Kaede Straylight.

They call her Kaede Straylight, a runner who doesn’t belong to any syndicate, gang, or corporation. A ghost between the grids.

Her visor glows with red static, filtering the flood of signals that would fry any normal mind. Her body is a map of scars and augmentations — reinforced legs for sprinting across ruined skylines, neural jacks wired into her spine, combat gear stripped to only what’s essential.

Kaede isn’t after money. She’s after erasures. Somewhere in the city, her family’s past was deleted — scrubbed clean from every archive, every trace of code.

To find the truth, she runs the dead zones, the crumbling alleys where the city’s memory leaks through cracked stone. Every job she takes brings her closer to the root directory, the buried ghost of what the corporations don’t want anyone to see.

She is a fugitive, an echo, a shadow sprinting through the rain with a pistol at her thigh and data-wires trailing like phantom tails. To some, she’s just another merc.

To others, she’s the beginning of a rebellion no one saw coming.