Kei Narutani, a Chinese-Japanese teenager whose mother, an air show pilot, was killed in a Zai ambush, is evacuating Shanghai with his childhood friend Song Minghua when the mysterious Zai attack the ship. A red fighter drives them off, and Kei meets its Anima: Gripen, one of the cyborg girls who operate the retrofitted aircraft called Daughters, humanity's only effective answer to the Zai. Taken into the project as Gripen's partner, he finally gets his own way into the sky. This manga adapts the Girly Air Force light novel, the same source as the 2019 anime series.