Josuke Higashikata sat in the passenger seat, watching the scenery blur past the window, and stifled a yawn.
He pulled out the drink he'd just bought from a vending machine, popped the tab with one hand, and glanced over at Jotaro, who was focused on driving.
"So... what exactly is it you need my help with?"
"I don't know. But Inori specifically asked me to bring you along."
Jotaro didn't look at him, just kept his eyes on the road. Going by his mental map, the cemetery was only two turns away.
"Man, I really don't get it."
Josuke couldn't help a sigh.
"Someone as strong as Big Sis actually needs my help?"
...
Among everyone Josuke knew, no Stand was more powerful than Inori's King Crimson. His own Stand battles could be counted on one hand, and since the hair incident with Jotaro had never happened, Josuke still didn't have a real grasp of what his nephew could do.
"She's definitely in danger. She needs your healing ability."
Jotaro found this kid annoyingly chatty, always spouting whatever popped into his head. He swallowed the urge to snap "shut up" at him, but since Josuke had been nothing but respectful, calling him "Mr. Jotaro" and everything, he couldn't bring himself to actually snap.
"That makes even less sense!" Josuke exclaimed. "I don't think there's a Stand out there that can beat Big Sis's King Crimson!"
"There's no such thing as a strong or weak Stand. Only how skillfully the user wields it." Jotaro's reply was cold and flat. Then he yanked the steering wheel hard.
"Oh..."
Josuke could tell Jotaro didn't want to keep talking, so he dropped it.
—Still, it's like characters in a game—there are always strong picks and weak picks. A high-skill player can beat a strong character with a weak one, sure, but if both players are on the same level, the character difference decides it.
—What kind of Stand does Mr. Jotaro even have? Is it stronger than Big Sis Inori's? And what's the deal between those two, anyway?
Lost in thought, Josuke finally got the can open and raised it to his lips.
"Hm? Cough cough cough—"
A sudden moment of disorientation hit him. When his awareness snapped back, all he felt was something alien in his throat. He choked hard, carbonated soda erupting from his mouth and splattering all over his school uniform.
"Oh no! Mom's gonna kill me... Wait, what the hell? I just opened it—how'd it suddenly end up in my mouth?"
"That was... a time skip." Jotaro had noticed the anomaly too—he'd been about to make a turn, but when he came to, he was already on a different street.
"This is King Crimson's ability. She's fighting the enemy right now!"
Jotaro's expression darkened. He floored the accelerator and tore toward the cemetery, now visible just past the next turn.
...
...
The motorcycle rider that had burst out from behind Inori—Born This Way, an automatic long-range Stand—unleashed its ability, blanketing the ground in front of her in a field of extreme cold. With a different user at the helm, Born This Way's power was far more intense than it had been in the scarred man's hands.
Crystalline snowflakes and countless shards of ice materialized in an instant. Sheer Heart Attack's special property was "indestructible," but that didn't grant immunity to status effects. In the original story, Koichi had pinned it down with gravity. Now, in this ultra-low-temperature environment, thick rime crusted over the car's treads and locked it in place. A few more seconds, and the entire vehicle was encased in ice, frozen solid and helpless like a display piece trapped under glass. Inori had finally sealed its movement and escaped the bomb crisis.
She recalled Born This Way. Stripped down to just a black long-sleeved shirt, Inori let herself gasp for breath. She looked at the large ice block lying on the ground, and her mood sank.
This opponent was genuinely formidable. The dual-bomb abilities were nightmarish enough, but this power to rewind time rivaled her own "Yet to Come"—a top-tier Stand ability.
No matter which fictional universe you put it in, time reversal was the absolute pinnacle of power. Especially someone like Kira, who could loop infinitely. He was basically a player on the hardest difficulty setting. Sure, he'd suffer defeat after defeat at first, but through sheer repetition, loading save after save, accumulating experience until he knew his enemy's patterns so well he could predict the next move from the twitch of a muscle, he would eventually clear the stage.
—Damn. I didn't expect Kira to become this difficult.
But this encounter wasn't without gains. At the very least, his desperate act of severing his own arm had confirmed something for Inori.
He most likely couldn't activate Bites the Dust at will. Just like in the original story, specific conditions had to be met.
If the ability had no restrictions, Inori would never have encountered Kira today in the first place.
Because the moment he ran into her, he could simply trigger Bites the Dust, rewind the day, and perfectly avoid the encounter altogether.
But destiny cannot be changed. World lines possess a self-correcting force—what some would call convergence.
Events that have already occurred will almost certainly occur again, unless something actively intervenes.
Inori thought of a famous line from another story: "Mayuri's pocket watch has stopped." A perfect example.
—So the question is: will Inori uncover the secret of Bites the Dust and kill Kira first, or will Kira find the one world line—out of infinite parallels—where he manages to kill her?
—Heh. Things just got interesting.
Sitting atop a headstone, the pink-haired girl let a pleased smile cross her face.
—This is a trial. A trial for Yoshikage Kira to overcome destiny. Fate gave him the power to rewind time and generate parallel worlds—but fate also placed his greatest enemy right in front of him.
"Phew..."
—Inori, that man is really dangerous.
Mana, silent for a long time, finally spoke up.
Out of concern for her other half, she didn't want Inori to keep involving herself in this.
—Why don't we leave Morioh? Go to Tokyo. To Roppongi... maybe we could find my grandfather there? Although I can't remember his name at all.
—I'm not leaving Morioh.
Inori's answer was ironclad.
—If I ran away now, I'd lose my dignity. I'm the sovereign who conquered her own destiny and climbed to the pinnacle of that world!
—Mana, stay quiet for a while. I'm sorry, but... until Yoshikage Kira is dead, I will not leave Morioh.
...
...
Jotaro and Josuke burst into the cemetery and froze at the scene before them. Headstones lay shattered into uneven fragments. The ground was scarred with blackened blast marks. A monk's body lay nearby, mangled beyond recognition. Inori sat on a stone slab, and at her feet sprawled a young man clinging to the edge of life.
Everything told the same story: a vicious battle had just taken place here.
"Inori... are you all right? Are you hurt?"
Jotaro strode over, scanning her for injuries.
"I'm fine."
Inori shook her head.
"Where's the enemy? What's its Stand ability?"
Jotaro gave a relieved nod. The girl looked exhausted, but her eyes were still sharp. Dust and bloodstains covered her, but he saw no wounds. The young man on the ground, however, was in terrible shape—possibly already dead. Jotaro noticed a long smear of blood leading to the body, clearly a drag trail, and from the position of the bloodstains on Inori's clothes he deduced that this man was not the enemy.
"He got away." Inori shook her head, then looked past Jotaro to the steak-haired boy behind him and waved him forward. "Never mind that for now. Josuke-kun, come here."
Josuke had never seen anything this gory. He could barely imagine what kind of brutal fight had just happened here. But even more shocking to him was the realization that this town he loved—his Morioh—harbored a Stand user who'd slaughter innocents without a second thought.
This wasn't the Josuke of the original story, the one who'd already been tempered by the anguish of losing his grandfather. Inori had handled his first enemy, Angelo, for him. So he couldn't accept what he was seeing. He'd always believed Morioh was a peaceful little town. Something this terrible shouldn't exist here. Morioh wasn't supposed to be like this.
"You need me to heal this guy, right, Big Sis?"
"Yes. He's about to die. Also... could you please stop calling me that? You're a full head taller than me!"
Age aside, Inori genuinely could not handle a six-foot wall of a young man calling her "Big Sis." If it were some cute little girl, she could grudgingly accept it.
"...Heh heh. I just feel like calling you that. Nothing weird about it."
Josuke grinned sheepishly, then crouched down with easy confidence.
"Injuries like these? I'll have him fixed up in no time. Don't worry!"
As he spoke, he knelt beside Rohan. Crazy Diamond's hands pressed against the wounded body, and warm golden light suffused every wound. In mere seconds, the man who'd been at death's door was fully restored—even his shattered hand was whole again, even his ruined clothes were mended.
Crazy Diamond truly lived up to its reputation. Seeing it in action, Inori finally understood why Josuke's ability was called the gentlest in the world. If it could work on the user's own body, it really would be invincible.
"Hey, wake up! Hey!"
Josuke propped Rohan upright and slapped his cheek, calling out loudly. But Rohan's eyes stayed shut, his expression eerily peaceful, with no sign of waking.
"No way..."
A chill crawled through Inori's chest.
Crazy Diamond could restore a damaged body to its original state, but if the person was already dead—if the soul was gone—then all the restoration in the world only left behind an intact corpse.
Had Rohan failed to hold on after all? She'd bandaged and treated him so carefully!
"Rohan-sensei! Wake up!"
...No response.
No. No, no—did Rohan Kishibe really die? Just like that? Killed by Yoshikage Kira so easily? I can't accept this. I refuse to accept that a character this important just got written off!
"How is that possible? I healed everything!"
Josuke didn't yet fully understand his own power. He'd assumed that closing the wounds automatically meant saving the patient.
"Good grief."
Jotaro tugged the brim of his cap. One look was all he needed to read the situation. Crazy Diamond repaired things—it didn't resurrect the dead. The man had been that badly injured; death was entirely plausible. Judging by the worry etched across Inori's face, this was probably a friend of hers. Yare yare... he'd only looked away for a moment, and something this ugly had happened.
He wanted nothing more than to press Inori for the whole story—the enemy, the Stand—but given what she was going through, he could hold off. Examine the surroundings first.
Then he noticed something behind them: an irregular, prismatic object catching the light. What was that? Some kind of crystal?
"Cough cough..."
At that moment, Rohan suddenly hacked twice, expelling stale air trapped in his chest. Consciousness returned gradually. He opened his eyes—and the first thing he saw was a pink-haired girl staring at him in wide-eyed delight.
The unbearable agony that had been crushing his will was gone. It was as if everything before had been nothing but a nightmare. But he knew it wasn't a dream, because he was still in the cemetery, and the air still reeked of char.
"You jerk—I thought you were dead!"
Inori wanted to slap him and scream in his face, but then she remembered Jotaro was watching from behind her. To maintain her carefully cultivated good-girl image in his eyes, she forced herself to hold back.
"I'm... Ah! The serial killer—the serial killer found me!"
The memories before he'd blacked out came flooding back. Rohan bolted upright and whipped his head around in alarm.
"His ability is creating explosions! And I think he might have an accomplice... Huh? Who are these two?"
"Hey!" Josuke bristled at the attitude. "I'm the one who healed you, you know!"
"They're allies we can trust." Inori cut in with a straightforward answer. "Rohan-sensei, don't panic. We're safe now."
"What's going on here? Inori, what do you mean, a serial killer?" Jotaro's eyes widened at Rohan's words. He'd been about to start investigating Morioh's various anomalies, and now Inori had already stumbled into a dangerous Stand user. Just like that man's daughter.
"Rohan-sensei, Josuke-kun, Mr. Jotaro—there's something I need to come clean about."
"What is it? You're suddenly so serious... the whole vibe just shifted."
The youngest of the three men and the least experienced, Josuke scratched the back of his head in bewilderment. He looked endearingly clueless and not particularly reliable, but he was the single most indispensable member of the team—the top-tier healer.
"Mr. Jotaro. Rohan-sensei and I stumbled across the ghost of a girl who died fifteen years ago. She told me there's a serial killer in this town. For fifteen years he's been committing murder after murder. Morioh has the highest missing-person rate in all of Japan, and it's because of him."
"...It sounds like his Stand has formidable killing power."
Jotaro arrived at the correct conclusion in an instant, then nodded for Inori to continue.
"Inori, that's not all! He seems to have two Stands—or else he has an accomplice!"
Rohan blurted out the intelligence he'd nearly died to obtain.
"I know."
Inori looked at him and gave a solemn nod. Then she summoned King Crimson and sent it to retrieve the ice block from further back, setting it down in front of the group.
"Th-that's...!"
Rohan stumbled back two steps, gaping at Inori. Encased inside was the very thing that had nearly killed him—that terrifying bomb-car.
"This is called Sheer Heart Attack. It's formed from Yoshikage Kira's severed left hand."
"Yoshikage... Kira?"
Josuke repeated the name, testing the syllables. Had a nice ring to it, actually.
"Yes."
Inori laid all her cards on the table. With the weight of absolute certainty, she declared to the three people standing before her:
"The serial killer's name is Yoshikage Kira."