Chapter 5: The Alchemist's Suffering

Grateful for Edward Elric's help during the Bald affair, the young alchemist calls in a favor from Colonel Roy Mustang: he wants an introduction to someone versed in living-tissue alchemy, hoping such knowledge might point the way toward restoring the bodies he and his brother lost. Mustang directs him to Shou Tucker, a certified State Alchemist celebrated for crafting chimeras. Two years earlier Tucker had earned his license by producing a beast that could form human words, though Mustang grimly notes the creature managed only to plead for death before wasting away. Welcomed into Tucker's residence, Edward is turned loose among the shelves of the man's private collection of biological research.

While Ed buries himself in the texts, Alphonse strikes up a friendship with Tucker's lonely young daughter Nina and the family dog Alexander, and their play soon pulls Ed away from his studies as well. An offhand reminder from their escort Jean Havoc reveals that Tucker's annual evaluation looms, a review that decides whether a State Alchemist keeps his funding or loses his commission. Over the following days the Elrics keep Nina company as her father shuts himself away in mounting desperation. When the brothers return to a home that is dark and silent, Tucker triumphantly unveils a new chimera that can speak, one that unnervingly greets Edward as its older brother. The truth lands like a blow: the animal was assembled from Nina and Alexander, mirroring how Tucker's first speaking creature had been made from his vanished wife.

Enraged, Edward denounces Tucker for treating human lives as experiments, but the older man throws the accusation back, likening Ed's own attempt at Human Transmutation to the same sin. The words send Edward into a fury, and he pounds Tucker with his automail arm until Alphonse physically drags him off to keep the man alive. Later, reporting the horror to Mustang, Ed accepts that his path as a military alchemist will expose him to far worse and may one day force his own hands to cruelty, yet he resolves to keep pressing toward his goal even as he mourns his failure to rescue a single child. That night a red-eyed stranger bearing an X-shaped scar cuts down the guards at the Tucker home and confronts the ruined alchemist, condemning him as one who has strayed from God's path before destroying his body from within. Finding Nina weeping over her father in spite of his cruelty, the intruder gently ends her suffering as well and departs, commending both souls to the divine.

Edward secures a referral to Shou Tucker in his search for bio-alchemical knowledge. Alphonse and Ed grow close to Nina and Alexander. Tucker reveals his creation of a talking chimera and confesses that it was forged by fusing his daughter with her dog. Edward beats Tucker in a rage before Alphonse restrains him, and the brothers hand the case to the military. A scarred killer with red eyes then murders both Tucker and Nina using a strange destructive power.

This chapter is the fifth of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga, printed under the Japanese title Renkinjutsushi no Kuno, and it appears in Volume 2. It reached Japan on November 15, 2001, and arrived in English on July 5, 2005, following Chapter 4: Battle on the Train and preceding Chapter 6: The Right Hand of Destruction. The installment spells out how Mustang's fire alchemy works: his gloves are woven from ignition cloth, and a snap of his fingers throws a spark while the transmutation circle stitched onto them lets him regulate the oxygen around whatever he targets. It also notes that Mustang's superiors attribute Edward's missing limbs to the Ishval Civil War.