Dante of the Deep Forest

Alphonse attacks Wrath until Izumi intervenes, and Wrath answers her embrace by tearing off part of her shirt, turning his hair-like left arm into a weapon to fling her aside and seize control of Al's body. He forces Al against Edward and tries to crush the automail, but Al breaks loose, revealing that Wrath alone among homunculi can use alchemy because he holds Ed's original limbs, and that assimilating objects into his body is his own gift. Ed and Wrath duel with transmuted spears despite Winry's protests, and Ed knocks the boy down, ready to finish him, until Izumi splits them apart with a tremor of alchemy that frightens Wrath with its raw force.

As Envy and Sloth watch, Izumi tells the brothers that Wrath is her burden alone and forbids their interference, then her illness forces Winry to stay and tend her. Wrath flees and the Elrics give chase, only to meet Envy disguised as Bradley and Sloth in her Juliet Douglas identity, with Wrath hidden inside Sloth's body. The homunculi discuss human transmutation with the brothers, then resolve to visit their master to learn how to stop Greed.

In the Southern Slums, Scar presses the exile about his tattooed arm and the lives held within it, and Rick and Leo warn of the military's arrival. Hawkeye announces the refugees will be escorted to an official settlement once identified, but Yoki, hoping to claim his reward, is shot dead, actually struck by Lust's Ultimate Spear while Gluttony mimics gunfire. Panicked soldiers open fire and wound refugees, and the two homunculi incite the radicals to fight despite Scar's master's efforts, forcing Mustang to step in as the riot spreads.

In Dublith, Izumi formally expels the brothers for repeating her own sin by passing through the Gate, and they leave dejected until Sig and Winry point out that, freed of the teacher-pupil bond, they may now speak to her as equals. The Elrics rush back to discuss the Gate, the truth, and making a Stone without human sacrifice, and Izumi takes them in. She reasons Al saw more of the Gate since his whole body was the toll, and suggests shock repressed his memories, then sends them to her old teacher Dante for medicine. At Dante's, they meet the transformed Lyra, now Dante's student, and Dante, who knew Hohenheim and warns that the Stone brings only misery. Greed and Kimbley ambush the brothers, Greed knocking Ed out with his Ultimate Shield, and the chimeras move to abduct Al, who refuses to go quietly and prepares to face Roa and Martel.

The episode adapts the chapters Master and Apprentice and To Meet the Master, and its title may nod to the opening of Dante's Inferno. Wrath's comfort in his mother's embrace exemplifies a homunculus's divided psyche, torn between the person it was meant to be and the being it has become, and shows that his love for Izumi still runs beneath his rage.

The brothers' unease in discussing how homunculi are born hints that they have begun to suspect Sloth was born from their own transmutation, a thread revisited nine episodes later.