Fanfic / Cyberpunk Edgerunners: Distortion

Cyberpunk Edgerunners: Distortion is a Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Peggy Sue fanfic by Nightmare 72364 on Archive of Our Own.

After his death at the hands of Adam Smasher, David is given a second chance at life by the powers that be, being sent back in time to the day after he punched out Katsuo Tanaka at Arasaka Academy. He then decides to take a different approach to being an edgerunner: instead of going full-borg, he chooses to remain mostly organic as he hones his skills towards stealth and guerilla tactics. This decision comes to shape his life as he forges his own destiny in his new life.

This fic contains examples of:

Main Fic

• Adaptational Badass: While David doesn’t have the full-borg body or the Cyberskeleton, he has something better: the Gamer (or at the very least something like it), based on the skill system from Cyberpunk 2077. As a result, he’s MUCH more of a potential threat than he ever was in the last timeline.
• Adaptational Relationship Overhaul:
  • Because Rebecca is the first to meet David this time around, she ends up growing closer to him and becoming his girlfriend. Or, at least, his first girlfriend.
  • Kiwi is far closer to the crew than she was in canon thanks to David helping her regain her faith in others.
• Adaptational Wimp: Zigzagged. David doesn’t have his full-borg chrome, making him much squishier in comparison to how he used to be, but he also has the Gamer and his newfound stealth skills to make up for his relative lack of firepower.
• Asshole Victim: It's hard to feel bad for Tanaka and Jimmy Kurosaki when they were the people responsible for the downward spiral that hit Maine's crew in the previous timeline.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: David starts cultivating his personal image in the Solo world by dressing himself up in a snazzy suit, which he proceeds to wear when tearing through Scavs like wet paper.
• The Blacksmith: More “the weaponsmith”, but still applies. David has begun to dabble in customizing and upgrading various weapons both for Rebecca and for other clients, and turns out to be fairly good at it.
• Child by Rape: To his horror, Maine discovers that David was conceived after someone raped Gloria, with Gloria choosing not to abort her child because she believed that it wasn't the child's fault for existing. It is later revealed that Oleg, a corrupt Trauma Team debt collector with ties to Scavengers, was the one responsible for this.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Jimmy Kurosaki is subject to some well-deserved torture from David and Lucy after he's captured.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Kiwi was once a corporate Joytoy owned by Jerome Lobe, who subjected her to unwanted biosculpting and abuse from himself and his friends before she managed to escape with Faraday's help. Unfortunately, Faraday's help came with the price of making her pay off the debt she owes him for his services in return for letting her daughter live a good life away from Night City, leaving her traumatized and unwilling to trust others as a result of being used, abused, and manipulated throughout her life before she met David.
• The Dreaded: David’s new reputation as the Boogeyman has garnered him some serious notoriety among a good deal of Night City’s merc community, as well as the Scavs.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • David and his friends are disgusted at how utterly depraved Tanaka and Oleg are after they overhear the conversation Tanaka had with Oleg on buying a prostitute from the latter, with David in a state of ice-cold rage at hearing that Oleg was the one who raped his mom.
  • Maine, Dorio, and Kiwi are horrified to discover that Oleg kept a collection of engrams containing the digital 'souls' of his victims after they kill the loathsome Scavenger.
• Evil Debt Collector: Oleg is a Trauma Team debt collector who moonlights as a Scavenger involved in Night City's sordid sex trade, and is an absolutely loathsome excuse for a human being responsible for raping David's mother.
• Eye Scream: It's mentioned that David reduced Faraday's eyes from four to two after the Tanaka job both as payback for the wicked fixer's depredations against David and his loved ones and as Rogue's message to the corpo-wannabe that his days are numbered.
• Fusion Dance: System and Lucy decide to let CGI merge themselves together after David refuses to let Lucy kill System despite all the pain she brought them.
• Godzilla Threshold: Lucy built herself a cyberdeck containing Hades, one of the rogue A.I.s from the reaches beyond the Blackwall, for situations where regular netrunning and hacking wouldn't make the cut. She later releases Hades when the crew end up facing off against Elizabeth, one of Kiwi's old captors from the Syndicate, due to how outgunned they are against her forces.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Syndicate serves as one for Kiwi and David due to how they were involved in the tragedies both people faced in their lives.
• Hand Cannon: Dorio's new pistol, Hellgiver, is an Overture revolver modified to fire .666-caliber rounds capable of punching through armor without any adjustments to the bullets themselves.
• Hate Sink: Oleg manages to tick all the boxes for "horrible excuse of a human being" before and after his death, especially after Maine, Dorio, and Kiwi discover that he used Arasaka's Soul Killer program to turn David's mom into his virtual Sex Slave.
• Hope Spot: Zeke and his girlfriend are set to leave Night City for a better life in chapter 24... only for Wraiths sent by the Syndicate to destroy the convoy they're in.
• I Have Your Wife: Faraday forced Kiwi into his service by making her pay off the "debt" she owes him for spiriting her away from Jerome Lobe in exchange for letting her newborn daughter live a safe life far away from Night City.
• Internal Reveal: David eventually reveals to the crew that he is a Peggy Sue and has an otherworldly power in "Cat's Outta the Bag".
• It's Personal: The Syndicate's massacre of Zeke's convoy, along with their kidnapping of Kiwi amidst the chaos, sends David into a righteous fury as he vows to make them suffer for their transgressions, something that manages to unsettle Rogue when he meets with her at Afterlife.
• Jealous Romantic Witness: Falco has a deep resentment toward David for having a healthier relationship with Kiwi than he could ever have back when he and the older netrunner were dating, though he eventually cools off somewhat.
• Karmic Death: Tanaka and Jimmy Kurosaki are driven insane by Lucy via the same methods that Jimmy himself used to break his victims (with some tweaks here and there courtesy of Sasha Yakoleva's old code from her last job) before letting both men rip each other apart in their mad frenzy. Given how Tanaka was a sadistic gorehound of a corpo and Jimmy a massive scumbag who exploited countless people for his twisted "art", having them die in the exact same manner as their victims gives their last moments a poetically ironic sense of justice for all the people they hurt.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: David ends up beating Oleg within an inch of his life after tearing through the Scav leader's forces like wet paper while in a dissociative fugue from having to deal with hallucinations of his past life.
• No Kill like Overkill: Kiwi, with some help from CGI, uses her hacking skills to breach Elizabeth's personal server and pump her full of daemons to disable her while she's fighting David. While it doesn't kill Elizabeth, it occupies her long enough for David to immobilize her before he delivers a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on the sadistic ex-Maelstrom ganger.
• Oh, Crap!: David and the crew end up panicking when they find out that Tanaka manged to loan out Adam freaking Smasher from Yorinobu Arasaka himself as security, only managing to escape after Smasher decided let them go so he could better monitor David's progress.
• Off with Her Head!: Lucy decapitates Elizabeth with her monowire just as the ex-Maelstrom ganger was about to attack David and Kiwi while they were in the middle of escaping her camp.
• One-Man Army: David. While he’s not nearly as tanky as he was with his excessive augments in his last go-around, he is still more than capable of utterly devastating an entire army, as proven with the Maelstrom gangoons who kidnapped Rebecca.
• Papa Wolf: Maine is practically David's father in all but blood and takes his duty to protect his adoptive son very seriously.
• Polyamory: David gets into a relationship with Lucy, Rebecca, and Kiwi in the new timeline.
• Seen It All: David tells Jimmy Kurosaki the XBD that he's hooked him up to is nothing compared to what he went through in his previous life, simply laughing at the braindance architect's attempts to drive him crazy.
• Shout-Out: David ends up making the Cerberus weapons from Gungrave.
• Spoiled Brat: Ivanka Akilisov is the obnoxious corpo heir-apparent to SovOil who behaves like everything should revolve around her whims and immediately mocks Rebecca for her short stature when she first meets the merc.
• Wham Episode:
  • "Amen to that Sister, Part 3" sees Maine, Kiwi, and Dorio find out that Oleg has ties to Arasaka's highest echelons after they discover that Oleg has a collection of engrams made via Soul Killer.
  • "Until All Become One" reveals that System is actually an alternate version of Lucy who snapped after witnessing David's death and went on the warpath against Arasaka, only for her to get hit with Soulkiller after Arasaka captured her.
• Yandere: System is obsessed with making David hers and keeping him safe, no matter the costs she may incur. Much of this stems from her experience as an alternate-timeline version of Lucy who became obsessed with avenging David's death at the hands of Adam Smasher, only for her to be dissected and soulkilled by Arasaka, after which she ran into the being who would later be known as CGI and requested that it help her save David via the engram Arasaka had from him.
• Your Head Asplode: Maine crushes Oleg's head into paste after David and Kiwi respectively beat the Scav black and blue and ripped his mind apart while scouring his brain for information.

Omakes

• Adaptational Badass: A more minor case, but the “Old Man David” Omakes follow an older and more grizzled David who is one of the legends of Night City, someone who predates even Johnny Silverhand and who Adam Smasher thinks of as a rival. That said, it’s implied this David has most of the same types of equipment as his counterpart, but he’s just more experienced and skilled with it.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: Old Man David has two suits: a somewhat rumpled one that he wears when V first meets him in at the Afterlife, and a combat-worthy variant he puts on to help V in her attack against Arasaka.
• Didn't See That Coming: Rebecca and David’s hobby of making Braindances (albeit edited to preserve their identities) to sell for a bit of money ends up causing a wave of BD addictions and potentially helps stave off or lessen Cyberpsychosis. The reason being that the idea of a humble and fulfilling domestic life full of love is simply so alien to the dystopia of Cyberpunk.
• For Want Of A Nail: The “Local NekoRunner” omakes follow a subplot that begins with David inadvertently saving Sasha (the net runner from the “Let You Down” MV) and taking her back to his apartment so that he and his mother can help her. After she heals, the two start a relationship, with Sasha getting out of the Cyberpunk lifestyle and helping David find other schooling besides Arasaka Academy.
• Ultimate Blacksmith: “Old Man David” is this, with even his more shoddy works apparently go for a fortune on the street. He even got his hands on Johnny Silverhand’s Malorian Arms 3516, which he turned from a Hand Cannon into an absolute monster that can shred through dozens of people in a single shot.