goes into a crushing bite that destroys the attacker's own weak spot before he collapses.

A past mission into Titan territory ends with Murakumo partially devoured; inside the creature his dormant shifting ability wakes, and the resulting transformation destroys the Titan around him. Whether self-injury would suffice to trigger the change, as it does for inheritors in the main series, is never settled, though both of his known transformations follow his being eaten, pointing to bodily harm as the mechanism. Like most Titans in Attack on Titan Volume 0, his form lacks pupils.

His human body regrows the limbs lost to that first partial devouring, though the Titan form itself never demonstrates regrowing a limb. Strength belies the form's thin, muscle-poor frame: one hand crushes a Titan's head, the corpse becomes a projectile thrown clear of Tsubaki, and a crowd of attackers falls to him with relative ease. Endurance rounds out the set. A shoulder ripped open, an arm nearly torn away, even the destruction of his Nucleus fail to stop him at once; he keeps fighting in a severely weakened state long enough to kill his final opponent before giving out.