"Do you remember now? How you died?"
In Ghost Girl's Alley, Reimi Sugimoto stood with her chin lifted and one finger pointed steadily at Yoshikage Kira. Soft & Wet loomed at her side, poised and unhurried, ready the instant it was needed to send this irredeemable man straight to hell.
"You... who are you, exactly?"
Kira wasn't agitated — only mildly confused.
He knew he had lost. He'd accepted that calmly. He felt he had given everything, done all he could. There was only one reason he'd lost, and it was simple: his opponent had simply been too powerful. Inori's Stand was too strong.
"Fifteen years ago, you weren't a Stand user yet. You had no way to hide the body."
Reimi met his eyes and explained clearly, every word deliberate.
She had waited fifteen years for this. She'd imagined it countless times — standing over Yoshikage Kira, pronouncing judgment on his crimes, pushing him with her own hands into the depths of the underworld.
"So my death made the newspapers."
Reimi turned away. Her fingers undid the buttons at her collar, and she exposed the graceful line of her back — and the terrible wound upon it. The fatal injury from fifteen years ago, laid bare for Yoshikage Kira to see.
"Doesn't this scar look familiar? Or was I so forgettable — your very first kill, the one time you failed to take the hand — that I never crossed your mind again?"
"So... it's you." Kira's eyes widened slightly. "I remember... Reimi Sugimoto. Have you really been here all fifteen years?"
"Yes."
She answered without turning back.
"I waited for the people I needed to wait for — Inori and Little Rohan. They sent you to me. Don't you understand yet? Kira — you're going to hell. Right now."
"What...?"
The full picture snapped into place, and Kira's teeth ground together in cold fury.
—So that's why Inori and Rohan Kishibe suddenly knew everything about me. I assumed it was Inori's precognition. It never occurred to me this woman was behind it. If I had known — I should have activated Great Days and come here first thing. None of this would have happened.
He had already made his peace with losing. But knowing now that his defeat came down to a ghost stubbornly haunting one alley for fifteen years, his anger came back white-hot.
Not that it mattered anymore. He had lost Killer Queen. He was an ordinary man.
"You! You're the one who told Inori everything about me!"
Kira lunged forward, trying to get around Reimi to face her — then stopped dead.
"Wait... Why did you expose your back to identify yourself?"
He rarely lost his composure. Especially not now.
—If he could use this woman, Kira thought, there might still be a way to turn this around.
"Is this... that place? The place you can never look back from?"
The words struck like a blade. Reimi broke out in a cold sweat. Yoshikage Kira even knew about that?
"My father told me once. This town has a passage for the dead — there's a place where you must never look back, or some invisible force drags you somewhere else."
"You're setting a trap for me, aren't you! Reimi Sugimoto!" Kira laughed coldly and lunged — reaching to grab her, to make her test the consequences of looking back — but his scheming hand never reached her. Soft & Wet seized it, pinned it fast.
"A Stand... this Stand is Soft & Wet. Did Inori give it to you?"
Soft & Wet wasn't strong, but more than enough for an ordinary man.
It gripped Yoshikage Kira and triggered its ability at the same moment — Soap Bubbles. A mass of soap bubbles engulfed his ethereal body, stripping away his balance. As he toppled, the motion completed itself: he turned, he looked back, and landed face-up on the ground.
"Accept your judgment, Kira."
Reimi looked down at him and pronounced it calmly.
"Wh-what are these — urgh!"
Countless hands — hands, the things Yoshikage Kira had loved above all else — came surging out of the dark and closed around him, dragging him back.
"Where — where am I going — no — NOOO—!"
Kira's soul was torn apart by all those grasping hands, shredded to pieces, then drawn into a vortex like a black hole — until there was nothing.
—Be a good person in another world, Yoshikage Kira.
...
...
Hayato Kawajiri had been stuffed inside an empty communal waste bin, hands and feet bound tight, a filthy rag jammed into his mouth.
Kira hadn't been in any rush to kill him. The reason was probably simple: he hadn't been confident he could kill Inori in a single attempt. If things went wrong, keeping Hayato alive left room to maneuver. If they went right, killing him later would be just as easy.
Unfortunately, Kira never had the chance to come back.
Hayato crouched in the bin, shaking. He couldn't move. He couldn't make a sound. He could only wait — either for Yoshikage Kira to return and finish him, or for a garbage collector to find him in the morning.
The stench was nauseating enough to knock him out, but sharp enough to keep him awake despite himself. A special kind of misery.
Then the lid above his head was wrenched open.
Hayato looked up in a panic to find a young woman with pink-white hair peering down at him, smiling warmly.
"Hayato Kawajiri?"
"Nnh — mnh!! Mnh mnh mnh!"
His eyes welled up instantly. He nodded over and over, which combined with his bound limbs made him look exactly like one of those round-bottomed roly-poly toys.
There was no reason he could name, but Hayato knew — the beautiful young woman looking down at him was "Inori." Her hair and face matched Kira's diary descriptions exactly. And the only person coming for him at this hour was either Yoshikage Kira, or the person who had defeated him.
Inori had no intention of touching the filthy boy. She summoned King Crimson and had it lift Hayato out and undo his bindings.
"Kira! ...Phew — ha... Inori-nee, where's Yoshikage Kira?"
"Dead," Inori answered flatly. "How did you know I was Inori?"
"Huh? What do you mean... We came out here together, didn't we? I gave you everything I knew — wait, huh? What..."
The boy's answer contradicted itself, and he knew it. His memories felt wrong.
He was certain they'd come here together, that he'd given her every lead. And yet his first instinct on seeing her had been to compare her face to the description in Kira's diary. Hadn't they been here together this whole time?
He'd followed Yoshikage Kira off the tram and run into a pink-haired young woman — who else could it be but Inori?
And yet. Something didn't add up.
—Must be my imagination.
"Inori-nee! Is Yoshikage Kira really dead?"
"Really. Completely dead." Inori let out a small sigh. "Want me to take you to see the body? Though you wouldn't recognize it anymore."
"No... that's fine. That's enough."
No trace of relief appeared on Hayato's young face at the news.
He bowed his head, and tears came without warning. He bit down on his lip and couldn't find words — because this meant his father, the real Kosaku Kawajiri, had been erased from the world completely.
Losing his father while still a child. Another wound carved into Morioh by the monster called Yoshikage Kira — another victim just as real as every woman who had died to feed his obsession with hands.
Paper crumpled by force can never be smoothed back to its original shape by hand. The people whose lives had been torn apart by Kira's existence would not come back to life just because he'd died. Like Reimi Sugimoto, who had waited fifteen years in the alley.
—But even so.
We don't know what tomorrow holds. Only that it can't be worse than today.
"I... I want to go home. My mom is waiting."
"Can I come with you?" Inori bent down and ruffled the boy's hair gently. "I want to look through what Kira left behind. There might be something there that interests me."
—For instance, there's still the Photo Old Man — exactly how Kira transformed into Kosaku Kawajiri remains a mystery, though it no longer matters much. But surely Yoshihiro still holds some secrets.
—Including the saint's corpse part used to create Stands in JoJolion.
"But... I don't know how to explain it to my mom... can it wait?"
"Relax. I'll slip in quietly — she won't even know I'm there."
Inori winked, entirely self-assured.
"I'm very good at sneaking around~"