Chapter 30 Double Chapter: The Symphony of Extermination
I tested all that power in the palm of my hands and began to create explosions.
It was not a single outburst, nor an act of desperation. It was a conscious decision—almost ceremonial. I felt the energy flow without resistance, felt how the Philosopher's Stone responded to every impulse of mine as if it had been waiting for me my entire life. There was no longer friction, no clear limits, none of that uncomfortable sensation of forcing something the world did not want to grant me. Now the world obeyed.
I left no one alive.
Neither enemies nor allies. All the wounded from our side died right there, buried beneath the same thunder that annihilated the Ishvalans. Not out of tactical necessity. Not by superior order. They died because they were there, because they breathed the same air I had decided to turn into dust. That way, no one could report my lack of conscience, no one could say that the Crimson Alchemist failed to distinguish sides once the battlefield became his stage.
The silence afterward was absolute.
Not a single one of those ants remained. That was how I saw them then: small bodies, fragile, insignificant before the magnitude of what I had just unleashed. Where there had once been screams, gunfire, and desperate orders, there was now only an irregular crater, thick smoke slowly rising, and unrecognizable remains scattered as if the ground itself had vomited them out.
I was ecstatic.
There is no other word that does it justice. Power coursed through me like a constant current—not violent, but pleasurable. I loved that sensation. Absolute destruction. The rumble of stones breaking from within. Dust suspended in the air, filtering the sunlight until it turned red. Blood soaking into the dry land of Ishval as if it had always belonged there. All of it filled me. It made me feel complete, real, present.
It was perfect music.
The monster—that ally who had appeared from nowhere—vanished after that. He left no trace, gave no explanations, demanded nothing. He simply disappeared, as if his only purpose had been to hand me the Philosopher's Stone and watch what I would do with it. He left it with me, and I felt neither surprise nor gratitude. Only acceptance. It was logical that something like that would end up in my hands.
With the stone in my possession, I continued.
I continued my sea of destruction again and again. Each new engagement was shorter than the last. There were no more elaborate ambushes or organized resistance. It was enough for me to approach for fear to spread faster than any order. Some tried to flee. Others froze in place, as if understanding the inevitable robbed them of the will to move.
I advanced without haste.
I did not need to run. I did not need to shout. The battlefield surrendered at my mere presence. Each explosion was precise, elegant in its brutality. I wasted no energy; I distributed it the way a composer distributes notes, seeking the exact impact, the correct rhythm. Sometimes a single detonation was enough to erase an entire defensive line. Other times I chained several together—not out of necessity, but for pleasure.
That was how I reached that village.
I arrived at midday, when the sun burned in the sky with an almost familiar cruelty. There were no clouds to offer shade, and the heat made the air shimmer above the low rooftops. From a distance, the village looked peaceful, unaware of the sea of destruction I carried with me. People walking. Distant voices. A false normality that I found almost offensive.
I climbed the clock tower.
From there, everything was visible: the narrow streets, the small plazas, the faces that slowly lifted as they noticed my presence. They did not know who I was, but they sensed it. Silence began to spread like an oil stain. Some pointed. Others stepped back. No one dared to approach.
I saw them as fools.
As if the world could still function under old rules, as if the war were not already devouring everything. From above, they were small, fragile, perfectly aligned to be erased with a single gesture.
Then one of them shouted.
"Crimson Demon!"
The echo of those words rose to me—clear, sharp, heavy with terror. And I smiled.
It was not a forced or cruel smile. It was sincere. Because in that instant, I understood that my name no longer belonged to me. Ishval had baptized me, and that baptism burned hotter than any medal from Amestris.
I made my first move.
I released an explosion out of nothing.
I did not aim at a specific person. I did not choose a military target. I simply unleashed the energy around the clock tower. The shockwave shattered walls, tore roofs away, flung bodies into the air. The ground trembled with a deep roar, and several civilians died instantly—crushed, torn apart, reduced to unrecognizable stains against stone and sand.
Chaos erupted immediately.
Screams. Crying. Desperate running. The entire village awakened to reality in a single second. I remained at the top, observing the result of my first gesture the way an artist observes the first stroke on a blank canvas.
Then I began to speak to them.
Not to negotiate. Not to warn them. I explained, calmly, with almost pedagogical clarity, why I was their karma. Why every decision, every accumulated hatred, every bullet fired and every ignored prayer had led them to that exact moment. I spoke to them as one speaks to something inferior—not with rage, but with the certainty of someone who knows he is fulfilling an inevitable function.
From atop the clock tower, under Ishval's merciless sun, I was no longer a soldier.
I was consequence.
I was death's envoy, sent to kill them.
Not to judge them. Not to warn them. Not to offer redemption. To kill them. That was all. In that instant, I understood that there was no "after" for them—no "perhaps." I was an agent of chaos, a force without moral intention, without ethical weight. There was no good or evil in what I did—only pure, direct, irreversible consequence.
After this, none of them would remain standing.
I was going to be the last thing they saw.
As I released explosion after explosion, the world fragmented into layers of noise, heat, and dust. The detonations did not feel like separate acts, but like a single prolonged action—a continuous flow of destruction born in my hands and expanding without permission. Houses collapsed onto one another, walls split open as if made of wet paper, and the ground itself seemed to give way with each blast, as if it wanted to swallow the entire village just to avoid witnessing what was happening.
I was at my peak.
There was no fatigue. No doubt. The Philosopher's Stone burned with a constant, almost affectionate energy, amplifying every impulse, every violent thought before I could even fully form it. I did not need to think about the amount of energy or the exact direction. Everything flowed naturally, perfectly. Alchemy was no longer a technique; it was an extension of my will.
Then, out of nowhere, soldiers appeared.
They did not arrive in heroic formation, nor with clear orders ringing through the air. They came running, shouting desperately, trying to impose an authority that no longer existed. They yelled at the villagers to surrender, to drop their weapons, to get on the ground. They tried to reconstruct the concept of "control" in a place where that concept had died minutes earlier.
But I was already too exhilarated.
I did not truly listen to them. Or perhaps I did—but I did not care. The climax had already begun, and no one could stop it. The entire village was in motion: civilians running without direction, colliding, falling, getting back up only to fall again. Fear turned every step into a mistake.
And then it happened.
By accident.
As the villagers ran, as screams blended with the roar of explosions, I released another detonation. I did not aim. I did not calculate. I simply let the energy out. When the dust settled, three of those soldiers lay on the ground—destroyed, unrecognizable. Three bodies from Amestris, erased in the same way I had erased everyone else.
The silence was immediate.
Not the silence from before, but a heavy one—dense, charged with understanding. The remaining soldiers saw it. They saw the remains. They saw that there was no difference between them and the civilians of the village. In that instant, they understood something they could not unlearn: I was not there to save anyone.
I did not distinguish sides.
When I finished with the village, nothing remained that could be called a home. There was no final heroic cry, no last stand worthy of remembrance. Only smoking ruins, bodies buried beneath rubble, and thick air that tasted of ash and metal.
Then I descended.
I approached the soldiers who remained. I did not raise my hands. I made no threatening gesture. I simply walked toward them calmly, as if everything that had happened had been an inevitable procedure. No one moved. No one fired. Not because they could not—but because it no longer mattered.
They put the cuffs on me.
The cold metal around my wrists was almost disappointing. After feeling power capable of erasing cities, it was ridiculous. Even so, I did not resist. There was no need. I had already finished what I came to do.
They condemned me for war crimes.
The words sounded distant, irrelevant. Crimes. War. Laws. Small concepts, trying to cage something they did not understand. I felt no anger, no surprise, not even irony. Only a strange, heavy calm—like the silence after a particularly large explosion.
Then I saw him.
Among the tense, frightened, hate-filled faces, there was one that did not belong. A calm face. Familiar. His eyes locked onto mine with an intensity I recognized instantly.
"Hello, Kimblee."
They were the eyes of the monster who had given me the stone.
(End of the Chapter)