Hughes listened intently, the two fingers of his left hand tapping the armrest beside him, the rhythm and frequency shifting as Allen spoke. Allen didn't know what it meant, but he filed it away. As acting head of the Intelligence Bureau, Hughes handled secrets that could never be put to paper; if too many knew them, they wouldn't be secrets. By that logic, this rhythm had to be a way to mark crucial details under special circumstances.
Allen's time at the State Alchemist Center hadn't been long, and he finished his account quickly. The instant Allen closed his mouth, Hughes's fingers—thinking Allen wouldn't notice—also stopped tapping. After a brief pause, Hughes said, "Heh, when Mustang gets back from the East, you'd better treat us to a meal. We did a lot to help you get that certification so smoothly. By the way, Mustang said you want into the military?"
Allen nodded with a mild smile. He picked up the coffee on the side table, took a small sip—bitter first, then rich—and, savoring the lingering taste, took two more before setting it down.
Seeing Allen's agreement, Hughes didn't celebrate. He folded his arms and lowered his head, thinking. After a while he looked up. "Getting you into the military isn't hard. Mustang or I can assign you to a department directly. But you don't have any record of merit yet, so you'll start low. Promotions will be… trickier."
Hughes had only met Allen twice, but he already counted him as one of their own. He understood Mustang's ambition; the two had clawed their way up from the bottom together, commoners bound tight. As things stood, Allen's arrival added a heavy piece to Mustang's board. State Alchemists were special; State Alchemists embedded in the military were rarer still. If Allen got into the army and climbed to major, he'd be indispensable when Mustang made his move.
Allen didn't know Hughes had thought that far ahead. He just found Hughes's phrasing a little funny, let out a small laugh, and drew Hughes's attention.
"What's so amusing?"
Allen waved it off. "No, nothing. Ishval is rioting right now, isn't it? Transfer me there. One war is plenty to rack up the kind of 'military merit' you mean."
Hughes didn't answer at once. He thought a moment, and his face soured—leaving Allen puzzled.
"You probably don't know. This 'riot' is more of a farce. It's hard to say whether the country would start a war over a common soldier. If Ishval compromises, there'll be no war. Then it's hard to…"
"What happened, exactly? I only heard Ishval is resisting the government. I don't know the spark. Tell me." Allen was curious: what power pushed a people without a nation to resist a vast country in the East and risk getting caught between two powers? Hughes laid it out—start to finish. A soldier had accidentally killed an Ishvalan child. Unrest in one small area had spread until all of Ishval was in turmoil.
Allen felt half his hope go cold. Waging war over a grunt? Not unless the Führer was an idiot. Weigh one soldier against the interests of a nation and the individual looked trivial. Allen was sure that if the Führer agreed to hand over the soldier, Ishval would calm down—and his chance for battlefield merit would vanish.
He wouldn't watch a chance at greater power slip through his fingers. His body, relaxed a moment before, drew tight. His fists clenched; the skin along the outside of his forearms blanched white with the force.
Hughes noticed the shift at once. He asked what was wrong, but Allen's tension eased just as quickly. The sunshine left his face; something colder took its place. He said quietly, "Since I chose to work with Mustang—and since you're in Mustang's camp—I'll ask once: do you want the Ishvalan War to happen?"
The room grew heavy. Do you want a war—there was weight in that. War meant death and displacement. If it was a swift, flawless victory, perhaps. If it dragged on a year or more, the nation would bleed out interest, and a country in the West was eyeing Ishval like a hawk. Silence pressed in. Hughes's breathing thickened. After a moment, he seemed to make up his mind and bit down hard. His greatest wish was to see Mustang atop this world, to put its rot in order.
Catching Hughes's lean, a flash of feral light passed through Allen's eyes and was gone. He leaned back against the sofa, face composed. He was gambling. If Hughes didn't want the war, Allen would need a new path—one that didn't include this country. Luckily, the mild, chatty Hughes had ambition enough—even if it wasn't his own.
After a brief silence, Hughes frowned. "What do you have in mind to make Ishval worse?"
Allen's mouth quirked. "Religion—the Ishvalan faith. You don't have a religion, so you don't know what it can do. Faith drives people mad. It makes them forget death. If the government profanes their 'sacred' religion, this war becomes inevitable. Those who need merit to climb will get exactly what they want—provided it's short and decisive."
Hughes wasn't religious, but he understood zeal—especially among Ishvalans. He sighed and nodded.
"In that case, Captain Hughes, appoint me a Special Intelligence Officer and send me to Ishval for pre-war investigation."
Investigation? It was provocation—stoking ethnic hatred and lighting a war's fuse. Hughes kept that thought to himself. Since joining Intelligence, he'd watched darkness after darkness float up from the deep. It had hardened his resolve to put Mustang in the Führer's chair.
Soon, Warrant Officer Allen was named Special Investigator to the Ishval Inquiry Team. With Hughes seeing him off, he boarded the express to Ishval. As the train slid out of Central Station's sightline, a religious massacre sparked by a single man began, quietly, to unfold.