"Even if it's a trap, we still have to go look." Polnareff stepped forward without waiting for consensus. "There's nothing else out here to navigate by. We have no other choice."
The group followed him into the thinning mist — and every one of them stopped breathing at the same moment.
On the perfectly flat ice, three mounds had been raised from the frozen earth. Crude and small and unmistakably deliberate.
Graves.
Crooked wooden markers had been jammed into each mound at imprecise angles, leaning like things put in place in darkness by someone who wasn't planning to stay. Under the pale, diffuse moonlight filtering through the fog, they cast thin shadows that shifted as the mist moved. Frost had furred over their surfaces entirely, but underneath it — faint, half-legible — Latin letters were still visible.
Polnareff felt the cold in a different place than before.
"Why are there graves here?" he said, voice lower than usual. "Did a Stand User...?"
Joseph said nothing.
He stepped forward. His eyes moved across the markers with the expression of a man who has recognized something he would have preferred not to. His breathing had changed — heavier, slower. He reached out and wiped the frost from the middle marker with the side of his fist.
John Torrington — January 1, 1846.
The moment the name cleared, Joseph went still.
Jotaro's eyes moved to him.
"Old man. What is it?"
Joseph straightened. His voice came out tight, controlled.
"I know what this is. I know what this Stand User is trying to recreate."
He pointed at the three solitary mounds.
"These are the graves on Beechey Island. The first burial site of the Franklin Expedition."
ゴゴゴゴゴ...
"The Franklin Expedition?" Shintaro asked, recognizing the name immediately.
Joseph nodded.
"1845. The British Royal Navy launched its two finest exploration vessels — HMS Erebus and HMS Terror — carrying 129 men handpicked from the navy's best. Their mission was to chart the Northwest Passage."
He looked at each of them.
"None of them came back. All 129. Not a single survivor."
The fog absorbed the silence.
"The official explanations were starvation and scurvy," Joseph continued. "But the bodies found decades later told something worse. Lead poisoning from their food tins. Madness. Physical deterioration no amount of resolve could survive." He paused. "And at the end — evidence of cannibalism. For survival."
"These three graves mark the first men to die. After them, the remaining 126 walked into three years of polar hell from which none returned."
His expression darkened with something that went past professional concern.
"And here's the problem. Those ships were trapped in the ice for over two years before they were finally abandoned. If this Stand User is recreating that disaster accurately — two years. On ice." He glanced at them. "We have less than fifty days."
"We have to find the Stand User immediately," he said.
The mist came alive.
It churned — not the random drift of natural fog but a deliberate, muscular movement. From behind the three tombstones, something emerged.
Large. Translucent. Wrong in its proportions — too long in the limb, too hollow in the face. It was assembled from ice crystals and something that moved through its body like trapped aurora light. The face that it turned toward them wore hollow sockets where eyes would have been, and it looked at every one of them in turn with the patience of something that had no concept of urgency because urgency belongs to the living.
Whispers threaded through the cold air — voices layered on top of each other, fraying at the edges, drifting in and out of comprehension.
"So cold..."
"So hungry..."
"Captain... which way are we going..."
"Meat. I want meat..."
Shintaro staggered.
He looked down.
Dark purple bruises had materialized on his skin without warning — spreading across the back of his hand like something beneath the surface had ruptured.
"Scurvy?!" Joseph's voice cracked with disbelief as he registered identical bruising appearing on his own forearms. He looked up, something between horror and fury working through his expression. "How can this be—"
He knew immediately.
"This thing wants to turn us into part of those 129 dead," he said, the words coming out hard and flat. "It wants us to finish the expedition they started. Right here. On this ice."
Jotaro moved.
His figure blurred as Star Platinum erupted into existence — the purple shape firing forward with the force and finality of something that has simply decided the conversation is over.
"ORA!!"
The ice-crystal torso detonated. The tombstones shattered. Frozen ribs of light exploded outward and scattered across the ice in a cascade of cold light and sharp debris.
"Silver Chariot!!"
"Emerald Splash!!"
Polnareff and Kakyoin followed in the same breath.
Sword light and emerald projectiles tore into what remained, reducing the Stand to fragments that covered the ice like crushed glass.
A moment of silence.
Then the fog went insane.
It surged inward from every direction simultaneously, visibility dropping to almost nothing — two meters, one, less. The white swallowed outlines, distances, faces. The remnants of the Stand dissolved into the mist without sound and disappeared.
"Back-to-back! Now!" Joseph's command carried even through the wall of white.
Shintaro turned — and saw blood at the corner of Joseph's mouth.
Joseph wiped it with the back of his hand, fingertips trembling as they touched the swollen, bleeding line of his gums.
"The scurvy is accelerating," he said, and the disbelief in his voice had been replaced by something harder. "This isn't a slow deterioration. This thing is burning through our bodies."
The truth landed on every person simultaneously.
Limbs going heavy. Bruises spreading at visible speed. The kind of weakness that moved from the extremities inward, patient and methodical.
Hoooo—
A breath that didn't belong to any of them moved past their backs.
"Mr. Joseph! Above you!!" Polnareff's shout tore through the fog.
Ice — shaped into a blade, moving like a guillotine — dropped toward Joseph's head.
Clang!
Silver Chariot materialized in the path of it, rapier meeting ice at the last possible fraction of a second. Sparks flared and died instantly in the cold. Polnareff's arm absorbed the shockwave through his Stand, grimacing.
Joseph turned and Hermit Purple snapped outward, locking around the Stand's neck.
"Overdrive!!"
Golden Hamon poured through the vine. The ice torso shattered from the inside outward, crackling apart in sequence — chest, shoulders, arms, waist — until the lower half dissolved into dust.
And then the upper half followed it into nothing. Evaporating back into the fog as though the Stand had simply decided to stop being where it was.
"It regenerates," Kakyoin said, pressing a hand against his arm where a new bruise had bloomed under his fingers. His voice was controlled — but his eyes were very alert. "Or rather — I don't think it actually leaves. The mist itself may be part of its body."
Polnareff's breath was rapid, condensing in quick bursts.
"You're saying we've been standing inside it this whole time?"
Shintaro shook his head, turning the information over.
"Or there are two users working in tandem. One creates the environment. The other moves through it."
Everyone looked at him.
"Think about it," he said. "On the ship, we weren't touched. No attack, no approach, nothing. Only after we followed the graves out here did the combat begin." He glanced at Kakyoin. "One lays the stage. One hunts."
"But the Black Sperm have covered over a hundred meters in every direction," he continued, voice tightening. "No human signature. No one is physically out here with us."
Khhh—
The cold breath came again.
The Stand emerged from nothing — directly in front of Jotaro, inside the reach of a blink.
"ORA!!!"
Star Platinum's elbow connected with the Stand's skull and removed half of it in a single violent explosion of ice shards.
But the counterattack was already in motion.
From the remaining half of its hollow face, an ice blade erupted — scraping across Star Platinum's arm with a sound like something being scored.
Chih!
Two deep cuts opened on Jotaro's forearm. Blood soaked through the dark uniform and dripped onto the ice.
"Jotaro!!"
Joseph was there immediately — palm pressed over the wound, Hamon flowing into the injury with practiced efficiency, stopping the bleeding. His jaw was set, eyes hard.
"Where is it coming from?!"
Kakyoin's voice came level and precise, the way it always did when his mind had found the shape of something.
"It doesn't need to move through space to reach us," he said. "If the fog is part of it — it can emerge from any point within the range of its own body. We're not fighting something that approaches us." His eyes moved through the white around them. "We're fighting the environment itself."
Polnareff inhaled sharply.
"Then it could come from anywhere—"
"That's exactly the problem," Shintaro said.
He looked at the ice beneath their feet — dark now, carpeted with Black Sperm in a ten-meter radius. He looked at the fog pressing in from every angle. He looked at the bruises spreading across every arm visible in the mist.
They couldn't last.
Time was the weapon this thing had chosen, and it was working.
"Black Magician!"
His shadow erupted.
Black Sperm flooded outward in every direction, paving the ice in a dark, writhing blanket — short legs scrambling, tiny hands planted, every face turned outward toward the fog.
"Ten-meter radius," Shintaro said. "Anything moves in this field, I'll know before it reaches us."
Then he reached into his pocket.
_____________________
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