There is a strange breed of mechanical creatures, aptly called “Machines,” who will, on the condition that their Host never love another person for as long as they live (else the debt will be paid in blood), grant their wielders fortune and prosperity. And where a Host has betrayed his Machine, you are sure to find a member of the mysterious Gari family, wielders and hunters of Machines, in the ensuing carnage…So it was justifiable when the Gari family was dispatched to Shakunage High School to covertly investigate a brutal murder perpetrated by the spindly hands of a Machine… But it wasn’t so justifiable when Hanare Shizuma, a youth with an agenda of his own, enrolls at the High School soon thereafter, hell-bent on conducting his own investigation – and soon meets the head of the family of hunters, shockingly enough, a girl his own age. But little do either of them know that their encounter will set the cogs of fate spinning rapidly into motion…