Greed

Greed's first body reads as a tall, well-built young man, his black hair spiked and swept back above a faint widow's peak. Slit, cat-like pupils sit in purple eyes, his teeth come to sharp points, and a broad grin is rarely off his face. He favors leather: a short jacket trimmed with fur, tight pants, and upturned shoes, worn over a snug undershirt that echoes his siblings' outfits, plus belted straps at each wrist. Once he takes Ling Yao as a host he wears the prince's face, altered only by those same purple slit eyes. Raising the Ultimate Shield darkens his skin to blue, lengthens his nails into claws, and sharpens his features into something close to a red devil's mask.

True to the name, Greed runs on wanting. He may crave everything precisely because he cannot pin down what he actually longs for, and that gap keeps him reaching. Alone among Father's creations he defies and openly mocks his maker. He is loose, charismatic, cocky, and vain enough to skip his full shield because it hides a face he likes, and he claims never to lie and never to harm women or children. Beneath the bravado, what he wants is simple: real friends who care for him as he cares for them, a truth he masks by branding those people his 'possessions.' Over time he forms a genuine bond with Ling. The two occupy one body, and the prince's own appetite rivals Greed's, so it is fitting that Ling becomes the one who helps him name what he actually wants. In the end he dies content, having spent himself to shield the people he loves.

As a homunculus, Greed heals from nearly any wound and stops aging so long as his internal Philosopher's Stone holds power, which left him leaning so hard on those defenses that his raw fighting stayed only average. His signature trick, the Ultimate Shield, reworks the carbon in his skin into hard graphene while the flesh underneath stays supple. Usually he armors just a few spots or grows claws up to his shoulders, but taken to its full form his whole body turns effectively indestructible, shrugging off even a point-blank blow from Father. The catch is real, though: a skilled alchemist can turn his graphene skin brittle by degrading it to graphite, and he cannot harden and heal in the same instant, a gap Wrath exploited by carving him apart between regenerations. Sharing Ling's body handed him the prince's speed and martial skill, finally letting him keep pace with Wrath.