Chapter 28 Double Chapter: The Call of the Crimson Flame
The year 1901 marked the beginning of a wound that would never fully heal. The Ishval War did not begin with marching armies or grand speeches, but with a single clumsy and brutal act: an Amestrian soldier shot and killed an Ishvalan child. A mistake, some said. An accident, others insisted. But for those who lived beneath the red sun of the desert, it was the confirmation of something they had felt for generations—the contempt, the repression, and the quiet hatred Amestris had cultivated against them.
The response was immediate. Protests, uprisings, resistance. Ishval was no longer willing to bow its head. And as always happens when an empire feels challenged, Amestris answered with fire.
When the news reached Kimblee, he felt neither sadness, nor surprise, nor outrage. He felt excitement. A vibration in his chest that he recognized instantly. War. A simple word, yet heavy with promise. Where others saw death and chaos, he saw an opportunity: the perfect stage for his alchemy, a place where explosions would cease to be isolated experiments and become a continuous symphony.
"My alchemy would be the most useful," he thought. "The most logical to deploy."
And yet, they did not send him.
First they sent others. Regular troops. Common soldiers. Then, when the resistance did not yield, they began deploying State Alchemists. And among them, the first chosen was Major Armstrong. Kimblee still remembered the news clearly, as if someone had told a badly delivered joke.
Armstrong. Large, muscular, proud. A man who spoke of honor, of protecting the weak, of serving the nation with a clean heart. Kimblee could not help laughing when he learned Armstrong had been sent to the front. To him, the man was a walking contradiction: too much emotion, too much conscience, too human for a war that demanded no humanity at all.
And he did not last.
Armstrong saw children die. Girls. Elderly people. Entire families reduced to dust and blood. He saw what a military order truly meant when carried out without question. And he broke. He returned marked—not in body, but in something deeper. Kimblee never said it out loud, but he thought it clearly: Armstrong did not fail because he was physically weak; he failed because he still felt guilt.
That made him useless.
The irony was not lost on Kimblee. He—of average height, slender build, with a constant smile and a disturbing reputation—remained in Central while men unsuited for what Ishval required were sent ahead. Each report spoke of fierce resistance, of ambushes, of cities reduced to ruins, and still Kimblee waited.
Waiting for permission to do what he did best.
The years passed. 1902. 1903. 1904. The war did not end quickly, as high command had promised. Ishval did not surrender. Every destroyed village seemed to fuel more hatred. Every summary execution created new fighters. Amestris grew frustrated.
And frustration, in a military state, always leads to desperate decisions.
It was near the end of the war, in 1905, when a general—whose name Kimblee never bothered to remember—had what he called a "brilliant idea." If common soldiers were not enough, if the first alchemists had failed to break the resistance, then the solution was simple: send all State Alchemists to Ishval. Without exception. Without real restrictions. Turn the civil war into total eradication.
To Kimblee, that order was music.
There was no heroic speech. No moral warning. Just a direct, cold order, written in official ink: deploy State Alchemists to eliminate the Ishvalan threat once and for all. Kimblee read the document and smiled. At last. At last the government understood that wars are not won with doubt, but with absolute resolve.
Before departing, Kimblee walked the halls of Central with an almost cheerful lightness. He knew what was coming was no ordinary mission. Ishval was not a skirmish—it was a complete stage, a vast canvas ready to be marked by explosions, fire, and noise. There, he would not have to hide his nature or restrain his alchemy. There, destruction was not only permitted—it was demanded.
While other alchemists departed with tense faces or heavy silences, Kimblee advanced with a calm smile. To him, there was no contradiction between serving the country and enjoying what he did. Amestris wanted results. He knew how to obtain them.
When he finally set foot on Ishvalan soil, the heat was suffocating, the air dry, thick with dust and resentment. The gazes of the inhabitants cut through him like blades—eyes full of hatred, fear, and broken faith. Kimblee observed everything carefully, memorizing every gesture, every scream, every prayer that turned into a curse.
It was there that he understood something with absolute clarity: Ishval was not just a war. It was a mass sacrifice. And he had been invited to officiate the ceremony.
While other alchemists hesitated, questioned orders, or tried to preserve some fragment of morality, Kimblee acted without hesitation. To him, war was not a tragedy; it was a language. And explosions were its most honest form of expression.
Thus began his true service to Amestris—not as a mere soldier, but as a pure instrument of destruction. An artist amid genocide. A man who, instead of breaking before horror, found in it a form of fulfillment.
And while Ishval burned, Kimblee smiled, convinced of a single truth: the war had not changed him. It had merely given him a stage worthy of what he had always been.
Continuation — The Baptism of the Roar
I was ecstatic.
At last, they had taken me into account.
Not as a symbol, not as a warning, but as what I truly was: a resource. A conscious weapon. During the first deployments, I was assigned to advanced trenches and the defense of temporary bases—places where morale shattered quickly, where Amestrian soldiers trembled more at what they could not see than at what stood before them. My mere presence was enough to change the rhythm of the battlefield. Some panicked because they knew that if I intervened, there would be no lightly wounded: you either survived whole, or you did not survive at all. Others simply knew that my presence meant total eradication.
I do not blame them. I myself could feel the air tighten when I brought my hands together.
The trenches of Ishval were narrow, improvised, filled with reddish sand and dried blood. The sound of gunfire never fully ceased; it was a constant murmur, like an insect burrowing into your ear, refusing to let you sleep. Soldiers took turns watching, shooting, praying in silence. I did not pray. I observed. I listened. I waited for the exact moment when the explosion had to be born.
It was on one of those nights that the general interrupted me.
"And the artifact?" he suddenly asked, looking up from his notes. "The one they gave you for that war."
I smiled—not because the question bothered me, but because it was inevitable.
"They hadn't given it to me yet," I replied calmly. "And if you already know they gave it to me later, why ask?"
The general frowned slightly, more out of protocol than displeasure.
"It's for the report," he said. "And personal curiosity. I didn't fight directly in Ishval. I was in logistics, in the supply chain. The stories… they arrive distorted."
Logistics. Of course. The place where war becomes numbers, boxes, routes. Where blood does not stain uniforms—only paperwork. I looked at him a second longer than necessary before continuing.
"It was one night," I said. "We were being ambushed in an Ishvalan trench."
The memory returned with almost offensive clarity.
It was night, but in Ishval darkness is never complete. The sky was covered with low clouds, and the wind kicked up sand, slamming it against the skin like tiny needles. Flares lit the battlefield at irregular intervals, revealing shadows that moved too quickly to be mere soldiers.
The ambush was clean. Too clean. Shots came from impossible angles; enemy explosions were precise, surgical. Amestrian soldiers shouted orders no one heard. Some fired blindly. Others simply curled up at the bottom of the trench, clutching their rifles like talismans.
I was standing.
Not because I was brave, but because I wanted to see better.
The Ishvalans attacked as if they knew every inch of the terrain. They appeared, fired, vanished. They were not seeking a swift victory; they sought attrition. Fear. And they were succeeding. The base commander shouted for reinforcements that would not arrive in time. Ammunition began to run low. The silence between volleys grew longer, heavier.
That was when the messenger arrived.
A young soldier, covered in dust and blood he did not know was his or someone else's, slid through the trench toward me. He carried a sealed metal box—small, heavy for its size. He extended it to me with trembling hands.
"Orders from high command, sir," he said. "Immediate use authorized."
I did not need to ask what it was. I knew the moment I felt the weight. It was not just metal. It was something else. Something dense. Alive.
I opened the box.
Inside, wrapped in layers of cloth and alchemical seals, was the Philosopher's Stone. Not one of the great ones—not one of those legendary monstrosities. It was compact, dark, with a barely perceptible crimson glow, like a heart beating very slowly.
I remember thinking: so this is it.
I felt no revulsion. No guilt. I felt curiosity. And something closer to gratitude.
The ambush continued. Screams mixed with the whistle of bullets. The commander shouted at me to do something—anything. I calmly closed the box and pocketed the stone.
"Now then," I murmured.
When I brought my hands together that night, it was different. There was no resistance. No familiar friction of equivalent exchange. The energy flowed like a swollen river. The ground beneath the trench vibrated—not like an explosion, but like a deep breath.
I touched the edge of the trench.
The explosion was not immediate. It was progressive. The terrain before us rose in waves, as if the desert itself were being torn up by the roots. Ishvalan positions vanished in a succession of chained detonations, each feeding the next. There was no time to scream. No time to flee.
The sky turned red.
The Amestrian soldiers fell silent. Some dropped their weapons. Others vomited. I, on the other hand, felt something close to peace. For the first time, my alchemy was not limited by my own body. For the first time, I did not have to calculate how much I could give without destroying myself.
The stone made it possible.
"That was when they gave it to me," I said, returning to the present. "Not before. Not after. At the exact moment the war decided to stop pretending."
The general stopped writing. He looked at me with an expression hard to define. It was not horror. Nor admiration. It was belated understanding.
"And what did you feel?" he finally asked. "Using it?"
I smiled—slow, sincere.
"I felt complete."
I added nothing more. There was no need. The Ishval War needed no further explanation. Only witnesses. And I had been one of the most enthusiastic.
(End of the Chapter)