After healing Josuke, Inori used the borrowed Crazy Diamond to patch up Jotaro and Rohan as well. Once she returned the Stand, the group finally had a moment to sit down and exchange the intelligence they'd gathered.
"A Stand user who can soften bodies and Stands?"
Rohan recounted the ambush—how they'd been caught, and how Josuke's arrival had turned a hopeless situation into a narrow victory. Inori clicked her tongue. She shot a wary glance at the pulverized corpse Jotaro had left in the corner and felt a retrospective chill. Splitting up had been the right call.
Even she couldn't have predicted those handprints without a warning. Once softened, no amount of Time Erasure would have helped. If she'd actually been pushed that far, her only option would have been Yet to Come—summoning a future version of herself for a few seconds to overwrite reality.
That skill was Inori's final trump card, capable of instantly reversing any unfavorable situation.
But with her Stand-related memories stolen by the ambushers outside, she hadn't been able to use King Crimson or Everlasting Crown, which meant Yet to Come was off the table. Fortunately, Mana Ouma turned out to be a solid ace in the hole.
The one uncertainty was whether Yoshikage Kira knew about this ability.
"Big Sis... how did you beat those two?"
Josuke's elation had cooled into sharp thinking. She'd been an ordinary person out there—no Stand, surrounded by venomous snakes. How had she pulled it off?
"This is a little embarrassing to admit, but... Rohan-sensei, you were right that time."
"Huh?" Rohan had been standing against the wall, listening intently. He blinked at being singled out. "What does this have to do with me?"
"Remember when I was talking to myself?"
"..."
Rohan's brow creased. He had already guessed the answer.
"I really do have a split personality." Inori lowered her head with a sheepish smile. "It's a mental illness. I'd never say anything if I didn't have to."
"I see."
Jotaro nodded. He finally understood why this girl had two Stands.
—The Stand that steals abilities must belong to her other personality. Stands are born from psychic energy. If she has two psyches, having two Stands makes perfect sense.
"But I'd appreciate it if you kept this between us. It's a secret for our team only. Yoshikage Kira can rewind time, and I'm certain he doesn't know about my split personality yet—otherwise he wouldn't have sent such an insidious Stand user after me."
Inori looked each of them in the eye.
"The enemy has hidden cards. We can't afford to put everything on the table either."
She thought she'd delivered a perfectly reasonable explanation, but the reaction she expected didn't come. Jotaro and Rohan exchanged a glance, their expressions turning odd.
"What is it?"
Inori could tell they had something to say.
"Yoshikage Kira... appears to be dead."
It was Rohan who spoke.
"Ha?" Inori's tone dripped contempt. "Says who?"
"Tamaki Damo." Jotaro picked up the thread. "The man we defeated. Vitamin C's user. He said they double-crossed Kira to steal the Arrow and killed him."
"That's fake. Guaranteed."
—Yoshikage Kira, dead? Even a child wouldn't buy that. (Specifically, Hayato Kawajiri.)
A man who'd been playing her, Jotaro, and every Stand user in this entire town in the palm of his hand—taken out by a handful of lackeys? Kira's lifelong ambition was to live quietly, yes, but that didn't make him ordinary. Even without Killer Queen, his intelligence and social instincts were leagues beyond a normal person's.
—This has to be a staged death. He's trying to shake his pursuers by playing dead.
"Whether it's real or not, one look will tell us."
Rohan pushed off the wall and strolled toward Damo's mangled corpse, dropping that line with admirable cool.
"Rohan-sensei, can you use Heaven's Door on a dead body?"
"Should work. I've never tried."
Star Platinum had caved Damo's skull in. Rohan crouched beside the body, steeled himself against the gruesome sight, and summoned his Stand.
Inori and the others watched with a mix of curiosity and tension—half hoping Kira was truly dead, so they could all go home and sleep, and half hoping he'd only faked it, which might yield new leads.
"It worked! Heaven's Door worked!"
Josuke's excited shout broke the silence.
It was hard to believe. Inori recalled that in canon, Rohan didn't gain the ability to use Heaven's Door on objects until his own spinoff. Perhaps brushing against death so many times had forced his Stand to evolve.
"...Tamaki Damo, born 1965 in Sapporo... Who cares about that? Keep going, Rohan-sensei." Inori pressed, unable to contain her nerves.
"Patience."
Rohan remained composed, flipping through the raised pages until he reached the final entries. At last, he found Yoshikage Kira's name—but before it came someone else's.
"Yoshihiro Kira... Yoshikage Kira's father. He pierced himself with the Stand Arrow and then struck a deal... He traded this samurai villa—the Kira family estate—in exchange for Damo and his people's cooperation in eliminating the Stand user group led by Inori and Jotaro Kujo..."
Rohan read the lines out rapid-fire.
"In order to acquire the Stand Arrow and create more subordinates, they killed Yoshikage Kira..."
"They softened him and killed him. The body was buried in the woods, mixed into the soil... Time: April 12th, 7:17 AM... That's just a few hours ago!"
"Yoshikage Kira is really dead!"
Rohan's voice trembled with shock.
"Absolutely not."
Inori shook her head. Not a trace of doubt.
"This is part of his plan!"
"What Heaven's Door reads is absolute truth." Rohan wasn't angry—just firm, meeting her eyes with emphasis. "Yoshikage Kira's ability is bombs. Against Vitamin C's surprise attack, he had no way to fight back."
"But he can rewind time!" Josuke pointed out.
After everything they'd been through, Josuke had dropped most of his grudge against Rohan. Otherwise the two of them would already be at each other's throats.
"If he could rewind time, then we wouldn't see the 'truth' of his death. Inori said it herself—we still don't know what conditions trigger Kira's time rewind. It's possible those conditions can't be met while softened. So Damo simply killed him."
Rohan's reasoning wasn't careless. He genuinely believed the explanation held. Yoshikage Kira wasn't some supernatural demon. He was a Stand user—a human being. Being assassinated by something as insidious as Vitamin C was entirely plausible.
"Mr. Jotaro, what do you think?"
"...It's certainly possible." Jotaro couldn't decide whether to buy it. Rohan's logic was airtight—not a single crack—but that was precisely what made it suspicious.
"I still don't believe it."
Inori was swaying internally, but her intimate knowledge of Yoshikage Kira told her the man would never let his guard down around a dangerous, antisocial personality like Damo. This had to be his escape plan. Fake his own death and slip away.
Just like how he'd used Cinderella to become Kosaku Kawajiri in the original story!
"You're giving Yoshikage Kira too much credit, Inori." Rohan sighed. "He's terrifying, I'll grant you that. But he's not some unkillable monster."
"Arguing about it here is pointless."
Inori didn't want to fight with her own team, and more importantly, she couldn't think of a counter-argument. She could hardly say I just feel like Kira isn't dead—call it women's intuition, could she?
"Let's go look for him."
Inori made the most rational call available.
"Those woods are large, and we're shorthanded. Josuke, your grandfather is a police officer, right? Report a homicide—say the victim's remains were buried underground—and let the police help us verify whether Kira's death is real."
...