Petra Ral

At 158 centimeters, Petra stands noticeably below most of her squadmates. Brown eyes and light blonde hair give her a soft look that contrasts with her elite reputation. On duty she dresses in the standard Survey Corps gear, a white button-up shirt visible beneath the jacket and harness.

Devotion to Captain Levi defines much of Petra's service, though she happily punctures the public legend around him, telling Eren how little the real man matches the myth of humanity's strongest soldier. Her sharpest friction is with Oluo, whose constant Levi impressions she cannot stand, but years of shared missions bind the two beneath the bickering.

Kindness comes naturally to her. When Eren joins the squad she guides him through his new life, worries over him openly, and becomes the voice that finally persuades him to place his trust in his comrades. That gentleness sits on top of hard conditioning: the instant Eren accidentally sparks a partial transformation, her blades are out and pointed at him. Once Hange exposes the innocent cause, she and her squadmates bite their own hands, mirroring Eren's transformation trigger, as a gesture of shared trust and apology. A letter recovered after her death shows she had written to her father of her wish to dedicate herself entirely to Levi and to her career.

Petra's record of 58 Titan kills, ten of them solo, ranks among the highest known in the Corps, and her coordination with Eld and Oluo lets the squad function as one organism. That resume earns her a place in the Special Operations Squad. She first appears on an expedition beyond Wall Rose, tending to a dying soldier while Levi clears the surrounding Titans.

After Eren's trial places him in Survey Corps custody, the squad relocates with him to the Corps' old headquarters, where Petra chats with him during the cleaning and later monitors Hange's experiments. The teaspoon incident, in which Eren transforms without meaning to, nearly ends in bloodshed before the squad's hand-biting reconciliation. A month later the 57th expedition rides into Titan territory. When the Female Titan tears through the formation, Levi's squad flees through the giant forest, Petra begging Eren not to engage and to trust his teammates. Erwin's trap briefly captures the enemy, but the Female Titan's operator escapes, murders Gunther, and transforms again. Petra, Eld, and Oluo blind the Titan and shred both its arms, coming within moments of victory. Then the Titan concentrates its healing into a single eye, a defensive trick no one has seen before, and bites Eld in half. Shock roots Petra in place; the Female Titan's kick shatters her spine against a tree. Levi finds her body during his pursuit. On the Corps' return, her father approaches Levi, cheerfully sharing her letter, still unaware his daughter is gone.

Petra's memory threads through the rest of the story. Eren names her among the deaths he blames on himself beneath the Reiss chapel. She stands with the fallen in Erwin's vision at Shiganshina, in Hange's argument against Eren's Rumbling, and among the dead who welcome Hange in Odiha. In Levi's final vision after Eren's defeat, she salutes her captain one last time with the rest of the lost Survey Corps.