Be Thou for the People

After a day shopping with Winry, Edward is sent by Mustang to inspect the coal mines at Youswell. When he tries to book a room and offer repairs to offset an inflated bill, innkeeper Halling throws him out for wearing the State Alchemist badge, so Ed pretends he and Alphonse are strangers to keep Al inside. Al learns that Lieutenant Yoki, the grasping local governor, is the source of the town's misery. Yoki soon arrives to collect crushing taxes, and when his assistant Lyra uses alchemy to strike down a protesting resident and a soldier moves on Halling's son Kyle, Ed steps in to save the boy. Impressed, Yoki invites him to dine at his mansion.

Over dinner Yoki bribes Ed through Lyra in exchange for a favorable report, and Ed plays along. That night Yoki secretly has Lyra wreck the inn, though Al pulls Kyle to safety. The next morning Ed refuses to simply transmute gold for the townsfolk, since the law forbids it and taxes would swallow it anyway. Instead he covertly makes gold, buys the whole town from Yoki in a quiet deal, then trades it to Halling for a free night in the inn he rebuilds with alchemy. Meanwhile in Central, General Hakuro promotes Mustang and Hawkeye and arranges their transfer to oversee the eastern headquarters.

Enraged at being tricked, Yoki sets Lyra on Ed, but the boy declares he never sold his soul to the military and defeats her by cutting away the necklace that channels her alchemy, while the miners overpower Yoki's men. The Elrics celebrate with the workers, and Hawkeye notes to Mustang that the affair has burnished Ed's reputation as a hero of the people even as a so-called dog of the military. The scene then jumps three years forward: riding toward Reole, Ed loses his temper when the cab driver calls him short and chases the man out into the desert while Al hurries after them.

The episode adapts Chapter 3, The Mining Town. Two changes stand out from that chapter: Lyra, a character unique to this series, razes the inn with alchemy rather than Yoki's men torching it, and Kyle, trapped inside at the time, is rescued by Alphonse. Here Ed coats transmuted culm in gold coins to fake gold bars, whereas the manga has him convert the culm to gold and back, implying the 2003 version treats base-to-gold transmutation as impossible without the Philosopher's Stone rather than merely illegal. The installment ends the flashback spanning Episodes 3 through 9, and the next entry resumes after Episode 2.