In the end, the four remaining Stardust Crusaders split into two groups.
Joseph, with Hermit Purple and its ability to trace clues, moved together with Kakyoin, the sharpest mind in the group when it came to that kind of situation. The two of them would retreat while trying, by any means possible, to uncover the secret behind Dio's Stand. Further behind, Jotaro and Polnareff, both built for direct combat, advanced as the second blade of the plan, ready to step in the moment an opening appeared.
And then Joseph, without the slightest hesitation, pulled out a stack of bills and casually bought a pickup truck parked by the roadside as if he were solving nothing more than a minor inconvenience.
The audience's reaction was immediate.
"How much you wanna bet that truck gets wrecked?"
Inside Aurora Entertainment, Bruce Walts, who had once played Caesar, threw the line out with a crooked grin while looking at the younger actors around him. The reply came in the same tone of resigned amusement.
"Is that even a question?" someone shot back with a shrug.
By that point, everyone already knew about Joseph's infamous curse with any vehicle unfortunate enough to exist near him. On the screen, the comments flooded in nonstop, mixing tension with mockery: "The vehicle-killer Stand is about to activate," "Truck: please stay away from me," "Alright, now we just wait for the crash."
Then the camera rose.
Under the night sky, Dio appeared atop a rooftop with his arms folded across his chest, knees slightly bent, body arched into an absurd yet majestic pose, as though even gravity needed his permission to keep functioning. That single shot was enough to send the audience into another frenzy. Even in a scene this heavy with tension, the series still had that outrageous ability to pull unexpected reactions out of people.
But the real laughter came when Dio, with the calm cruelty of someone who no longer saw anyone else as human, said:
"The sidewalk is wide enough. Keep driving."
It was monstrous. Inhuman. And yet there was something so absurd about the line that a lot of people simply could not stop themselves from laughing.
The quote, of course, escaped fiction almost instantly. Somewhere in the real world, a teenager buried in the episode, sitting in the back seat of his father's car, lifted his eyes from his phone when he saw the traffic jam outside and repeated it with fake, dramatic authority:
"The sidewalk is wide enough. Keep driving."
The slap he received in the very next second echoed like a universal parental response to questionable pop culture influence.
On the screen, however, the joke ended fast.
The city streets turned into the stage for a violent, frantic chase drenched in chaos, smoke, steel, and blood. Kakyoin, taking advantage of Hierophant Green's long-range superiority, launched a barrage of emeralds at Dio. It was fast, precise, ruthless. But Dio did not even need to summon his Stand to answer. With nothing more than a casual flick of his fingers, he deflected the entire attack as though he were brushing dust out of the air.
Then, in the very next fraction of a second, The World appeared.
The blow came and vanished so quickly it barely seemed real. Hierophant Green was struck and hurled away, and Kakyoin, connected to it through the shared damage, clutched his already bloodied head, unable to hide the shock on his face.
Again.
Just like back at Dio's mansion, he had seen nothing.
Nothing at all.
Then Dio grabbed the overweight politician driving for him as if he were nothing but disposable garbage and hurled him straight into Joseph's windshield. The impact was brutal. Caught completely off guard, the vehicle spun out of control and smashed into the guardrail.
Even in the middle of a life-or-death crisis for the protagonists, plenty of viewers on the other side of the screen let out a nervous laugh.
The vehicle killer remained undefeated.
Joseph and Kakyoin stumbled out of the truck, injured and gasping, without the luxury of thinking about anything except survival. Facing Dio's assault, they used the powers of Hermit Purple and Hierophant Green to extend vines and tendrils, latching onto the structures of the buildings on both sides of the street and launching themselves through the urban landscape in a desperate retreat. Behind them, Dio continued the chase, merciless and steady, like a shadow that refused to peel away.
It was during that escape that Kakyoin's gaze changed.
For one brief moment, while the wind cut across his face and the city blurred past in streaks of light and concrete, his mind turned inward.
His lonely childhood rose before him in silent fragments, like old pages being turned too quickly. And at the center of it all was the question that had followed him for years, motionless and cruel, almost too intimate to be spoken aloud.
How many friends can a person have in one lifetime?
If someone truly tried from childhood onward, maybe they could make fifty. Maybe a hundred. Celebrities probably had thousands - tens of thousands. Even the most ordinary person in the world would likely still have at least one person with whom they shared something real. Just like his mother had his father. Just like his father had his mother.
But he would have no one.
Not even one.
Because no one could see Hierophant Green.
And if no one could see the shape of his soul, then how could anyone truly understand what lived inside him?
The voice echoing in his heart did not sound bitter. It sounded worse than that. It sounded old - so old that it should have stopped hurting long ago, and yet had never truly stopped bleeding.
Before I met Mr. Joestar, Jotaro, Polnareff, and Avdol... I really believed that.
The thought of Avdol and Iggy's deaths passed through his chest like ice.
Why does simply remembering them make me shiver? Because they were the first. The first companions who walked in the same direction as I did. The first people with whom I truly shared something.
The journey to defeat Dio lasted only fifty days.
Fifty days.
But for someone who had spent seventeen years completely alone, those fifty days carried enough weight to fill an entire life.
The memory faded.
With Hierophant Green's help, Kakyoin leapt to the top of a clock tower. By the time he landed there, his body was already at its limit, but his mind was not. His eyes had found an answer. A plan.
Outside the fiction, the atmosphere also began to change.
Mark, watching the scene unfold, felt the strange sensation of seeing something far too familiar. Bruce Walts beside him did not look much better. Even if that parallel world still had no specific term for this kind of narrative structure, the feeling was obvious enough to leave no room for denial.
It was almost identical to what had happened before Caesar's death.
The introspective pause. The return to the past. The glimpse into childhood. The character laying his heart bare right before the end.
The realization fell over everyone like a cold blade.
Could Kakyoin also...?
No one wanted to finish that sentence.
Many veteran viewers felt exactly the same. The foreboding spread in silence, heavy and clinging, as if the entire episode had begun breathing differently.
And then Dio arrived at the tower.
What awaited him there was magnificent.
The entire surrounding area had already been covered by Hierophant Green's barrier. Invisible threads, energy, traps, and attack routes filled the space in every direction, forming a magnificent, lethal web. One slight movement would trigger the entire system instantly. Even Dio's gaze, so perpetually arrogant, finally showed a rare trace of caution.
"Hierophant Green's barrier...?"
Then the soundtrack exploded into life - intense, noble, stirring - lifting the scene with such force that, for a few seconds, many viewers forgot the fear planted in them by the earlier flashback.
Kakyoin raised his voice.
"That's right! Hierophant's barrier triggers the instant you touch it! Everything within a twenty-meter radius around you is already within my range! It doesn't matter whether it's you or The World... I'll know every single movement!"
In that moment, the audience began to believe again.
They began to cheer again.
They clung once more to the possibility that, perhaps this time, intelligence could overcome terror.
"Take this, Dio! Twenty-meter-radius Emerald Splash!"
The assault descended.
Green gems fired from every direction, dense as a storm, tearing through the air in a perfect encirclement. It was beautiful. Violent. Desperate. In front of their screens, fans shouted, muttered, pleaded, as if their support could somehow cross the distance between fiction and reality.
But Dio did not move like a man under pressure.
There was no hesitation.
No fear.
Only that cold contempt born from monstrous certainty.
"Foolishness," he said. "I'll show you The World's true ability. Its power is to govern the world itself."
Joseph, hidden in the shadows, widened his eyes. Kakyoin, standing atop the tower, strained his vision to the absolute limit. Both of them were looking for the same instant. The same flaw. The same clue.
Show your Stand, Dio.
Show us the secret.
Then came the cry.
"Za... Warudo!!!"
That bizarre, hypnotic pronunciation sliced through the air.
The music cut off abruptly.
The World, colossal and gold, materialized before Dio in a flash. Yet even then, neither Joseph nor Kakyoin managed to see what happened next.
Because there was nothing to see.
In the next instant, all that remained was the dull sound of impact.
Kakyoin was already flying backward.
His body was hurled away with terrifying force, slammed into the structure at the top of a building as though some invisible power had crushed him there. His abdomen tore open. Blood poured out in great waves, hot and unstoppable, splashing across stone in a scene so brutal it was hard to bear even for viewers who had already been pushed to their emotional limit.
The audience's reaction was immediate.
Again?
The same sensation gripped everyone. Just like Polnareff's impossible descent on the staircase. Just like the vampire servant suddenly appearing inside the coffin. Once again, something had happened right in front of everyone's eyes... and no one had the slightest idea what it was.
Pinned there, broken, on the edge of death, Kakyoin could barely think about himself. His consciousness was already slipping between waves of pain, and yet his mind remained locked onto the only thing that mattered.
The secret.
The final thread of truth.
He noticed the time. Five fifteen. Somewhere far away, his parents were probably already asleep. A flicker of guilt surfaced, gentle and tender, like a goodbye that would never find a voice.
I'm sorry... for making you worry...
But even that thought was soon swallowed by something greater. More urgent. More cruel.
Any change in Hierophant Green's barrier should have been detected. Any touch, any cut, any movement. And yet what had just happened defied the entire logic of the system itself.
These had not been sequential cuts.
There had been no progression.
The entire field, across a radius of twenty meters, had been severed at the same time.
At the same time.
Without the slightest delay. Not even the smallest difference that would exist if someone had crossed the threads one after another.
When the audience realized that Kakyoin, with a gaping hole in his body and blood pouring out without end, was still using the last seconds of his life to analyze Dio's power, the anguish became unbearable. No one had the emotional room left to complain about the author, question the cruelty of the writing, or pretend any distance from what they were seeing. What came out of them instead was pure desperation.
Stop pushing yourself!
Where are the others? Somebody save him!
I knew it... I knew something was wrong the moment that flashback started...!
But the scene kept moving forward with the merciless indifference that only a true tragedy can carry.
Once Dio confirmed that Kakyoin would not survive, he lost interest in him. His focus shifted. His eyes turned toward Joseph, the last direct Joestar bloodline present there.
"To fuse this body completely with Jonathan's, nothing is more suitable than the blood of the Joestar family... wouldn't you agree?"
He pulled back the collar of his clothes and revealed the scar on his neck. The smile that followed held nothing human in it. Then he charged toward Joseph.
And at that exact moment, Kakyoin gathered what little remained of him.
Hierophant Green appeared one last time.
From between the Stand's hands, a final burst of emeralds erupted through the air and struck the clock at the top of the tower dead on. The face shattered.
Dio's brow only twitched for a second before he sneered.
"What's this? Attacking something meaningless? Do you want your death to look dramatic? Pathetic."
But Joseph froze.
No.
Kakyoin was not the kind of person who would do something meaningless.
Never.
If he had aimed at that clock, then there had to be a reason. There had to be. It was a message. A warning left behind on the border between life and death.
Kakyoin could no longer speak. His face grew paler with every passing second. His eyelids grew heavier. His consciousness sank deeper. And even so, within the silence of his own ending, his thoughts still reached out toward his companions.
The final Emerald Splash...
That is the sign...
Mr. Joestar... please...
Understand...
Tell everyone...
Then his eyes slowly closed.
And at that moment, the words appeared on screen - the words that shattered whatever restraint anyone still had left.
Noriaki Kakyoin - deceased.
There was no room for witty remarks.
No more jokes.
No irony left strong enough to soften the blow.
In front of computers and phones, countless people simply covered their faces and began to cry.
Because no matter how fictional it was, the pain felt too real to be treated as mere invention. When characters gain flesh, soul, and truth inside the hearts of their audience, the distance between story and reality breaks apart. And when that happens, loss hurts for real.
That boy, delicate as a flower and sharp as a blade, fell in the very prime of youth, fading like petals carried away by the wind.
Seventeen years of solitude.
Fifty days of friendship.
And, in the end, the final shower of emeralds.
The fans who had followed the Stardust Crusaders all the way to that point could no longer hold back their tears. Many bent over their desks and cried openly. Others simply stared at the screen in silence, eyes reddened, as though they had truly lost someone they knew.
Even the industry professionals watching with analytical eyes - some for inspiration, some out of envy, some with the near-instinctive urge to imitate what worked - found themselves shaken in a way they had not expected.
Killing off a beloved character already required courage.
Turning that death into something this devastating, this beautiful, and this cruel at the same time was something else entirely.
Alex...
That man was terrifying.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Additionally, more chapters exclusive content are available on Patreon: https://patreon.com/ImmortalEmperor?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink
- CHRONICLES OF THE ICE SOVEREIGN
-PLAYING ANIME LEGENDS
-THE OTHER WORLD'S ANIMATOR
Join now and help shape the future of the story while enjoying special rewards!