Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood S2E27: “Flame of Vengeance”

That's a Mustang vs. Envy title if I ever heard one. And they're both in the tunnels under the command center, fighting and preying on (respectively) the mannequins, so this is about the time for him to finally confront Hughes' murderer. We also just saw him make a similar entrance into the same room as in "Death of the Undying" when he killed the accomplice, so the story is taking pains to remind us of that subplot. I'm sure once they talk it over and see each other's sides of the story they'll be able to resolve this amicably.

No teaser this time. The episode opens with an assortment of Amestrians in bars and cafes across the country, including some familiar minor characters and some randos, tuning in to the radio. Particularly the ones in and around Central, who have been seeing or at least hearing the insurgency going on outside their windows. The host is interviewing Queen Bradley, whose voice the people easily recognize.

Makes sense. Regardless of Wrath having chosen her in particular out of love, the reason Father had him get married at all was to sell him as the Amestrian strongman ideal. So, they'd probably have encouraged Queen to become a national celebrity in her own right to back up the "husband and father" part of that ideal.

Since they do recognize her voice and speech patterns, and since FMA's tech level makes copying voices very difficult for entities not named Envy, the people are very much intrigued to hear her story. About how, with her husband Ding Dong Dingus the Despicable missing since before the fighting began, one of the generals ordered the Central garrison to kill her without a second thought if it meant increasing the chances of hitting Mustang too. When asked, she describes in detail how she was held at gunpoint and would have been knowingly killed by Central's own security forces, with their superiors' go ahead, had more of Mustang's guerillas not saved her at the last moment.

From the ground level, this looks like something that it actually isn't. Well, sort of. But backwards. Ish.

Over at the station broadcasting this live interview, the host asks Queen if she has any idea where her husband might be. When she answers no, the members of Team Mustang who are guarding her realize that things are lined up for them to land a perfect shot. She doesn't know about her husband being Wrath yet (I can understand them not wanting to overwhelm her), and nobody on Mustang's team would have been eager to tell her that an ally of theirs blew up a train with him on it yesterday evening. So, that one member of Mustang's crew whose name I will never fucking remember cuts into the interview with some breaking news: the Oberuberopenfuhrer's train was blown up on its way back from Eastern yesterday, and the authorities have *for some reason* not made this information public.

And, just twelve or so hours after that, said authorities also gave the order to kill his wife.

And, now that the subject is raised, no one knows where adorable photo op goldmine Selim is either.

And the military has been giving orders to everyone to kill mustang ASAP and not talk to him.

Brilliance.

This is probably my favorite type of ploy in fiction, at least when it's executed well. Someone has crafted an elaborate falsehood, and then their enemies use that very same lie against them in a way that they can't refute without coming clean themselves. Grabbing the lie out of an opponent's mouth and turning it back at them.

It doesn't have to convince everyone. It doesn't even really have to convince *anyone.* It just needs to make people confused and uncertain. Get enough soldiers and supporting personnel indecisive enough that they'll stand down and wait for more information before picking a side, or at least just think twice before following orders. As I pointed out in a few previous episodes, societies with tight information control are very vulnerable to this kind of psyop. Especially if they've had military coups in living memory, which Amestris most likely has. I don't know if it was Mustang, Grumman, or one of their underlings who came up with this scheme, but it's brilliant.

I'm thinking probably Mustang, since he's likely the one who sent her to the radio station before heading into the tunnels, this is the sort of Bavarian Fire Alarm-ish trickery he's employed in the past. Grumman's flavor of subterfuge is a little different.

General Whatsisname who may be the last surviving four-star at this point calls the broadcasting center and demands that they stop transmitting on pain of death.

The station operator tells him that the insurrectionists have him at gunpoint, and he can't do anything. They don't, actually; he's either a sympathizer, or the real station operator is locked in a broom closet and this sympathizer on staff promoted himself with Team Mustang's approval. When the general demands to speak to Mustang himself, the operator realizes that he can't tell the truth (that Mustang is not personally present at the moment) without potentially giving them tactically relevant information. So, he just does a hilariously over the top performance of being beaten and possibly killed by a nonexistent insurgent before hanging up.

Meanwhile, the broadcast continues. Queen Bradley has fainted at the revelation of her husband's probable (assuming you're an idiot who's managed to live with two haemunculi for years without suspecting a thing) demise, so someone else needs to deliver the closing remarks. Ross decides to do the honors; the reveal that she's alive (at least, for anyone who knows her and can recognize her voice) and on Mustang's side is going to do wonders for their credibility. Or at least confuse everyone even more, which is still a win.

The other dummy who Ross used to work with is happy to hear her voice.

There's also a few shots of the Ishvallans confirming the train explosion to various and sundry in Central. I'm not sure why they're the ones communicating this, considering that Ishvallans are largely mistrusted and that they themselves would be pretty high on the list of "people with a motive to assassinate Kingpin Duketack." Yeah, this detail was not well thought out.

Up on the walls of the command center, soldiers who haven't heard or don't care enough about the broadcast are still holding the line against the insurgents. Mustang's troops and irregulars are still sewing chaos for the defenders all around the city to give Armstrong's a clear shot at the fortress itself. The Central garrison is holding its own against the northerners, but then Hook brings out his greatest asset.

I'm not sure how the hell they got that into the city unseen. The macroglyph tunnels miiiiight be wide enough, but I don't think the entrances are.

Though granted, that looks like an MBT rather than one of the smaller destroyer-ish tanks we saw them custom design up at Briggs. If there's an armor base near the city, I could see them just grabbing one from there and smashing through the outer defenses while everyone is distracted by the fighting inside.

The tank starts hammering on the command center's front door, and they don't have much to hit back at it with. Cut back to the Sin Inc waiting room, where Mustang is apparently surprised to see Scar fighting alongside Edward.

Do we really have to keep doing this? Really?

There's some dumb back-and-forth. Hawkeye laments how relentlessly bulletproof everything in this campaign is and wishes the DM told her about this before she picked her build. Scar tells them to stop wasting time and actually help, and Mustang uses that remarkable fine control of his flare-shaping that he started having a few episodes ago to incinerate the lot of the mannequins.

It doesn't take nearly as long as Lust to wear out their defenses, of course. But I still want to know how he can make these complicated shaped flares with just the glyphs on his gloves. Him adjusting the angle and width of the cone of air he's transmuting in front of it I can buy, but this feels like it should require some more scrawling based on the rules we've been presented with.

Anyway, the mannequin stockpile seems to have finally been exhausted. No more are coming through the door, so all the ones that didn't get destroyed here have presumably been eaten by Envy or wandered up into the command center and its surroundings. Those poor guards are going to get sandwiched between mannequins and Briggs troops. Ouch. Edward, Mustang, and the others prepare to move onward, but then the wall explodes and Envy and May fall out.

Envy seems to have kept chasing May after eating the last of the mannequins that came their way, and it hasn't been an easy ride for either of them.

May runs over to the others. Scar asks her why the hell she didn't just bring Envy back to Xing with her, he was really looking forward to seeing the look on Father's face when they tell him that they mailed his kid to China, it would have been amazing. Way to ruin everything, May. However, when May starts crying, Scar softens and comforts her.

Envy is sickened, of course.

After a short, but tense, staring contest, Envy remarks on how bizarre it is to see this motley crew working together. She mockingly asks Scar if he's really that sure he wants to fight side by side with the guy who personally burned hundreds (if not thousands) of Ishvalan civilians to death. Scar just glares at her - the catalyst for the entire Ishval genocide - and says "yes." She whines childishly about how they aren't any fun. When they ask her what she's even on about, she says "Come on, don't humans enjoy schadenfreude?" Mustang just stares at her pityingly and says, totally deadpan, that yes, yes they do.

Envy's expression is priceless.

Mustang identifies her (or just recognizes her name from the others' reports) as the shapeshifting haemunculus. She just keeps going off on this childish ramble about how much she wishes they would kill each other. Mustang sighs, and tells her that if she's not going to attack could she please just step aside and be a babbling fool on her own for a while so they can complete their mission.

Right. This is the first time that Mustang has actually met Envy face to face (at least, knowingly. He's likely bumped into her in disguise a time or two). He hasn't actually witnessed her sadism and viciousness in person, nor has he had the experience of fighting her in her horrifying true form. So yeah, his first experience of Envy is her falling gracelessly out of a hole in the wall and then just standing there cackling like an idiot and making inane morbid comments while wildly gesticulating. He's understandably unimpressed. Envy normally would make a more effective entrance than this, but she's very much not on top of her game right now either physically or mentally after her ordeal.

When Envy stops running her mouth for a second and starts trying to act quiet and menacing, Mustang asks her another question; who killed Hughes? Right, neither he nor any of the other characters ever quite got confirmation on that, though process of elimination (taking Lust's answer at face value) would have narrowed it down to either her or Pride. The music gets ominous, and there's a long, silent moment before Envy answers.

First, she says that it was Ross, who he killed. She sees it with a grumpy, irritated expression, as if annoyed that Sin Inc lost one of its human catspaws in that exchange. It's a good performance, and probably would have worked if Mustang hadn't already confirmed Ross' innocence. When Mustang tells her to stop playing games, he already knows that that's bullshit, Envy changes tack and tries to gloat at how they tricked him into murdering an innocent woman.

Wow, Envy REALLY isn't on top of her game. She's assuming that the guy who racked up a triple digit body count in Ishval is going to be that torn up over having murdered one more? Also, doesn't she have a grudge of her own against Mustang, of an avenge-the-death-of-my-loved-one sort? She was the one demanding his head after Lust's death, with only Wrath having stayed her hand. Now it's like she's forgotten about that.

Given what Envy is, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that she's shooting so poorly after what she just went through. Being rendered helpless and locked in a glass jar, when she's the part of Father that probably carries most of the pain and trauma of the Dwarf's early life...

Anyway, Mustang just sighs and asks one more time if she knows who killed Hughes. Finally, Envy confesses.

Mustang is disbelieving at first. Hughes might not have been an alchemist, but he was a cunning and skilled fighter, and Mustang has trouble believing he could have died to this scatterbrained circus clown of a haemunculus. This goads Envy into revealing exactly how she did it, assuming the form of Hughes' wife again and cackling about the look he had on his face when he saw his wife holding a gun on him.

And, watching Envy's expressions and body languages during this last change of form, I realized who she's been reminding me of throughout the series:

I knew it was someone from something else.

Edward reacts almost as strongly to this as Mustang does. He never found out which of them specifically killed Hughes either.

Envy screams out more insane laughter at their horrified expressions. Mustang, Edward, and Hawkeye are all wide eyed and slack jawed, probably imagining something much more horrible than what actually happened to Hughes.

Mustang tells the others to back off so he can go all out on Envy. Though he doesn't even really bother masking the fact that this is as much about personal motivations as it is combat tactics.

They're reluctant, but Hawkeye tells them that based on the Elrics' intel she's confident that Roy can do this, and so they might as well move on to the final boss while he deals with Envy. Envy tries to stop them from moving on, but Roy shoots a flare into her flapping mouth and burns it to a crisp from within. Which makes her a not happy entity, and encourages her to keep her attention on Mustang while the others move on through.

Edward looks distinctly unoptimistic as they move on into the command center's underbuilding. Simian tries to reassure him that if there's anyone they know who can defeat a Sin one on one, it's Mustang. He's done it once before, after all, and in that very same room. But that's not what has Edward so concerned.

He's either worried about Hohenheim still not having showed back up, or he's afraid of Mustang doing something spectacularly stupid.

Though, as the next cut proves, making spectacularly stupid decisions would just put Mustang on even footing with Envy. What do I mean? Well, put yourself in Envy's position here. You're facing ranged, persistent DPS dealer Roy Mustang in an open room without much to use for cover. You know the facility, though, and there are at least three openings you could run, climb, or leap through to bring the fight into a more favorable environment. You also know that Mustang's companions are now wandering that same tunnel system looking for Father, which means there are plenty of forms you could take on to effectively confuse him if you can just get out of his sight for a moment. So, what do you do?

I wonder if maybe Envy *can't* run and hide right now, even if that's obviously the best tactical option, even if it's only for the couple of minutes she needs to sneak back around and attack from behind. She's been too small and helpless before humans for too long up until now. She can't show vulnerability right now, even if it kills her. She might actually rather die.

Which would be looking pretty likely right now even if it weren't the final arc of the series.

Mustang tells Envy to get back up, so that he can burn her back down again. It won't be as satisfying to just burn her new soul collection away while she lays there. And now, at long last, Envy remembers that oh yeah, this is the guy who fucking killed her sister.

Remembering this both fills her with a new resolve born of hatred, and an understanding that she can't just think of Mustang as another human to victimize. He's actually a genuine threat, a proven haemunculus killer. If she hadn't been in such a bad state coming into this encounter, I think she might have avoided dialogue altogether once she recognized Mustang and immediately made a break for it. Well, better late then never! She bashes the floor open to raise a cloud of vision-obscuring and flame-retarding dust, and then quickly shrinks into a smaller, nimbler form and runs back into the tunnels.

...

This is a very interesting concept for a battle. Both opponents have a set of very powerful abilities that are also very different from each other's. Both of them are in good physical condition (Envy may not be back to Xerxian-grade philostone power yet, but she's eaten enough mannequins that she's likely close). But both of them are emotionally hobbled to near incapacitation.

Envy could have avoided taking these nasty initial hits and preserved some amount of surprise advantage if she weren't even more psychologically fucked up than usual right now, sure. But by that same token, Mustang could have finished the battle right then and there if he wasn't determined to make Envy suffer instead of just killing her.

The duel's outcome will be determined by which of the combatants can get over themselves first. Or by Hawkeye surprising Envy with a grenade at the opportune moment; that could also happen.

...

Mustang chases after Envy once the dust has cleared, looking unhinged, and orders Hawkeye to stay back. She does not look any more optimistic about this situation than Edward. Speaking of Edward, we now return to the rest of the party (now including May) as they crawl through the increasingly Gigeresque passageways of Sin Inc Executive Headquarters. The chimaeras remark on how biology-like these tubes are. Like capillaries of an immense circulatory system. May remarks that the ki of many thousands of suffering souls are coalesced up ahead, and that tendrils of that mass extend out around them, likely through the pipes. She also attributes some minor pains and "offness" of the other party members to interaction with Father's massive ki field.

Interesting, that last bit. I wonder if Hohenheim also causes weird ki-interaction symptoms like that in people around him? Maybe he'd have to spread his material out into tendrils to hit people with it from multiple directions like Father does for that to happen, idk.

After a minute of them following May's sensor readings toward the target, they start hearing fire and seeing the distant, reflected light of flares from behind. Edward pulls Scar aside for a moment and asks him if he thinks Mustang's going to be alright.

Scar replies that no, no he doesn't think Mustang will be alright. But he also (understandably) doesn't seem too put out about this. Not just because he thinks Mustang deserves to die, though. No, it seems like it's a bit more complicated than that. There's an understanding here that goes a level deeper than just "I know what it's like to be blinded by vengeance."

This isn't really about Hughes. I'll wait and see if I'm right about where this is going. If so, I might just have to to do a full post about Mustang's character arc.

On the topic of Hughes, Envy tries to throw him off by taking Hughes' form before attacking. No dice. She should have tried one of the living companions she just saw him with, and go for misdirection rather than shock. On the topic of blindness, after she recoils from his counterattack and vanishes back into the tunnels Roy starts firing blindly into the tunnels trying to flush out Envy. He succeeds, and forces her to make a desperate lunge at him...only for him to fire two thin beams directly into her eyeballs.

For at least the second time. 

Once again, he has her down and in his sights. And, once again, he blows his opportunity to finish her off in the interest of drawing it out longer, giving her another chance to slip away. There's no telling that she won't manage to connect a killing blow with him before he runs down her new batteries, the way he's going. Or that she won't just flee to the surface, leaving one of the group's heavy hitters shooting uselessly down empty tunnels while Father's spell grows ever nearer to completion.

Back when he was pretending to go insane to throw the bad guys off, I observed that he was self aware enough to know that his own sanity WAS precarious and that therefore this would be a convincing ploy to use. Well, self-awareness isn't going to help now that the real thing seems like it's starting to hit.

Back in the antechamber, Hawkeye hears the screams, roars, and explosions, growing ever wilder and more inhuman on both sides.

She heads in after him.

Envy escapes Mustang once again, and while she's creeping away trying to decide if she should try a new tactic or just bail she happens to spot Hawkeye. A devilish grin overtakes her, and we cut back to Mustang. He hears something around a corner, and wheels it. Hawkeye also heard someone around the corner, and so they both end up drawing on each other.

I'd find it suspicious that Hawkeye is holding her pistol up, as if she thought that would do anything to Envy. But, we've seen Hawkeye reflexively do this when faced with haemunculi and other bulletproof monsters before, so it could be the real her.

Mustang asks her why she didn't stay back like he instructed. She says that she couldn't just stand back and wait. Hmmm...I don't think that that's what Hawkeye would have actually said in response. Although, if she's testing to see if HE is Envy, she might be trying to fish for a reaction.

Heh, this is what I thought was going to happen in Fort Briggs, just with Winry as Hawkeye and Edward as Mustang. I guess it was inevitable, what with the conjunction of "intrigue-filled story" and "one of the baddies is a shapeshifter." Got to do the Thing thing sooner or later.

They decide to move on and hunt for Envy together now. Mustang instructs her to stay by his side, as he has an idea of how to make use of her. They move a few steps onward before Hawkeye raises her pistol and points it at the back of his head. He notices. Both of them look like themselves though, in expression, body language, etc. No sudden wild grins or the like from either. So, Hawkeye could be Envy, or she could have noticed something off about Roy that I missed. So, either of them could be Envy, or neither of them could be. Though I think I'm going to bet on Hawkeye being the fake.

End episode.

Better than the last couple I think. Aside from the brief moment with Mustang being pissy about Scar (rather than the much more deserved reverse), there was nothing that annoyed me. It had the same high notes as the other episodes of this final arc, but avoided dropping to the same lows.

The real highlight of this one, of course, was the PR coup using Queen Bradley to essentially hijack the enemy's own propaganda. Like I said, it's my favorite trick to see in spy movies and the like, and it was very well executed here. The characters generally got to be good at being themselves. Not always in positive ways, but always in convincing, internally motivated ones.

I have a lot more to say about it as well, but I'm going to wait until I've seen at least the next episode before doing so, to confirm a few things and see where this is actually headed. Like I said, this may end up warranting its own article.