"Aoyama-sensei... you're serious?" Ryo Shien asked, his voice barely a whisper in the hush of the conference room. He stared at the whiteboard, where Aoyama had just scrawled the outline for the manga's final arc.
The 'Visitors' from LightSpeed were collectively frozen, their expressions a mix of horror and professional fascination. They had come here to talk about a game, but they had just been given the ultimate spoiler for the source material.
"Dead serious," Aoyama said, snapping the cap back onto his marker. "In the end, everyone except Lucy and the backup driver dies. It's the only ending that makes sense. It's a tragedy. A cybernetic requiem."
The room went cold.
The celebratory energy that had been building since the contract signing vanished, replaced by a stunned, hollow silence. Even the air-conditioning hum seemed to drop an octave. Ryo Shien's mouth opened, but no sound came out for several seconds. He looked like he'd just been told his favorite childhood pet had been sent to a "farm" upstate.
Ayumi, standing just behind Aoyama, let out a soft, sharp intake of breath. She gripped the back of her chair so hard her knuckles turned white.
"Wait... wait a minute," Ryo stammered, his eyes wide. "You said only Lucy and Falco survive? What about David? What about the protagonist?"
Aoyama gave a small, tired shrug. "He dies. In Night City, there are no living legends."
A ripple of shock went through the younger members of the tech team. Watanabe, the senior dev who had been so arrogant just an hour ago, looked genuinely pained. For them, Edgerunners wasn't just a business asset anymore; it was a story they'd begun to live in.
"But... he's the hero!" Ryo protested, his voice rising in disbelief. "Can't you... can't you let him live? Give him a win? Let him and Lucy escape together?"
"If I did that, the story would lose its weight," Aoyama explained, his gaze distant.
He wasn't the original creator, but he understood the soul of the work better than anyone in this world. "A 'happily ever after' in a world like Night City is a lie. It's cheap. If David survives, if everyone makes it out, then the setting doesn't matter. The stakes don't matter. It becomes just another generic action series that people forget a month after it ends."
He looked at Ryo, seeing the genuine grief in the man's eyes. "A tragedy is meant to be etched into the soul of the reader. It's meant to hurt. Because that pain is what makes you remember the names of the people who fell."
"But it's so cruel..." Ayumi whispered, her voice trembling.
"It is," Aoyama agreed. "But look at it this way. If the game is ready when the fans reach the end of the manga... if they see David fall to someone like Adam Smasher in Arasaka Tower... don't you think they'll be lining up to buy your game just for a chance to kick that bastard's teeth in?"
The logic hit Ryo like a lightning bolt. His expression shifted from grief to a dark, calculative resolve. "You mean... we give the fans the closure the story denies them? We let them finish what David started?"
"Exactly," Aoyama said, a faint, sharp light in his eyes. "We build a 1:1 recreation of Night City. We put Arasaka Tower at the center of it. And we let the players settle the score."
The partnership was no longer just about technology and money. It was about shared spite.
---
Aoyama walked out of the Manga World building twenty minutes later, the weight of the collective grief he'd just inflicted still lingering on his shoulders.
At the front desk, Pochita was waiting. He'd been unusually quiet, his head resting on his paws. The moment he saw Aoyama, he sprang up, his tail whipping back and forth like a metronome on overdrive.
"Did you wait long, buddy?" Aoyama asked, kneeling down to unhook the leash from the desk. He buried his hand in the dog's thick, sun-warmed fur. "Let's go home."
"Woof!"
"Aoyama-sensei!"
He turned to see Ayumi running toward them. She stopped a few feet away, her eyes red-rimmed and her expression deeply somber. She looked even more dejected than Pochita had been five minutes ago.
"Is it... is it really true?" she asked, her voice low. "Why does it have to be David?"
Aoyama looked at her, his heart heavy. In his past life, he'd spent nights staring at his ceiling after finishing the anime, feeling that same hollow ache. He knew exactly what she was feeling.
"The greatest meaning of a tragedy is to be remembered," he said, and for once, there was no trace of his usual lazy irony. "I want David Martinez to live in the hearts of every reader in this country. I want them to carry his memory for years. And for that to happen... he has to fall."
He gave her a small, sad nod. "I know I sounds like a heartless bastard, Ayumi. But some stories are only finished when the curtain falls on a funeral."
He turned and walked away into the late afternoon sun, Pochita trotting happily by his side, blissfully unaware of the emotional wreckage his master had just left behind.
[Translated and Rewritten by Shika_Kagura]