Girl On the Battlefield

An exhausted Ling carries Lan Fan through Central while Wrath sends Gluttony tracking their scent. Ed sends the shaken Winry off with the military police and rejoins Alphonse against Scar, vowing to explain everything once he returns. Mustang orders Hawkeye, disguised as a doctor, to reinforce them and to meet later at a safe house outside the city. Cornered and bleeding, Lan Fan severs her own left arm and ties it to a stray dog to throw the hunters off her trail, then slips into the sewers. Scar and the brothers fight Gluttony, who regenerates from every wound, until Ling drops in shirtless from the sewer, feeds the homunculus a grenade, and blows away his upper body.

Ed transmutes railway steel into wire so Ling can bind Gluttony before he reforms, and Hawkeye's jeep lets them haul the captured homunculus away while the brothers pretend not to know her. May Chang and her tiny companion Shao May arrive, flooring both brothers with martial arts and covering Scar's escape with an alkahestry blast. In the safe house Ling insists they collect Lan Fan, and Mustang recruits Doctor Knox to close her wounds. Ling then delivers the crucial deduction that King Bradley is himself a homunculus, bearing an ouroboros mark beneath his eye patch, a claim strengthened when Knox reveals Bradley's son Selim is adopted. As the group argues over who should claim Gluttony's Philosopher's Stone, the bound homunculus hears Mustang's name, recognizes Lust's killer, and tears open, a vast eye splitting his belly and blasting apart the house.

The episode adapts the manga chapters on the girl gripped by past and present battles and the promise made by those who wait. Its title card blends a purification array with a simple transmutation circle. The dub introduces a lasting localization error by calling Shao May a panda bear and later a cat, since Amestris has no pandas and mistakes her for a black-and-white cat. A new scene has Lan Fan tell Ed his earlier severed-limb decoy inspired the trick that saved her. The title can point to any of three characters: Winry, May, or Lan Fan.