In that instant, Avdol's flames did more than scatter the fog.
They purified the battlefield.
The microscopic ice shards suspended throughout the air — the ones that had been silently shredding lungs and throats with every breath for the entire battle — flashed, hissed, and ceased to exist. Not melted. Erased.
Joseph felt it in his chest before he consciously registered it. The obstruction loosened. Something fundamental cleared.
Hamon could flow again.
He stepped forward without hesitation and took Shintaro from Avdol's arms, lowering carefully onto one knee. He pressed both palms to Shintaro's chest, ignoring the blood still moving through his own torn throat.
Golden light surged — steady this time, purposeful, not the desperate last-expenditure from moments earlier but the measured, sustained kind.
"Stay with me," Joseph muttered. "Don't you dare fade out now."
Avdol rose to his full height.
The heat rolling off Magicians Red billowed the hem of his coat like a flag in a storm, snapping loud in the recovered silence of the cleared field.
"I am not a man who loses composure easily," he said.
His gaze settled on the Ice Crystal Stand — still burning from the ignition he'd delivered on arrival, the fire growing fiercer by the second rather than dying down.
"But you have injured my comrade."
The air around him shimmered with accumulated heat.
"I will not remain calm."
Magicians Red brought its palms together.
Between them, a sphere of flame began to compress — tighter, denser, smaller, the condensation radiating a heat so concentrated that the ice beneath Avdol's boots began to sweat and crack in a widening circle.
The Ice Crystal Stand felt it.
For the first time since the battle began — it hesitated.
It tried to dissolve backward into mist. Into the obscuring white that had sheltered it throughout the fight.
But there was no mist left.
The moisture had already been burned from the surrounding air. The environment it had built and inhabited and hunted through was gone.
The crystalline figure jerked around and fled — scrambling toward a distant patch of lingering frost at the edge of the cleared perimeter, the only remaining humidity in a hundred meters.
"Hmph." Avdol's eyes narrowed. "Running?"
"Cross Fire Hurricane."
Magicians Red thrust its hand forward.
The compressed sphere detonated.
A blazing cross-shaped pillar of fire roared outward from the palm in a jet of scorching red and white, tearing across the ice field with the sound of something that had been waiting to be released. It pursued the fleeing Stand with the unwavering persistence of a divine judgment.
The Ice Crystal Stand spun mid-flight and unleashed a desperate barrage — dozens of ice spikes hurled straight into the incoming column of fire.
They vaporized on contact.
Not shattered. Not melted.
Erased. Mid-flight, mid-form, before they could even complete the arc of their trajectory.
The cross of fire expanded in the Stand's narrowing, hollow eye sockets.
It stopped exhaling cold.
For the first time — it screamed.
The sound was thin and shrill, like glass fracturing under pressure that has finally exceeded its tolerance.
The flames swallowed it whole.
The crystalline body cracked from within, splintered in sequence — shoulder, torso, leg — and disintegrated inside the blaze. Shards burned to nothing before they could reach the ground.
No smoke.
No residue.
Only heat.
Avdol did not recall his Stand.
Instead — Magicians Red spread its arms wide.
Boom.
A ring of pure thermal force erupted outward from Avdol's position. A visible shockwave of distorted red heat, rolling across the ice field in every direction simultaneously.
Where it passed — the dense, stubborn, suffocating fog evaporated in an instant.
Ten meters.
Thirty.
Fifty.
One hundred.
In seconds, a vast clearing had been carved into the white void that had surrounded them since they stepped off the ship. The impossible blank sameness of the fog-world tore open and revealed itself as what it had always been — frozen sea under an open sky.
Moonlight returned.
Starlight glittered faintly across the ice surface, pale and honest and ordinary.
Avdol exhaled slowly, fine sweat beading along his brow.
"Magnificent!" Polnareff's shout rang across the opened field with genuine, uncomplicated relief. "Now that rat has nowhere left to hide!"
"There." Kakyoin's voice came sharp and precise.
From the shattered remains of the three Franklin Expedition grave markers — now rubble from Star Platinum's earlier assault — a thin ribbon of blue smoke curled upward from the central mound.
Jotaro moved before the word had finished leaving Kakyoin's mouth.
Hat brim lowered. Leg muscles coiling. He launched forward like a released arrow, crossing the ice in silence.
The frozen soil beneath the mound trembled.
Purple light solidified behind him.
Star Platinum's fist descended.
"ORA!!"
The frozen earth detonated — ice and dirt exploding outward in a violent spray that caught moonlight and scattered it in every direction.
Star Platinum plunged its hand into the crater and yanked upward.
A man emerged from the wreckage as if uprooted by something that had decided he was done hiding.
"AAAAAAH!!"
Thick polar gear. Face blistered and scorched from Avdol's flames, expression twisted by the specific combination of pain and terror that comes from being dragged into open air by an entity that has no emotional stake in your continued existence.
Star Platinum held him aloft by the collar with the easy, complete authority of something that has never had to try.
"Let me go — cough — let me go!" he choked.
Jotaro ignored him.
He ripped back the hood. Exposed the bald forehead.
Under moonlight — smooth. Even.
No Flesh Bud.
Not a puppet. Not brainwashed. A person who had chosen this.
Jotaro's eyes narrowed slightly, and then he scanned the perimeter.
The fog was gone. The Stand was destroyed. The main body was in hand.
And yet — the ice field remained perfectly solid. The ship still sat imprisoned at its center, locked in place, unchanged.
"Yare yare."
Star Platinum's grip tightened. The man gagged.
Jotaro turned toward the open expanse of cleared ice and spoke at it, his voice carrying easily across the silence.
"Come out."
No theatrics. No elevation.
"I don't care what your arrangement is. His life is currently in my hands."
Star Platinum squeezed. Bones creaked with an audible protest.
"Three seconds."
The voice didn't rise.
"Release the ice. Show yourself. Or I crush his skull, and then I dig you out at my leisure."
"One."
The knuckles whitened.
"Two."
The prisoner's feet kicked uselessly in the air. His eyes darted frantically toward the left section of the ice sheet — fixed on something unseen, desperate, pleading.
Silence answered him.
Only moonlight on frost. Only the distant sounds of the ship.
"It appears," Jotaro said evenly, "that your partner has no intention of saving you."
Star Platinum's grip began to close the rest of the way.
Joseph, still cradling Shintaro, scanned the perimeter with grim vigilance.
Polnareff stood ready, Silver Chariot's rapier poised and steady.
Kakyoin's eyes moved methodically across the cleared horizon, searching for the faintest distortion, the subtlest wrongness.
Just as Jotaro prepared to end the count —
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