Parallel World Light Novelist

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David Martinez had sacrificed everything, laid down every scrap of his humanity, and paid the ultimate price to realize one simple dream.

Help Lucy reach the moon.

When he had first confessed his feelings to her, he promised that he would make her dream a reality. David kept that promise, even though it cost him his life. He was a man of his word until the very end.

The atmosphere among the audience was heavy, suffocating, and filled with an overwhelming urge to weep. Yet, despite the pain, Kagura was ready to shout from the rooftops that this anime was a masterpiece. After finishing Madoka Magica last year, Kagura believed she would never be so deeply moved by another series again. But the tenth episode of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners had delivered that exact same emotional gut-punch.

Kagura wasn’t the only one experiencing a mental blankness. Seven or eight out of every ten fans who had watched the full ten-episode run were in the same state. They wanted to cry but felt too drained to do so. Their minds were flooded with images of David and Lucy, accompanied by the haunting melody of the series’ theme song, ”I Really Want to Stay at Your House.”

”So, that’s it? Haruto really ended it like that? What about Lucy’s actual ending? Is she just stuck there?”

”I’m not sure, but seeing her have hallucinations of David on the moon feels wrong. Is she losing her mind? Is she falling into Cyberpsychosis too?”

”Probably not. That’s just how much she misses him. Not every mental break in this show has to be Cyberpsychosis.”

”Rebecca... David... I’m literally drowning in my own tears,”

”I haven’t cried since Madoka Magica ended. Tonight, I was sobbing so hard I couldn’t breathe. Is it just me? Am I too sensitive?”

”You’re not alone. I feel terrible. I thought I’d watch the finale and go to bed, but now I’m wide awake and miserable.”

”Same here. There’s no way I’m sleeping tonight.”

”Haruto needs to pay for his crimes, but I have to admit, this anime is a divine work of art.”

”This plot touched me deeper than anything else. It honestly made me want to cry even more than Madoka did.”

”But is this really the end? Adam Smasher killed Rebecca and David, and he just gets to walk away scot-free?”

”There has to be a second season, right? There’s no way it ends here.”

”Exactly. No anime ends with the protagonist being brutally murdered by the villain while the villain laughs it off. That’s just bad writing if there isn’t a sequel.”

”I agree. A second season is definitely coming. Haruto is playing the long game. Maybe David isn’t completely dead? Maybe he’ll come back as a construct in Season 2?”

”Does anyone here work at Haruto’s studio, Haru-Yuki Animation? Can anyone give us a leak?”

”Who would dare? Even if they knew, they wouldn’t risk their career. Those non-disclosure agreements in the industry are no joke.”

Throughout the night, Haruto remained the number one trending topic across every anime forum and social media platform. ”Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Finale,” ”Rebecca’s Death,” ”David is Dead,” and ”Cyberpunk Season 2 Rumors” occupied almost every slot on the top ten trending lists. For industry professionals, the situation felt incredibly familiar. It was almost a carbon copy of the explosion that occurred when Madoka Magica went viral the previous year. Madoka’s influence had continued to grow for two months after its conclusion before reaching its absolute peak. Everyone wondered if Edgerunners was following the same trajectory.

The next morning, AniSphere Forum released the updated user rating for the series based on a million fan reviews. It sat at a staggering 9.8 out of 10, identical to the rating for Puella Magi Madoka Magica. This number alone was enough to send shockwaves through the animation industry.

By noon, the Tokyo TV1 network released the viewership ratings for the previous night’s finale. The number was a massive 6.01 percent. When this data went public, the industry felt a jolt of shock.

Was it real? Had he broken the 6 percent barrier again? This was beyond comprehension. In an era where the anime industry had seen a slight decline compared to twenty years ago, a 6 percent rating was a once-in-a-decade phenomenon. For a single creator to achieve this feat with two different works was unheard of.

Haruto and his studio, Haru-Yuki Animation, were now viewed as titans within the industry. By the afternoon, the talented animators and producers that Haru-Yuki had been quietly headhunting from other major studios began calling in. Nearly half of the candidates they had previously contacted reached out to express their eager desire to join the team. Yukino was buried under a mountain of paperwork and recruitment calls, as she was the one managing the personnel department.

Meanwhile, Haruto sat in his office, looking at the 6.01 percent figure.

He let out a long, slow breath. As he expected, Madoka Magica was not an easy mountain to climb. Madoka’s finale had hit 6.30 percent, while Edgerunners settled at 6.01 percent. Although both were massive hits, it was clear that Edgerunners was just a half-step behind the peak of Madoka.

After reviewing the ratings, Haruto turned his attention to his account, which was flooded with over a million messages. Most were fans venting their grief or begging for information about a second season.

The fans could sense that the story of Night City felt incomplete. It was incomplete. What kind of story allows a villain like Adam Smasher to slaughter the protagonist and a fan-favorite heroine and then just keep on living? If the series ended here permanently, fans twenty years from now would still be cursing Haruto’s name.

The fans’ instincts were close to the mark, but there wouldn’t be a ”Season 2” in the traditional sense. Instead, Haruto planned to release two movies with a combined runtime of over three hours, to be sold alongside the Blu-ray sets. These movies would cover the plot of the original Cyberpunk 2077 game.

The story would follow a ”Nomad” or ”Streetkid” named V, showing how this Night City legend rose from nothing. It would detail the heist on Arasaka Tower with his best friend Jackie, the theft of the bio-chip, and the moment V is forced to slot the chip into his own head. The chip contained the digital soul of Johnny Silverhand, a legendary rockerboy and terrorist. The two of them, a living human and a digital ghost, would eventually join forces to seek revenge against their common enemy: Arasaka Corporation.

The plot of the original game was vast. Even after trimming away the tedious side quests, it required two full-length movies to tell the story properly. Haruto had anticipated this from the start. While the TV series was being animated, the production for the movies had been running in parallel. Over the next two months, after the TV Blu-rays hit the shelves, these movies would be released to the public.

Having learned from his experience with Madoka Magica, Haruto was now a master of planning these multimedia rollouts.

He knew that the story of V in 2077 might not be as intimately heartbreaking as the story of David and Lucy in Edgerunners. The game’s plot was focused more on exposing the darkness of Night City and fleshing out the cyberpunk world, rather than the relentless emotional torment found in the anime. However, the primary purpose of these two movies was to broaden the world-building and, more importantly, to give the audience what they craved.

Seeing V absolutely demolish Adam Smasher.

It was meant to give the project a sense of closure. David couldn’t beat Smasher, but his spirit would be inherited by V. In the movies, V would complete a side quest to obtain David’s iconic yellow jacket. Furthermore, in the game, a patch had been released after the anime aired that allowed players to find Rebecca’s green shotgun near the spot where she died. Haruto’s plan was to have V find and use that very shotgun in the movie.

Seeing V storm Arasaka Tower wearing David’s jacket and wielding Rebecca’s weapon to turn Adam Smasher into scrap metal would be the ultimate revenge. This was Haruto’s final act of kindness toward his fans. He didn’t want them to suffer like the fans in the other world, who were left with nothing but the image of Smasher killing David. If those fans wanted revenge, they had to buy a game and play for dozens of hours to reach that point.

Haruto would announce these plans over the coming week.

But for now, he picked up a different file. Inside were the distribution details for the first volume of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Blu-ray, which was set to go on sale tomorrow. This was the true test.

Viewership ratings were just a reference.

The real measure of an anime’s success was the number of Blu-rays it could sell to the hardcore fans.