It opens with a wall of vocabulary. Lily, CHARM, Huge, Garden, Rare Skill, Legion, Schutzengel, all thrown at you before you've learned a single face, and then Shaft hits you with a fight scene so fluid you stop caring about the glossary. That's the deal here: the plot is not the point, the craft is. Riri latching onto Yuyu and dragging her back from her own withdrawal gives the Schutzengel bond actual weight, and the sisterhood pairings turn what could have been another squad of pretty designs into girls who fight better because of who's standing behind them. The opening goes hard enough that you won't skip it once across twelve episodes, and the endings keep rotating like the staff had something to prove. Come for the CGDCT-with-swords hangout, stay because the battles are animated like somebody actually cared.

Earth's survival depends on an unlikely defense: teenage girls wielding weapons forged from science and magic. When colossal creatures called Huge emerged to threaten humanity, the world united to build CHARM, armaments that synchronize especially well with teenage girls, who become the heroes known as Lilies. Across the globe, military academies called Gardens train these fighters and protect the people around them. Riri Hitotsuyanagi, once rescued by a Lily during a Huge attack, earns a place at the prestigious Yurigaoka Garden, where she finds that her savior, Yuyu Shirai, is now a classmate. The girl she remembered as cheerful turns out to be withdrawn and prefers to fight alone, yet Riri is set on becoming her friend as she trains to become a Lily herself.