Chapter 1: The Two Alchemists

The story opens on a boy bleeding out in a cellar, one leg reduced to a ruined stump in the wake of a forbidden alchemical ritual gone wrong. He screams for his brother Alphonse, but no answer comes. Years later the same boy, now traveling beside a towering figure encased in steel armor, reaches the frontier town of Reole, where every radio pours out worship of the sun god Leto as preached by the local holy man, Father Cornello. A minor scuffle forces the pair to reveal themselves as alchemists, and they announce themselves as the famed Elric brothers: the armored one is the younger Alphonse, while the much smaller elder is Edward, the State Alchemist called the Fullmetal Alchemist. They meet Rose Thomas, a devoted follower who was promised her dead lover could be revived through Leto's power, and Edward's suspicion of such claims prompts him to dig deeper.

In the church, Ed challenges Rose's faith with scientific reasoning meant to disprove gods and resurrections, but a public demonstration of Cornello's power convinces the brothers that something unnatural truly lies behind it, something they have long been chasing. They request an audience, and the wary priest, fearing they were sent by the State Military to probe his secret plans, orders them killed. When his subordinate Brother Cray moves to carry it out, Ed and Al swiftly overpower the men, but the fight knocks Alphonse's helmet loose, exposing the empty armor within. Explaining to a horrified Rose that Al's condition came from trespassing into God's domain, the brothers urge her to face the truth about her leader.

Confronting Cornello in his sanctum, the Elrics accuse him of using alchemy to counterfeit miracles, and note that his impossibly free transmutations point to the legendary amplifier, the Philosopher's Stone. Cornello admits both the fraud and his possession of the Stone, but refuses to surrender it. Rose, swayed once more by a renewed promise to restore her sweetheart, stands aside as the priest looses a chimera to kill the brothers. Edward takes the beast on and stuns his foe by transmuting without a circle, and when even that fails to fell the monster, he reveals that his right arm and left leg are both automail, vowing to teach the third-rate Cornello the difference between them.

The Elric brothers are introduced, along with the aftermath of the failed ritual that cost Edward his leg and Alphonse his body. In Reole they meet Rose Thomas and expose Father Cornello as a fraud whose miracles run on a Philosopher's Stone, the very artifact they seek. The confrontation reveals Alphonse's hollow armor and Edward's automail limbs, and ends with a chimera attack and Ed's circle-free alchemy.

Edward loosely invokes the myth of Icarus while describing human arrogance in the church, hinting that Amestris knows of Greek-equivalent lore, later confirmed by Xerxes. The chapter also establishes that Edward earned his State Alchemist license at the age of twelve.