When Shintaro's hand came out of his pocket, four strawberries rested in his palm.
Bright red. Plump. Glossy. The kind of color that belonged to a summer market, not a frozen sea in the middle of a South China Sea midnight. They looked almost offensively alive against the white.
He held them toward the Black Sperm nearest him. Four small creatures took the fruit immediately, each hugging a strawberry to its chest with the territorial seriousness of something that understands value.
"Mr. Joseph."
Joseph turned at his name — and the moment his eyes found the fruit, something ignited in his expression. The same spark that appeared when a man who has been working a problem for hours suddenly sees the solution standing right in front of him.
"You brought fruit?!" His voice cracked slightly on the word. "Shintaro — Vitamin C. Scurvy's natural enemy. You brilliant, beautiful child—"
The Black Sperm moved without being told. Four of them set off across the ice in four directions, each carrying a strawberry toward its designated recipient with the focused dedication of very small, very determined couriers.
Joseph didn't wait for ceremony. He bit into his strawberry the moment it was in his hand.
The juice hit his tongue — sharp, sweet, real. Warmth spread down his throat and radiated outward through his chest. He looked at his forearm.
The bruises were retreating. Not slowly — visibly, like ink being absorbed back into a surface, the dark purple lightening shade by shade.
Shintaro watched, cataloguing.
Accelerated aging and deterioration via Stand-imposed environmental conditions. Almost identical in mechanism to The Grateful Dead. Vitamin C interrupts the effect because the underlying physiology is real — the Stand mimics the disease, but the disease follows real rules.
"Good — everyone eat," Joseph started, then stopped. He looked at Shintaro. "Wait. There were exactly four. What about you?"
"Don't worry about me yet," Shintaro said.
He kept his voice steady. His face was pale in a way that read as calm unless you were looking for the specific kind of pallor that came from holding something in rather than from absence.
A faint golden shimmer moved under his skin — Hamon circulating through his meridians, pressing back against the disease with the focused discipline of someone who had been doing this since before the fight began, and intended to keep doing it regardless of cost.
The bruises on the back of his clenched hand were still spreading.
Kakyoin looked at the strawberry in his own palm.
Then he looked at Shintaro's hand.
He didn't say anything immediately. He broke the fruit cleanly in half and extended one piece.
"Half each," he said, and bit into his own portion.
"Kakyoin—" Shintaro started.
"The half I kept isn't enough to fully suppress the symptoms," Kakyoin said, matter-of-factly, before Shintaro could finish. He could feel it already — the bruising on his neck had lightened, but the relief was shallow, holding rather than resolving. "But it helps."
He looked at Shintaro steadily. "You need the other half more than I need it."
Shintaro looked at the piece being offered. Then at Kakyoin's face — the particular expression of someone who has made a calculation and is presenting you with the result, not requesting a debate.
"That amount won't be enough for you either," Shintaro said.
"It will manage," Kakyoin replied. "Take it."
Shintaro didn't take it.
A brief, quiet standoff lived in the space between them.
Kakyoin exhaled through his nose, and without further discussion, placed the remaining half of the strawberry into his own mouth. The effect was immediate and clearer — the bruises on his neck receded at a more meaningful pace, the exhaustion in his limbs loosening its grip by degrees.
Shintaro watched and said nothing.
Joseph had been watching both of them in silence. Something moved through his expression — the crease between his brows tightening slightly, the way it did when he'd come to a conclusion he didn't entirely like.
He opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Let a heavy breath out through his nose instead.
"...Hang in there, kid," he said finally, his voice quieter than usual. "We will find this thing's main body."
Jotaro's strawberry was gone without comment. But his eyes, beneath the hat, had stopped on Shintaro's hand for one measured moment — on the bruises still moving outward across the skin, on the Hamon that flickered rather than flowed — before lifting again toward the fog.
The Black Sperm that had been sweeping the ship completed their circuit and returned.
Nothing. No Stand User on board. No human presence anywhere in the hull.
Shintaro processed the result and made his decision.
Five thousand Black Sperm stayed behind — stationed at Avdol's bed, spread through the corridors, watching every sealed hatch and porthole.
The rest he called.
His shadow became motion. A dark tide surged outward from beneath him, spreading across the ice in every direction, the Black Sperm racing through the fog in a widening wave. The sound of dozens of small feet against frozen water created a low, rustling hiss that moved through the mist like a current.
The complaints came through the shared link immediately.
"Boss, my feet are going to fall off, it's freezing—" "Everything's the same color, I've lost track of which way is forward—" "Hey — can I bite the ice? Would that help?"
Hoooo—
A single thread of cold cut through the noise.
The crystalline Stand materialized from the fog without warning or transition — simply present where it hadn't been a breath before. Its forelegs swept in a single arc.
Puff. Puff-puff.
Black Sperm in the strike zone dissolved into dark mist before they could scatter. No screams — just absence, sudden and total.
"Spread out! Reduce density!" Shintaro barked the order the instant the feedback registered.
The Black Sperm dispersed immediately, flowing apart like ink in water, no longer a concentrated mass but a spread net. At the same moment, the nearest units threw themselves at the Stand's torso — small hands catching on ice crystal formations, trying to hold, trying to anchor.
The Stand blurred.
Vanished.
The Black Sperm clinging to it landed on the ice alone, their grips closing on nothing.
"It left us—!" "Fight us properly, you frozen coward!"
Hierophant Green's tentacles extended alongside them, threading through the fog in thin, searching lines.
Khhh—
The cold breath again.
This time it arrived with no interval and no warning.
The Stand came into existence directly in front of Jotaro — half a meter away. The exact distance that negates reaction time.
"ORA!!!"
Star Platinum's elbow tore through the skull, detonating the upper portion of the Stand's head in a concentrated burst of ice debris. Shards scattered in every direction.
But the counterattack was already in motion — had been in motion before the blow landed. From the remaining lower half of the shattered face, an ice blade erupted in a fast, scraping arc.
Chih!
Two gashes opened across Jotaro's forearm. Deep. Immediate. Blood soaked through the black uniform within seconds and began to drip onto the ice, freezing almost before it landed.
"JOTARO!!"
Joseph closed the distance in two steps, slamming his palm over the wound. Golden Hamon moved with precision — sealing vessels, arresting blood loss. His jaw was set hard.
"Where is it coming from?!"
Kakyoin's voice arrived measured, stripped of anything except observation. "It doesn't travel," he said. "If the fog is part of its body — it doesn't approach us. It simply becomes present. Anywhere within the range of its own field." He looked at the white surrounding them, at the way it pressed in uniformly from every angle. "We're not fighting a Stand that moves through space. We're fighting the space itself."
Polnareff's next breath came out rough.
"Then it has no blindside. No approach vector. It's everywhere we're standing—"
"That's the problem," Shintaro said.
He surveyed the group.
Jotaro's forearm wrapped, expression unchanged, but the pallor under the hat was new. Kakyoin's hands showed bruises between his knuckles despite the strawberry. Polnareff leaned a fraction of his weight into Silver Chariot, the kind of lean that wasn't a choice. Even Joseph, with the Hamon running at full, showed exhaustion in the set of his shoulders.
The disease was slow. But the cold was not.
And every second spent here was a second the enemy didn't have to commit.
"Black Magician!"
Shintaro's shadow poured outward — not spreading but concentrating this time, Black Sperm stacking and linking and pressing together into a dark, writhing carpet across the ten-meter radius around them.
"No gaps," Shintaro said, quietly, to himself as much as to them. "If it materializes in this range, we'll feel it."
His hand came out of the other pocket.
Something small. Something specific.
And he looked at the fog, and at the ice, and at the graves that had started all of this, and he thought:
We need to find where the body actually is. Everything else is just managing the damage.
_____________________
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