The truth was, if Valentine wanted to neutralize Yimi's mounted mobility, he didn't need a vehicle that could match the horse's speed and sturdiness—staying in that room would have suited him perfectly.
The problem was Yimi. Alongside the one Stand capable of restraining D4C, she herself possessed the raw, predatory strength of a tiger. Caught in a pincer, D4C might not manage the "clamping" motion in time before he died—which meant staying put would simply trap him.
Valentine moved.
He hauled Lucy—barely able to move—through the door, clamped them both, and returned to the Corpse's origin world.
"Mr. President, when did you— ah!"
The shriek belonged to this world's conductor.
Valentine regarded the man who had "said the wrong things" in the parallel timeline with cold detachment, and had his Stand shear off both his legs.
"Wait, why— I haven't done anything wrong!"
Valentine didn't answer. He lashed the man's hands to the train's throttle lever with rope, then directed D4C to angle a pane of glass so it tilted into a gateway to a parallel world—with half the conductor's body wedged into the parallel world.
Then Valentine killed the parallel world's conductor, kept a short distance between the bodies, and let the severed legs drift toward the parallel side—where they met the parallel conductor's feet and annihilated. The message was unmistakable: this is what falling in would mean for you.
"Why—why are you doing this?! What did I do?!"
Valentine ignored the screaming. Bandaging the man's bleeding stumps was the full extent of his mercy.
The train lurched into motion as the conductor's thrashing jolted the throttle. The common-sense move was simply to sit down and stay put—but nothing about this arrangement followed common sense.
In a parallel world, identical objects attract and merge by force. If the unsecured tilted pane of glass lurched forward during sudden braking, it could slide the conductor entirely through to the other side.
If the conductor wanted to avoid ending up like his feet, he had to keep shoveling coal and holding the lever—keeping the train running. Anyone with no personal stake in the mission would collapse the moment a gun was pointed at them. Only the certainty of dying if you stopped would keep a man at the throttle without fail.
—
"Mrow?"
Yimi raised her head and looked at her own Stand, large eyes filled with confusion.
No one had ever explained the properties of Stands to her. This was the first time she had learned that a Stand's injuries transferred to its user.
Injury right now was not a welcome development. Every instinct told her how badly it could end—and what it would cost her in this very moment.
Yimi chewed carefully and swallowed the lizard she had caught. The wound didn't change. No energy returned. Not even the faintest edge of satiation—lizard wasn't up to the standard of the high-end cat food she was used to, but she could at least barely call it a "delicacy." Even the recoil from the scratch she had landed on Valentine hadn't fed back to her. Clearly, "empty stomach" meant more than just going hungry: the demon's demanded price had additional drawbacks.
Yimi licked her wound gently, leveraged off her three good limbs, and landed on the horse's back. Famine wrapped one arm around her.
They broke from the manor and galloped through the streets. Untreated, the wound painted the road in red. Pedestrians still about at the midday hour stared at the strange rider—the Stand that should have been invisible to ordinary people projected itself onto every pair of eyes in the vicinity. A nearby group of worshippers couldn't control their expressions, clapping hands over their heads and releasing curses that didn't suit their station.
Yimi didn't sprint. She held distance, waiting for the hunger penalty to expire. She had learned her lesson: if she recovered the Holy Corpse while unable to eat, it would flow right back to that greedy frog demon.
Along the route out of town, she snatched several fish from a vendor's cart. The man took one look at the horseman's silhouette and the dark energy rolling off it and said nothing. Since Yimi couldn't measure time reliably, she used intermittent small bites to gauge when she'd be able to eat properly again.
Inside the train, Valentine caught the sight of Lucy from the corner of his eye. She was curled motionless in her seat, skin stripped of the glow it should have had. The swell of her abdomen had already receded.
Like a stiff puppet. The impression was of someone in the process of converting into the Corpse itself.
And around her, the interior of the train was visibly contracting—walls pulling inward in ways the naked eye could track.
Not only the train. Every inch of land in this country was shifting, with Lucy as the epicenter. But the man who should have been most exposed, standing closest, remained entirely unaffected.
Valentine reached toward the puppet-still Lucy—and stopped.
Gold light crept from his fingertip all the way up his arm.
"…A rift?"
He looked out the window. Rivers, mountains, the distant horizon—all of it drifting toward this fracture in space. Even the Stand-mounted rider he had left far behind was now entering his sightline, closing fast.
And D4C's ability to move freely through dimensional gaps would let him navigate this phenomenon however he chose.
"This isn't caused by the Holy Corpse itself… Rather, the Corpse has unlocked a latent potential, and awakened a new ability in D4C?"
Before he could examine the thought further, Yimi—wound healed at last after finally taking a bite of fish—surged forward and caught up. Famine wrenched a CAUTION: BEAR warning post out of the ground and sent it arcing through the air like a javelin toward his window.
"Such a feeble attack?"
D4C manifested at his side and swatted the sign away. At the same time, Valentine himself broke the cardinal rule—that a Stand user's role is passive while their Stand acts—and drew a revolver, emptying the cylinder down at the rider.
He hadn't held a firearm in years. As a former soldier, his aim was still immaculate.
To his surprise, the cat immediately dismissed her Stand and dropped to ground level. Yimi had grown up in a violent city—violent enough that sneaking out to play on a bright afternoon could mean watching someone press a gun to another person's head and pull the trigger in a back alley. She knew exactly what that thing was capable of. Smaller, faster, harder to track. And the revolver took time to reload. In moments, the cat was nearly level with his window.
Valentine stepped back, directing D4C to hold a hand-blade at the opening. "You'll come through that window? It's too narrow—you won't have a single moment to react when you do."
The cat launched herself—and didn't enter the window at all.
Instead, she bit savagely into her own paw and flung the blood directly at his face.
"WHAT?!"
[Achievement Unlocked: "How About Blinded by Blood?"]
Reward: Portal Energy +5%