Rebecca's death in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners — the writer says killing her was "a pleasure"

Edgerunners premiered on Netflix on September 13, 2022: ten episodes from Studio Trigger and CD Projekt Red, set in the Night City of Cyberpunk 2077 and directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi. Rebecca is the crew's tiny, foul-mouthed gunner with a shotgun almost as big as she is, voiced by Tomoyo Kurosawa in Japanese and Alex Cazares in English. She shows up in episode 3 and falls for David Martinez, who's busy falling for someone else.

The story ended with season 1. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2, which premiered on October 20, is a standalone story with a new cast.

How Rebecca dies

It happens in episode 10, "My Moon My Man." The fixer Faraday has kidnapped Lucy and used her to force David into a prototype military cyberskeleton. The crew storms Arasaka Tower to get her back, and Arasaka sends Adam Smasher, its full-body cyborg, to recover the suit.

Rebecca opens fire on Smasher. He lands on her and crushes her into the ground. She dies instantly. A few minutes later, Smasher gets to David too.

Rebecca isn't the first in her family to go that way. Her older brother, Pilar, is killed in episode 4, and Imaishi staged both deaths the same way, showing each from three different points of view.

"A pleasure"

Bartosz Sztybor, who co-wrote the story and is showrunner on the sequel, addressed both deaths at Netflix's panel at Anime Expo in July 2025. He started with David: "I wanted to say it was a pleasure writing that, but it was not." Then he moved on to Rebecca.

"But it was a pleasure killing Rebecca, so I'm sorry for that," Sztybor said.

He also confirmed she's really dead. At the same event, he explained the show's general mood: "people in Poland are sad. They are born sad, they die sad."

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The character who almost wasn't

Rebecca didn't exist in the earliest drafts. Her role belonged to a male character named Kyle, until CD Projekt Red and Trigger agreed to change the character's gender. By the fourth draft, she had her name.

Then CD Projekt Red's staff voted to remove her, arguing that she looked too childlike for the world of Cyberpunk 2077. Trigger refused: "the loli must stay." One of the CDPR developers later admitted he felt guilty about the vote and called her the production's "best girl."

From there, she only got bigger:

• Screenwriter Masahiko Otsuka and Imaishi rewrote the plot around episode 7, which gave her a much larger role.
• She became one of the show's most cosplayed characters and was nominated for Best Supporting Character at the Crunchyroll Anime Awards.

When Cyberpunk 2077 added items from the show in a September 2022 update, Rebecca's shotgun, Guts, went in too. It's hidden in a bush in Corpo Plaza, in the shadow of Arasaka Tower.

Previously we wrote: Pinocchio: Unstrung deaths: who dies, who survives, and whether Geppetto is really dead