Establish in a futuristic Japan later the ending of a barbarous world warfare, science has improved by leaps and bounds lending mankind the choice to prolong life and reduce distress from the utilization of complicated cybernetics. Together with humankind linked in to one approach of thoughts and characters called ghosts, the biggest threat to culture would be the cyberterrorists capable of copying people’s memories and bodies. Every time a ghost-infecting virus called Firestarter starts dispersing through the system leading in the assassination of the Western Prime Minister, Major Motoko Kusanagi and her elite group of special operatives are called in to monitor its origin. While they delve deeper and deeper in their analysis, they discover hints of government corruption and also a dark agent that conveys an all-too-familiar face. The picture can be really a continuation to the storyline of the Pyrophoric Cult incident of Arise, and ties up loose ends in this arc.