"Fuck… that was manly as hell!"
It wasn't just the domestic audience that erupted when they heard Polnareff's declaration of vengeance. Across the Atlantic, countless American viewers were slamming their desks and cheering at their screens, just as fired up. There was no denying it: that kind of character - a proud, wounded man burning with rage and resolve - always struck a nerve especially well overseas.
On streaming platforms, plenty of content creators had already started live watch parties. They followed the episode in real time while reading chat, shouting theories, reacting to every turn, and nearly leaping out of their chairs along with their audiences. The atmosphere was electric.
But as cool as Polnareff's speech had been, the problem still remained.
How were they supposed to kill a Stand that moved through reflections, through that maddening mirrored world?
"Sorry, kid. I'll buy you some candy later."
The next moment, Polnareff kicked up a spray of sand.
The boy standing in front of him immediately felt a sharp sting in his eyes, as if grit had been driven straight into them. Panicked, he squeezed his eyes shut and started crying on the spot.
"Ow! There's sand in my eyes!"
And the instant his eyelids closed, everyone saw it - a faint beam of light slipping through the tiny gap between them.
At that exact same moment, Silver Chariot appeared in front of Polnareff like a white knight shielding its master and brought its blade down in one clean, merciless slash.
"Polnareff… your eyes?!"
Kakyoin was the first to realize it.
The Hanged Man was inside Polnareff's eye.
With a smile that carried both confidence and simmering fury, Polnareff finally laid bare the logic behind the enemy's Stand. If the Hanged Man could only move between reflective surfaces, then the moment one of those surfaces vanished, it would be forced to jump to the next available target.
That was the key.
And when the boy shut his eyes, the next available reflection became Polnareff's own.
Which meant that as long as he could predict that tiny opening between transitions, he could drag the Hanged Man into a split-second gap - and strike it in the real world.
The comment sections exploded.
A lot of viewers had always seen Polnareff as the reckless type, the kind of guy who charged headfirst without thinking. But now they had to admit it: this wasn't just guts. It was sharp observation, quick deduction, and real battle instinct.
Even fans of Bleach were completely hooked at this point. Many of them genuinely couldn't believe that two series with such wildly different combat philosophies came from the same creator. Bleach felt more like an RPG, where overwhelming power and hierarchy often determined the outcome. JoJo, on the other hand, felt like a strategy game - a fight where intelligence, setup, information, and improvisation mattered just as much as raw strength.
Of course, there were still people joking that Jotaro could solve most things with a simple barrage of "ORA ORA ORA."
If anything, that only made the contrast even better.
But the exhilaration didn't last long.
A scream rang out from the nearby town, sharp and full of pain, and Polnareff and Kakyoin rushed over at once.
By now, the audience already understood one of the cruelest rules in this world: when a Stand took damage, that damage fed back to its user. So that scream could only mean one thing.
They had found the real body of the Hanged Man's user.
For one brief moment, everyone watching thought the same thing.
At last. It's over.
But the episode refused to give them that relief so easily.
That bastard pulled another trick.
He slashed an innocent passerby, making Polnareff and Kakyoin briefly mistake the wounded man for him. Then, using the chaos, he drew in the poor townspeople nearby until they surrounded the two on all sides.
And the trap snapped shut.
With more than a dozen people crowded around them, every pair of eyes became a new route for the Hanged Man. Every pupil, every glimmer of reflected light, every wet surface inside those eyes turned into another jumping point.
The villain's laughter scraped through the scene like rusted metal dragging over stone.
"Well? What now, Polnareff? Why don't you try killing them all? Go ahead. You wasted so many years chasing me, and in the end, this is how you'll die. What a dull, pathetic life."
Hidden in the distance, he savored every second of it.
Polnareff, already cut over and over by attacks too fast to track, was quickly being covered in wounds. Blood ran down his face, his arms, his chest. Every strike felt deliberate, not just meant to injure him, but to humiliate him, to drain him, to grind his rage into helplessness.
This wasn't just the kind of villain who made viewers angry.
He made them want to crawl through the screen.
"Y-you bastard!"
Polnareff roared, eyes wide with fury, his whole body on the verge of exploding.
And outside the story, the effect was immediate. Blood pressure skyrocketed in living rooms everywhere. Countless viewers clenched their fists, swore out loud, and leaned toward the screen like they were about to physically intervene. Some of the more hot-headed ones actually smashed their fists into their monitors, only to end up continuing the episode on their phones with throbbing hands and even worse tempers.
It wasn't only because Polnareff and Kakyoin were suffering.
It was because this enemy was disgusting in the most effective way possible.
The kind of villain who made people forget the boundary between fiction and reality for a second and think, with complete sincerity, that they wanted to kill him themselves.
It had been a long, long time since people had seen a scumbag this hateable.
Then Kakyoin's voice cut through the tension.
"That's not right, Polnareff."
His tone was calm and steady, as if he were placing the final piece into a puzzle the two of them had already been solving together in silence.
"When you're taking revenge… you don't just call someone a bastard. What you should say is…"
He barely got halfway through the line before the audience understood.
Eyes lit up everywhere.
Because they knew exactly what was coming.
It was the perfect callback to Polnareff's earlier words, now being repurposed by Kakyoin himself. And then, as if the episode knew precisely how to seize the hearts of its viewers, Kakyoin's execution theme began to rise.
The Noble Hierophant.
That was all it took.
The moment the music started, it felt as though thousands upon thousands of people in different homes all inhaled at the same time.
That's it. It's over now.
Everyone could taste the catharsis before it even arrived.
"My name is Noriaki Kakyoin. To console the spirits of my friend Avdol… and my friend Polnareff's sister…"
As he spoke, Kakyoin took out a coin and held it high.
He no longer looked like someone merely fighting an enemy.
He looked like someone pronouncing a sentence.
"I demand your death as atonement!"
At that instant, the blood of countless viewers ignited completely.
There was no way anyone could stay still anymore.
Kakyoin tossed the coin into the air. The metal spun beneath the light, and as it did, the eyes of everyone nearby were naturally pulled toward a single point.
A single reflection.
A single opening.
Polnareff understood immediately.
No extra explanation was needed.
The instant the position of the Hanged Man was revealed, Polnareff lashed out again, kicking sand into the eyes of an old man in the crowd. Startled by the discomfort, the man shut his eyes on reflex.
And with nowhere else to go, the Hanged Man was forced out of that reflection and launched toward the next available target - the spinning coin in the air.
"Now!"
Polnareff roared.
Silver Chariot shot forward.
Its blade flashed like a streak of silver lightning and struck the Hanged Man in mid-flight, nearly cleaving it in two.
A shriek of agony tore out from the user in the distance.
No longer able to control his Stand, he staggered and turned to flee, overtaken by pure panic. The sneering confidence from moments ago was gone. So was the mockery. So was the arrogance.
All that remained was terror.
He ran through the alleyways in a blind scramble until he slammed into an iron gate.
He tried to open it.
Nothing.
He pulled again, frantic.
Still nothing.
"It won't open… it won't open… please… please…"
Then footsteps approached from behind.
Polnareff appeared like vengeance given form.
His face was covered in blood. His eyes burned with murderous resolve. And when he spoke, his voice was low and cold enough to make it clear the end had truly come.
"That scream of yours… now that's something worth hearing, J. Geil."
The man trembled.
Polnareff stepped closer, each word landing like the unsheathing of a blade.
"From here on, you'll cry, scream, and descend into hell. But there is one thing… one thing alone… that I cannot leave to the wardens of hell."
Then he raised his hand.
"Judgment by a Thousand Blades!"
Silver Chariot lunged.
Like a knight of light, it erupted into a storm of thrusts so fast they were almost invisible, piercing through its enemy again and again and again, until that sinful body was shredded beneath the fury of justice.
Geil's scream shattered into the air.
And Polnareff, teeth clenched as he stared at the end he had waited for so long, finally let out the words that had been buried inside him the whole time.
"I've waited for this moment… for far too long!"
At that point, almost nobody had the presence of mind to type.
A ridiculous number of viewers simply jumped up from their chairs with their chests heaving, veins bulging, shouting at their screens like they'd been possessed by a troop of enraged gorillas.
"Ohhhhhhhh!"
"That was so satisfying!"
"Holy shit!"
"Beautiful! Beautiful!"
Parents, sleepy mothers, roommates, and even imaginary girlfriends were all startled by the sudden howling coming from bedrooms across the country. Some people got knocks on their walls. Some got texts asking whether they'd lost their minds. Some got yelled at on the spot.
No one cared.
Only after J. Geil's body finally collapsed for good, and the episode gave the weight of that moment a few seconds to breathe, did the viewers sink back into their seats, still shaking with satisfaction.
Then the comments came flooding in.
Even a lot of people who usually watched quietly without ever posting anything finally gave in. There was no holding that kind of emotion inside. If they didn't say something, it felt like they'd burst.
Kakyoin was impossibly cool. The line instantly became an iconic scene. Silver Chariot looked like justice itself clad in white. And in that very moment, for many fans, Polnareff had reached a kind of absurd greatness - not just in stats, but in sheer presence.
For some, the release was so intense it was almost embarrassing to admit how good it felt.
And just like that, the first episode of the week came to an end.
On the other side of the screen, Boris Andersen, the actor playing Kakyoin, had just finished watching it too.
Much like Mark, who used to show off endlessly after playing Ichigo and Peter, Boris Andersen - already in his thirties - simply couldn't hold himself back. He grabbed his phone and started showing off in every work group, friend group, and family group he had. He wanted people to see it. And for the first time in a very long while, he had more than enough reason.
Back during filming, he had never imagined he would look this good on screen.
To be fair, he knew he had acted well. But a scene like this didn't come from acting alone. It needed buildup. Direction. Editing. Timing. Atmosphere. The perfect musical cue at the perfect second. Every piece had to lock together to create something greater than any one part.
Without The Noble Hierophant, for example, the scene's impact would have dropped by at least half.
That was why so many talented actors often left a set feeling satisfied with their performance, only to end up disappointed when they saw the finished version after post-production. A project could elevate an actor to the heavens - or bury them without mercy.
"Babe! You blew up - you really blew up!"
At that moment, Boris Andersen's wife walked in carrying their child, her face full of excitement.
"Several film and television companies contacted me just now. A bunch of them want you to sign with them!"
For a moment, he just stood there, stunned.
The episode had barely been out for any time at all.
And people were already coming after him?
A second later, he understood. This wasn't just fan enthusiasm. People in the industry were watching Alex's work too, trying to figure out what they could extract, imitate, and repackage into their own projects.
To put it more bluntly, they wanted to learn how to plagiarize more effectively.
"It really wasn't easy… after being cold for so many years, you finally got another chance to shine."
When his wife said that with tears in her eyes, Boris Andersen suddenly found himself unable to feel entirely happy.
Was that supposed to be encouragement or a knife to the ribs?
Still, after giving it some thought, he didn't immediately accept any of the offers. Instead, he called Alex first and asked whether there might be any future role where he could still be useful. Maybe when Bleach Season 3 finally entered production, it would be better for him to keep his schedule open.
Only after Alex told him the script was still being refined did he finally relax and start looking over the offers properly. Before hanging up, he thanked Alex again and again, bowing so many times into the phone that it almost felt like he wanted to crawl through the line and express his gratitude in person.
Watching him act like that, his wife couldn't help teasing him.
"Honey, you kind of look like a total simp right now."
Boris Andersen rolled his eyes.
A simp?
If sucking up to someone were all it took to land a role that good, half the industry would already be lined up and wagging their tails.
Meanwhile, inside Aurora Entertainment's office, Alex lowered his gaze toward Emily, who had just returned from a round of promotional appearances and was now kneeling beneath his desk. Every now and then, the sound that escaped resembled someone sucking on a popsicle.
Alex reflected in silence.
He really wasn't used to letting men do that kind of thing for him.