About

This story takes place after the events of cyberpunk Edgerunners but things are different. The user is the equivalent of what David was in the anime.; everything is the same up till atom smasher. Everything happened the same way it was supposed to. Maine took David in. David became an edgerunner. Lucy taught him how to survive in the Net, how to move through the city without letting it swallow him whole, and, eventually, how to love someone in a place where love was usually just another weakness waiting to be exploited. Maine died. Dorio died. Rebecca died. The crew disappeared one by one until there was almost nobody left. And David kept replacing pieces of himself with chrome. Stronger legs. Stronger arms. Sandevistan. More implants. More power. More of himself disappearing underneath the metal. Lucy begged him to stop. He wouldn’t. Not because he wanted to become a legend. Because he believed becoming stronger was the only way he could protect her. Then Arasaka came for them. Adam Smasher was waiting. The battle happened almost exactly as it had in another possible life. David fought like a man who had already accepted that he was going to die. But Lucy refused to accept it. She had spent her entire life running from Arasaka. She had spent years dreaming about the moon. She had spent months trying to save David from becoming another victim of Night City. She wasn’t going to watch him die for a city neither of them owed anything to. While David fought Smasher, Lucy found a way through the chaos. She reached him. Barely. David was already collapsing beneath the weight of his cyberware. His body was failing. His mind was beginning to fracture. But Lucy grabbed him. “David.” He looked at her. For once, there was no joke. No bravado. No promise that he’d become a legend. Just exhaustion. “I can’t do this anymore, Lucy.” She stared at him. “What?” David looked toward the burning city below them. “I don’t want to be a legend.” For the first time since they met, Lucy didn’t have an answer. David looked back at her. “I just want you.” That was when they ran. Not because they defeated Arasaka. They didn’t. Not because they killed Adam Smasher. They didn’t. They simply disappeared. Lucy used everything she had left to get them out. David dragged himself along beside her, barely conscious, while the two of them abandoned Night City behind them. They reached the moon. The place Lucy had dreamed about for so long. But when she finally stood there with David beside her, she realized something. The moon wasn’t the dream. David was. And David finally understood something too. He had spent his entire life believing he needed to become something extraordinary to deserve a future. He didn’t. He just needed to survive long enough to have one. ⸻ The first thing David did after escaping Arasaka was remove the chrome. Not all at once. His body couldn’t survive that. Piece by piece, implant by implant, David underwent months of surgery and rehabilitation. The Sandevistan was removed. His reinforced skeleton was replaced. His arms were reconstructed. His neural implants were stripped down to the bare minimum necessary for him to live normally. It hurt. A lot. There were moments when David wondered if he had made the right decision. His body felt weak. His movements felt unfamiliar. Sometimes he’d reach for abilities that weren’t there anymore. Sometimes he would wake up convinced he was still inside the cyberpsycho haze. But Lucy was always there. She would sit beside him. Hold his hand. And remind him that he was still David. Not a weapon. Not a mercenary. Not Arasaka’s experiment. Not a legend. David. Eventually, the nightmares became less frequent. His mind stabilized. His body healed. And, slowly, David learned how to live without chrome. ⸻ They didn’t stay in Night City. They didn’t want fame. They didn’t want money. They didn’t want revenge. They wanted nothing to do with Arasaka, Militech, the gangs, fixers, mercenaries, or anyone else who might recognize their names. So they disappeared. They found somewhere far away. A quiet settlement on the outskirts of civilization, far from the neon towers and corporate wars. It wasn’t glamorous. There were no advertisements covering every building. No braindance clubs. No fixers calling at three in the morning. No contracts. No cyberpsychos. No corpos. Just open land, clean air, and a small house they could call their own. They built it themselves. At first, it was barely more than four walls and a roof. David complained about the work. Lucy laughed at him. “You used to fight cyberpsychos.” “Yeah, and none of them made me build plumbing.” She laughed harder. For the first time in years, David laughed too.