{{short description|Japanese manga series} , also known as Battle Angel Alita: Last Order in the English translation, is a Japanese science fiction manga series created by Yukito Kishiro and published between 2000 and 2014. It is the second series of the Battle Angel Alita franchise, and a direct sequel to the original series. The series tells the story of Alita (or Gally in the original Japanese version and several other languages) continuing her quest to uncover her mysterious past. The story is continued in the third and final series Battle Angel Alita: Mars Chronicle. Story Last Order begins when Alita is resurrected by Desty Nova's nanotechnology in the floating city of Tiphares. The city's dark secrets are brutally exposed, but it turns out to be a small part of a complex world. Going into space with new and old companions alike, to look for her lost friend Lou Collins and to find out more about her forgotten past, Alita is caught up in an interplanetary struggle between the major powers of the colonized solar system. Along the way, she forms an alliance with three of the Alita Replicas who have now begun to think for themselves, an unsavory superhacker, and Nova himself when she enters the Zenith of Things Tournament (Z.O.T.T.), a fighting competition held every ten years. During the course of the story, more background about the setting of Battle Angel Alita that was not disclosed in the prior series is revealed, such as how the Earth emerged from a cataclysmic impact winter that wiped out most of the population. Setting Earth is a wasteland after a cataclysmic solar flare and asteroid impact, which created a long impact winter and nearly made humans extinct. Some managed to survive and, with the help of a mysterious quantum computer, rebuild civilization to what it is in Last Order. The colonization of the solar system and complex politics between the now independent colonies have left the Earth surface cut off and underdeveloped. The Scrapyard and Tiphares are found in what was once the USA (specifically the area of what is now Kansas City). Tiphares is now a big laboratory for its much more glorious sister city in space - Ketheres. Tiphares is a futuristic utopian city that is suspended several thousand feet above the Scrapyard. Originally, Tiphares was designed to be a prototype society that was intended to test candidates for the