This one doesn't tell you a story so much as smear one across your eyes and dare you to keep up. Production I.G made a 45-minute Heian nightmare where you can still see the pencil under the paint, colors bled out to bone and ash, CG camera moves gliding through hand-drawn murk. Follow the plot on a first pass and you will lose, because Kaidomaru's whole deal, the girl passing as a man with the kanji for flame burned onto her arm, riding as one of the Four Devas for a dead Raikou Minamoto, arrives in fragments rather than exposition. The demons in the forests and rivers aren't monster-of-the-week set pieces here, they're texture, the ambient hostility of a Kyoto that hasn't decided yet whether spirits are real. What you remember afterward isn't who won. It's her arm, and the fact that she kept swinging for someone who wasn't coming back.

During Japan's Heian period, evil spirits still dwell in the forests, mountains and rivers. Kaidomaru, a woman disguised as a man with the character for flame tattooed on her upper arm, is one of the Four Devas and battles these spirits. She fights for the honor of her lost love, Raikou Minamotono, who gave his life defending the capital, Kyoto. The threat he died stopping came from a princess cursed by a malicious ogre. That princess, once Kaidomaru's childhood playmate, has now become her greatest enemy. The story is told in a single OVA episode mixing action and fantasy.