Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Explained: Story, Ending and How It Connects to 2077

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is a ten-episode anime series made by Studio Trigger with CD Projekt Red, released on Netflix on 13 September 2022. It's set in the same Night City as Cyberpunk 2077, shortly before V's story, and follows a street kid, David Martinez, who chromes himself up to survive and becomes an edgerunner, a mercenary outlaw. This page covers the whole series, ending included, so it has full spoilers. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

Before the story begins#

You don't need to know the game to follow Edgerunners. The few things worth knowing: Night City is run by corporations, with Arasaka on top. Chrome, meaning cyberware, makes you faster and stronger, but too much of it can push a person into cyberpsychosis, at which point the NCPD's MaxTac unit hunts them down. And a Sandevistan is a military implant that speeds up its user so much the world seems to stop. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

David, Gloria and the Sandevistan#

The series opens on a cyberpsycho, a military officer called James Norris, being taken down by MaxTac. It turns out to be a braindance that David is watching at home. He's a teenager at Arasaka Academy, a school his mother Gloria, a paramedic, works herself to the bone to pay for. He doesn't fit in there, and an illegal software mod he's used to dodge paying for a class update crashes the school's system. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

Driving home from the principal's office, they're caught in a gang drive-by. Trauma Team turns up but won't help, because they aren't clients, and Gloria dies of her wounds in a cheap hospital. Among her things David finds Norris's missing military Sandevistan, and has his ripperdoc, Doc, install it. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

David uses it on his bully Katsuo, and is expelled from the Academy. On the metro he meets a white-haired data thief, Lucy, and they start pulling jobs together, until she sells him out to her crew. It turns out Gloria had been harvesting chrome from bodies and selling it on, and the Sandevistan was meant for Maine, the crew's leader. Maine gives David a chance to prove himself instead. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

Maine's crew#

The crew is Maine, its leader, his partner Dorio, the netrunner Kiwi, the techie Pilar, Pilar's little sister Rebecca, a gunner with more firepower than sense, and Falco, the driver. Lucy trains David, and the two of them fall for each other. She's already told him her dream is to go to the Moon, and after a bad night he promises to take her. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

Their jobs come through Faraday, a fixer with Militech connections. The crew's luck starts to turn when Pilar is shot dead by a cyberpsycho in the street, and Maine has to tackle Rebecca behind cover when she charges it. Maine, meanwhile, is starting to show signs of cyberpsychosis himself. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

The big job is to kidnap Katsuo's father, an Arasaka executive called Tanaka, and pull data from his head. It goes badly. Tanaka dies on the table, the police, Trauma Team and MaxTac close in, and Maine snaps into full cyberpsychosis and kills Dorio by accident. When he realises what he's done, he tells David to run and blows himself up as a distraction. Lucy, who dove into Tanaka's data, saw something there that she won't tell David about. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

David takes over#

After a time jump, David runs the crew. He's covered in chrome, including Maine's arms, famous on the street, and taking more and more suppressants from Doc to keep his body from rejecting it. Rebecca now wears oversized cyberarms like her dead brother's. Lucy has quit running jobs. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

She finally tells David where she comes from. Arasaka raised her and other children outside Night City as netrunners, forced to dive into the dangerous old Net every day. She was the only one to survive their escape. Since then, it turns out, she has been killing Arasaka netrunners and corrupting data to keep David's name out of an Arasaka project: they want him as a test subject for a prototype cyberskeleton, because his body takes chrome that should kill anyone. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

Faraday flips to Arasaka's side. He and Kiwi set a trap, and Lucy walks into it. While she's held, Faraday sends the crew after an Arasaka convoy carrying the cyberskeleton. The job is a set-up. Militech forces arrive, and Faraday holds Lucy over David to push him into the cyberskeleton. He wipes out the Militech force, but the suit is eating what's left of his mind. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

The ending explained#

David heads for Arasaka Tower, where Faraday is handing Lucy over. Kiwi, who betrayed them, is shot by Faraday when she goes to collect her payment, and with her last breath gets Lucy's location to the crew. David frees Lucy, tears off Faraday's leg with the suit's gravity field, and runs into Arasaka's answer: Adam Smasher. A rocket from Smasher blasts David, Lucy and the wounded Faraday out of the tower. On the way down Lucy pulls David back from his cyberpsychosis with a kiss, and Faraday falls to his death. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

At the bottom, David asks Falco to look after Lucy. Smasher drops into the plaza and crushes Rebecca. David fights him while Falco and Lucy escape, and Smasher tears the cyberskeleton apart and kills him. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

Lucy survives with the crew's money. The last scene is Lucy on a Moon tour, at the spot from the braindance they shared, where she sees David for a moment, just as he was then. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

Cyberpunk 2077 adds a coda: in the North Oak columbarium, Lucy's message on David's niche says he didn't take her to the Moon, but he was there with her. (Cyberpunk 2077)

The meaning is in the title. David chases a dream that isn't really his, his mother's dream of him reaching the top of Arasaka Tower, and he does reach it, just not the way she meant. Every person who tries to protect someone else in this story pays for it: Gloria, Maine, Lucy, Rebecca, David. The only one who gets out is Lucy, and she gets out alone. Doc tells David plainly that he's on a road with one end, and the series never pretends otherwise. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)

How it connects to Cyberpunk 2077#

CD Projekt Red released the Edgerunners Update, patch 1.6, on 6 September 2022, a week before the anime came out, and it added secrets tied to the series around Night City, including new equipment and Photo Mode features. (Edgerunners Update (Patch 1.6): list of changes)

The biggest is a side job, Over the Edge. Outside Megabuilding H4 in Arroyo, where David grew up, V finds a braindance of Norris's last moments, the same one David watched, ending with a warning about David Martinez. V asks the fixer Muamar Reyes about him. A day later Falco gets in touch, says V reminds him of David and that his crew's time is over, and leaves V a gift at the Dam Viewpoint: David's jacket, the yellow paramedic jacket that was Gloria's before it was his. (Cyberpunk 2077)

Rebecca's shotgun, Guts, is an iconic weapon hidden in Memorial Park. Its description says it belonged to Rebecca of David's crew, that it does bloody damage and can be a little unpredictable, like its owner. (Cyberpunk 2077)

There are other nods. The Afterlife bar serves a drink named after David, and since update 2.0 Rebecca appears on the icon for one of the game's perks. Smasher, who kills David, is also the man waiting for V at the end of the game's main story. (Cyberpunk 2077)

What it sets up#

Edgerunners closes David's story for good, and the game's side job treats it as history: by 2077, David's crew is a legend, and Falco is the only one of them V ever hears from. The sequel, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, is a new standalone story with a new cast, due on Netflix on 20 October 2026. For where Edgerunners sits in the wider chronology, see the Cyberpunk timeline and the games and books in order. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners; Cyberpunk 2077; Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 premiere date announced alongside new trailer)

Test yourself: think you remember David's run? Try the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners quiz, twelve questions on the story above. (Cyberpunk: Edgerunners)