It takes one of the most genuinely nasty psychological horror manga ever drawn and squeezes it into chibi gag shorts, and the whiplash is the whole point. Zera still runs the Hikari Club like a boy-emperor with a god complex, Jaibo still worships him with a knife in hand, and Litchi the homemade robot still runs on actual lychee fruit like the world's cutest engineering flaw. Kanon is still the kidnapped girl in the corner of the frame, which is exactly the joke the show refuses to let you laugh off cleanly. Eight episodes, barely any runtime, and it still leaves the aftertaste of a factory basement full of fourteen-year-olds who decided beauty was worth killing for. Read Furuya's manga after and the punchlines curdle retroactively. That's the trick: the cute art style doesn't soften Zera, it just makes you complicit in finding him funny.

Nine boys at an all-boys school make up the Hikari Club, a cult-like group led by the enigmatic, beauty-obsessed Hiroyuki "Zera" Tsunekawa. This short comic take on a psychological horror manga is set in an alternate reality where the club never collapses after finishing Litchi, its humanlike robot that runs on lychee fruit. Litchi has already brought them the beautiful Kanon, their kidnapped captive. With their goal achieved, the boys fill their days with antics, from selling Litchi's fruit-powered technology to rebuilding the robot for new tasks.