Bonus Chapter: His Battlefield Once More

The chapter opens amid the Ishval Annihilation, where Maes Hughes steps into Roy Mustang's tent to inform him that the assault on the twenty-seventh district is set for half past ten. A demoralized Roy calls them all slavedrivers and presses Hughes on why he is slaughtering his own countrymen, dismissing the answer of military protocol with contempt. Trying to lift the mood, Hughes produces a letter and a photograph from Gracia, declaring that once the fighting ends he intends to propose and that Roy had better be ready to stand as his best man.

Roy asks whether Hughes could truly embrace the woman he loves with blood on his hands. Hughes counters that a wife and family may be an ordinary sort of happiness, but that its very ordinariness makes it the greatest thing of all, worth any effort, even smiling at her side as though the war had never happened. He cuts the exchange short with a reminder that duty calls. When Roy sinks deeper and begs for thirty seconds, Hughes grants him well over a minute before calling again, and Roy rises and walks out with resolve in his eyes. The scene then shifts to Eastern Headquarters in the present, where Hawkeye rouses the oversleeping Colonel, who muses that he has changed since his days in combat. Unsettling his staff, he asks what they would do if he ordered them to kill innocents, and they brush it off, certain he could give no such command, before promptly burying him in paperwork as he grumbles once more that they are all slavedrivers.

The piece appeared in the supplementary release Book in Figure: BLUE, published in Japan in August 2005. It serves as a character study of Mustang and Hughes, bridging the atrocity of Ishval with the lighter tone of their later peacetime routine.