Jill

Jill is a small child whose head barely rises past Guts' waist. Brown hair falls into a pair of pigtails long enough to brush her shoulder blades, framing wide brown eyes. She dresses as a peasant would: a mostly pale gown with ruffled cuffs and a darker laced panel over the hips, a shawl knotted with a ribbon at her chest, a strip of cloth tied behind her waist, and plain shoes that stop at the ankle.

Sensitivity does not stop Jill from speaking her mind. Her father Zepek, a bitter drunk lost in memories of his soldiering days, belittles and strikes her, leaving her hungry for any kindness, and the two clash often. Her mother means well but is herself worn down by the same cruelty, so the home stands broken, a battlefield in Jill's own words, and the girl is deeply miserable with no one her age to lean on.

Years earlier she did have one true friend in Rosine, four years her senior, whom she looked up to like an elder sister. Jill found the older girl's tomboyish streak odd and never grasped that Rosine suffered the same abuse at home. When Rosine vanished, Jill was left to turn the friendship over in her mind. Their eventual reunion brings a terrible offer: the transformed Rosine, now an apostle, invites Jill to join the so-called elves. The girl refuses once she glimpses the truth behind that paradise, yet she still holds Rosine as her dearest friend, even throwing her own body over the dying apostle to stop Guts from delivering the final blow.

Rescued by Guts from bandits and monsters alike, Jill comes to see the swordsman as the father she lacks, an attachment Rosine reads as something closer to a crush. She calls him Mister Swordsman, sneaks him food after her village drives him off for keeping company with the elf Puck, and begs to travel with him. He refuses, unwilling to lead a child into danger, and tells her the fight that matters is the one waiting in her own home. Jill carries that lesson back with a fragile new hope.

For a stretch of her childhood Jill's only companion was Rosine, a girl who bore her own domestic wounds; Jill missed the signs, misreading her friend's restless, unladylike spirit as mere adventurousness. Her first real appearance comes after bandits snatch her, when Guts cuts her free from a possessed tree in the forest. Meeting Puck, she takes him for one of the valley's elves. Back home her mother shields her from Zepek's rage as he rants and drinks, and that night she bars her door against his prowling war comrade, wrapping herself in the cloak Guts left behind.

At Guts' request she explains what these creatures are and where they nest, then joins him and Puck into the forest to look for Rosine despite the danger. The reunion thrills her at first, but Rosine's push to turn her into an elf, and the cruelty she witnesses, breeds doubt. Still she blocks Guts from finishing her old friend after his duel with the apostle. Returning home, Jill absorbs his message that fleeing solves nothing and that her battlefield lies with her family, and she resolves to keep going, hoping to change something however small.