Kaede

Kaede keeps her dark-gray hair cropped into a bob and looks out through brown eyes. Black-framed glasses sit on her face, and she dresses in a gray top with a bright scarf of yellow and red draped around her.

Behind a frail, grieving exterior, Kaede proves capable of sudden nerve, wresting a shotgun from her captor and dictating terms. Long resigned to her illness and unversed in the money matters her late husband once handled, she carries a quiet weariness that in the end gives way to a fragile willingness to go on.

A visit to withdraw her savings turns to panic when a punishing exchange rate guts the value of Kaede's money. As Batou tries to calm her, armed robbers storm the bank, and the guard on duty, Nashida, reveals himself as their accomplice and takes her hostage at gunpoint. When Batou points out that the stolen cash can be traced, Kaede flips the situation, flooring Nashida, claiming his shotgun, and demanding that Batou find a way to launder the funds.

With police ringing the building, she presses Batou into carrying messages while she tells her captors about her dead husband and the savings she meant to spend on euthanasia in Switzerland, a plan born of her terminal illness. She learns that the Synchronized Global Default caused the collapse she never saw coming, having left every financial concern to her husband. Batou stakes his own money to buy and flip QWE cryptocurrency for a profit, and in the end Kaede chooses to hold on a while longer, departing for Honolulu until she is ready to face her death.