By the time dinner ended, the count had quietly crossed fifty-five thousand.
Avdol hadn't touched his food.
The headache that had gripped him since boarding had settled into something heavier, taking up residence behind his eyes with the quiet authority of something that intended to stay. He barely had the strength to sit upright at the table. Joseph ran through possibilities quickly, ruled out anything alarming, and landed on the obvious answer: a seasick man, possibly fevered, who needed rest more than diagnosis.
After eating, Joseph stayed with Avdol. The rest drifted to their cabins as the sun finished its business and left the South China Sea to the dark.
In the cabin shared by Shintaro and Kakyoin, the lights went out without ceremony. A closed book on the table. Two steady sets of breathing, synchronized by proximity.
Then — cold.
Not the mild kind that invites another blanket. The kind that arrives with purpose.
Shintaro felt it as something climbing his spine with deliberate patience — thin needles of cold dragging upward, vertebra by vertebra. He frowned in his sleep and curled inward. The temperature had dropped sharply. But what woke him wasn't the cold itself.
It was the absence of motion.
The ship wasn't moving.
The constant low rhythm of hull against water, the imperceptible rocking that a body learned and accepted within hours of boarding — it was simply gone. What remained was a stillness that belonged to solid ground, not sea.
Shintaro's eyes opened.
Faint moonlight through the porthole. The cabin was dim and very, very cold. Kakyoin breathed slowly beside him, still under.
Shintaro threw off the blanket. The moment bare feet touched floor, the cold drove straight through his soles like something determined to reach the bone.
He crossed the room and pulled the door open.
White.
Dense, impenetrable fog had swallowed the deck. The railings were faint suggestions in the mist, barely visible at three meters. The world beyond them had been erased entirely.
And it was silent.
No engine vibration. No wave-slap against the hull. No groan of cables or complaint of rigging. The ship sat inside a silence so total it felt manufactured — as if someone had constructed it to this specification.
"This isn't right," Shintaro said, to no one in particular.
He didn't waste another second.
"Black Magician."
Several Black Sperm spilled from his shadow, landing with the groggy indignation of creatures pulled from sleep mid-dream.
"Over the railing," Shintaro said. "Check what's around the hull."
They didn't hesitate. They leapt.
Half a second later—
"AHHHH!!"
"It hurts — what is this thing?!"
"Main body! Main body! Something's very wrong down here!!"
The pain hit through the shared connection like a slap. Shintaro's vision snapped into theirs.
He froze.
The sea was gone.
In its place — a vast, perfectly smooth sheet of ice extended outward in every direction, faintly luminous, glowing pale blue beneath the fog like the surface of something ancient. Thick. Unbroken. Endless. The ship sat fixed at its center, locked in place as though it had always been part of the landscape.
Stand attack.
He cut the vision and turned immediately.
"Kakyoin. Wake up!"
He shook Kakyoin's shoulder — hard, once, twice.
Red hair shifted. Purple eyes opened, unfocused, then snapped alert the moment they registered Shintaro's expression.
"What happened?"
"The ship's frozen solid. Stand User." The words came out in rapid sequence. "Get dressed. I'm waking the others."
He was already through the door.
Cold fog followed him into the corridor, spreading white frost across the floorboards as it went. Behind him, Kakyoin reached for his coat with cold-stiffened fingers, exhaling a breath that clouded immediately in front of his face.
He looked through the porthole.
Nothing but white pressed against the glass.
Shintaro moved at speed, deploying half the Black Sperm as he went — letting them pour into every reachable corner of the ship like dark water finding its level, searching for anything that shouldn't be there.
He pushed open Joseph's door and pulled the blanket back without ceremony.
"Mr. Joseph. Now."
"Mm — what—" Joseph surfaced, bleary — then the cold air hit him full in the face and the blurriness evaporated instantly. "This temperature — Stand User?!"
They turned together toward the adjacent bed.
"Avdol. Avdol."
Nothing.
Avdol lay motionless, face pale and drawn, breathing deep and labored. The exhaustion of the day had pulled him somewhere beyond ordinary sleep — a heavy, feverish depth that didn't respond to voice or sound.
Shintaro made the call immediately.
"Leave him. Cover him with yours too." He looked at Joseph. "I'll station guards."
Joseph didn't argue. He wrapped both quilts around Avdol with efficient hands while Shintaro sent dozens of Black Sperm climbing onto the headboard, spreading out in a silent perimeter.
"Deck," Shintaro said. "All of us."
Five minutes later.
The fog sat on the ship like something that had decided to stay.
Polnareff hugged his own arms, teeth rattling at intervals, already wearing everything he'd been able to grab in the dark. Even his habitual tank-top confidence had capitulated to the cold without negotiation. Jotaro stood at the railing with his hands in his pockets, hat brim low, eyes moving through the mist with the slow, cutting patience of a predator deciding where the threat is coming from.
Joseph folded his arms and exhaled a cloud of white breath.
"No argument needed," he said, his voice carrying the flat gravity it took on when theatrics had been set aside. "This part of the sea doesn't freeze. What's under this fog is a Stand User who has decided we're the target."
"If Avdol were awake," Polnareff said grimly, "we could melt all of this in under a minute."
"Not an option," Jotaro said. "Forcing him awake in that state makes it worse. We deal with this ourselves."
Shintaro looked at the ice — at the way the fog sat just above its surface, concealing distance and direction with equal efficiency.
"Staying on the ship is the worst position we can hold," he said. "If the enemy attacks the hull from underneath, we don't get to choose how we go into the water. We have to move. Find the source."
"Agreed," Joseph said, the word carrying the weight of Holly is waiting behind it, even unspoken.
They lowered the rope ladder. One by one they stepped down onto the ice.
It held.
Solid. Flat. Absolute.
The fog reduced the world to white in every direction — no horizon, no depth, no edges. Standing on it felt like standing inside a sealed room that had forgotten to include walls. The instincts that governed balance and orientation began, quietly, to disagree with themselves.
"Hold the rope," Shintaro said.
The Black Sperm linked together, forming a long dark tether between each person's wrists.
They walked.
Five minutes of nothing. Breathing and footsteps and the faint creak of ice under weight — and cold that worked with patient, systematic efficiency, cutting through coats and layers, finding the places where warmth hid and extracting it.
Then Joseph stopped.
"There." He pointed toward the forward right, voice careful. "About eleven o'clock. The fog's thinner there."
They looked.
A gap had opened in the white — deliberate, shaped, unlike the random gradients that fog made naturally. Something had made room there. Left a window.
Kakyoin's voice came very quiet.
"Is it a trap?"
A long pause.
They all already knew.
[havent had a singel sale of this book think i should not rewrite this one]
[I kind of started a part time job as well but still would like it if you people at least visit my patreon page]
[update on my parttime job it was shit and am not doing it even if i used all my fucking knowledge and make a 'ideal' situation it would still fall 85$ a month i mean its not bad but they advertise at least 100$ and as i said its in a ideal situation 80$ in reality its less than 45$ so i kind of did my shift and left told them to there face that might not come tomorrow]
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