Scar

**The Scarred Man**, known more casually as "**Scar**", is a nameless lone serial killer and revolutionary who targets State Alchemists for his own brand of lethal justice in accordance with the fundamental tenets of his religion and for the revenge of his slaughtered people. An Ishvalan survivor of the Ishval Civil War, Scar's moniker comes from the large X-shaped scar on his forehead and sports a conspicuous and intricate alchemical tattoo on his right arm, which he uses as his murder weapon of choice.

## Physical Appearance

Being a native Ishvalan, the man known as Scar carries the dark complexion and distinctive red irises of his people. He is fairly tall with a muscular build and his hair is shaved close on the back and sides, leaving a silver-colored crown on top. In the manga and 2009 anime storyline, this crown sticks up a bit. Scar's right arm is adorned with a thin scar stretching entirely around the limb where the bicep meets the shoulder and, from that mark all the way down to the wrist, is nearly covered with a complex tattoo. The upper portion of his face is disfigured with a large X-shaped scar which stretches across his forehead and down over his eyes into his upper cheekbones. The manga storyline portrays Scar as being in his early- to mid-thirties. In the early part of either series, Scar wears sunglasses to hide his red eyes from view and bears a distinctive gold-colored jacket emblazoned with a cross on the back and sleeves. Additionally, he sports a pair of black slacks with a white cross on the left leg and a white stripe running down the right.

## Personality

Scar is a decidedly brooding and angry man, almost totally consumed by hatred toward the people who destroyed his homeland. Knowing full well that his actions go against many of the teachings of his religion, he still fashions himself an agent of God's divine punishment and takes out his fury on State Alchemists. However, vestiges of his former life's kinder nature are prone to seep through. Even in the middle of his bloody vengeance, Scar is willing to show compassion toward others, honoring last requests and offering a chance to pray before dying. He is reasonably wise and a skilled rhetorician, though his misguided thirst for vengeance clouds his greater judgment and leads his arguments in circles. Having had his people and his family stolen from him, Scar sympathizes with those who care for their loved ones and looks after those who have lost their place in the world. Additionally, he is very protective of his surviving kinsmen and takes all their words of encouragement or chastisement to heart.

## Abilities

* **Master Hand-to-Hand Combatant**: As a former warrior of Ishval, Scar is quite adept at hand-to-hand combat, boasting significant strength and stamina, remarkable agility and reflexes and deceptive speed. He displays his abilities on the field by subduing a number of armed Amestrian soldiers using only melee tactics. Scar's killing spree throughout Amestris itself is proof of his skills, as he manages to murder ten State Alchemists (including Basque Grand, who had been hailed as a combat specialist) and is able to hold his own against combat-based alchemists like the Elric brothers and Alex Louis Armstrong. In addition, Scar proves himself capable of taking down inhuman beasts such as chimeras and Homunculi. Most impressively, through a combination of luck and skill, he managed to gain a pyrrhic victory over a severely wounded Wrath, a human-based Homonculus with surpreme swordsmanship prowess and physical abilities beyond an average human.
* **Keen Intellect**: Scar is also reasonably intelligent, able to comprehend some more complex alchemical texts and concepts despite having never studied the craft and an adequate tactician capable of immediately identifying and assessing his opponents' weaknesses in combat.

### Alchemy/Alkahestry

* **Deconstruction Alchemy**: While his physical prowess and intimidating figure are frightful in and of themselves, Scar's most dangerous element is his right arm, which is able to destroy anything with which it comes into contact by way of the intricate and arcane Transmutation Array tattooed thereupon. As a fundamentalist opponent of alchemy, Scar does not consider himself an alchemist in the traditional sense (having purposely avoided even its study), but the strain of alchemy that his arm itself allows him to produce is powerful, advanced and unique. As observed by those who have seen it in action and lived to tell the tale, Scar's method follows the cyclical flow of transmutation, but only takes into account the first two steps - comprehension and deconstruction. By "stopping at the second step", the physical structure of whatever he targets is broken down and not reshaped, essentially reducing it to formless debris. By applying this method to his victims, he destroys their internal systems (general organs in the manga, but the brain specifically in the 2003 anime version) instantly while circumventing both Human Transmutation and the Ishvalan stigma associated with giving new form to one of God's creations. Still, for all the serial killer's anti-alchemical posturing, the fact that he is unable to deconstruct an object whose composition he does not comprehend suggests that Scar does have a fair bit of alchemical knowledge and must actively identify, or at least make educated guesses at, the makeup of objects he wishes to destroy; despite his repeated assertion that the arm (and not himself) is the one performing alchemy, Scar is an amateur alchemist by practice. The origin of the markings on Scar's arm was originally the right arm of Scar's older brother, transferred from one sibling to the other in an emergency procedure during the Ishval Civil War.
* **Reconstruction Alchemy**: Scar's arm array is the deconstruction half of a two-piece complementary set designed by his older brother. By studying both Amestrian alchemy and Xingese alkahestry, Scar's elder brother was able to find similarities between the two and combine them into an array that incorporated their strengths. The right arm, marked with "TERRA" and "AER", carries an array incorporating twin snakes in a Caduceus pattern surrounded by reptilian scales which may represent the "Dragon's Pulse" of alkahestric origin and a series of tribal arrows leading down to the wrist, representing an outward flow. This arm is designated for deconstruction. The left arm, designated for reconstruction, is marked with the same array turned upside down to represent an inward flow and with the Dragon's Pulse tattooed in white ink rather than the black ink of the right arm. Its inward flow completes the cyclical pulse of full transmutation and it is marked with "IGNIS" and "AQUA", completing the elemental tetrad. After an attack by State Alchemist Solf J. Kimblee left the young Scar dying from exsanguination due to the loss of his right arm, his older brother used the Alkahestric properties to transfer his own right arm to his brother's body in exchange for his life. Though Scar is unable to transmute past the deconstruction stage with this arm, the Alkahestric nature of the array makes his transmutations immune to Father's alchemy-sealing ability.