Chapter 24: Fullmetal Alchemist

Acting on a report of two unusually gifted young alchemists, Lieutenant Colonel Roy Mustang and Second Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye travel to Resembool hoping to recruit them for the military. Their local guide is amused to reveal that the pair are still children. Mustang steps inside the abandoned Elric house and recoils at a blood-marked room dominated by an intricate array on the floor. Directed to the Rockbell residence, he barges in and demands the boys appear. He finds Edward slumped in a wheelchair, robbed of an arm and a leg, seated before a hollow suit of armor. When Roy accuses the child of the horror in the house, it is the armor that answers, and Alphonse voices his regret.

Mustang lays out the case for enlistment, arguing that a government license and its privileges could open a path back to whole bodies. Pinako counters that she has already buried the ruined thing the boys transmuted, and questions whether Roy would truly steer them back toward the craft that crippled them. In another room Winry admits her hatred of soldiers, since the army took her parents to die in war, and pleads that the brothers not be led away. Hawkeye replies that she serves to shield someone dear to her, and that no choice will be imposed, only offered. Leaving his contact details, Roy departs, remarking that beneath the boy's frailty he glimpsed eyes that burned. Stirred, Edward agrees to automail and vows to finish a three-year rehabilitation in one.

A year on, a recovered Edward spars with Alphonse, then claps his hands to convert his arm plating into a blade, proving he can transmute without a circle after glimpsing the Truth, though Alphonse recalls no such vision. Edward reunites with the newly promoted Colonel Mustang and travels to Central for the alchemy examination, where Führer King Bradley attends in person. Needing no drawn circle, Edward raises an ornate lance from the floor and drives it at Bradley, halting the tip a breath from his throat to warn the leader about lax security. The furious proctor calls it a failure, but Bradley overrules him and passes the boy, quietly severing the lance with a sword Edward never saw him draw.

Mustang privately notes that Bradley's death would have cleared his own ambition for the top office, while both he and Edward now hold leverage over each other, since the brothers' human transmutation remains a crime that could cost Ed his license and see Alphonse studied in a lab. Bradley fast-tracks the certification to bind such talent to the military before rivals claim it, and assigns the honorary name Fullmetal Alchemist, which Edward gladly accepts. That night in Resembool the brothers set fire to their family home as Winry weeps. Ed's public cover story blames the Ishvalan train bombing, the three laws of State Alchemy are introduced, and the closing scenes fall on October 3, 1911.