"...You're challenging me?"
Jotaro Kujo narrowed his eyes. Both hands stayed in his coat pockets—no sign he intended to move.
Yare yare daze.
The ease he projected was the ease of absolute confidence in his own power. From anyone else, Inori would have read it as arrogance and made sure to teach them a lesson about how wide the world really was. But this was Jotaro. From the very beginning, "the strongest" had been the only two words that described him.
"Fight me. Win, and I'll tell you the truth. Lose, and you'll owe me one thing."
She walked toward him, King Crimson already summoned.
"I don't make a habit of hitting women," Jotaro said evenly, shaking his head—then took two steady steps forward. Gold light blazed from him, star-bright as cosmic dust, and a purple-and-gold hulk of sculpted muscle materialized in front of him, wearing the same cold expression as its owner. It didn't rush in. It waited.
Star Platinum's color seemed to shift with whatever hat Jotaro was wearing at the time. At seventeen, when he'd beaten DIO, he'd been in a black modified school uniform with a thick gold chain, and Star Platinum had been predominantly black and purple back then. Small detail—nobody really noticed.
That's the Stand the author designated as the strongest in the JoJo world... Fine, then. Let me take you on.
"WORA!"
Both Stands were out. Inori didn't waste another second—she closed to within two meters, King Crimson's effective range, and the crimson figure let out a shout and drove a fist at Star Platinum's jaw.
A crack rang out sharp and clean, like fabric tearing. Star Platinum raised its arm in a motion almost too fast to follow and caught the punch dead.
"...This power."
Star Platinum's expression changed the moment it took King Crimson's fist on its guard.
"A Stand this strong—from a girl?"
Something genuinely serious entered Jotaro's face for the first time. He'd half-expected Inori to be an overconfident kid who didn't know the size of the world. But this power from her Stand...this was a feeling he hadn't had in a very long time.
"Underestimating girls is going to cost you. JOtaro!"
She gave him no room to breathe. King Crimson wound up and threw again; this time Star Platinum ducked the fist with a slight tilt of its head, but the shockwave of the punch still grazed its cheek—just as it had once happened against DIO, all those years ago. A small cut opened on Jotaro's cheek. Blood ran.
He touched his face with a look of genuine surprise, turning something over in his mind.
"Your Stand is the same type as mine—limited range, but capable of high-speed, powerful, precise movements."
"..."
Inori blinked. The phrasing was strangely familiar—though it did confirm that he was taking her seriously now. The important thing was to make sure he understood she wasn't the kind of opponent you could wave aside with a few casual ORAs.
"WORA WORA WORA WORA WORA WORA!!"
King Crimson erupted at its maximum speed, filling the air with a blur of punches so dense they dissolved into afterimages. Jotaro bit down hard. The surprise settled fast and turned into something focused—he hadn't faced a close-range Stand with this level of both force and speed since that battle. He knew he needed to be serious.
"ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA!"
He made his decision: this girl, this "Inori Yuzuriha," was going to get everything he had. Star Platinum threw its signature rapid-fire barrage, and King Crimson met it without flinching, fist against fist, the concussive thunder of the exchange rolling without pause.
They stood less than three meters apart, eyes locked on each other through their Stands—but both fighters had their full attention on the battle happening in front of them, because in a clash between two Stands with power and speed both rated A, the first one to slip would be the first one to fall.
The battle cries sounded almost the same—Inori's, Jotaro's—close in phonetics but not quite identical. Nobody remarked on the difference.
King Crimson and Star Platinum wove their blows into a web of pure speed between them. Three seconds. Five seconds. Star Platinum shared Crazy Diamond's power and speed ratings—both at A—but the saying held true: your power is A because A is your ceiling. Star Platinum's power rating is A because A is as high as the scale goes.
"ORA!"
It was inevitable. Star Platinum's endurance—far beyond King Crimson's—finally tipped the balance. A flash of stardust light pulsed from Star Platinum's fist as it broke through King Crimson's guard and drove hard into its chest. The exchange was over. The winner was Jotaro Kujo.
Inori clutched her chest with a pained expression. Star Platinum did not press the advantage.
"As expected of you, Jotaro... In raw strength and speed, I lost."
"You seem to know a lot about me." He lowered his fist, expression sharp and composed. "Now—will you tell me about yourself?"
Inori knew what had just happened: Star Platinum had pulled its punch. One direct hit from Star Platinum at full force and she should have been launched off her feet. She wasn't. She'd taken a deep hit that felt like a bruised sternum—not because King Crimson's defense had held, but because Jotaro had controlled his power from the first moment. He had never, not once, treated her as a real enemy.
That annoyed her, honestly. She looked like a young, pretty girl, and so apparently she wasn't worth his full effort?
In truth, when their Stands had been trading blows, Inori had understood clearly: if Jotaro had gone at her the way he'd gone at DIO, King Crimson might not have lasted three seconds. But she had never intended to actually provoke him—or beat him by force alone, for that matter. If anything, this had been closer to two Stand users sparring, testing each other—probing, measuring, not trying to kill.
And Inori had never once fooled herself into thinking she could beat Star Platinum on raw power.
"I haven't lost yet, Jotaro."
The girl raised her face and gave a small, quiet smile.
"You want to know what my Stand can do? …Then watch carefully."
Thoom——
A deep, muffled impact. The crimson silhouette swept across her vision. The ground, the sky, space itself—everything cracked and shattered in this moment, and for the next few seconds, time itself would cease to flow in this world.
Inori was wearing Yasuho Hirose's sneakers, and she moved through the void of deleted time, circling wide around Jotaro's blind side—his expression frozen, no response, no awareness. It was the move King Crimson relied on most: use Time Erasure to vanish from his field of vision, then strike from behind.
Jotaro's ability was Time Stop. Inori's was Time Erasure. Fundamentally different concepts—and besides, Jotaro had never truly viewed her as an enemy, which was exactly why he wouldn't react during this interval. The only other person who had ever moved freely inside a world of erased time was Diavolo.
The moment Time Erasure ended, every hair on Jotaro's body stood up—because that girl had disappeared from where she'd been standing. That sensation... this long-forgotten sensation took him back to a certain nemesis, in Egypt, more than a decade ago.
"WORA!"
By the time Jotaro registered someone behind him, it was too late. King Crimson's fist was already coming for his face.
But this was Jotaro Kujo. Even caught off guard, he didn't panic. In the instant before the Red King's punch connected with Star Platinum, a name thundered out of him.
"Star Platinum: The World!!"
——Star Platinum: The World.