Slicer Brothers

The two brothers exist as a single walking suit of armor, their souls fixed to the metal through a pair of blood runes, one set inside the helmet for the elder and another in the neck guard for the younger. Fans note the plating is rendered red in the 2003 adaptation and green in the later 2009 version. A katana serves as their signature weapon, wielded by the sibling whose spirit animates the main body. The runes themselves used a hexagram in the manga design, a detail altered in both anime to sidestep any religious reference.

Condemned to die for their murders, the siblings were instead handed over to Laboratory 5, where the facility's grim experiments stripped the souls of Central Prison's death-row inmates from their bodies. Their two spirits were fastened to one armor shell and given the duty of cutting down anyone who trespassed. When Edward Elric slips inside the lab during a covert inquiry, the pair confronts him as Number 48. Edward at first assumes a lone soul inhabits the metal, spotting only the elder's rune in the helm, and believes the duel is finished once he pries the head loose, only for the body to keep swinging on its own.

Though killers as adults and delinquents as boys, the brothers carry a rough sense of honor, each eventually pointing Edward toward the location of their runes mid-fight. Beaten, they ask the young alchemist to end them, but he refuses on the principle that they remain living people, an idea that amuses souls who no longer count their own existence as worth anything. Their fates diverge across the adaptations. In the manga and 2009 anime, Lust and Envy silence them before they can hand Edward too much information. In the 2003 anime, the younger brother shatters his own rune to move on, while the elder survives long enough to guide Edward toward the developing Philosopher's Stone before Lust kills him slowly to pressure the boy into helping her.

Most of what the pair can do is displayed by the younger soul, a master swordsman whose katana work keeps Edward pinned on the defensive for nearly the entire bout. His speed borders on the uncanny, closing a wide gap between the two combatants almost instantly. The elder boasts that together they outclass Barry the Chopper, though how much sway he truly holds over the shared body stays ambiguous, since either mind could in theory steer it while the helmet is attached. Freed of pain and fatigue, the armored guardian fights without the limits a body of flesh would impose.