Arima's descent into the role that will destroy him plays out in thirty minutes of animation so precise it feels like watching a surgeon work. This is what the franchise needed: a prequel that doesn't explain him away, just shows you the exact moment his humanity became a liability. You finish it understanding why he became unstoppable, and it hurts more than it should.

Taishi Fura, a former baseball player who has drifted into delinquency, stumbles onto a scene where the man-eating ghoul called Lantern hurts one of his old friends and kills another. His classmate Kishou Arima steps in and drives the ghoul off, revealing that he is secretly working undercover for the Commission of Counter Ghoul. Wanting revenge for his friends, Fura teams up with Arima to track ghouls through the 13th Ward, with Lantern as their final target. The single OVA episode looks back at the high school years of the man later feared as the CCG's Reaper and shows how he and Fura first met, told as a supernatural horror drama.