"..."
Inori knew exactly what kind of person Rohan was. Taking a hit from his Stand "Heaven's Door" would absolutely be catastrophic, so she instinctively took two steps back.
"Do you know the secret to drawing interesting manga? It's authenticity—authenticity is the energy you pour into a work."
Rohan didn't come after her. Instead, with total seriousness, he began laying out his personal philosophy of comics.
"Manga is easily mistaken for a product of pure individual fantasy. But that's not how it works! Real manga draws from what you yourself have seen, heard, and lived through, reshaped and put onto the page—only then does the work become interesting! For example... a beautiful girl on a public street suddenly talking to herself. Who are you, really? What have you lived through? What do you like, what do you hate? At what age was your first time? Is the self-talk a personal habit, or some particular condition?"
Rohan Kishibe is a pervert!
Just listening to him say this stuff gave her goosebumps all over. Inori swallowed and looked at him with unconcealed disgust.
"You have a very beautiful face. If I used it as the basis for a character, readers would love her."
A pink-haired, red-eyed girl was an incredibly rare sight, and her hair color looked wholly natural—a gradient red from top to bottom, like paint that had been meticulously mixed.
He might not care for the industry's current trends, but manga was no longer what it had been ten years ago, when muscled men and hot-blooded stories were enough to draw readers in. Female characters! Diverse, distinctive female characters—those had become the main draw of manga now.
Inner beauty mattered, of course, but what first caught the eye was always the character's face.
Drawing a pretty female character was a trivial matter for Rohan. Pointed chin, big eyes, small nose, long lashes. But drawing one with truly distinctive character was no small task—and a face like Inori's, exquisite, exceedingly rare, with utterly perfect features, conjured in Rohan's mind a dozen or more complete manga heroine designs the instant he laid eyes on her.
"Creating based on the guesses in my own head would be no problem—but then the character would lack any real spark. Stereotyped. Like the difference between something machine-made and something handcrafted. No soul!"
"So... allow me to read your mind!"
Inori knew she couldn't dodge this one.
He'd latched onto her because of her face. But if he actually triggered "Heaven's Door" and read her lived experiences... it would shatter the worldview he'd built over twenty years. It wasn't hard to imagine the ecstatic frenzy he'd fall into upon seeing everything she'd been through in the world of Guilty Crown.
Worse still, he might even glimpse the memories of her previous life—including every past and future plot beat of this JoJo world they were both standing in. He was the most dangerous Stand user of all.
This is an absolutely unacceptable outcome!
Inori set her resolve. By now, a short ashen figure had already manifested beside Rohan—clothed in white, wearing a transparent hat with its frame visible. This was Rohan's Stand, "Heaven's Door."
Wait, what? The old man can materialize Heaven's Door already, at this stage? If I remember correctly, his ability only leveled up after Josuke beat the stuffing out of him. Before that, he could only activate it by getting people to look at a specific manuscript page.
Did my arrival cause some subtle shift? Or is it some other unsolved mystery of this town?
Rohan had no idea the girl in front of him was also a Stand user, so he let his guard down completely and walked toward her naturally, while behind him Heaven's Door was already reaching out toward Inori's face... to turn her into a "book" that he could read.
Come! Let me see what kind of woman you are!
"King Crimson."
With Heaven's Door about to make contact, Inori calmly activated King Crimson's ability.
Don!
A red silhouette flashed through, and the world shattered anew. Heaven's Door's hand completed its forward trajectory and touched Inori's face—and nothing happened. Inori remembered that Rohan could even read the memories of ghosts, but he had no way of interfering with King Crimson, because for the next several seconds, she personally had slipped beyond this world's space and time.
Time resumed its course.
"...? Wha—"
Rohan's eyes widened in shock.
He'd expected her face to sprout book pages and for her to collapse to the ground... he had not expected himself to be the one held in place.
Rohan, being a Stand user himself, naturally saw the scene before his eyes: his Stand, Heaven's Door, held from behind by a tall, powerfully built red monster that had seized it by both arms, utterly immobilized. He looked again at the girl's composed, faintly triumphant expression, and in an instant Rohan understood it all. He knew he had tangled with a very troublesome opponent.
"You possess a power like mine?!"
Rohan felt the situation slipping badly. Forget turning and fleeing—he couldn't even manage something as simple as taking a step back. King Crimson's overwhelming strength had pinned his Stand Heaven's Door, and damage dealt to a Stand fed straight back to the user. Of course his limbs felt as if they'd been locked in invisible weighted shackles, unable to move at all.
Rohan Kishibe... does not move.
"Rohan Kishibe, right? Being a mangaka is a respectable enough profession. But suddenly using a Stand attack on a girl you've only just met..."
Inori drifted forward with light, airy steps, wearing a mild, friendly smile as she came closer.
"You're actually a pervert, aren't you? The kind of guy who sees a pretty face and gets ideas!"
Her voice abruptly sharpened, and in the same instant the smile vanished.
The roles flipped in a heartbeat. Rohan, confident and smug only moments ago, was now breaking out in cold sweat. He'd never dreamed there could be another Stand user in Morioh—and this girl... how had her Stand appeared and pinned Heaven's Door all in the space of a single breath? Damn it, that Stand's movements were quick enough to feel like they were skipping through time. His body wouldn't move at all.
Rohan was terrified, but he wasn't flustered. He had to find a way to trick this girl—to get her to look at the manuscript in his bag. The moment she saw that, he'd be able to activate "Heaven's Door" and turn the tables.
"I apologize, miss. I, Rohan, only wanted to gather material... My Stand 'Heaven's Door' has the ability to read a person's memories. It won't leave any wounds at all!"
"Eh? Do you really think I'd believe that, Rohan-sensei~?"
Venom crept into Inori's words, and in the same moment King Crimson tightened its grip further. Rohan let out a pained groan. With her swaggering in front of him, she looked like a delinquent shakedown artist extorting a poor, helpless mangaka.
"Everything I said is true! I can demonstrate it for you!"
Rohan, breathing hard, forced out a strained smile, trying to bluff his way through.
"A Stand is a manifestation of a person's mental strength. You say you're a mangaka, and you can read people's memories... which most likely means you can also use your pen to alter my memories and my personality, right?"
Another chill went down Rohan's spine. This girl was sharper than he'd thought... she had deduced the full scope of Heaven's Door's abilities just like that?
"You say you're 'only going to take a look'—but who's to say you wouldn't rewrite my life? Force me into all kinds of depraved acts, turn me into a [censored] or something."
"Don't give me that 'I just want to look'!"
Her tone plunged to below freezing. One hand shot up and clamped straight onto Rohan's ear—and her grip was astonishingly strong. Rohan's face went white in an instant. The pain was almost secondary; the terrifying part was that since she'd manifested her Stand, the girl had become like a completely different person, radiating a suffocating, dreadful aura from every inch of her.
"Your excuses sound as ridiculous as a would-be rapist caught by the police trying to argue that he was only checking his victim's injuries!"