The walk home passed without further incident.
Dinner was as lavish as the night before. Mrs. Hirose's hospitality only deepened Inori Yuzuriha's sense of guilt at sitting across the table from them. She, Inori, was an independent person, after all. Back in the previous world, when Hare Menjou's parents had been abroad, she'd never even met them. But this was different. She didn't want to give them the impression she was freeloading.
Maybe she should give Jotaro's suggestion another look. Staying at a hotel meant a private room of her own, and meals and laundry weren't exactly problems either.
…
…
Inori lay on the bed staring up at the ceiling. Outside the door, she could hear Yasuho and Koichi talking on and off—siblings discussing something domestic, by the sound of it. Inori rolled onto her side, but no matter how she lay, sleep wouldn't come. The moment she closed her eyes, the day's images crowded back in: too many loose ends, too many doubts. What was her next move supposed to be?
The Morioh she found herself in only diverged from her memories in one place, really—the existence of Yasuho Hirose, and the two Stands that didn't belong to this universe at all: Soft & Wet and Yasuho's Paisley Park. But if this Morioh was a hybrid of two JoJo timelines, then Soft & Wet's user should have been Josuke Higashikata—the Part 8 one, Josuke.
At present, Morioh held two Stand Arrows. One was in the hands of Keicho Nijimura. The other belonged to Yoshihiro Kira. The Stand user Keicho had created from the Arrow—Angelo—hadn't shown anything abnormal. He hadn't even been aware of her Stand ability. But what about Soft & Wet's user? Had he, too, been created by Keicho? Or… had Yoshikage Kira begun making Stand users, gearing up for something bigger?
It didn't add up. Yoshikage Kira—a man who would sever his own arm for a good night's sleep—had no reason to invite that kind of trouble onto himself. Inori had been planning to come for him eventually, but she had only been in this world for about a day. Not only had she not gone looking for trouble with Kira, she'd deliberately held back during her shopping trip at Kameyu Department Store earlier that day, refusing to even ask around about him for fear of tipping her hand.
And yet things had still happened. Before Inori had so much as moved a finger, Yoshihiro Kira had already started churning out Stand users. It defied all logic. Unless Yoshikage Kira had undergone some kind of personality shift—gone from the quiet salaryman content to live a peaceful life despite his terrifying gifts to a born-evil DIO-style villain?
She couldn't rule it out entirely. But… if it had been Kira and his father who'd given that lowlife thug Soft & Wet's powers, then how had he known about the intel on King Crimson? How had he known about both Epitaph and Time Erasure, and even worked out a counter-strategy? It was as if he'd fought King Crimson before. More than once.
Could it be that… Yoshikage Kira… had already activated Bites the Dust?
It was a deeply disturbing theory. Just the thought of it made Inori's skin crawl. Because if true, it meant this wasn't her first day in Morioh at all. She might have already cornered Kira, and he'd activated his time-rewinding Third Bomb—Bites the Dust. Her consciousness had been thrown back to day one of the transmigration.
Reality had been rewritten by Yoshikage Kira.
But Bites the Dust could only be planted on someone without a Stand. Its activation conditions were strict. And Kira himself wouldn't retain memories from the version of events before the rewind. More crucially still: Bites the Dust could only rewind one hour. With Inori's usual habits, she certainly wouldn't have been in any rush to confront Kira—she'd have settled in first, taken at least three days before making any real move.
Contradictions stacked on contradictions. Even when Inori came up with a plausible-sounding explanation, the next contradiction would knock it down. The only two things she could state for certain: Yoshikage Kira had somehow learned of Inori's existence, and he had begun crafting unknown Stands from outside this universe to deal with her. Soft & Wet was just a special case for now. But if Stands from JoJo Part 8 kept showing up from here on, she'd be in real danger of getting blindsided in a back alley.
—I once cornered Yoshikage Kira. Faced with annihilation, he obtained a stronger version of Bites the Dust, rewound time to the day of my arrival in Morioh, and retained all his memories. Then, drawing on what he remembered of our fight, he worked out his counters and fed those countermeasures—the intel on King Crimson and the strategy to handle it—to every Part 8 Stand user he had somehow created.
There was no proof. But for now, it was the most coherent explanation on the table.
Then again, all of this was guesswork. It might have nothing to do with Kira at all… and someone else was loose in Morioh, stirring up trouble.
No good. She had no leads at all…
Inori opened her eyes and sat up irritably.
A cigarette would have helped right now. Something to settle her nerves and let her think things through, work out the soundest move. Unfortunately, since becoming Inori Yuzuriha, she'd nearly stopped smoking altogether—back when she'd lived with Hare Menjou, she'd been afraid Hare would mistake her for someone with bad habits.
The world of Guilty Crown had been treacherous, no question. But she had never once been left as completely stumped as she was now.
She didn't enjoy thinking. That didn't mean she couldn't. If she couldn't, she'd have died in the previous world long ago.
When she really tallied things up, her position wasn't all that grim. King Crimson, plus the Everlasting Crown's two abilities, gave her solid safeguards. Yasuho's Stand was perfectly suited to investigation. Tracking down Kira would be trivial.
—Start with Kira, then.
Inori steadied herself, lay back down, and pulled the covers up.
—Tomorrow, get Rohan Kishibe to come along. Visit Ghost Girl's Alley together and meet Reimi Sugimoto. As a ghost who's watched over Morioh for fifteen years, she sees the world differently from the living. She might have important leads.
…
…
The next day, Inori still went with Yasuho and Koichi as far as the school, but lied about heading home afterward. Halfway back, she switched directions, asking after the manga artist Rohan Kishibe's address from a young milkman delivering his rounds.
As for why she was bringing Rohan along—simple. The man's Stand ability was extraordinarily useful for intelligence-gathering. On top of that, Rohan had old ties to the ghost girl Reimi Sugimoto. Bringing him along made sense both practically and emotionally.
"This house is way too fancy."
Inori took in the elegant detached villa in front of her, an undeniable twinge of envy pricking at her.
Living in a place like this at twenty? At twenty herself, she hadn't even graduated college yet. Truly the man, Sensei Rohan. The only pity was that, like Yoshikage Kira, the man had a taste for the quiet life. If he'd stayed in Tokyo, his career would have flourished far beyond what this little country town could offer.
Ding-dong—
Inori pressed the doorbell and waited patiently.
"Who is it?"
A listless, deeply irritated voice came through as the door opened. Inori smoothed the smile back onto her face, raised a hand, and gave him a winking little wave in greeting.
He stood there with dark circles under his eyes, his face ghostly pale, still in his work clothes. The unmistakable look of a man who'd pulled an all-nighter and was paying for it now.
"Hello, Sensei Rohan. We meet again."
"…? Inori—!"
Every trace of irritation on Rohan's face crystallized into shock the instant he registered the girl in front of him. He still remembered, vividly, what she had done to him the day before. His expression shifted in an instant, sleepiness gone, and without another word he made to slam the door shut.
But Inori's brand-new high-heeled ankle boot was wedged between door and frame before it could close.
"Don't be so cold. Didn't I tell you we'd meet again?" The girl tilted her head slightly, smiling faintly, the carefully woven braid in her hair shifting with the motion.
She was strong. Rohan knew perfectly well he couldn't push her out, and resisting too hard would only break his own door.
"You… what do you actually want? I don't want to see you again!"