"I know what you want to ask."
Back then, during the critical moment against Kibutsuji Muzan, the Red Feather Blades had been broken. The Golden Feather Blades had been wasted—depleted without landing, because she'd had no information going in. Both techniques shut down. It was Mana who had saved her.
In the days since, Mana had not been idle. She had been diving into the depths of Inori's memories—the parts where Inori herself never went—searching for traces of the past, for something connected to the star-shaped birthmark. She believed her theory was correct: the answer lay in what had happened before Inori awakened in the GHQ Anti Bodies research facility, before this crossing of worlds had even begun.
Whatever had happened then had given Inori a Stand as powerful as King Crimson. And whatever that was, it was also the reason she kept being sent from world to world.
Inori had simply, very irresponsibly, forgotten all of it.
"Tell me, Mana."
They sat facing each other in the dark—like contestants in a quiz show with no set and no furniture, just the two of them sitting in empty space, hands resting calmly on their thighs.
Inori in her black feathers. Mana in her white dress. In some embarrassingly earnest moment early in their acquaintance, Inori had told Mana she was the Demon King and Mana was an angel—and here they sat, color-coded for the occasion. She preferred not to think about that.
Ancient cringe. Moving on.
Two girls who looked almost identical, dressed in opposite colors, same posture, same expression, sitting across from each other in the dark—if the backdrop were anything more than empty void, it might have made a famous painting.
"What did you actually see in my memories?"
Inori spoke first.
The Nameless Monster hadn't emerged from nowhere. Mana had found the thread in the critical moment and pulled. She must have found something in Inori's deep memories to pull on.
"I've been thinking about how to tell you since you defeated Muzan. I wanted to give you an answer you could actually do something with."
Inori's brow creased slightly.
Why would answering a question require that much preparation? Couldn't she just relay what she saw?
"Whatever it is, just say it. I can handle anything—even if it turns out I used to be a man."
She weighed the pause and went ahead with it.
She was prepared. She had done the mental work. Whatever Mana was about to reveal—even the discovery that her previous existence had been that of a grown Chinese adult male—she could handle it. As far as that particular scenario went, transmigration and reincarnation were practically a genre at this point; she could improvise a cover story in seconds. Mana wouldn't catch her.
"Oh, don't say such frightening things~! Inori-chan is obviously way too adorable—she must have been an adorable girl in every life!"
"..."
Inori's lips twitched. Her expression went complicated. She said nothing.
"I found a story about another girl," Mana said slowly, "inside your memories."
She had taken a long time to get the words organized. Sorting through fragments wasn't a simple process.
"Another girl?"
"I'll be honest—when I first realized your deepest memories were about someone other than me, I was a little annoyed. A little jealous, actually. But when I looked more closely, I realized she wasn't quite what I expected."
A girl was a girl. How different could she be—unless she wasn't entirely what "girl" suggested?
"What do you mean?"
"It's hard to describe. Your deep memories are like a dark sea—full of scattered fragments, most of them useless debris. I spent a long time moving through it, collecting piece after piece, trying to build a complete picture."
Mana's fingers tightened slightly on the fabric of her dress, as though the memory still had weight.
"Thank you for putting in all that work."
"Not really. I found it fascinating—more interesting than watching you flirt with Kocho Kanae."
She said it with the faintest edge of sour.
Under normal circumstances, Inori would have immediately launched a precise correction: Kocho Kanae and I have a perfectly respectable, entirely platonic friendship. But right now was not the moment. The thread was fragile and she would not snap it.
"I felt like a great fish in the ocean," Mana continued, "moving through the dark, watching every shard that drifted past. Gathering them. And eventually I had enough to see the shape of a girl's life."
"Tell me."
Inori was paying close attention now.
"The images weren't clear. But what I could make out—she wasn't from our time. Not Guilty Crown's era. Not late twentieth century Morioh. Earlier. Something like the Industrial Revolution period, I'd say. And not Japan."
Mana closed her eyes, pressed her fingers to her temples, and worked to bring back the details.
"Around the late nineteenth century."
The late nineteenth century.
That was wrong. Her previous life—as far as she had any reason to believe—had been a contemporary Chinese person. And every world she'd passed through since had been Japan at various points in time: Guilty Crown's 2039, Morioh's 1999, now Taisho-period Demon Slayer. Nothing that placed her anywhere outside of Japan, and nothing older than a century. The late 1800s, in some non-Japanese country—the description didn't match anything she could account for.
She couldn't make sense of it. The more she turned it over, the more unsettled she felt. Inori shook her head and gestured for Mana to continue.
"What was the girl's name?"
"..."
Something shifted in Mana's expression. She went briefly still. Then she raised her head, and her eyes held a specific quality—the expression of someone about to say something they had been working up to for some time.
"JOJO."
"Oh—Jolyne Cujoh?" First association: the only female JOJO she could bring to mind. Jotaro's daughter. Born 1993. Stone Ocean.
"Not that one," Mana said, shaking her head. "I couldn't find her real name. The people around her just called her JOJO." She paused. "And besides—1993 is nowhere near the late nineteenth century."
"She was strange. How do I put this—her hair was the same color as ours. And she had two personalities, from birth. A split self. Something like a congenital dual identity."
—Same hair. Two personalities. Inori's interest sharpened considerably. I know exactly who this is—it's the scumbag-boss Diavolo. A parallel-world, gender-swapped Diavolo.
She almost wanted to see this girl for herself.
"The outer personality was an ordinary, kind girl—a little dense, never held grudges against people who wronged her, a faint strain of chuunibyou running through her without tipping over into the embarrassing kind. But the inner personality was sharp. Strategically brilliant. An enormous amount of nerve."
"..."
Even the personalities matched? Sweet and helpless Doppio on the surface; cold and decisive Diavolo beneath. Was this girl genuinely a feminized version of Diavolo from some parallel nineteenth-century branch of history? But that still didn't work—Diavolo was born in 1966. Nothing close to the 1800s. And a member of the Joestar bloodline on top of it?
The pieces refused to fit.
"Oh," Mana said.
Her eyes opened wide. She looked at Inori with something that might have been startled recognition.
"The inner personality—she gave me a feeling I'd had once before."
"It was like the first time I ever saw you, Inori-chan."