What was this guy doing, wallowing in self-pity all by himself? Acting like I'm the one who drove him to this. Nobody would've come after you if you hadn't done what you did.
Sure, he cut a pitiable figure right now, bearing the agony of a severed hand while choking out those dramatic declarations, the kind of scene that might tug at your heartstrings. But after witnessing the horror of Reimi Sugimoto's fate, Inori would never again feel an ounce of sympathy for this hypocrite. Before ending up this pathetic, maybe you should've thought about how many innocent people you've hurt. Were their lives worth nothing? Losing one hand was getting off cheap, as far as Yoshikage Kira was concerned.
"You think that little toy car of yours can stop me?"
Inori's killing intent was absolute. Whatever Kira was planning, she could subdue him within King Crimson's erased-time window. Sheer Heart Attack was nothing special. Yes, it detonated on contact, but as long as she punched it away before it could react, the damage was avoidable.
Sheer Heart Attack's toy-car form was an automatic, long-range Stand weapon. Its true body was just a portion of Killer Queen's left hand. That alone wasn't enough to hurt Inori. But it could absolutely buy time—because the little car had one ironclad property: it was indestructible. Like an RPG character with defense hacked up to 9999, no amount of punching would put it down.
In the original story, Jotaro beat it until it cracked and still couldn't destroy it.
It couldn't hit Inori, but Inori couldn't stop it either. Still, a solution existed if she thought it through, because this thing only ever attacked the hottest target within its operating range.
"Don't move!"
"Use your Epitaph and look, Inori... see what happens if you dare attack me right now!"
Kira screamed the words in sudden panic, then spun around and bolted for the small gate at the far end of the cemetery. The searing pain made him stumble with every step, but he didn't dare slow down. Didn't dare look back.
"Look over here!"
The toy car kept up its repeated, guttural growl.
—That bastard!
Because Inori was too far away, Sheer Heart Attack's primary target had shifted to Rohan, who still lay on the ground with residual body heat. In the image that flashed through her mind, poor Rohan-sensei took another explosion. Injuries that severe plus another blast—he'd die.
Inori had no choice. She abandoned the pursuit of Kira and activated Time Erasure, sprinting forward with inhuman speed. Borrowing King Crimson's strength, the girl launched herself into the air, leaping to close the distance, and ended the erasure just before the car reached Rohan's face.
"Ora ora ora!"
King Crimson's barrage of fists sent Sheer Heart Attack flying, but it meant nothing. The overturned toy car bounced back upright like some nimble turtle, the pallid skull-shell still emitting its voice.
"Look over here!"
"...Rohan-sensei! Rohan-sensei!"
Inori left King Crimson to hold the thing off while she crouched down to check on him.
She didn't know how to treat wounds, but in her previous world she'd seen more than enough of this kind of carnage. That had been a society ruled by brute force, a world teetering on the edge of apocalypse. She'd been a member of a terrorist organization. People died around her every day—some of them enemies, but most of them comrades.
Rohan's injuries were severe, but he could still be saved. She could only hope Jotaro would bring Josuke here soon.
...
On the way over, Inori had already anticipated that Rohan might get hurt—that if she was too late, he might die. Just in case, she'd used a phone left behind by the car's previous owner to call Jotaro, telling him there was an emergency and asking him to pick up Josuke from the Higashikata house before heading to the cemetery together.
"Look over here!"
—This is bad!
Her pink braids whipped through the air. Epitaph showed her what would happen in a few seconds: the instant King Crimson's fist made contact, Sheer Heart Attack detonated. Her body was blasted open in several places. She collapsed, critically wounded and unconscious.
Sheer Heart Attack was a simple-minded automatic weapon, sure, but it wasn't some brainless drone stuck on a single pattern. Once it adjusted to the delay caused by Time Erasure and got used to King Crimson's speed, its detonation trigger would grow more and more sensitive.
"King Crimson!"
Since conventional methods weren't working—time for the old reliable. When in doubt, King Crimson.
Inori grabbed Rohan's body and dragged him along, pulling them both into the erased-time dimension. Sheer Heart Attack tore through the air like a baseball, rocketed to where they'd been standing, and detonated exactly as Epitaph had predicted. But now Inori and Rohan had escaped into the higher dimension where this world's events couldn't touch them. The blast wave only toppled a couple of headstones. She'd dodged it.
"Ora ora ora ora ora ora!"
"Wryeeeaaa!!"
The moment Time Erasure ended, Sheer Heart Attack—still convinced it had already detonated—sat motionless. Inori didn't waste the opening. King Crimson kicked it into the air, followed up with a rapid-fire volley of punches, and sent it smashing into yet another ancient headstone, reducing it to rubble.
"But... none of this actually accomplishes anything."
And just like that, she was right back where she'd been fighting Born This Way—that nauseating stalemate where she couldn't hurt her enemy and her enemy couldn't hurt her. Against this kind of auto-tracking Stand, the only option was to take out the user. But Kira had already destroyed the original body—Sheer Heart Attack was now an effectively invincible entity. No amount of head-on combat could put it down.
Damn it... I should've sent Born This Way after Kira. Should've called out the motorcycle rider...
Wait—the motorcycle rider. Born This Way! That thing wasn't just a high-mobility bike. It could summon blizzards. If she used its extreme cold to freeze Sheer Heart Attack solid, the little car would be helpless.
"Look over here!!!!!"
The blue-treaded toy car unleashed an even more savage roar, surging out of the headstone debris like death incarnate, hurtling toward Inori at terrifying speed.
"I'll admit it... Yoshikage Kira, you win today."
Inori let out a sigh and began unbuttoning her coat. (Explanation time doesn't count toward the clock.)
"If you activated Bites the Dust to survive, then you've succeeded. To save Rohan-sensei, I can't pursue you any further today. But I will find you. Not today. Not tomorrow. But I will hunt you down again!"
She flung the coat toward the oncoming bomb-car.
The wide, dark khaki trench coat floated through the air like a flag snapping in the wind. Inori had been wearing it since she'd gone out earlier that day, so it still held her body heat. The temperature wasn't as high as Inori herself, but it was the closest heat source to the car, naturally triggering its detonation mechanism.
Boom!
Her precious coat was blown to shreds, scraps of fabric drifting down through the air. At the same instant, a roaring black motorcycle dragging a howling blizzard in its wake burst out from behind the girl, charging straight at Sheer Heart Attack.
The explosion that shredded the coat had also blown apart the button Inori had deliberately left behind, triggering the condition to summon Born This Way.
"Freeze! You're not going anywhere!"