Basque Grand

Grand is a huge, muscular, bald man who looms over ordinary soldiers, marked by a long, pointed handlebar mustache and a small scar near his chin. He dresses in the standard blue Amestrian uniform and rolls his sleeves up in a fight to bring his transmutation gauntlets to bear. His look has barely shifted since the Ishval war, where he added a white coat and cap over the uniform, as most alchemists at the front did.

A seasoned soldier certain of his own strength, Grand shows no fear even facing Scar, the killer of many State Alchemists. He insists on leading from the front rather than hanging back behind his rank, which earns him real respect from his men. For all his ferocity, he has no appetite for pointless killing; he guns down his own superior, Brigadier General Fessler, rather than carry out needless slaughter, and he shows a measure of regard for the Ishvalan cleric Logue Lowe.

Across the manga and the 2009 anime, Grand appears mostly in flashback, since he is among the first names on Scar's list. The Ishval flashback of Chapter 60 shows him at his peak, charging ahead of his men despite his rank and taking Logue Lowe under his protection to seek a swift end to the war. When Fessler turns out too devoted to the slaughter to permit a meeting with Führer Bradley, Grand coldly shoots him and assumes command, a killing the watching soldiers, Maes Hughes among them, quietly agree to write off as a stray bullet. An omake reveals that Scar only bested the general by catching him drunk outside a pub, whereas the 2009 anime instead has Grand cornered in an alley, overconfident in his own alchemy and killed for the mistake.

The 2003 anime hands him a larger early role as an antagonist, bullying Shou Tucker over his chimera research, trying to cart off Tucker's daughter Nina, and later pursuing Marcoh's Red Stone before Scar kills him while he is preoccupied with the relic. In combat Grand fights by slamming his fists to form a transmutation circle, then reshapes stone and metal on contact with an expert grasp of weaponry, raising cannons, gatling guns, and flails straight out of the ground. His forearm gauntlets carry alchemical inscriptions, and in the 2003 version his firearm-conjuring style may have leaned on a government-issued Philosopher's Stone.