Chapter 104: The Center of the World

High above the fight, Wrath studies Scar's new tattoo and marvels once more at how stubbornly people cling to life. Down below, Edward hands the wounded May over to Alphonse and squares off against Pride himself. Stung at being ranked so minor a threat, Pride lashes out with his shadows and reminds the humans that they survive only for as long as they remain useful, then plays his hidden edge: his small stature. Since Edward has always fought larger foes, he has no practice against an enemy shorter than himself. The gap hands Pride a brief opening, yet Ed turns it inside out, arguing that a lifetime of facing bigger opponents has made him an expert on every trick a small fighter relies on. Reading Pride's movements exactly, he lands a savage headbutt that cracks a piece off the homunculus's already crumbling face.

Nearby, May tries to seal her injuries with alkahestry, leaving herself exposed to Father, but Alphonse reaches her in time and takes the blow meant for her. He and Izumi mount a coordinated strike on the shadowy figure to no effect. Untouched, Father sends black tendrils toward the four human sacrifices and reels them into a ring around himself, announcing that the moment he has awaited has finally come.

On the surface the eclipse is seconds from total. The captured General Klemin loses his nerve and begs the Briggs soldiers holding him to carry him to the middle of the Nationwide Transmutation Circle, where he insists they will be safe. As the moon swallows the sun and tremors grip the land, Father gleefully asks his captives whether they have ever pictured the planet itself as a living consciousness, a system able to hoard universal knowledge on a scale no single person could reach. Forcing open the gate of such a being, he says, would grant unimaginable power, and he means to pry it open using the five sacrifices bound to him.

Greed abruptly appears at Father's side, boasting that he has found the true center of the world, and rakes his adamantine claws across Father's form while declaring everything his. Even reduced to a shadow puddle, Father claims the advantage is still his and that he had fully expected Greed to turn up, since Greed was once carved out of him. He slides back to his throne with the sacrifices, the freed Van Hohenheim among them, arranged around him, then brings his palm down on the small model of the Five-Point Circle on his table, igniting the enormous array.

The eye of the gate blooms upon each sacrifice as the black film around the lair swells upward like a rising tide and engulfs all of Central Command. Shadow hands erupt from every gate and collide at the circle's core, building a surge of alchemical energy. Across the country the array roars to life; every person inside Amestris drops where they stand as their souls are torn free. A colossal pair of gate doors opens over the nation and Father, swollen to titanic size, rises out and hails the ring of light around the eclipse as God.

Seizing the tendrils that reach down from a gate in the sky, Father vows to drag God down to Earth and fold it into himself. A blinding flash washes over the planet, and when it fades the entire land lies silent and lifeless, though deep underground the five sacrifices, together with Pride, Greed, and May, begin to stir. Roy remarks on the unnatural quiet, and Ed wonders aloud whether everyone above was turned into Philosopher's Stone. A voice confirms it, and a human figure steps from the dark, transmuting robes and sandals onto itself without any circle. Containing God, he explains, demanded a staggering amount of energy, so the people of Amestris were rendered into fuel, and the power of God along with the whole nation's lives now rests inside him. Wearing a fresh, youthful body modeled on a young Hohenheim, Father thanks the sacrifices for their help.

Father's trick of misdirecting Greed about where the circle's real center sits mirrors the way he once seized control of the array back in Xerxes. During the tremor montage, the chapter checks in on familiar faces scattered across the country: Mason at the Dublith meat shop, Halling and Kyle laboring in the Youswell mines, Rick and the elderly Ishvalan man in the Central slums, Garfiel and Paninya in Rush Valley, and an engineer last seen aboard the train early in the series. The chapter's Japanese title is Sekai no Chushin, released in Japan on February 10, 2010, and in English on September 20, 2011. Its events were dramatized across two episodes of the 2009 anime adaptation.