Yasuho Hirose's heart was hammering so hard it hurt.
She'd been hiding behind a telephone pole, but she'd heard every word of the confrontation between father and son. Yoshikage Kira—wasn't that the name of the serial killer Inori had been hunting? He wasn't dead after all. And he'd become this child's father.
The boy's exchange with Kira about "time travel" had sent chills crawling up her scalp, and she barely understood half of it. But only one thought mattered: Forget about my own past for now. I need to tell Inori immediately. Kosaku Kawajiri was Yoshikage Kira—she had to let her know, right now.
She didn't dare make a phone call. The sound would give her away. All she could do was endure the tension and keep waiting—until Kira summoned his Stand. He was going to kill Hayato. That was the breaking point.
Her urgency wasn't just about the boy being a critical witness. She simply couldn't stand by and watch a brave child like this be silenced by a monster.
In that desperate moment, the extraordinary Paisley Park had already been working ahead. It had preemptively sent a text to an unknown number, and moments later the punk from the train emerged from the apartment entrance, walking right into Yoshikage Kira.
The two clashed—and Yasuho seized her window.
She didn't have time to think. A motorcycle sat parked in front of a restaurant behind her. She had no key, but she had Paisley Park. This was a Stand that could hack classified police databases without breaking a sweat; hotwiring a motorcycle was nothing. Yasuho didn't even bother with a helmet. She threw a leg over the seat, gunned the engine, and in the seconds Kira spent dealing with the punk, she grabbed Hayato and tore away from the scene.
...
...
"O-Onee-san... who are you?"
Hayato had already braced himself to die, so being rescued by a complete stranger left him reeling.
He'd seen her before—during his surveillance of Kira, they'd exchanged a few brief words. Hayato had considered telling someone, anyone, and asking for help, but he had no idea where to find the girl named "Inori" who appeared repeatedly in Kira's diary.
Ordinary people wouldn't believe him. That was what he'd always assumed.
Yet the person who'd saved his life turned out to be someone he'd met only once in passing. He didn't know what to feel.
"My name is Yasuho Hirose."
"Hiro...se?"
Hayato froze.
He'd seen that surname in Kira's diary. But its context was peculiar—the name didn't appear among the list of pursuers Kira feared. Instead, it occupied a strange, ambiguous position Hayato couldn't make sense of.
He wrapped his arms around Yasuho's waist. She was riding fast, and the cold night wind whipped past them on both sides. He had to press one hand against his yellow cap to keep it from blowing away. Night had fully descended over Morioh by now. His mother had probably finished cooking dinner and was waiting at home for him and his "father" to return. Sadly, going home tonight was no longer an option.
"Your father is actually Yoshikage Kira, right? You mentioned a diary—can you tell me more?"
They'd been talking too rapidly during the confrontation, and the parts about time travel were hard to follow from fragments alone. Yasuho wanted a clearer picture first.
"Onee-san, if you know about Yoshikage Kira, then you must have one of those Stand abilities too!"
"Sort of. But my Stand has almost no combat power."
Yasuho gave a wry smile, then turned the bike toward the coast.
—Not "almost." It has none.
"It's a notebook. It describes Yoshikage Kira's battles against a group of kindhearted Stand users. I read about an ability that rewinds the entire world's time by twenty-four hours—the condition for activating it is detonating himself with his own Stand bomb."
Yasuho had more or less confirmed this already, but she wanted details.
Paisley Park hadn't led her to cross paths with this fake father-son duo by accident. What she wanted wasn't to capture Yoshikage Kira—it was to find the reason she'd been transported to this world. And perhaps Kira's diary held even more answers.
"Onee-san... do you know Inori?"
When she didn't respond right away, Hayato pressed his question with growing urgency.
"Inori-chan? Her name is in the diary too?"
"She's the person Yoshikage Kira fears the most!" Hayato's eyes went wide with excitement when he heard Yasuho refer to Inori by a familiar nickname. "She's also the person he most wants to kill. I need to give her every piece of intelligence I've gathered on Kira! Can you call her?"
"Don't worry, Hayato-kun." Yasuho's voice was warm but firm. Steady. Reliable. "I've already notified her. We're heading to Lovers' Cape now. I'll get you to Inori."
"Great!"
Some of the tension drained from Hayato's body. He let out a long, shaky breath.
Time was limited—he hadn't been able to read everything in Kira's diary. But one thing was certain: every line of those notes dripped with fear of Inori. As long as that woman learned what was in the diary and understood Kira's two abilities, she could absolutely defeat Yoshikage Kira.
"I used every trick I could think of to lead him into my trap... but it doesn't mean much. He could activate Bites the Dust at any moment and rewind everything."
The relief didn't last. Hayato calmed himself and laid out his full analysis for Yasuho.
"To beat him, the one thing you absolutely cannot do is kill him."
"Hayato-kun... I have one more question."
"What is it, Onee-san?"
"Did you see my name in the diary?"
Yasuho suddenly stopped the motorcycle along a quiet, deserted side road and turned to look at Hayato, her expression grave.
...
...
Honestly, this had come out of nowhere.
Inori had only chased after Yasuho out of concern for her emotional state—she had no idea that Yasuho had already recovered her memories from her original world. After circling Trattoria Trussardi multiple times with no sign of her and getting nothing but unanswered calls, Inori was about to head back to the restaurant and rally the group for a proper search when her phone buzzed with a message from an unknown number.
—Yoshikage Kira is Kosaku Kawajiri.
—Come to Lovers' Cape.
The sender... was Paisley Park.
But the name Yoshikage Kira burned through the screen like a brand, searing itself into Inori's crimson eyes. She'd been on the verge of giving up. She never expected a lead to surface at a moment like this.
...No, that's impossible!
After discovering the corpse, Inori hadn't actually abandoned the search. She'd remembered the original story's plot point where Kira swapped faces with Kosaku Kawajiri, so the very next day she'd gone to Aya's Beauty Salon Cinderella to confirm—and nearly ended up getting held captive for a forced breast augmentation in the process.
Aya's answer had raised no red flags. But if it wasn't done through Cinderella, had Kira found another Stand capable of swapping bodies?
—None of that matters now.
The specifics were irrelevant. All Inori needed was one result: Yoshikage Kira was alive. Her gut had been right. He really had faked his death back then. But what he probably hadn't anticipated was that she'd been one step ahead all along—she'd known he would become Kosaku Kawajiri before it even happened.
Even without Paisley Park's message, she'd planned to check in on the Kawajiri household before leaving Morioh.
—Right now, what matters is getting there as fast as possible.
Yoshikage Kira had become Kosaku Kawajiri. And from the look of it, Yasuho had likely run into him. She was in danger. Inori didn't have time to double back to the restaurant for Josuke and the others—she flagged down a taxi and raced toward Lovers' Cape.