Nick

Deep wrinkles line Nick's forehead and gather around eyes ringed with dark circles, giving him an aged look to match his towering frame. His hair rises high on his head and sweeps toward the left, cut close along the back and sides. He dresses in a black cassock marked near the collar by three bands bearing the emblems of the Walls.

Extremism defines the minister's early appearances. Any tampering with the Walls registers to him as sin of the worst order, and he condemns dissenters loudly and instantly, whether calling for Eren Yeager's execution at trial or branding a merchant a heretic for proposing to seal the gates. Sheltered inside Wall Sheena, he has never seen war's cost, and the sight of the devastation beyond shatters him. From then on he turns withdrawn and bleak, speaking only when he must, his public condemnations gone.

What never bends is his secrecy. Even after witnessing the Titans' horrors, he divulges nothing of the Walls, and the prospect of being dropped from the top of one cannot pry his vow loose. There are hints of a shifting conscience before the end: he points the Survey Corps toward Krista Lenz as someone able to speak, and under torture he betrays nothing about the Corps, which Levi reads as a sign his loyalty had begun to move.

Nick claims alcohol addiction cost him his family. As a church leader he wields his influence against every proposed alteration to the Walls, from mounted cannons to sealing the gates, publicly damning such work as blasphemy while privately guarding against workers discovering the Titans entombed within.

He first appears at Eren Yeager's tribunal, joining Nile Dok in demanding the boy's death, and erupts so furiously at a merchant's sealing proposal that Darius Zackly has to silence him. Later, while he preaches in a Stohess church, the battle between Eren and Annie's Titans demolishes the building, and he alone survives. When Annie's climb breaks open Wall Sheena and exposes a Titan inside, Nick begs for it to be shielded from sunlight, unwittingly confirming he knew the truth all along. Hange dangles him over the Wall's edge, but he embraces death rather than speak.

Marched at gunpoint to Ehrmich District, he watches floods of refugees driven from Wall Rose; Levi forces him to face the consequences of his silence. Shaken, Nick concedes one thing to Hange: a Survey Corps soldier named Krista Lenz knows more than he can say. He is later quartered in Trost's military barracks, where two agents of the First Interior Squad visit him in the night, fearing he had spilled royal secrets. They torture him brutally, learn nothing, kill him, and disguise the murder as a burglary gone wrong.