A/N: I cut an entire chapter so I could finish in time. Yall didn't need it anyway :'DDD I use chi/flow/dragon's pulse interchangeably. If I don't use chakra its because i dont want to think about naruto.

warnings: bruh you know the drill.

"Is it something…" Mustang paused, choosing his words. His eyes were narrowed towards the girl sitting across from him on the floor. "Well, can you see it?"

"The flow?" He heard her scratch her head. "It is more of a feeling, like the wind except you don't feel it with just the sensory nerves on your skin. You feel it from your own chi. When you concentrate and have practiced enough, it'll be like sticking a dagger into the ground and feeling the area's chi around you. And in that same way, the five daggers become an extension of you in the array.

"I've seen different arrays for alchemy, but with alkahestry it's much simpler. Five points for the five places the Dragon's Pulse can leave and enter our bodies. Allow me draw it."

"That's not what I meant." He hesitated - Roy Mustang hesitated. During their "meditating" practice, there was a flickering behind his eyes or in front of his eyes - somewhere, he didn't know. To be honest, Roy felt silly that after a day of learning, that he'd see something. But he wanted to put it to rest; to be sure if it was memories of sight slipping into his mind or if he should be naive enough to theorize that his blindness could light a path for something bigger. He had nothing to lose. "When you use your "Dragon's Pulse"-"

"It's not my Dragon's Pulse!"

"You know what I mean," Roy grumbled, gesturing meaningfully to his closed eyes. By the sounds of the strokes of metal engraving the wood and the vibrations of it, he could almost visualize her making the circle. But even that took a lot of effort.

"It's not something that common in my clan, Mister Roy," she said, huffing as she carved. "But Xing is a large country with a lot of history. If you had family from one of the clans, I'd be more inclined to say it wouldn't be a crazy thing to think."

Before he had a chance to ask her more, his train of thought was interrupted by a blast that stole their attention. For a moment, Roy had the luxury of forgetting Amestris's current predicament.

Quick to recover: his mind immediately vaulted to the worst: the Cretans, the Aerugonians or both had arrived in Central over a day sooner than expected. Roy heard the clatter from the drop of a dagger and then footsteps towards the window where he could feel the sun slip through.

"Can you see where that came from?"

She was quiet and the second eruption washed out any smaller detail he tried to listen to. "It's beyond their wall. I can't really tell... There's fire - out there in the city."

He got to his feet slowly. "That's an entire day's worth of travel." His eyebrows raised slowly, talking moreso to himself than to her. "Unless they managed to use the railroads to get here quicker… But that would be reckless. How many trails of smoke do you see?"

"Just two."

"Then it's not heavy artillery," he said suddenly. "And the tremors from before…" He allowed himself some relief, "They weren't tanks."

"What tremors?"

He'd felt it over an hour ago and even asked her if anything was going on outside. "The tremor of something heavy crashing into something solid - like a wall."

Footsteps dashed behind them and a sudden yelp became strangled. The furniture from one of the rooms was knocked around and chairs screeched as they scratched the floor.

"That came from Scar's room," May gasped and he noted the cracks that betrayed the steadiness of her voice. "Maybe he's woken up!" Her own footsteps started out quick and light, like she was sprinting, and then she slowed to stop a few paces in front of him.

He heard it as soon as she did: that haunting, squelching noise that wasn't in his memory to dread until the dead began to rise.

May squeaked at the moment hefty footfalls rattled the floorboards moving towards the center of their path. She ushered him to hide behind the safety of one of the rooms. He heard her trying to control her breathing. Down the hall, wood splintered and cracked with bits of sliding across the floor. She gasped and clasped hands to muffle the sound of her sobs.

"Wait a minute, do you know where Jerso went?"

"He's-" She swallowed thickly, "He's got him."

"Who?"

"I think..." She sounded like slid down to the partition to where it met the floor. "It's Scar."

That stung him too. Like a sucker punch to the diaphragm. The back of his skull burrowed into the wall behind him as he tensed from what he couldn't see. When - how had he turned? None of it had made sense to him.

If he had died from his ailments, that still excluded him from the nationwide transmutation circle. So, what in the fuck was acting as a catalyst for these bodies to stand on two legs. Roy stood there as it thrashed around in the corridor they were just in, clutching the gloves in his pocket, and found a new meaning to the definition of "useless" - frozen and clueless even without the rain.

"Get up," he ordered.

She whimpered, confused.

"We're leaving Central and we need to find the others to do so."

His brave thoughts were halted when something was flung into the room, crashing into the other side of the room. Whatever it was, May couldn't help screaming. The thing outside roared as well. Not the screech he heard in front of the radio station, nonetheless with the animalistic ferocity he only ever heard in beasts from the zoo. It came bounding down in their direction, judging by the succession of footsteps getting louder and closer. Without sense of sight, he tugged May and moved across the length of the room until the wall adjacent stopped him just in the precise moment it charged through the room. He heard the wreckage and felt it from the dust kicked up and the chips of wood and plaster landing on or around him. Roy didn't recall Scar ever being Armstrong's level of bulk and yet he sounded much larger than that.

"He's right in front of us," May murmured.

Roy played with his chances. Fire sparked from his finger tips and shot point-blank until he got confirmation of a hit the same way he did in Ishval: agonized cries or the smell of burning flesh.

It didn't disappoint, growling in a higher pitch, and the smell of singed meat wafted in the room.

"He's-he's getting back up." May cried, "You've only made him angrier."

He tsked and opened his eyes expecting the world of color he'd known for the last thirty years. Instead he saw the flickering again, wispy tendrils of white and he blinked repeatedly to make sure he wasn't seeing things that weren't there.

Against a black backdrop, a translucent and moving mist or fog swirled in front of him and he noticed the enormity of it as it floated into the air in tandem with the sacrifice getting back up. The vision wasn't consistent, and was more reminiscent of a faulty light bulb shutting on and off, but when he shut his eyes it would disappear.

Roy poised his hand to snap when he saw that same misty object at the tip of where his fingers should be and travelling down the length of his arm until he saw swirling within him. To his right, he saw May's, smaller and petite to fit her stature. He curiously noted how both of them disappeared underneath their feet.

The monster began to storm towards them again. As a test, he quickly ignited the air around the fog and it stopped in its tracks, stumbling backwards. Long ago, Roy had told himself he never had to hear the composition of skin sizzle again; he figured his promises were for a different time.

The next spark was more forceful, concentrating more oxygen in area to combust; his mind's eye unaware of how close the ceiling was to the creature as the flames began to lick overhead. Roy snapped again and again until it broke through the window. The updraft agitated the fire and the drywall began to burn. He controlled the dispelled the oxygen above to dampen the intensity of the fire but he knew that the structure could already be compromised. He also realized the moving mist cleared from his sight, or whatever he had, dispersed as soon as walked forward. May began to cry in earnest and he sympathized with her, he really did. When he turned to tell her as much, he saw her chi, if that's what it really was; it was still, except for the shuddering that could only be explained by her sobs. When he began to reach out to her, there was another against the dark landscape. It was smaller - much, much smaller than hers or his or Scar's and he could see her sink to her feet.

His throat was dry suddenly, but not from the cinder and ashes that were lifted from the breeze. If the other took precautions to seal every exit, every nook, every cranny, who else would there be to stand at a short distance? He asked regardless, "Who...who do you see, May?"

Through her wet cries and sniffling, she confirmed it, "Alphonse." Then, he didn't need any kind of sight to know his face had paled; he could feel it with the drain of blood and the cold that didn't come from the cooling later afternoon.

From the street, Roy heard the growling again, Scar's growling, as it or he got up again after being tossed at a distance in the same way Gluttony was launched. The seconds slowed as he saw three figures running in a straight line, heading towards the hospitals. If he concentrated, the swirls grew less translucent and became solid enough to see white outlines and silhouettes.

He breathed.

Scar was bigger, way bigger than he remembered with arms large enough that he had to rest his knuckles on the ground. His shoulder had him hunching over with grossly swollen muscles rounding out the top. He wouldn't have know it was him unless May had confirmed it.

It roared again. The three that ran stopped. Scar prompted that familiar screech that had once called upon the other sacrifices.

He could see it then, as they moved: the strings attached to them, like marionettes except they sprouted from the tops of the sacrifices' head and only there. It arched high into the sky until it bowed down with the others. All the sacrifices, each and every one of them had this connection that converged to this one location towards the center of the city. Roy turned and he could see the braids and the cloth of the robes May wore. He saw how she sat with her hands holding her face. Same as before, her chi disappeared under her feet. It made sense, after all and in line with her teachings: all of the Dragon's Pulse flowed from the mountain tops, to the sea, emerging from the earth into all living beings.

Alphonse's, however, did not.

A/N: This changed A LOT. More characters died than I intended, oops. This was never going to be the end of this as it is on a cliffhanger and was meant to be as such since i realized this story was too big for me. But I do have a general idea of how the rest of this story goes which will be continued in another fic or a series of oneshots since multichap fics are the worst for me. BUT YAAAAAAAY. if you got this far. I'm so sorry (much love to you). but thank you!