The Revolution of the 14-year-olds

While Ishikawa's research confirms that Shinya Uotora attended the same school before creating Think Pol and vanishing, the Major and Togusa set out to examine Takashi Shimamura's household, leaving the rest of the team to pick apart the program and hunt for Suzuka Mizukane. At school, Takashi drifts through a lesson glued to a mobile game, his attention snagged by a classmate named Kanami.

A staged aerial attack empties the classroom. In the confusion Takashi glimpses Kanami stripped to her underwear as the teacher Takeru flees, and when the pair try to escape they are cut down by the attacking troops, with Takashi shot and Kanami rushing to his side.

Kanami's death is later announced even as Takashi turns up alive, and Yuzu reveals that the class knows the truth and that Takashi himself is the phantom Airborne Troopers. The revelation twists his thinking toward Orwellian slogans of war as peace and freedom as slavery. Searching his room, Togusa uncovers a bookmarked copy of 1984, and Takashi's mother admits he shut himself away with his computer for three days after a classmate's suicide.

The teacher Takeru is beaten to death by a mob of eyeless students while Takashi looks on and then withdraws from the act. The investigators learn the boy took his childhood security blanket when he left, and though Purin locates him within two hundred meters, he vanishes before anyone can reach him.

Warned that her son is no longer the child she raised and is bound to commit a massacre, Takashi's mother breaks down, later praying to her late husband and finding the old blanket with a letter from Takashi hidden beneath it. The eleventh episode of Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 carries the subtitle EDGELORD and falls between Reasons Leading to Flameout and All Will Become N.