Chapter 61: The Hero of Ishval

The chapter opens on Solf J. Kimblee waxing poetic about the music he hears in ruin, the Philosopher's Stone clenched between his teeth as he speeds along the extermination in Ishval. Unsatisfied with his own handiwork and callously spending a subordinate as a shield, he embodies the war's cruelty. Nearby, Scar carves a bloody path through the streets until he reaches his own family, where his older brother, a scholar rather than a fighter, presses his research notes into Scar's hands and asks which of them is likelier to survive. When Kimblee appears on a rooftop and looses a devastating transmutation, the elder sibling throws himself in front of Scar to shield him from the blast.

Scar's brother finds him alive but savagely wounded, his right arm torn away. Unable to halt the bleeding and desperate, the dying man uses the construction and deconstruction arrays inked across his own limbs to graft his arm onto his brother's body. Scar later stirs in the Rockbells' clinic, glimpses the familiar tattoos, and briefly believes his brother safe, only to grasp the horror that the arm now belongs to him. Consumed by grief and rage at the grinning soldiers and Kimblee's gloating, he seizes a knife and kills the two physicians tending him, Urey and Sara Rockbell, before staggering to a hilltop to find his entire village leveled and lifeless.

When the military reaches the abandoned clinic, Kimblee muses on the opposing duties of soldiers and doctors and pockets a photograph of the Rockbells posed with their granddaughter Winry, wishing he had met them alive. In another quarter, Roy Mustang incinerates a defiant Ishvalan elder who swears he will never forgive him, and word soon arrives that the last region has fallen, ending the campaign. Among the celebrating troops, Mustang realizes he cannot name the men who served under him, and one soldier, Charlie, reassures him that his squad regards him as a hero who never spent their lives to protect his own. Alone with his guilt, Roy resolves to protect everyone he possibly can, a vow his friend Maes Hughes dismisses as a naive dream even as he pledges his support, pointing toward Fuhrer King Bradley at the summit of the army.

Elsewhere Kimblee stuns a room of officers by swallowing the Philosopher's Stone rather than surrendering it, then blasts his way free, watched all the while by the homunculus Envy. Out in a desolate field, Riza Hawkeye completes a grave for an abandoned Ishvalan child and asks Mustang to burn away the flame-alchemy secrets tattooed on her back so she need no longer carry them. She then requests a place at his side, offering her skill with firearms and accepting the duty of guarding his back, aware that it grants her the means to shoot him should he ever betray their shared vision. As Mustang gathers his loyal subordinates toward a dream of a better Amestris, the newly transformed Scar dedicates himself instead to vengeance for everything the war has stolen from him.

Scar's brother sacrifices himself and transplants his tattooed arm onto Scar, remaking him into the alchemy-wielding avenger he becomes. Scar murders Urey and Sara Rockbell and discovers his village destroyed. Kimblee swallows his Philosopher's Stone in front of his superiors, observed by Envy. Roy Mustang and Riza Hawkeye each confront their guilt over Ishval, and Hawkeye asks Roy to burn the flame-alchemy code from her back before joining his cadre. Both Mustang and Scar walk away from the war bound to opposing purposes, reform and revenge.

The Hero of Ishval is the sixty-first chapter of the manga and appears in Volume 15, following Chapter 60: In the Absence of God and leading into Chapter 62: Beyond the Dream. It was published in Japan on July 12, 2006, and in English on December 18, 2007. Although Kimblee had been dispatched to stage a fatal accident for the Rockbells, the chapter leaves it ambiguous whether his men understand that errand, since they do not treat his praise of the couple as strange. This version also differs from both anime adaptations: here the photograph of the Rockbells with Winry is tucked in Urey's pocket rather than lying bloodstained on the floor.