Ayumi was still a junior editor, and ultimately she trusted the author's judgment, even when the story beat made her uneasy. Aoyama was also a new name in the field, and while Edgerunners had briefly cracked the top ten in one reader poll, it hadn't drawn sustained attention from senior editors or the editor-in-chief, Oumi Hiroshi, yet.
So Ayumi kept the decision to herself. The chapter went through.
The latest issue of Manga World GoGo printed on schedule and went out: by mail subscription, news stands, and convenience stores across the city.
Han Fumito was a subscriber. His copy arrived Saturday morning to the mailbox downstairs.
"Thanks, Delivery-san!"
He collected the magazine and his father's newspaper and trotted up the stairs, left the newspaper on the living room table, and disappeared into his room with the manga journal clutched against his chest.
He'd been following Edgerunners long enough that it had become the event he planned his weekends around.
The worldbuilding was the main hook for him. The implant culture especially: how everything in Night City was built around the physical augmentation of the human body. Maine's cannon-arm. The blade-install school of combat. The hacker's hardline approach, jacking into enemy systems to crash their implant networks mid-battle. And the utterly alien decision to voluntarily surrender healthy limbs in exchange for superior hardware, not because something had been lost, but because the trade was considered a logical upgrade.
"Flesh is weakness. Machine is transcendence."
That idea lived in other sci-fi too, but nothing quite ran with it this freely. Most genre fiction kept implants in the context of loss, such as prosthetics for the injured. Edgerunners was built on something colder: augmentation as ambition.
Then the neural ports. Everyone jacking directly into the net. The concept made Han's head swim a little every time he revisited it.
That combination of serious, almost-clinical hard sci-fi worldbuilding, wrapped in genuinely beautiful art, had cemented him as a dedicated reader. He'd started bringing issues to school. More readers had emerged. At this point there was a small informal Edgerunners discussion club operating in breaks between classes.
He found the chapter and started reading.
Picking up where the last issue left off: David, armed with the Sandevistan's bullet-time capability, had been running jobs back-to-back with Maine's crew. He was settling in. The team was working, with David, Pilar, Rebecca, and Kiwi becoming something like companions. The chemistry showed.
And threading through all of it, visible in the careful way David watched Lucy from across rooms, was the unspoken weight of something not yet named; Maine and Dorio had both noticed. Maine quietly arranged for Lucy to take David on evening runs, for training. In their time together, something began to answer that pull.
Lucy smoking, watching David with complicated eyes. Maine observing it all from a distance, his expression knowing.
Meanwhile David kept improving. He went back to the black market ripperdoc to get additional augments installed, stacking his capability higher, job by job.
In a quieter moment, David and Maine talked. About Lucy.
"A year ago, Kiwi brought her in," Maine said. "Said she was a natural-born talent."
"And before that?"
David, wanting more.
"I don't have the details. If you want them, ask her yourself." Maine looked at him with something that wasn't quite a challenge. "What I care is whether someone can work with me."
David smiled. "Same."
They bumped fists, Maine's massive cannon-arm unit against David's still-original knuckles. The visual gap was stark, but the gesture was exactly right.
Han grinned.
There was something about the uncomplicated warmth of that moment, the mutual recognition between a mentor who'd been used to carrying everything alone and a kid who was finally starting to figure out what he was capable of, that landed cleanly.
Up to this point, the chapter had built entirely on warmth. The whole run of David's integration into Maine's crew: finding the solid elder-brother energy in Maine, the quiet emotional intelligence in Dorio who always seemed to know what people needed, the unpredictable chaos of Pilar, Kiwi's wordless precision at the keyboard, and Rebecca's paradox -- explosive with Pilar, somehow patient with David.
All of it was painting the portrait of something David hadn't had in a long time, something like belonging.
And then...
[Translated and Rewritten by Shika_Kagura]