Chapter 4: Battle on the Train

Major General Hakuro settles into a leisurely train journey out of New Optain bound for East City, his wife and their two small children at his side, when armed members of the eastern extremist faction Blue Squad, led by the fearsome Bald, seize the locomotive. Back where the line ends, the local garrison answers to Colonel Roy Mustang, who receives Bald's list of demands and learns that Edward Elric sits among the captive passengers.

Roused from a nap and annoyed by the intruders, Edward swiftly overpowers the two gunmen posted in his car, to the dismay of the gentler Alphonse and their nervous fellow riders. Taking stock, the brothers split up to clear the rest of the train, Edward crossing the roofs toward the engine while Alphonse works through the cars themselves, subduing hijackers as he goes.

When Bald hears that his men in the rear cars have gone silent despite having killed the guards and captured the engineers, he grows suspicious. Hakuro urges the Blue Squad to give up as their scheme unravels, but Bald answers by shooting a hole through the general's ear with an automail arm shaped like a double-barreled rifle. Edward frees the engineers, who retake the controls and tell him the car ahead of Hakuro's suite is loaded with boiler water. Using it, Edward floods the first-class car and drops every terrorist inside except Bald. The brothers enter from both ends at once, beating Bald and wrecking his automail.

The train reaches East City safely, and Mustang and Second Lieutenant Riza Hawkeye take Bald into custody, greeting the Elrics to Edward's irritation. As the colonel and Edward trade barbs, Bald frees himself with a knife hidden in his ruined automail and lunges at Mustang. Revealing a transmutation circle stitched into his right glove, Mustang snaps his fingers and puts the terrorist down with a single burst of flame, then names himself Roy Mustang, the Flame Alchemist.

Blue Squad hijacks the East City express with Edward aboard. The Elric brothers clear the train car by car, and Edward floods the first-class car to subdue the terrorists. Bald is captured, escapes, and is finished off by Mustang's flame alchemy, which reveals the Colonel as the Flame Alchemist.

The commandeered locomotive bears the designation Limited Express number 04840, and the Blue Squad band appears to number roughly twelve. Its title page, which depicts Edward dozing atop a stack of open books, received full animation in the franchise's second film, Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos. This installment also marks the first time Alphonse's armored face begins to shift with emotion, a device that carries on through the rest of the series after his previously fixed visage.