"Oh my God! What is that?" Joseph shielded his face with his arm. The tinted lenses on the suit couldn't filter this radiance, but neither did it sting his eyes.
The thorn-crowned Saint flickered in and out of view beside the girl, one hand resting on her shoulder. Holy light seemed to veil his features, but it couldn't conceal the identity that had been doubted even during his time among the living.
When Joseph tried to study him more closely, all he could see was the boundless brilliance of Heaven.
Incomprehensible. The kid's constant talk about "going to Heaven"—she didn't mean it literally, did she?
As for the price: DIO had already paid his—the courage to abandon his Stand.
Had he defeated the Joestar bloodline fair and square and arrived at the designated location under the next new moon through proper means, that price alone would have sufficed. But he had borrowed another's hand.
Famine had always operated on fairness. I take something of yours, I give you something of mine. You take something of mine—you pay something back.
Under normal circumstances, Yimi would never have understood what DIO had done. But with her Divinity fully released, even the "Revelation" she was worst at flared to life, and the Scales of Injustice locked onto DIO.
Because the Stand DIO had abandoned wasn't given to Yimi.
"You think you can strip my power? Impossible! WRYYYYYYYYY!"
DIO strained to break The World free of Famine's grip. But the Stand that had just overpowered Star Platinum head-on couldn't budge against Famine—a Stand with a mere B in Power. The instant Famine's skeletal fingers closed around The World Over Heaven's hands, Reality Overwrite was revoked.
The emaciated Famine tore into The World's muscular frame. What should have been a laughably absurd sight—a skeleton savaging a colossus—instead looked like a nightmare of the damned being dragged to Hell.
Without inflicting so much as a scratch of sympathetic damage on DIO's body, his Stand power was stripped clean.
No follow-up. The Stand symbolizing Famine slowly retreated behind Yimi.
In this world where "fate" had been so emphatically stressed, fate had already been rewritten multiple times by Yimi's hand. But the ending—where the wicked receive their punishment—had not changed.
DIO glared at Heaven's light with eyes full of venom, as though he could hurl a curse through that veil at whoever stood behind it.
"Looks like this is the end of the line, DIO." Jotaro instinctively reached up to tug the brim of his hat—then realized this body not only had a hideous hat, but a prosthetic left hand.
"Heh. Heh heh heh. HAHAHAHA! Jotaro, you think you've won? I'll kill you first, then your grandfather—wherever he's wandered off to—and drink the Joestar blood to reawaken my Stand. Then I'll steep that rotten brat in blood wine! Some petty god thinking it can make me, DIO, submit? Not in a thousand years!"
DIO lunged at Jotaro, fingers rigid as blades, nails aimed at his throat.
Even without Reality Overwrite, even without Time Stop—so what? After overwriting his own reality, he was physically stronger than any living creature could withstand head-on. And with a Vampire's immortal body, he now possessed immunity to sunlight and Hamon alike.
"Star Platinum: The World!"
Time froze again. Jotaro drew a deep breath. This time, he hadn't relied on any external device.
"Impossible!" DIO's mind reeled.
His body and spirit were still intact. He still had the chance to reawaken a Stand—and just like Jotaro before him, he could maintain awareness within stopped time.
"I hit hard. Always have. Nobody I've ever beaten has walked out of the hospital. A teacher who had no business being in a classroom got a lesson from me and never came back to school. When the food isn't worth what they charge, I don't pay."
Jotaro delivered this entire speech within the handful of seconds he could hold.
"But even someone like me can tell when something is genuinely, disgustingly evil. DIO—you didn't lose because of some god. You lost because evil is what you are."
"ORA ORA ORA ORA ORA—"
The strongest punch ever delivered by a Stand in recorded history: a two-second barrage. Star Platinum crossed its arms and turned its back alongside Jotaro.
"Time resumes."
Like a bowling ball hurled full-force by a professional boxer, the impacts cratered DIO's body in ways no human frame could survive. The pulverizing force traveled from torso to skull.
"I, DIO—"
All he could do was watch his body crack apart, until his head burst open like a balloon with a wet pop.
"Yare yare. Got blood on my clothes." Jotaro flicked his sleeve.
Not that they were his clothes, anyway.
"Hey, Jotaro! It's not over yet!"
Joseph—using Jotaro's voice in a way that thoroughly annoyed its rightful owner—shouted at the top of his lungs.
"Hm?"
"Our bodies still haven't swapped back, and also—" Joseph stared at Yimi, cold sweat beading on his skin. His adopted daughter's expression was slack, her demeanor eerily calm—utterly unfamiliar to him.
"The streets are warped into something I don't recognize!"
"Yimi! Is that Yimi?"
Jotaro turned. Polnareff—who'd arrived at some point—was charging toward them with zero regard for dignity, openly weeping as he ran.
"Give it back to her." A hand rose from behind Jotaro's ear, pointing at the spear DIO had dropped on the ground.
Without turning to identify the speaker, Jotaro commanded Star Platinum to pick up the spear. Up close, the faint sting behind his eyes was unmistakable.
He gripped the spearhead and pressed the shaft into Yimi's hands, reversed. He had a feeling that two seconds later would have been too late.
The radiance ceased its collapse. The little cat who had just devoured the Heaven Stand's power blinked once, twice—then curled up on the spot and fell asleep.
"Don't sleep on the ground, you." Polnareff scooped her up, shrugged off his jacket and draped it over her. "She's breathing! Thank God, you little troublemaker—you had me worried sick."
Kakyoin patted his shoulder. "Polnareff, you've known her for two days."
Polnareff swatted his hand away. "Shut up! You were running even faster than me just now!"
"That's because your kidneys gave out and you couldn't keep up." Kakyoin pointed at him.
And really—for anyone with a shred of empathy, watching a sweet, mischievous little girl who'd been by your side for two days suddenly die in front of you would be a devastating blow regardless.
"You little brat five years younger than me, who do you think you are!"
"Oh—you'll wake Yimi." Kakyoin pointed at her, lying smoothly to redirect Polnareff's attention.
Then he eyed Jotaro and Joseph warily. "Speaking of which—who are you two?"
"Relax, it's me—Joseph. Kakyoin." Joseph clawed at the belt with Jotaro's hands. "Jotaro, how do I get this thing off? Jotaro, you brat, how long have you been holding it in? Help me—I'm about to piss myself!"
"Long story short: that headless body on the ground is DIO, the old man's body got de-aged, and he and I swapped bodies." Jotaro summarized the situation in one breath.
Lucky that Joseph's body had been de-aged, too. Otherwise he might not have been able to beat DIO to death just now.
"Incredible. You two took down DIO by yourselves? I feel like this entire trip I haven't been any help at all."
"Soul-swapping seems to be a new ability Polnareff awakened. Can't you swap them back?" Kakyoin looked at Polnareff.
"Yeah, I'll fix it right now." Polnareff hastily summoned his dramatically transformed Stand.
He still didn't fully understand his own Stand's power—Silver Chariot Requiem seemed to have developed a partial will of its own—but after Iggy's smack to the back of his head, he'd figured out how to undo the Soul Swap.
Under his control, every soul-swapped person across Cairo reverted to their original body.
The mutations should have been inevitable, but a stroke of luck had intervened: when Love Train's barrier had extended outward earlier, it had torn the local terrain apart but simultaneously classified Silver Chariot Requiem's mutations on bystanders as "misfortune" and expelled them.
"Ah, back to normal." Joseph flexed his wrists, then pointed at his grandson. "Jotaro—lend me that suit for a couple of days when we get back."
"..."
"This wrecked landscape can't be how Cairo normally looks, can it? And who's this woman?" Polnareff pointed at the woman rubbing her arm nearby.
She offered him a gentle smile. "Hello. My name is Doppio."