Niccolo

Tall and slender, Niccolo is a young man of Marleyan birth. His blond hair parts and falls toward either side in a style suggesting an undercut, and his nose is small and pointed. Marley's standard-issue military uniform is his usual dress, exchanged for a dark suit and tie on the day he visits the cemetery.

Fear and doctrine govern the early Niccolo, who curses the islanders as devils like any Marleyan and loathes having to live among the people who captured him. Long exposure to the Survey Corps wears that down into shaky friendship and reluctant respect. His nerve shows even in captivity; with a blade at his own throat he still shouts for his captain to open fire on the islanders. Protecting people matters more to him than being liked, and he will deride Connie and Jean as unworthy Eldians solely to steer them away from a bottle he suspects carries Zeke's spinal fluid.

Vengeance lives in him too. The revelation that Gabi shot Sasha drives him to punch the girl, march her before the Blouse family, and press a knife on Mr. Blouse with a vow to do the killing himself if the man refuses; he even puts the blade to Falco's neck to hold the soldiers off. Mr. Blouse's choice to forgive breaks that fever instantly, flooding Niccolo with regret and a resolve to become someone better. His words to Kaya and Gabi later capture his outlook: a devil hides in everyone, and that is why the world became what it is.

Niccolo reaches Paradis Island with the survey fleet's advance party, landing before the flagship arrives, and is taken prisoner. When Hange Zoë and Levi Ackerman hold a blade on him to force the navy's compliance, he screams at his own captain to shoot anyway. Kitchen work follows; his seafood cooking at the port astonishes Sasha Blouse, and the two grow steadily closer, close enough that he later says she rescued him from the war by showing him that food could bring people joy. Yelena eventually instructs him to pour the ships' wine for military personnel, top ranks first. Suspecting tampering, he says nothing and obeys.

News of Sasha's death at Liberio reaches him in 854, and a Military Police officer harasses him at her graveside until Jean and Connie step in. There he meets the Blouse family and promises to cook for them. On the day they visit his restaurant, Survey Corps officers arrive as well, and Niccolo yanks the elite wine out of Jean's reach with a jab about lowly Eldians. In the cellar he finds Gabi and Falco, learns they flew in on the airship from Liberio, and hears Gabi admit to killing a soldier. He beats her with the bottle, hauls both children upstairs, names Gabi as Sasha's killer, and offers her a knife's edge of justice: Mr. Blouse can kill her, or Niccolo will. Only the Blouses' refusal to take revenge ends the standoff. Once restrained, he urges Hange to keep any wine away from Falco's mouth, laying out his suspicion that spinal fluid drawn from Zeke went into the bottles, though he denies that stopping Jean and Connie from drinking was ever about protecting them, calling it atonement instead.

The Yeagerists, tipped off by another Marleyan prisoner, seize everyone at the restaurant and jail them in Shiganshina. Behind bars, Niccolo lunges at Griez for mocking Sasha, a quarrel Yelena ends by shooting Griez dead. When Marley's assault on Shiganshina begins, Onyankopon frees the prisoners, and Niccolo backs the man's claim of ignorance about the wine. At Jean's request he shepherds the Blouse family through the fighting with a rifle in hand, pulls Mr. Blouse clear of a Titan when Kaya stumbles, and covers for Gabi by claiming her anti-Titan rifle kill as his own. Listening to Kaya and Gabi call themselves devils afterward, he consoles them by answering that a demon lives in everyone. Once the Rumbling has passed he stays on with the Blouses, readying horses so Armin and Gabi can ride for Ragako and Falco. Three years past Eren Yeager's death, he walks with the family past a Yeagerist ceremony and gives it a scornful look.