It took until he'd finished the whole chapter for it to actually sink in.
"Wait. Pilar just... died?"
Han Fumito set the magazine down.
He didn't even particularly love Pilar as a character. The guy could be a nuisance: crass, boundary-free, forever draping himself over Lucy just to get a rise out of David. But he'd never actually been a problem for David, never crossed into genuine antagonism. And Han had a soft spot for him by proxy; loving Rebecca meant tolerating her insufferable brother, and somewhere along the way Pilar had grown on him.
Even for readers who'd been completely neutral on Pilar, this chapter landed like a slap. A main character, part of the core crew, killed by a random vagrant on a street. No villain plot. No meaningful sacrifice. No arc completion. Just: present, then gone.
Brutally, absurdly gone.
It was the same disorientation he'd felt after Gloria's death in the early chapters, that gut-level "wait, that doesn't happen" reaction when a manga decides the normal rules don't apply.
Han stared at the last panel and thought: whoever draws this is not a normal person.
He was not alone in this conclusion.
---
In the online group chat:
{ForceKing: "What the HELL"}
{ForceKing: "Did you all see the new chapter?"}
{ForceKing: "Why is someone just suddenly dead??"}
Shuu Fumiya had picked up his copy from the news stand earlier, not a subscriber; he bought each issue fresh as it appeared. He'd gotten home, poured himself a cola, opened the chat, and seen ForceKing's messages right as he was about to start reading.
He felt his curiosity spike and immediately looked away from the screen.
{EngineerBro: "Who died?"}
{ForceKing: "Pilar died."}
Pilar. Shuu remembered him immediately: Rebecca's brother, the crew technician who'd talked David into the gold-hand augment and caused way too many scenes with Lucy.
Pilar dead. How? Arasaka finally making a move?
The group chat was already building into a proper argument. Shuu made a decision and switched his monitor off.
"No, I'm reading this myself first."
He took a breath, opened the magazine to the Edgerunners chapter, and read it front to back. Just like every other fan: first he got absorbed in the warmth of the chapter's opening half, with David and Lucy, the ambiguity thickening between them, and the ease of the crew feeling like family. The chapter had that lived-in comfort that made the drop hit harder.
A vagrant. Urinating publicly. Pilar getting irritated.
He'd barely processed the scene before Pilar's head was gone from his shoulders.
"..."
He said nothing for a long moment. Then:
"What."
Not a question. Just an involuntary word.
That hadn't been a nobody vagrant. The visual cues were there in retrospect: the glitching eyes, Maine's sudden attention, Pilar noticing the implants too late and saying "that's some serious hardware." A cyber-psycho, running blind on overloaded augmentation.
Still. A crew member, taken out like that.
He thought about David's kill shot and the deliberate misdirection in the panels. The blood on David's face, the apparent headshot, and then the arm rising from behind. The horrible realisation that the throat hit hadn't been enough. He'd gone cold for a second.
Then Maine's fist, and it was over.
Shuu turned his monitor back on.
The chat had gone completely feral. He scrolled.
{ScienceEndsInGod: "David really isn't experienced enough, that's obvious; who goes for the throat on a cyber-psycho?"}
{BunnyBunnySqueak: "Oh, so it actually was a cyber-psycho; I genuinely thought he was just a vagrant."}
{GalaxySoldier: "Easy to say. It was David's first kill."}
{ForceKing: "The scary part is how many cyber-psychos there apparently are in Night City."}
{GalaxySoldier: "No kidding; you'd be on edge every time you walked past anyone."}
{SomeonesClearlyMad: "First kill, you don't think, you react."}
{SomeonesClearlyMad: "Also who expects a throat shot to be non-lethal??"}
{NetromancerBeetrayed: "Whoever wrote this manga has something medically wrong with their head."}
...
Shuu hadn't seen this group chat this alive in months. Most of the regulars, including himself, ForceKing, GalaxySoldier, and NetromancerBeetrayed, were the core of what had once been a bigger community. Time and real life had quieted a lot of old members down; they'd stopped posting but hadn't left, lurking under dozens of handles, keeping an eye on things without speaking.
Today, Pilar's death had dragged all of them back to the surface.
[Translated and Rewritten by Shika_Kagura]