Because 'Edgerunners' was published on a bi-weekly schedule, with only two chapters released per month, the actual progression of the plot felt agonizingly slow to its readers.
Furthermore, the early chapters of 'Edgerunners' were undeniably a slow-burn experience.
Consequently, for the first month of its serialization, the series remained a relatively obscure and unremarkable presence in the official reader popularity surveys.
However, once the story reached its third chapter, 'Edgerunners' finally pulled back the curtain to reveal the absolute, chilling brutality of Night City.
David, living in a state of constant poverty, found himself unable to pay the exorbitant fees required to upgrade his school-mandated operating system. This seemingly minor financial hurdle set off a catastrophic chain of events that led to him and his mother, Gloria, being accidentally caught in the crossfire of a violent gang war on their way home.
In the aftermath of the resulting car crash, David could only watch in stunned silence as a Trauma Team unit arrived on the scene. Despite his desperate pleas for help, the medical professional looked at his mother's lack of a premium insurance plan and simply abandoned her to her fate.
Ultimately, David was forced to take his mother to a shady, back-alley clinic run by a Ripperdoc connected to the Scavengers. Just when he thought his mother's life might be saved, he was heartlessly informed a few days later that her condition had suddenly deteriorated and she had already passed away.
He hadn't even been granted a single chance to say a final goodbye.
Having snatched up a fresh copy of the magazine and devoured the third chapter's plot, Satoshi found his entire world-view being shaken to its core.
"David's mom... she really just... she just died like that?"
He found the entire sequence of events incredibly difficult to accept.
After all, this was the protagonist's mother!
It wasn't that the mother of a protagonist couldn't die; in fact, the role of a protagonist's parent was notoriously high-risk in the manga world.
Usually, they were either killed by a primary antagonist, giving the protagonist a blood-soaked reason to train hard and seek revenge...
Or they died heroically while protecting the protagonist, often at a critical turning point in the narrative.
But the way David's mother, Gloria, had died fit into absolutely none of those established tropes.
She had simply been caught in a random street skirmish, ignored by professional medical services due to poverty, and then pronounced dead in a shady clinic a few days later.
There had been no dramatic final exchange of words, no heart-wrenching emotional payoff for the readers, and absolutely zero warning.
It was...
A sequence of events that left the reader feeling entirely blindsided and caught off guard.
At the time, Satoshi didn't truly realize the significance of what he was reading. However, years later, this specific style of storytelling would become Hayashi Aoyama's defining trademark.
The sudden, brutal dismissal of major characters, a plot direction that followed a cold, internal logic while offering absolutely zero foreshadowing, would eventually leave his millions of readers in a state of constant, miserable suspense.
Years later, when Satoshi reflected on this debut work and its sudden, unceremonious deaths, a moment of realization would wash over him.
"So that was it! He already started showing the symptoms back then! That was the very first sign of his madness!"
But for now, Satoshi merely felt a lingering sense of profound unease.
Gloria's death felt too... ordinary. She was just an ordinary woman, living a humble life, who happened to get caught in an ordinary accident on an ordinary day and suffered an ordinary, senseless death.
It felt like a perfect, chilling microcosm of daily life for an ordinary citizen in Night City.
An insignificant ant, crushed under the wheel of a city that didn't even notice its existence.
And in Night City, the death of an ant meant absolutely nothing.
The Trauma Team had bluntly told David: "Our priority is our client. You can leave those people for the municipal body-collection trucks."
The Ripperdoc had coldly informed him: "She was stable this morning, but her vitals suddenly plummeted, and she's already deceased... By the way, how would you like to handle the payment for our services today?"
Even the arrogant rich kid who bullied David at school had the audacity to say: "I heard your mother passed away. I know I'm supposed to offer my condolences, but honestly... I find it hard to feel any sympathy for a woman who raised a loser like you."
Money! That godforsaken city only cared about money!
As Satoshi watched David being brutally beaten and verbally humiliated by that elitist brat (who was using a set of high-end cybernetic implants to gain an unfair advantage)...
And then saw the final panel of David wandering aimlessly through the neon-drenched streets of Night City, carrying the small, cold container holding his mother's ashes...
Satoshi felt an intense, agonizing knot in his stomach. The depth of David's misery, further emphasized by a flashback of him being unable to stop his own leg from shaking in grief, left Satoshi feeling absolutely devastated.
Then, his gaze landed on the final scene of the chapter. David, holding the military-grade 'Sandevistan' implant, had tracked down his local Ripperdoc.
David stared at the doctor with a look of cold, unwavering fury burning in his eyes. "I'm not here to sell it. I want you... to... put it... inside me!"
That look of absolute, cold determination in David's eyes sent a visceral thrill through Satoshi's entire body.
[End of Chapter]
"Argh! Why does it have to end right there?!"
Satoshi muttered to himself, feeling incredibly frustrated.
Without even realizing it, he had already become deeply invested in David's journey. Having shared in David's intense feelings of suppression and misery, he now desperately wanted to see him install that 'Sandevistan' and begin his explosive comeback.
This was the classic narrative technique of "Compression and Release." After pushing the protagonist to the absolute brink of despair, the author introduces a powerful turning point that promises an explosive reversal of fortune.
It was a technique designed to leave the reader feeling incredibly satisfied!
Satoshi, of course, had no understanding of the underlying literary theory; he simply knew that he thought this new manga was actually starting to get pretty good.
While it still couldn't compete with his two established favorite series, he had officially begun to pay very close attention to this newcomer's work.
...
Elsewhere, Tachibana Akane had also just finished reading the latest chapter, and she felt a similar weight in her chest.
Unlike a high school student like Satoshi, she understood the deeper implications of David's situation. She felt that the tragedy of David and Gloria was practically a foregone conclusion in a place as cold and heartless as Night City.
A single-parent household, struggling to survive on a meager income... such a life was always on the verge of collapse in that environment.
A random, everyday gang skirmish was all it took to push David and Gloria into the abyss. Even if Gloria had somehow survived the crash, the resulting medical bills would have likely left them homeless and starving on the streets anyway.
Akane found herself increasingly convinced that Hayashi Aoyama's creative vision was anything but simple. 'Cyberpunk 2077: Edgerunners' felt fundamentally different from any other sci-fi work she had ever encountered.
Traditional science-fiction often focused on glorifying the wonders of future technology, neglecting to explore how those advancements would actually affect the lives of ordinary human beings.
If technology becomes incredibly powerful, does that necessarily mean that the life of the average person will become better?
Most sci-fi works provided a resounding "Yes" as their answer.
But Hayashi's 'Edgerunners' offered a much more sobering alternative: "Not necessarily."
In a world like Night City, where monolithic corporations control every facet of urban and national life, and where profit and power are the only things that truly matter...
Where autonomous robots and artificial intelligence are ubiquitous but human life is treated as disposable... a "Cyberpunk" tragedy like this is the inevitable result.
The level of technology is significantly higher, but the actual quality of life is undeniably lower.
Akane couldn't help but feel that she wasn't just reading a piece of throwaway entertainment. Instead, it felt like she was experiencing a profound, deeply philosophical work of literature.
"Hayashi... he might act a little eccentric sometimes, but he truly is a genius," she whispered to herself in awe.
However, as she considered the logical trajectory of the story's world-building, a faint, nagging sense of dread began to take hold.
"But... if he's strictly following the logic of this world... David isn't actually going to die at the end of this story, is he?!"
(End of Chapter)
[Translated and Rewritten by Shika_Kagura]
T/N: The First Symptoms (初次发病) - A meta-commentary on the author's "sadistic" tendency to kill off popular characters, often used as slang in online fandoms (发病 - Fābìng).
T/N: Compression and Release (先抑后扬) - A narrative technique where a character is suppressed or suffers (Yi) before a triumphant comeback (Yang).
T/N: Gloria (葛洛莉亚) - David's mother.
T/N: Katsuo - The name chosen for the arrogant rich kid bully.