While Major Motoko Kusanagi is meeting with her lover, the prosthetic technician Jose, she receives an urgent report from her comrade Batou about a bomb terror incident at a building in Nishino-uchi. Rushing to the scene and suppressing it, they discover that the terrorists have had false memories implanted by a super-wizard class hacker rumored to be the "Fire-Starter." Furthermore, on the chest of the main culprit, a Caldis person, is tattooed the Teardrop Dagger—the symbolic mark of "Scrasus," a hero of the Caldis independence war that once occurred in the Kuzan Republic. Seeing this, Motoko asserts, "Scrasus should have died during the war." Around the same time, an explosion at the Yamateno Dam results in the death of a detective. Among his belongings are a business card for a shop named "Mermaid's Legs" and a prosthetic leg section with a tag labeled "Aerial." Investigating the case, Detective Togusa of the Shin-Hama Prefectural Police traces the clues to Saido, a representative of a Kuzan Republic water enterprise. What are the explosives at the conference venue? What is the true identity of the Fire-Starter? When the two incidents intersect, the revived Scrasus's aim becomes clear—.