This is my first time going back to the beginning of this series, and I’m reminded now that I actually had a bit of a difficult time getting into it when I first picked up this volume. I hadn’t read much manga at the time. My first had been Hikaru no Go, and I loved that so much, I spent several weeks afterwards going through other shounen competitive/sports-type manga, searching for something I could love as much, and being horribly disappointed by everything else I read. I picked up volume 1 of FMA a bit out of desperation, and immediately felt lost. The thing that kept me going, though, and got me through the first volume, and then on to the second and third volumes (at which point I was a goner), was that as lost as I felt, I also immediately fell in love with Ed, and re-reading this volume, I’m reminded so much of why.

Ed and Lin, while battling it out with Envy and Gluttony, find themselves in a pickle; Gluttony swallows them! Trapped in his stomach, they search for a way out, only to learn that Envy was gobbled up with them. The foes begin fighting again, but Ed convinces them that if they work together, they just might escape the cavernous void they’ve entered. Meanwhile, Roy Mustang has problems of his own; he’s beginning to learn just how strongly the homunculi control the military and the knowledge is chilling indeed.