Chapter 190: Chapter 25: Heaven
Diavolo’s Time Erasure had a fairly wide reach, but for people standing still it was honestly hard to notice—except that paired with Silver Chariot Requiem, the results were deeply unsettling.
The gene sequences rewriting themselves inside every swapped body, for instance. To everyone except Diavolo, each skip in time was another burst of acceleration.
The upshot was that DIO—freshly transferred into a healthy body—ran into Yimi and immediately felt like he’d hit a wall. His bones had already begun to twist. His skin was cracking. His whole appearance was shifting toward something that belonged in the Jurassic.
Willpower alone could slow the mutation, but King Crimson’s repeated time-skips had only sped it up. DIO was starting to doubt whether his willpower was really as iron as he’d believed.
"Diego!" Yimi pointed at the increasingly dinosaur-shaped figure before her, stunned.
He’d chased the cat all the way here!
"W-what? What’s happening?" Behind her, Doppio let out a terrified yelp.
The mutation was universal—it hit everyone whose body had been swapped.
Yimi turned back to look at this auntie who was a bit of a nuisance but genuinely kindhearted, and reached up to grip the fabric of her clothes with one small hand.
A flash of pure radiance. The misfortune warping Doppio’s body was transferred to some office worker in Morioh.
"Huh? I’m saved? Though this doesn’t really seem like my body..." Doppio patted herself down in confusion.
"That’s the one."
DIO narrowed his eyes.
Hermit Purple’s Spirit Photography was an extraordinarily versatile ability. It could even produce images based on whatever the user was thinking about.
When he’d used it to divine the matter of "attaining Heaven," he had effectively channeled fate itself as the medium. And that meant this brat was the key to solving his final condition.
Location. What kind of power could cross an ocean to help him overcome that obstacle? Vanilla Ice’s earlier pursuit of her and his subsequent disappearance, plus the girl’s materialization out of thin air on the streets—it all pointed to one answer.
Spatial teleportation.
DIO raised a withered arm. "Brat. Heal the mutation on my body. Now."
Even knowing that the optimal play was to impersonate Pucci and make the request politely, his pride refused to let him grovel.
Yimi twitched the ears atop her head. She looked at DIO—jaw splitting open to reveal a mouth of fangs, looking more like Diego by the second—and tucked both hands behind her back. "Nope."
"You think I’m begging?"
The World appeared behind him. In place of his deformed hands, the Stand reached for Yimi’s throat—only for its grip to twist away the instant before contact. Simultaneously, out on the open ocean, an orangutan aboard a cruise ship suddenly screeched in agony, clawing at the deck.
DIO caught all of it through the white radiance at the edge of the deflection.
He stared at his own dragon-clawed hands, baffled. "What? My attack was redirected?"
"Hey! What do you think you’re doing to an innocent child, you animal!"
Doppio’s mild expression flipped to a mask of fury. She pulled a knife from her pocket—one the Empress had used for self-harm—and drove it straight at DIO’s mouth.
Even at a distance shorter than Yimi’s height in human form, The World would never permit such an overstep. But as The World swatted Doppio’s hand aside, a bare-knuckle straight from Famine slammed in without warning, forcing DIO to cross his arms in a block.
"Diego! First Spirit! Four Emperors!" The little cat slapped three labels on him in rapid succession.
"Scales... implying ’justice’—no, implying the Horseman ’Famine.’ Is that her Stand?" Combining the observation with that sacred glow, DIO identified Yimi’s Stand at a glance.
"Then—"
The World’s fist drove straight at Yimi’s face. The girl didn’t flinch or dodge, simply shunting the blow to the other side of the planet. But that was exactly what DIO wanted to see.
Every time an attack was deflected, the white radiance briefly mirrored a glimpse of the world on the other side.
His primary reason for ascending to Heaven was to break free of fate—but under the fate implied by Hermit Purple’s earlier divination, this little girl was destined to help him reach Heaven in precisely this manner.
The strike having fallen short, Famine snapped back to Yimi’s side as it always did, pressing the harvested Red Light onto the shaft of a spear that had appeared in the girl’s hand at some point.
Then Yimi raised her arm and, channeling the Adaptive Power that this world converted into raw strength, hurled the spear. The shaft bent into an arc mid-flight, cracking the air with a whip-like shriek.
"Attacking with your main body? Bold—but too slow!"
The World raised a fist to block.
"Hm?"
The fracture started at the fingertips and raced up the arm, all the way to the shoulder, which shattered entirely. Despite the catastrophic damage, DIO bit back any scream—but he wasn’t an undead Vampire right now.
DIO dropped to one knee, coughing blood. The spearhead lodged in The World’s shoulder transmitted searing pain to his body—the kind of agony he’d barely felt since becoming a Vampire.
"You dare make me, DIO—"
He looked at Yimi again. Somehow, despite being the one taking the beating, he saw more clearly now than before.
It was the spear.
"The World!"
Time froze. Seven seconds—no, with the Requiem enhancement it doubled. Fourteen seconds of stopped time. Bearing wounds that should have been fatal, DIO strained to move The World’s remaining arm and pry the spear loose.
He wrenched it from Yimi’s grip.
Three seconds elapsed.
Even within frozen time, the irrepressible Divinity continued to spread of its own accord. Simultaneously, the girl’s eyes—now glazed with gold—turned toward DIO.
The sudden pressure made him flinch. "She moved? No—of course she can move."
As Divinity spread outward, Love Train’s spatial barrier tore across Cairo in an instant. Fortune rushed inward. Misfortune scattered outward. This was precisely what DIO needed most.
"I hate to admit it, but this time ’fate’ has chosen to stand on the side of me, DIO!" He threw himself at the spatial barrier with every last ounce of strength.
From the moment his body had been swapped—no, more precisely, from the instant he’d seen Yimi appear directly before him—DIO had known. Where fate pointed, he would reach Heaven.
Surviving the brink of death was naturally part of strong fortune. But back on the clock tower he’d already sensed the anti-Vampire power radiating from the girl. Had he still been in a Vampire body, approaching that radiance would have reduced him to ash in under a second.
So fate had sided with him, allowing him to touch Heaven’s miracle reflected upon the world through the body of a believer.
28°24′ N, 80°36′ W—the spatial rift carved by Love Train happened to align exactly with these coordinates as it passed through his body.
The dinosaur mutation peeled away on its own. His fatal injuries vanished with it. His eyes reflected the color of Heaven.
The World’s hardened shell crumbled layer by layer. The old Stand was abandoned, exactly as the conditions for reaching Heaven required.
"It’s over."
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