—This outfit won't come off. It's so annoying.
Inori walked without direction through the dark mountain forest, picking her way by what little moonlight filtered through the canopy. She wasn't hungry or thirsty—but she desperately wanted to find a stream or small river, splash cold water on her face, clear her head, and decide on her next move.
To be honest, being left alone in a pitch-dark mountain at this hour was genuinely unsettling. The imagination ran wild with darkness like this—anything could come lunging from the trees, some predator or something worse. Inori had no idea what world this was. Even monsters or spirits appearing wouldn't be out of place.
Every time she awakened a new ability, the usage method loaded itself directly into her mind. Nameless Monster's abilities had arrived the same way—already there, already hers. And in a completely different direction from time-based King Crimson; yet for all its strangeness, this form's combat strength was no weaker than King Crimson at its best. Whatever came at her, she could handle it.
"Found one."
The girl stopped walking. The crimson-and-gold sleeves—like paired butterfly wings—stopped with her, but then without any wind to move them, they drifted on anyway, rising and falling in a slow, breathing rhythm.
Long black stockings covered her from toe to the tops of her thighs. Rust-orange high-heeled shoes with thick lacing, their soles impossibly soft—she'd moved through rough mountain terrain and they hadn't so much as pinched. However strange this outfit was, it apparently looked after its wearer.
She reached the stream. The water was clean.
It made sense—the less human activity, the clearer the water. But water this clear troubled her a little. Was she going to make it out of this forest tonight? Was there any chance of finding another person, someone she could ask for the time and the place?
Inori crouched at the bank and looked down through the still surface at her own reflection.
Her face—nothing had changed. Still the same familiar old appearance. Only the pink hair was tangled and loose, scattered across her shoulders like clusters of cherry blossom petals. Her eyes were white as polished rice, and between them, those twin crimson pupils gave off a strange, unearthly glow—the kind of thing that might make a person flinch on a dark night.
The outfit was genuinely beautiful. When she'd first watched Guilty Crown, she had admired the female lead Inori's Goldfish Outfit without reservation—it was gorgeous, she'd thought.
On someone else.
Just look at the exposed chest—from the collarbone down, both sides of her bust in full, clear view, the open line continuing unbroken to somewhere below her navel before it finally closed. The humiliation alone was unbearable. And the back was mostly bare too—smooth and pale and entirely on display. The shorts were... not quite shorts. More accurately, they were a thick triangle of fabric that barely qualified as the bottom of a swimsuit, leaving roughly half of her figure exposed. Thank goodness for the cascade of ribbon-cut skirt panels doing what little they could; without them, absolutely nothing would have been left to the imagination.
—Ahhh!! This is barely better than nothing! I need to find something to put over this immediately.
She had absolutely no problem looking at this on other people. She had a very serious problem with other people looking at it on her.
—I want a real body so badly.
Mana resurfaced right on cue.
—So I could sneak up from behind and reach into little Inori's outfit and squeeze to my heart's content~!
...Pink-haired girls really were all like this, weren't they. Mana—lewd, fixated on Inori's body. Inori felt embarrassed and vaguely insulted in equal measure, with no recourse available since this outfit was staying exactly where it was.
She just needed to find other clothes to layer over it as fast as possible.
"Mm."
She cupped a handful of water and washed her face, then used the stream as a mirror to straighten out her tangled hair.
Inori gathered her hair, lifted it, and let it fall naturally down her back—a simple arrangement that left the pink cascade smooth and straight along her shoulders.
She was about to settle herself and think clearly about what to do next—
When something in the corner of her eye stopped her. Something small and incongruous.
There was something on her neck.
Her hand swatted reflexively—but it wasn't a bug. She tilted her head and caught her reflection from the side, straining to get a clear angle in the water's surface...
And then she saw it.
A pink star, like a painted motif etched into the skin at the back of her neck, just below the hairline.
"Star-shaped birthmark?"
—What—what does this mean?!
Inori was genuinely rattled—more than she had been all night. A Joestar Family birthmark. On her. That mark was the oldest symbol of the Joestar bloodline. And she was Inori—a vessel crafted by Keido Shuichiro in the image of Mana Ouma, a manufactured human with no lineage and no family tree. Every one of those memories was too real to be false.
She absolutely refused to believe she had somehow inexplicably become a Joestar.
She scooped another handful of water and scrubbed at her neck—cold water ran down under the back of the outfit. She rubbed hard, for a long time.
The star didn't fade. Not one bit. She scrubbed harder. Still nothing. This wasn't face paint or someone's prank. It was a real, permanent birthmark, as fixed in her skin as anything.
Had she spoken something into existence through sheer repetition? She'd been letting Jotaro assume she was DIO's daughter. Had karma finally come to collect?
—Mana. Do you know what this is?
Inori sat down on the damp grass of the riverbank, fingers resting against the star on her neck, and asked with something close to helplessness.
—It wasn't there before. I would have noticed. I always checked your body carefully when you bathed.
...Absolute creep.
Inori kept that observation internal.
—So it must have appeared after Nameless Monster awakened!
"That can't be right." She thought aloud, working it through. "Everyone with the star-shaped birthmark is a Joestar descendant from the other world. I'm a manufactured human built from your template. The Saint's Corpse can mess with me all it wants—it can't just engrave a family crest onto my skin out of nowhere."
Unless the mark concealed some hidden ability? But that was impossible—this was her own Stand. Her Stand had no secrets it kept from her.
—Little Inori. Stay calm.
Mana, too, felt the weight of this. It wasn't something to brush past.
—This may be connected to your origins.
—My origins? I know exactly who I am. You know better than I do.
She'd woken up in a GHQ stasis pod, two researchers watching her from behind glass, no memory of anything before that moment. A product taken off a shelf and switched on. What kind of "origins" could that account for?
—I mean the time before you had G祈's memories.
Mana said it lightly, as though the words weighed nothing at all.
That single sentence carried enough to make the stomach drop.
—Before I... had these memories?
She'd been an ordinary anime nerd before any of this. Before Guilty Crown, before the world Inori lived in—in her original world, JoJo had been nothing but a manga on a shelf. There was no space there for any Joestar connection.
—Think about it.
Mana's voice shifted—careful, analytical. The other mode. The one behind the teasing.
—You knew I still had a future with Shu. Things between us that hadn't played out yet. You told me it was Epitaph—a dream, King Crimson's ability. But what if it wasn't?
—Second: you were forced into a second world-crossing by a Stand you call Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. But you have no memory of ever encountering that Stand.
—Third: the Saint's Corpse—the thing that gave you this cute appearance, this form you're wearing right now—came from another world too.
—And fourth: haven't you ever found yourself strange? A newly born artificial human, knowing nothing. And yet she possesses King Crimson—one of the most powerful Stands in existence—plus that dark resolve that makes many grown men bow their heads in defeat. How do you explain that?
—Your body was built by Keido's team. That's true. But your soul?
—Before you had G祈's memories—before you were Inori—you were very possibly someone else entirely.