Nobody objected to Inori's plan. Real or fake, finding the body and reading it with Heaven's Door would settle everything.
"Mr. Jotaro, did you find the notebook with his fingernail records?"
"...His what?"
Jotaro looked blank, completely lost on what she was asking.
"The log where he records his weekly nail count."
"No." He shook his head. "The entire house was cleaned out. He didn't even leave fingerprints."
Inori studied the bottle of human fingernails. The label read "1999"—this year's collection—but it was less than a third full, as if it hadn't been updated in a long time. She remembered clearly: Yoshikage Kira kept a notebook logging the exact count of nails shed each day. That timeline might contain useful clues.
But knowing Kira's meticulous nature, he'd either taken the notebook with him or destroyed it. Their only hope now was the body search.
Inori was genuinely angry.
Yoshikage Kira—who did he think he was, pulling something like this? Time reversal was absurdly overpowered. No matter how brilliant a strategy she devised to defeat him, he could simply rewind and avoid every unfavorable outcome before it happened.
The only thing Inori could do was crack the secret of his Stand before he found the timeline where he killed her. Easier said than done. She didn't even know what triggered Bites the Dust yet, though she had several working theories.
"Hey, Inori. Hand me that bottle."
Rohan walked over to her.
"What for?"
"A single fingernail is probably too small to get a reading from... but the bottle itself might work."
His brow was slightly furrowed, eyes flickering with uncertainty. He wasn't sure it would succeed, but it wasn't going to cost him anything to try.
Inori handed over the half-empty bottle of nails. Rohan summoned Heaven's Door and successfully activated his reading ability on the glass container. Inori had never seen anything like this—a power that hadn't appeared in the main story. He had actually turned a bottle of fingernails into a book.
"Manufactured 1995. Material: quartz powder, dolomite... Place of origin: Yamada Glassware Factory, S City..." Rohan flipped past the dense production specifications and found the final page. Written clearly was a date. "Last opened and an item placed inside... April 2nd, 1999."
"Really?" Inori's eyes flew wide. A flash of insight sparked in her mind. "You're sure it's April 2nd?"
"Heaven's Door doesn't make mistakes."
"What's the deal with April 2nd? What does that tell us?"
Josuke asked, confused.
"Yoshikage Kira has a habit. He puts every nail clipping into a bottle and logs the weekly count in a notebook. He's an extremely fastidious man."
Inori's gaze was lowered, her tone measured.
"This 1999 bottle was last opened on April 2nd—ten days ago. For someone with Yoshikage Kira's obsessive-compulsive habits, going a full ten days without storing his nails means that something happened starting on that date."
"That's... kind of a stretch, isn't it?" Josuke scratched the back of his head, forcing an uncertain smile. "Maybe he just forgot, or got tired of doing it?"
Inori bit her lip in mild annoyance. Were Rohan and Josuke professional contrarians? Did they have to push back on everything she said?
"He wouldn't."
Jotaro chose this moment to side with Inori.
"A man who has done the same thing every single day for fifteen years does not stop because he's lazy or busy. Something must have happened—something that upended his entire way of life."
"And that's exactly the question." Inori seized the opening and drove the point home. "I didn't arrive in Morioh until April 9th. Even if I killed him on the day I got here in some timeline he later reset, the earliest the nail collection should have stopped is April 8th. Not April 2nd."
"A day or two off, I could understand. But a full week without trimming his nails is something Yoshikage Kira would find absolutely intolerable."
—The real Kira trimmed his nails multiple times a day. For him, even one day without cutting them was already pushing it—let alone an entire week.
This was a critical clue, possibly enough to blow Yoshikage Kira's cover wide open. Inori sank into thought. She could feel that this suspicious date concealed an enormous secret, laid out right in front of her. But Kira had locked it inside a box, and she still needed the key. Time reversal. The conditions for reversing time. What were they?
"Could it be that... Kira can rewind more than just twenty-four hours?"
The other three were beginning to see this wasn't a simple coincidence. Even Josuke had started turning the puzzle over in his head. The group had been racking their brains to no avail, but a single offhand remark from him sparked an epiphany.
"Yes!"
Inori's eyes blazed. She couldn't help snapping her fingers.
"That explains everything! He knows all of our abilities. He found Stand collaborators in this short a time. There's no way he did that by rewinding just a day or two!"
"Well, aren't you the clever one, Josuke!"
"Was that... a compliment?"
The boy broke into a sheepish grin, slow on the uptake.
"Of course."
"And what does that actually change?" Rohan couldn't help a flicker of irritation at how freely Inori praised Josuke. "Whether he can rewind twenty-four hours or two hundred and forty, odds are he's already rotting underground."
"It matters more than you think."
Yoshikage Kira's Bites the Dust—his third bomb—had awakened in canon only when the Arrow pierced him at his most desperate moment, a power born purely to protect himself. Following Inori's original strategy of killing him instantly with Time Erasure on sight, he should never have been driven to that kind of desperation. And yet this Morioh, where time and space had been warped, was full of Part Eight Stands, and Yasuho Hirose existed here, as if someone had deliberately renovated the world.
—Yoshikage Kira has a fourth power, beyond time reversal.
"Let's table this until we find the body."
Jotaro's calm reminder pulled them back to the present.
"We're standing in a crime scene right now. The snakes outside, the bodies—someone's going to notice. If we stay any longer, the police will want to have a word, and things will get complicated."
"And I want to find that Stand Arrow."
"Right—the Arrow's important too."
Inori remembered what she'd extracted during her interrogation of Born This Way's user. The Arrow had a bone from some creature tied to it—most likely a human bone. Kira had used that Arrow to create the Part Eight Stands. There might be a connection between the bone and whatever power had allowed him to "renovate" this world.
"The Arrow is in Room 211 of the Beach Resort Hotel."
Rohan recalled seeing this detail in the pages he'd read on Damo.
Beyond the bottles upon bottles of fingernails, there was nothing else of note. The four-person Kira-Hunting Team evacuated quickly. The battle at Kira's estate had come to an end.
From this day forward, the Kira family home became another entry in Morioh's catalogue of ghost stories: "The Villa That Loved Its Master." The original owner had been cornered and killed by three gangsters from out of town. But when those three tried to ransack his belongings, the house itself—bereft of its master—had taken its brutal revenge, leaving them dead in ways too gruesome to describe.
...