Inori had fallen into the same bewilderment as Josuke Higashikata.
—She was being tormented by the ultimate philosophical riddle: who, exactly, was she?
When she first woke up as Inori, she hadn't given it much thought. That whole transmigration-into-a-new-body setup was practically the premise of every transformation novel she'd ever read. Did anyone who enjoyed that genre go pestering the author to explain the mechanics? Of course not.
Put it in a real situation, though, and the question became infinitely more complicated.
Mana's analysis had been disturbingly airtight. Could it be that... before he became Inori, there had been some history, some identity, some unknown past that no one knew anything about?
The Saint's Corpse was an object that could awaken Stands in people—and yet it had never given any upgrade to Killer Queen, Yoshikage Kira's Stand. She had barely touched it before it triggered a violent chain reaction inside her. As if the Corpse had recognized her from a long time ago. As if it had been glad of the reunion—burrowing into Inori's body of its own accord, granting her something new and not entirely welcome.
She hadn't wanted any of it.
—Oh, stop complaining, Inori-chan. Your body is artificial. There's no way it can reach a normal human lifespan—a few years at most before the flesh starts to wither.
Shuichiro Keido had already been half in the grave by the time he conceived of an artificial vessel to bring Lost Christmas back. An artificial body wasn't built to last. They could, of course, use the advanced medicine and genetic technology of their own era to modify and extend it—but that assumed they could go home, and going home wasn't currently on the table. The cross-world journey had to continue.
—But now that this outfit has transformed you, you've gone beyond human entirely!
—I still remember what you said to Eve back then, you know. About how humans have limits—about how the harder you scheme, the faster you run out of road, so transcending humanity is the only way forward. Wasn't that it?
...Why did it feel so mortifying when Mana said it back at her.
Inori's expression grew complicated.
Said by her own mouth, as she prepared to pass judgment on Eve, those words had landed with real weight. Parroted back through Mana's mouth, they produced a very specific kind of cringe—the secondhand embarrassment of someone listening to a past version of themselves who thought they were being profound.
—I know it's not a bad thing, all right? But not being able to take it off is a serious problem! It's like wearing shackles everywhere I go. What about going to the bathroom later? What am I supposed to do—just wet myself?
—Hmm~? Now that you mention it, I'd kind of love to see the face you'd make in that situation. If you can't hold it, maybe just fully commit to the superhuman angle and go right there in your pants.
—Get. Out.
Somewhere along the way, Mana Ouma had shed the reputation of having a perverted little-brother complex. The only label left written on her now was a simple one: Inori's exclusive pervert.
Not that the bickering didn't help. It always did, a little—this low-grade, comfortable friction smoothing down the edge of whatever she'd been grinding against. Inori knew things hadn't actually gotten worse. If she ever wanted to make it back—to the other worlds, to Hare Menjou, to honoring the promise she'd made to Reimi Sugimoto—she had to first break the mechanism of D4C, the cross-world displacement she kept being subjected to against her will.
And the key to that lay in the Star-shaped Birthmark at her throat.
She needed to understand why it was there. Needed to figure out who she had been before she became Inori.
Staring into the dark and thinking very hard about it wasn't going to produce answers before sunrise. All she could do was keep moving, and hope that somewhere in the journey ahead, the right clue would find her.
"One thing at a time. First: get out of here."
She took a slow breath to clear her head—and felt something shift.
It wasn't the calm she'd been reaching for. It was deeper—a state of total, frictionless focus, as if she'd slipped sideways into a different kind of consciousness. Her vision tinted deep red. The dark mountain forest, which had been an undifferentiated wall of blackness a moment ago, resolved itself in extraordinary detail. She could make out every tree. Every branch. Even a cicada resting on a piece of bark.
The girl's crimson eyes glittered faintly in the dark, cutting through the thick weave of night.
Eagle Vision—one of the Nameless Monster's abilities. Her senses, all of them, had stepped up to a new register. Through that sharpened awareness, beneath the strange already-familiar rot that clung to this mountain air, she caught something new: the clean iron smell of blood.
And threading through the insect-song and the stillness, barely audible at first, growing louder and more frantic—the bright ring of steel on steel.
Not far. Maybe several fights at once.
...
...
"Someone—please, someone—"
The boy dragged himself forward, body a dead weight he had to haul inch by inch. His fingers were trembling too hard to hold the Nichirin Sword properly, but he wouldn't let go. At this point the blade wasn't a weapon. It was just something to grip.
Straw, that's all it was. And straw couldn't save you.
Blood from the wound in his stomach had soaked through his uniform and was seeping into the dirt beneath him. His left leg bent at an angle no human joint should—like something had seized it and, with brute, savage force, torn it at the joint using some blunt and merciless implement.
Injuries like these had only one verdict.
But no one chooses to lie down and die. Not when it means dying for nothing—cut down in the dark, without understanding why, without having done a single thing that mattered. The pain in his leg had gone numb through sheer excess of it. In its place rose something else: the last-ditch do-or-die courage that surfaces when you've got nothing left to lose. He forced his upper body upright. Made his shaking hands grip the Nichirin Sword. Pointed it at the shadow in the dark.
"I'm—I'm not afraid! I'm not afraid!"
The blade shook in front of him, aimed at the demon hiding somewhere in the darkness.
"Come on then! I'll cut your head off! I'll cut you down!"
He screamed it in a voice already ruined, like a wounded dog with nowhere left to run.
But bravado doesn't change facts.
"You talk too much."
The demon's voice came from the shadow.
Once again, the boy couldn't make out its face.
Blood bloomed like a flower. Heat spraying from the cleanly severed neck. His head left his body, rolled several times across the dirt, and went still.
Darkness pressed in from the edges.
What a meaningless life. All that effort, and he still couldn't avenge his little brother and sister. Damn it—why send rookies like us up against something this strong? Where are the Hashira? Why didn't any Hashira come?
Even after decapitation, the brain doesn't die immediately. So in those last seconds before the dark took him, the boy forced his eyes to focus—and finally, finally, he saw the demon's face.
Pointed ears. Several ugly scars crossing the cheeks.
And in the blood-red pupils, written in crooked strokes—
—Lower Rank Three.
...
...
In the moon-dimmed, thin-aired killing night, the crimson butterfly silhouette of a girl threaded through the dense forest.
This mountain was almost certainly uninhabited—the undergrowth was too thick, too wild, too many years without a human hand to tend it. Unchecked thickets and untrimmed branches should have lacerated Inori all over. It was fortunate, then, that she was wrapped in a thick protective layer that the forest's overgrowth took exception to.
Another few dozen meters—and then, leaping like a carp breaching the surface, she cleared the dense brush and landed in an open patch where the moonlight could reach.
In front of her lay a scene of extreme carnage.
An incomplete body. The torso at the base of a tree; the head somewhere on the other side of the clearing. The left leg bent at a grotesque angle—a single glance confirmed it had been struck with tremendous blunt force. The neck's cross-section was still bleeding.
This just happened.
—This isn't a peaceful era, is it.
Mana, taking in the sight, sounded slightly thrown.
"A clean cut like that, plus the speed and force behind it..." Inori surveyed the area. "An ordinary human couldn't do this."
The pink-haired girl in her vivid finery glanced up at the pale disc of the moon.
—Which world is this?