Kenny
Ackermann

Kenny Ackermann was a serial killer famous enough to be a fairy tale, the Ripper who cut down Military Police by the score in the capital, and a son of a bloodline the crown had spent generations persecuting. He hunted the true king, Uri Reiss, to kill him, and was caught mid-attempt by Uri's half-transformed Titan. Instead of executing him, Uri bowed and apologized for what had been done to the Ackermanns. Kenny, who understood only strength, could not fit a king who knelt into his world, so he followed him. He served the Reiss family from the shadows for the rest of Uri's life.

In between, he found his sister Kuchel dead in the underground and her small son Levi starving beside the body. Kenny fed the boy, taught him the knife and how to survive, and left the day he judged the lessons had taken, deciding a killer had no business being anyone's father. He never told Levi who he was. Years later he was captain of the Interior Police's Anti-Personnel Squad, hunting his own nephew through Trost with gear built for killing humans, all in pursuit of one dream: to take the Founding Titan for himself and find out whether power was what let people like Uri talk about love.

Rod Reiss's transformation brought the cavern down on Kenny's squad and left him burned and dying against a tree, where Levi found him. He had stolen a Titan syringe that could have saved him and did not use it. Everyone he had ever known, he told Levi, had to be drunk on something to keep going, women or the king or family or power, and he was the same. He answered the one question that mattered, that he was Kuchel's brother, pushed the syringe into Levi's hands, and died.