The Scar

Bursting from Al's armor, Martel throws herself at Kimbley to avenge Greed and her fallen comrades, only to be tricked and nearly killed when Kimbley hurls a transmuted body at her. Al shields her, traps Kimbley behind a wall of his own alchemy, and wins her a chance to flee just as Mustang arrives to assert jurisdiction, prompting Kimbley to warn that their next encounter will see Al's suit rigged to detonate. At Central, Bradley names Hakuro acting Führer and departs, supposedly to quell the Reole uprising but actually to destroy it alongside Sloth and Wrath. In Reole itself, Ed dodges Scar and forces him to admit he mercy-killed Nina years earlier, a revelation that leaves the guilt-ridden boy reeling.

Scar and Edward duel again, and Ed's cold-resistant automail once more resists decomposition, though its shifting metal strains the mechanism. Lust and Gluttony intervene, and Scar produces a locket that stuns Lust and drives Gluttony to retreat with her. Settling at Rose's home, Scar recounts how his brother went into exile after attempting human transmutation to revive a dying love, and Ed explains that this very act birthed the homunculus Lust, since a homunculus assumes the appearance of whoever was meant to return and stays weak to remnants of that person's body. Scar reveals that his brother returned with the secret of the Philosopher's Stone but was ignored by the faithful, then sacrificed himself in the war by grafting his own tattooed arm onto Scar. Ed realizes the array on that arm holds an incomplete Stone, absorbing red stones because it remains unfinished, which is what lets Scar wield destructive alchemy. Beneath the outpost, Martel overhears Bradley scheming with Kimbley and Tucker to provoke Reole into a false first strike and to have Ed assassinated. When she attacks, Bradley knocks her aside, his eyepatch falls away to expose an ouroboros, and he pursues her into Al's armor, running his sword through to kill her as a horrified Alphonse breaks down.

This 2003 entry borrows some material from Chapter 30 while pursuing its own version of Scar's history and the homunculi's origins in botched resurrections. It marks Bradley's exposure as Pride and the brutal death of Martel inside Alphonse's body, a moment that deepens Al's trauma for the episodes that follow.