Chapter 7: After the Rain

His automail arm shattered by Scar's strike, Edward Elric drops onto the rain-slicked street while his pinned brother Alphonse shouts in panic from the pavement nearby. Certain the fight is already lost, Edward asks whether Scar intends to kill Alphonse as well, then offers up his own life so that his brother might be spared. The Ishvalan assassin accepts the bargain and steps forward for the finishing blow, only for Alphonse to plead with him to run instead. Before anything can happen, Colonel Roy Mustang and his troops arrive and surround the scene.

Mustang ties Scar to the killings of Shou and Nina Tucker, and the murderer answers that he acts as an instrument of divine punishment. When the colonel tries to burn him down, the downpour leaves his flame alchemy useless, and Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye drags him clear. Major Alex Louis Armstrong strikes from behind and introduces himself, then studies the killer's method and works out that Scar performs only the tearing-apart half of alchemy while skipping the rebuilding stage entirely. The major's wild swings prove to be deliberate bait, giving Mustang's unit time to form up. A rifle shot from Hawkeye knocks the dark glasses off Scar's face, revealing crimson eyes that mark him as an Ishvalan, after which he rips open the road and vanishes into the sewers.

Once the danger passes, Edward hurries to Alphonse and is met with fists and a furious lecture, his younger brother berating him for so casually throwing his life away and reminding him what they still have to live for. Back at command, Mustang recounts the roots of the conflict in the east: thirteen years earlier a soldier's accidental shooting of an Ishvalan child sparked a civil war, and after seven years of fighting the state's alchemists were unleashed to exterminate the region's people. Having served in that campaign himself, the colonel concedes there may be a bitter justice behind Scar's rampage, but Edward rejects the idea and calls it plain revenge painted over with righteousness. As Mustang swears to track the killer down, Edward realizes his missing arm makes it impossible to safely mend Alphonse's armor without endangering the soul bound inside it, so he decides his next stop must be his automail mechanic.

This installment launches the recurring joke of the colonel being branded useless whenever water is involved, a nod to his rain-crippled flame alchemy. It also introduces the Armstrong family habit of treasuring skills and heirlooms said to have been handed down the Armstrong line across the generations. The events here are later dramatized in the fifth episode of the 2009 series and the fifteenth episode of the 2003 series.