The next page opened on the crew walking through a Night City street together; all of them, side by side, briefly ordinary.
Then a figure appeared ahead of them.
Thin. Blank-faced. A vagrant standing on top of a shipping container, openly urinating into a metal drum.
The sound carried.
"Seriously?!" Pilar raised his voice at the guy. No reaction. The vagrant kept going, completely unfazed.
"Ugh," Kiwi muttered.
"Annoying," Lucy said under her breath.
Pilar's patience ran dry. He flipped the vagrant his golden middle finger. "What's wrong with you? Some kind of idiot, pissing in the street?!"
Still nothing.
Pilar stepped forward and knocked on the container. "Hey. You couldn't hear me?"
"Leave it," Dorio said simply. She and Maine were already walking forward, and the rest of the crew followed.
Pilar stayed put, grumbling.
"Dumbass," Rebecca muttered at his back.
He wasn't done. The vagrant wasn't acknowledging him, which was the one thing Pilar couldn't handle. He pulled himself up onto the container in one smooth motion, got right up in the guy's space.
"Still going? Listen. You can't do this here, you hear me? This walkway belongs to..."
Han Fumito lifted an eyebrow at the manga in his hands. This was a weird scene.
The vagrant's eyes had been doing something, flickering and repeating, like a visual glitch drawn into the panels. And Pilar had just noticed something on the vagrant's body, in the middle of his lecture.
"Wait... what kind of rig is that? That's some serious hardware on you..."
From across the street, Maine's eyes suddenly cut to Pilar. Something in his posture changed.
Too slow.
"I bet you use that thing every day for..."
Pilar made an obscene gesture with his hand.
And then his head exploded.
Not metaphorically.
All that remained above the neckline was bare neck and a fragment of jaw.
Han blinked once. Then he saw the vagrant's arm had transformed, reshaped into a gun barrel. The spread of blood hit the panel like a fountain, spraying upward into the night air.
In that same instant, David's Sandevistan activated involuntarily. The world turned green. Everything slowed. In the frozen tableau of bullet-time: his friend's body, still somehow standing, head reduced to nothing. The vagrant's arm still trained in that direction.
"Da... vid... get... clear..."
Maine's voice reached him slowed-down, stretched. And then the arm swivelled toward David, and a grenade was already airborne.
Maine moved first, with a flying kick that sent David sideways out of the blast radius just as the explosion hit.
Everyone came back to speed all at once. Weapons out. Combat.
"That bastard... Pilar's down!"
Dorio, furious.
"There's gray matter on me," Kiwi said, with the tone of someone describing a minor inconvenience.
"Give me that...!"
Rebecca didn't wait. She snatched a pistol from Dorio's hand and opened fire at the vagrant, screaming.
Han, who'd been sitting completely still since Pilar's death, lurched back into the chapter as the fight erupted across the next several pages. He couldn't look away.
"Nobody gets to kill him but me!"
The vagrant fired again. Maine tackled Rebecca bodily clear of the grenade. She slithered out of his grip, used his head as a stepping stone, and kept shooting with a gun she'd produced from somewhere impossible.
Meanwhile Maine's arm-cannon malfunctioned. The mechanism seized at the worst possible moment.
"Kiwi, reboot Rebecca's system, now."
"On it."
Kiwi's eyes went distant. A pulse of electricity arced through Rebecca's neural port. She dropped.
David finally unfroze. His first thought was elsewhere.
"Where's Lucy?"
He found her, close to the vagrant, jacked in. She'd tried to crash his systems. It half-worked: his hardware sparked and smoked, but he didn't go down. And now he'd locked onto her as the primary target.
A grenade detonated two metres from Lucy, throwing fire and debris.
David's jaw set.
"You...!"
He went straight at the vagrant.
A round fired. Green world. The Sandevistan spine markings blazed in the panel. David teleported, blinking directly beside the vagrant.
A flash of his mother Gloria's face, crossing his memory uninvited.
He pressed the muzzle to the vagrant's throat and pulled the trigger. A clean hole opened. Blood covered David's face instantly.
The vagrant swayed.
The first thing David did was look at Lucy.
"Lucy...!"
She looked back at him, at his face drenched red, eyes wide with something that wasn't quite relief yet, and smiled. "I'm fine."
He exhaled. "Good."
Lucy stood there, watching that expression shift from barely-controlled fury to something wide open and relieved; for a moment she didn't move. Something had caught in her chest and she couldn't name it.
Blood was running from her hairline.
And then, above David's shoulder, an augmented arm rose from behind. Gun barrel extended. Aimed.
Lucy snapped back.
Not just her; Han, reading at his desk, nearly dropped his magazine.
Maine's fist connected a moment later. The vagrant's head left its body entirely.
He was finished.
Rebecca pointed both guns at the airborne skull and reduced it to fragments. Then she turned to what was left of Pilar and shot apart the remaining jaw fragment below his neck, leaving only bare shoulders, and spat.
"End of chapter."
Han Fumito sat back.
He realised he'd read the whole chapter without noticing it end.
[Translated and Rewritten by Shika_Kagura]