Casca

Lean and athletically built, Casca has dark skin, brown eyes, and thin pink lips, with black hair worn cropped and unruly. During her years leading the falcons she carries a toned, muscular frame beneath her armor. Little about her look changes after the Eclipse, though her hair now reaches shoulder length and the Brand of Sacrifice scars her chest.

Before the Eclipse, Casca proves a resolute and gifted commander who wins her comrades' deep respect, rallying the outlawed mercenaries behind her and keeping them whole for a year after Griffith is jailed. The rank and file fondly dub her Big Sis, and even amid the horror of the Eclipse she refuses to let panic spread, ordering the men into formation. Her hard bearing strikes some as unfeminine, prompting Judeau's early remark that she surrendered her womanhood to live as a mercenary, yet she dons men's clothing purely because it suits battle rather than out of any wish to shed who she is.

Under that guarded surface she aches to be embraced as both a warrior and a woman, an acceptance she first chases from Griffith through fierce devotion and a longing to serve as his blade. That loyalty breeds early resentment of Guts, whose rising worth to Griffith stirs her jealousy, until she gradually admits her admiration will go unreturned and lets herself love Guts on the honest, mutual footing he offers her.

The butchery of her comrades, the apostles who violate her, and the rape Femto inflicts during the Eclipse break her completely, sinking her into a nearly mute, infantile state where she can scarcely think or feel. Even so, she shows tender, motherly warmth toward her demon child and the Moonlight Boy, growing distraught whenever they slip away or fall into danger. After Schierke and Farnese repair her mind, the old Casca returns, aware of all she witnessed while lost, yet now seized by panic attacks whenever she looks straight at Guts and the memory of the Eclipse comes flooding back.

Born the youngest of six in a bleak mountain village, Casca grows up braced for hunger and abduction as the ordinary facts of peasant life. Packed off at twelve to serve a nobleman, she is nearly raped by him on the road until Griffith rides in, cuts off the man's ear, and hands her his sword. She runs it through her attacker herself, and with no village left to receive her, she throws in with Griffith's mercenaries, dazzled by the man who saved her.

Years on, now the band's second-finest fighter and a frontline commander, she confronts Guts on Griffith's orders and is beaten, then made to warm the wounded newcomer with her own body. His recruitment feeds her envy. Through the Hundred-Year War she fights at the forefront, defeats Adon in a brutal rematch to help retake Doldrey, and is knighted alongside the band's officers. When Guts declares he is leaving and Griffith duels him for it, she openly questions her leader for the very first time. Guts wins and departs, driving Griffith into Charlotte's bed, which triggers his arrest and the outlawing of his followers, and Casca is thrust into command.

For a year she holds the fugitive company together at heavy personal cost. Guts returns, helps beat back Silat's raid, and the two reconcile as lovers. She then leads the raid into Wyndham to free a tortured, crippled Griffith, slipping past the Bakiraka and the pursuing Black Dog Knights. At the border, Griffith's recovered beherit drags them all into the Eclipse, where he offers his people as sacrifice. Judeau dies shielding her, and Femto rapes her before the Skull Knight tears her and Guts loose. The trauma regresses her to a childlike state, and days later she bears the demon child before it fades away at dawn.

Wandering off during the Conviction Arc, she falls in with the harlot Luca and is disguised as the syphilitic Elaine to keep her safe, only to be branded a witch in Albion and nearly burned until Guts and Isidro rescue her. Across the arcs that follow, Guts guides his growing party toward Elfhelm to mend her, weathering his own slide into darkness that briefly turns him against her. On Skellig, the Flower Storm Monarch leads Schierke and Farnese through the Corridor of Dreams into Casca's broken mind, where they rebuild her ruined self. She wakes restored yet unable to face Guts without reliving the nightmare, and is soon carried off by Griffith and locked away in Falconia.