It spends five episodes convincing you it's a warm, dusty summer about a press club kid chasing base rumors, then it takes the floor out from under you. Asaba's whole arc is small and mortifying in the best way: getting dragged around by Suizenji, fumbling a vending machine with a girl who doesn't know how to be a girl, noticing the bandages and the nosebleeds and choosing not to ask. Iriya Kana is the reason this thing gets shelved next to Saikano, a child handed a cockpit and a countdown, and Enomoto standing there as the adult who knows exactly what's being spent. The last stretch, the running-away days, is engineered to wreck you, and it does. Yes, six episodes means the war and the machine are never really explained, and yes, the front half is a mess. You will not care by the final minutes.

Asaba Naoyuki, an ordinary high school student in his school's newspaper club, has spent the summer camped outside the nearby Sonohara military base, hoping to glimpse the UFOs that local legend says are hidden there. On the last night of the break he sneaks into the school pool and meets a mysterious girl, Iriya Kana, who has small silver half-spheres set into her wrists. The next day she turns up as a transfer student in his class. Iriya has a hard time fitting in with her classmates but takes a liking to Naoyuki and joins his club. Her frequent summons to the staff room, her special privileges and her personal bodyguard, Enomoto, reveal that she is closely tied to the base, and Naoyuki slowly realizes a dark secret lies beneath the world he knows. The six-episode OVA blends romance, drama and science fiction into a heartrending summer story.