As he watched Envy's form sneaking into the forest, Shrike could not help but think of the day when Armstrong had driven it from Briggs and how he had seen it run away and get blown up. There was the possibility that it would die along the way and Shrike would never see it again. He wanted to run to it and hug it, but he nonetheless stayed where he was.

A few minutes after Envy had gone, Shrike moved into a position where he could not be seen at all from the surroundings of the abandoned power plant. He then flipped through his transmutation circles and chose one that he could use to transmute earth. He spent some time very carefully constructing a little cave for himself where he could stay and wait for Envy to come back. He also created a simple periscope that he could use to watch the building. Once he was finished, he settled in the little cave and relaxed.

Not soon after, he was very roughly attacked, first by one person and then another. The first was some Xingese man and the second an Amestrian woman in a military uniform. Shrike recognised her to be Colonel Sannah Ehrhardt. Even at this stressing moment, he managed to make the connection and realised that these two must have been who attacked Envy in Central.

Shrike had no chance to defend himself. The two had him immobilised almost instantly. He had only managed to crawl into a sitting position and now the Xingese man, Suwahao if he remembered correctly, was behind him, holding his arms in place, and Ehrhardt was in front of him, pretty much sitting on his legs.

"What's the situation?" asked Ehrhardt harshly.

"W-what?"

"Don't play dumb! Where's Envy?"

"Uh... I-I don't know, sir."

"Did it go into the building over there?"

"..."

"When?"

"W-why are you trying to kill Envy, sir?"

"What?! Are you kidding me? The thing's a mass murderer, a torturing sadist and utterly without compassion! It killed all my family!"

"And you really think that the circle of revenge will end once you've killed Envy?"

"No, it'll end when I've killed all the homunculi. All three of them!"

Shrike had no idea why she said there were three homunculi, but he thought this was hardly the time to get stuck on the exact number. "You're just feeding the endless cycle of revenge, sir."

"I don't care! I only care that I kill every last one of them. If the military so wishes, they may execute me once I'm done. There's nothing left for me here except revenge."

"...Stop hallucinating!"

Ehrhardt lifted her rifle and seemed very much like she was going to hit Shrike in the crotch with its bottom. Shrike went pale, cringed and tried but failed to twist himself free. "You're in no position to question my doings, boy."

"I-I'm in the... second best position to do just that," he said defiantly, even with a shaking voice. "If you really think there is nothing for you here, kill yourself, but don't take anyone else with you, sir."

Ehrhardt became even angrier and poked Shrike roughly in the abdomen with the rifle. "I have a feeling you'll wish you were dead in a couple of seconds." Ehrhardt then lifted the gun and hit him straight between his legs.

"Gaaahaaaaa! Gah! Gah!" Shrike screamed and tried to somehow move and bend to alleviate the terrible pain, but his two captors did not let him move. Tears of agony ran down his face.

Ehrhardt looked very displeased. "Avenging my family is the only thing I'll ever want to do. Do you really think you wouldn't do the same if your family had been killed and you knew who had done it?"

"...I-I'm p-pretty sure I w-wouldn't," said Shrike weakly, once he was able to talk again.

"Pah! You're just a cowardly loser!"

Shrike did not have anything to say to that. Resorting to insults as arguments was something he had grown out of at the age of seven. He just sighed and looked down, still shivering and trying to endure the pain.

"Hit a sensitive spot or what?"

Shrike lifted his head and looked at Ehrhardt. "What you said was meaningless, sir." He sounded absent-minded.

"Shut your trap, you infantile olm."

Shrike scoffed. Ehrhardt shoved the rifle's bottom against his crotch again, though not with force, and Shrike whimpered.

"You're coming with me or I'll cut your legs off."

Shrike did not even know why she would want to bring him with her, giving him a better chance at foiling her plans, but he did not complain.

"Does the building have a cellar?"

"I-I don't know, sir. Probably."

Ehrhardt looked at Shrike intently for a while. After that, she dug a pen out of her pocket and drew a transmutation circle on the back of her left-hand glove. She then looked at Shrike and Suwahao. "Suwahao, does he have any transmutation circles on his hands or gloves?"

Suwahao pulled off Shrike's gloves and examined his hands. "There are circles on the gloves. Not on the hands."

Ehrhardt picked up the gloves and looked perplexed at Shrike's thermal energy transfer circles. "What is this?" She stared at Shrike. "Explain!"

"U-um... I figured out that it was possible to simply transfer thermodynamic energy with a transmutation circle like that and it works because I just need to transfer energy so I need just circles... I mean, I don't need to deconstruct and reconstruct matter so I don't need other shapes."

Ehrhardt seemed annoyed and tossed the gloves into the snow outside the tiny cave. She then pressed the newly drawn transmutation circle on her glove against the ground and started slowly forming a tunnel into the ground. After a while, the first part of the tunnel was ready and she walked down. Suwahao grabbed Shrike and led him down as well. Shrike had a little difficulty walking since his crotch was still hurting.

Ehrhardt took out a torch, turned it on and continued transmuting the tunnel towards the building. Once she got closer, she became even more careful and advanced slowly.

Shrike could not help but notice that the tunnel Ehrhardt constructed was very sturdy and good quality, with support beams and everything. But that was not what he was worried about. "H-how did you even know where to look for us? You were in North City..." asked Shrike.

Ehrhardt gave Shrike a glare but replied anyway. "I knew Major General Armstrong had taken Envy to Fort Briggs. I tried to get transferred there, but she wouldn't take me. So let's just say I'm pretty glad that you didn't bother to check just how far I had gone off after you asked me to when you were making that phone call, back in North City headquarters. I got worried when that heavily armed team rushed in but they didn't care one bit about me. Nice job handling security, by the way. Totally unprofessional."

Now Shrike felt a little offended. "Yeah well, sorry for trusting my senior officer, SIR."

"Shut your trap, boy." Ehrhardt stopped transmuting the tunnel and turned at Shrike. "You're going to stay here. Stand against the wall."

Shrike did as Ehrhardt commanded. She pressed the back of her hand against the wall and manipulated the ground so that Shrike was bound by it and stuck in his place. She then started transmuting the tunnel further.

"W-wait! Are you just going to leave me here, sir?"

"Someone will find the tunnel eventually and free you, I have no doubt about that." Ehrhardt continued and made a turn with the tunnel so that Shrike could not see what was happening.

Shrike's hands were still free even if his arms were restricted along his forearms and upper arms. If he had had transmutation circles on the skin of his hands, he could have tried to transmute himself free, but he did not – and in that case, Ehrhardt would probably have drawn over them. He also had some transmutation circles drawn on paper in his pockets, but they were just outside of his reach.

After a moment, Shrike started hearing some noise of engagement from the newer end of the tunnel. The sounds were messy and echoed off several surfaces, but Shrike guessed that there had been gunshots.

Yet more moments later, he felt a light rumbling that felt somewhat like an explosion or an earthquake. That made him quite worried and he tried to tug on the earthly bounds holding him in place to no avail. His nails dug just slightly into the wall.

Shrike then realised that he could try to groove a transmutation circle on the wall with his nails. He obviously could not see what he would be drawing, but the transmutation circle to manipulate earth was not very complex. He was more worried that he would not be able to get the shape right, which would mess up the transmutation in more or less unexpected ways.

Nonetheless, he had no other choice, so he pressed his index finger into the wall and carved the necessary shapes into it. Once he was done, he hesitated for a moment before pressing his finger against the grooves and starting the transmutation carefully. The ground binding him started becoming undone. Some of the bounds tightened, some loosened and some disintegrated into loose earth. Eventually Shrike was free.

Shrike ran toward the end of the tunnel where he had come from and climbed up. He picked up his gloves, put them on and peeked through the periscope he had made.

The building was still there, but a small part of its wall seemed to have been collapsed. Soldiers were standing around the place, looking alert and readying their weapons.

Shrike's heart raced and he had no idea what to do.

Envy saw Major Generals Armstrong and Mustang who were having a tiff of some kind, and the homunculus child was lying on a bed, seemingly unhurt and apparently in a self-satisfied mood.

A sudden gunshot tightened Envy's nerves as it observed the unfolding of the events in the homunculus child's prison of a room. Armstrong and Mustang turned toward what seemed to be a large window in the room and then went out through a door. The child sat up. Envy could not see what was going on in the space beyond the room, and this particular ventilation shaft did not have other grates that it could have looked through. It could have probably shapeshifted itself through the grate, but doing that would take so much time that it did not want to try. Instead, it reversed and started cutting a hole into the shaft in a spot where it believed another room would be.

Envy squirmed its snaky body out of the ventilation shaft and into a dark room. The room was so lightless that Envy could see nothing even with enhanced vision. Frustrated, it started feeling along the wall on which it thought the door ought to be and found it soon. It attempted to shapeshift another eye-appendage through the keyhole but concluded that the lock was more sophisticated than it had previously encountered. There was no way through it. Envy then settled for picking it, and even that turned out to be challenging. There was something odd about the lock and Envy much disliked that. It heard more noise and sounds of fighting.

At last, Envy managed to get the door unlocked and turned the handle to open it. It saw into a corridor, and a guard who was looking at it immediately started taking aim with his gun. Envy leaped out of the room and smashed the soldier unconscious against a wall. It smacked another soldier over the head similarly.

It turned to face the southern end of the corridor since that was the direction where the room of the child was. It could see a large window and a fortified door along the wall. It ran to the window and looked in, seeing the surprised and then very delighted face of the child. Even Envy had to smile. It looked at the lock of the door and saw that the lock was similar to the one it had just picked. It tried to open the lock with a similar kind of fake key it had just used, but of course the door did not open. Envy had to spend another long moment trying to open the door before succeeding.

The child ran straight out of the room to hug Envy. It said nothing and just squeezed Envy tightly, pressing its face against Envy's neck. Its relief was so great that a few tears ran down its face. Envy had come for it! It was safe!

Envy smiled at the child and hugged back but only briefly as the situation was still on. More noise emanated from the southern end of the corridor. Envy pushed the child off. "It'd be nice to hug, but there's a situation. Do you know what's going on here?" Envy looked a little curiously at the child's tears but said nothing about that.

The child looked toward south. "...No. Was that not your doing?"

"No."

"Major Generals Armstrong and Mustang ran there."

The two homunculi saw a T-shaped fork in the corridor toward south, but neither knew which of the two directions the sounds were coming from.

Envy slammed shut the door of the child's room that was now empty before shapeshifting into a soldier and picking up a gun from one of the guards it had just felled. The child did the same, but as it was picking up a gun, it saw a pair of soldiers coming into view from behind the corner in the northern end of the corridor. One of them was Matilda.

"What – –?" started Matilda.

"Go back!" shouted the child. Hearing that, Envy turned and seemed half-ready to attack the two soldiers, but it turned back toward the south almost immediately since they now heard and felt rumbling that was growing more intense. Soon they saw a pile of soldiers being pushed from one corridor into another by a slide of concrete. Envy recognised the work of alchemy immediately but since it thought that Mustang was the only one around the place who could perform alchemy, it was rather puzzled. It did not think that Mustang would attack Amestrian soldiers.

Envy's confusion was soon cleared when the offending alchemist came into view. It was none other than Colonel Sannah Ehrhardt, followed closely by her Xingese tag-along.

"There!" shouted Suwahao. "Th-there are two! Those two in the front!"

"Run!" repeated the child to Matilda. When Ehrhardt turned and transmuted a row of spikes from the concrete straight at the homunculi, Matilda and his partner finally ran, and so did Envy and the child. However, the homunculi were not fast enough in reaching the northern turn in the corridor, so Ehrhardt's spikes mutilated them and left them trapped in the hallway. The child screamed in agony. Ehrhardt kept transmuting the floor, recreating the spikes so that she could just keep harming the homunculi without getting close. She did not care at all that the two unconscious soldiers were left in the way of her spikes since she thought they were dead.

Envy fired its gun at Ehrhardt, but with her spikes blocking most of the way, it didn't manage to hit her. After it was out of bullets, it stared at her in anger and frustration. It then turned toward the ceiling, transformed its arms toward its true form and struck them right in, starting to tear down the panelling.

Ehrhardt's response was to flatten most of the corridor and push Envy upwards toward the ceiling on a pillar of concrete and crush it against the structures. Now Envy screamed in pain, so she figured she must have been doing something right. She ran along the corridor and started to transmute a way up for herself. Suwahao ran after her.

The child was recovering from getting impaled and shivered on the now mostly flat floor.

"Suwahao, take care of that one!" said Ehrhardt as she made a smaller pillar and carefully raised herself up through the tear in the ceiling.

Suwahao turned at the child and promptly took a swing at it with his sword. The child managed to scamper away and flee behind the northern corner, even if Suwahao was right on its tail. Without knowing where it was going, the child thought that it would not get away, so it stayed to fight. Suwahao made his best to try and mutilate it, and the child tried to make its best at evading. It soon realised it was not very good at that. Fortunately for it, Suwahao seemed to be disturbed by both its regeneration and reactions to pain.

After the first three lost arms and an immense amount of pain, the child figured it could try to trick the Xingese man by throwing itself at him, not even trying to evade his attacks. As it expected, he cut it into pieces, but it made its best to concentrate and reform its body so fast that it could take him by surprise. It succeeded and reformed its ribcage right around his sword, trapping the weapon so that he could not use it, and placed its own, now feral and dangerous claws around his throat.

Instead of killing him, it spoke to him. "I am sure you can somehow kill me even while I hold you like this, but I am also sure I will manage to kill you. I can sacrifice one life from my Philosopher's Stone. You will die permanently." That at least seemed to make him stop moving. "Why do you want to kill me? I have done nothing to you or anyone else."

"You are an evil creature! You entrap the souls of many people!"

"I am not an evil creature and I can't help it that I have people's souls inside me! I want to exist and I am capable of doing it without killing anyone. Is that not enough for you?"

"..."

"I will let you go unharmed if you promise to not harm me and my creator, Envy."

"..."

"Will you promise?"

"Yes."

"If you break that promise, I will have to break your limbs to prevent you from harming me again. Which limbs would you rather have broken, or will you let me decide?"

Suwahao looked morbidly surprised and stared at the child. He was not sure what to think of the child's sudden promise that it would not kill him; he had believed that the child would kill him without hesitation if it managed to catch him, but it had not done so. And without even drawing a breath, it had right afterwards threatened to break his limbs. He could not respond.

"I will decide then. Please let go of your sword."

Suwahao did as the child asked, and the two let go and stepped away from each other. The child grabbed the sword sticking in and through its ribcage, pulled it out and then offered it to Suwahao, handle first. Suwahao could not quite believe what had happened and accepted the sword with a very confused look in his eyes.

The child backed down warily, turned around the corner and climbed up through the collapsed part of the ceiling.

Whatever the space had been before, it was nearly unrecognisable now. Ehrhardt had severely remodelled the large room with her concrete spikes. Envy jumped from a rack high in the room toward the place where the child was. Ehrhardt, seeing that the two homunculi were close to each other again, transmuted a wild mass of concrete spikes at them, impaling Envy and getting the child swept up along. The spikes went straight through the wall and pushed the homunculi outside the building. The partially torn floor collapsed some more, taking more structures down with it.

Ehrhardt transmuted a way for herself along a safer looking route to the left of the collapse and ran outside as well. She emerged from the side of the building and saw a focal point of extreme unrest forming right before her eyes.

Several soldiers were surrounding the building, mostly taking aim with their guns and staying out of the way. Armstrong, Mustang and some other soldiers were standing next to the entryway to the building, on the left side of the three cars parked next to the building. Armstrong was holding a rifle but was not aiming at anything, while Mustang quickly pointed his hand at the homunculi as they started regenerating and getting up. The two homunculi were partially behind the cars, taking protection between them and the uncollapsed part of the wall. Between the homunculi and Ehrhardt was the partially collapsed wall.

"What? Envy?! What?!" shouted Mustang in surprise. He also noticed Ehrhardt. "Who – –?! Colonel Sannah Ehrhardt?"

"Her?" asked Armstrong, more disbelieving than surprised.

Meanwhile, Envy and the child were busy regenerating, though Envy could not help but stare at Mustang and feel tense about his presence, pondering how it would get to kill him but not risk its own death.

"You know her?" continued Mustang.

"She wanted to be transferred to Briggs. I found her untrustworthy."

"Stay out of this!" shouted Ehrhardt. "I only want to kill them, nothing else!" She pointed at the homunculi.

"On whose authority?" required Armstrong.

Ehrhardt almost darted toward the ground to transmute, but Armstrong fired a warning shot toward the Colonel with her rifle, making her back down. "Stay."

Mustang grabbed Armstrong's rifle and turned it downwards. "What are you doing?!"

"You stay back! I'm going to take care of two of your problems for you!" exclaimed Ehrhardt.

Armstrong faced Mustang. "I don't know what she is doing and I will not have her kill the homunculi until I know what is going on here." Her tone was irritated. She tried to twist her rifle free but was not yet successful.

"Killing HER isn't any better! And how can Envy be here? You said you killed him!"

Armstrong spoke over Mustang. "I was not going to kill her! At the most I'd wound her and now she's going off again! Let go!"

In the meantime, Ehrhardt prepared another attack and transmuted spikes from the brick wall of the building at the homunculi, and then spikes from the ground as well. Both of them were hit since they had no space into where they could dodge. She ran toward them and jumped for Envy.

Envy shapeshifted, regenerated and broke some of the spikes while trying to get up. It growled hostilely at the woman and screamed when she finally arrived and touched it to deconstruct its body. Envy thrashed and knocked Ehrhardt down, but the woman just got up and tried again. However, now Envy had managed to regenerate more of its body and mass into a favourable position. When she slammed her hand on it again to destroy its body, it succeeded in swatting her upper body. The blow sent her flying a few metres through the air and landing into the pile of rubble from the collapsed wall.

Unceremoniously, Ehrhardt dropped flat on her back and stayed unnervingly still.