King Bradley

In the manga and Brotherhood, Bradley reads as a man closing on sixty whose build is startlingly powerful for his years. His dark hair is slicked back and clipped short at the sides, and a heavy black mustache sits above his lip in a squared-off, toothbrush style. One eye is an ordinary blue; the other hides an ouroboros where the pupil should be, which is why he keeps it behind an eye patch. The 2003 design is much the same, though softened by a leaner frame and an olive complexion, differences owed largely to the shift in art style.

His usual dress is a long blue military coat over matching trousers and black dress shoes, cinched with a grey sash he uses to sling his swords. He is almost never without a blade, and has been known to carry as many as five and swing them all at once. In the thick of a fight he sometimes sheds the coat for suspenders, boots and a short black undershirt, and on the Promised Day he wears a white shirt, blue trousers and a beige belt holding a hand grenade.

Bradley stands apart from his fellow Homunculi in how readily he mimics human warmth. He comes across as calm, agreeable, even funny, a mask the others rarely bother with. He hands Mustang the credit for stopping the Freezing Alchemist that he himself defeated, brings the hospitalized Elric brothers a melon, and slips out a window to duck his own aide, all small gestures that buy trust and deflect suspicion. Yet the fury named in his true title is never far. At Hughes' funeral, when little Elicia protested the burial, Mustang read Bradley's trembling hands as grief; Bradley later confessed he was straining to hold back rage that the child had broken the ritual's silence.

In combat he turns relentless and merciless, closing without hesitation, though he warms to opponents he respects, praising Ling's swordplay and marveling that Fu could fight so well at an even greater age than his own. Handed his throne rather than earning it, he scorns the ideal of a "true king" who serves his people, seeing rulers as powerless figureheads and accepting his role as a staged part he plays. Because almost nothing in his life was ever his own choice, he treasures the one that was, taking his wife of his own free will, and tells Riza he believes their bond needs no words. He keeps his distance from the other Homunculi, is gentler toward humans than his siblings after a lifetime among them, and half-enjoys the disorder the Elrics bring to a world otherwise scripted for him. He dismisses God as a tool for instilling fear, daring the Ishvalans to stop him with their own hands rather than wait on divine punishment, yet in death he wonders whether the sunlight that blinded him was a kind of judgment after all.

Unlike the rest of the Homunculi, Bradley began as a living human. Raised from boyhood as one of many orphaned candidates groomed to lead Amestris, he was injected as a young man with a Philosopher's Stone forged from wrathful souls. Those souls warred until only the single most furious survived, leaving him the first of just two human-based Homunculi, the other being Greed-Ling. That origin gives him a body identical to a normal man's but pushed far past human limits in speed, strength, reflexes, stamina and durability, well beyond what his age should allow. Ling notes that he registers only one chi where other Homunculi carry many, and because his stone holds a single soul he lacks their regeneration, making him mortal and, in that narrow sense, the most fragile of his kind. Only in death, as the stone disintegrated within him, did he finally age back to his true years.

His signature gift is the Ultimate Eye behind the patch, which grants near-precognitive perception of everything in view. A glance reads an opponent's strengths and weaknesses and maps the optimal path to victory, letting him react with flawless efficiency. The limit is that it sees only what falls within his sight, so a surprise strike from beyond his vision can still land, a vulnerability that ultimately undoes him. As a swordsman he may be the finest in the series, wielding up to five blades at once and slicing through cannon fire in midair even without the Eye. Severely wounded and blinded late on, he still outran Mustang's explosions, nearly killed Scar twice, and destroyed a Briggs tank with only a sword and a grenade, prompting Scar to admit he would have had no chance against an uninjured Wrath. Riza once told him it was tragic that nothing about his life was real; he answered that this was untrue, pointing to the one choice that had always been his, marrying his wife.