Jorge Joestar (Light Novel)

Chapter 6: The Island

Chaos reigned. The electric and phone lines had been severed, so there was no TV to watch, and the land lines were useless. But our cell phones were still working. Probably not for much longer, though. Morioh was heading out onto The Ocean, heading south from Japan at the insane speed of 100 knots (180kph) – much faster than most ships could manage.

We'd be out of our provider's coverage area in no time. I first used mine to check the news. The anchor said the SDF had scrambled planes to follow Morioh. I looked up just in time to see six of them rocketing towards us. Two were larger transport planes, but four of them were clearly fighters – guarding the transport planes? I supposed they'd scramble fighter planes either way, I thought. Then the lead F-22 exploded.

"Aaah!" we cried, and watched as the fire spread out flat. Like it was exploding against an invisible dome ceiling...which I guess it was. There was a dome up there. The burning plane slid up along the dome moving southwest, then slowed. For a second it stopped right above us, then began sliding down to the southeast, bits of it spiraling off to either side. The trail of it made the shape of the dome clear. The other five planes managed to pull up in time, and avoided crashing into the dome. The burning plane hit the water with a splash, but that was soon swallowed in the wake left by the great ship Morioh as it sailed across the water. The wake churned outside the walls of the dome – did it wrap all the way around underneath? 211 "Is this a Stand?" I asked Rohan.

"I don't know. I've never seen or heard of a Stand this large. The whole town's an island! Stands, you see, belong to a person. They're a person's individual power. There's a limit to what even the best of us can accomplish.

We all have our limits. Right? Or is my faith in limits betraying my own mediocrity? Damn it! I've never been this shocked in all my life! Is this really what mankind is

capable of?" Rohan's answer had drifted into a thought, which had turned into a sort of speech directed at himself, which was alarming. As an artist, I could see why mediocrity would be Rohan's greatest fear, and why he'd want to deny that humans have limits. But this didn't seem to be an idea worth this level of conniptions.

We still didn't know what was actually happening. Perhaps Stand Masters knew less about their own powers than they believed, or perhaps they were too ready to assume anything unusual was the result of a Stand.

"Perhaps this is more than a Stand," Rohan said.

"If so, let us call it Beyond."

"Uh, sorry," I said.

"That name's already taken."

"? Hunh? What? It is?" Authors were frightening. Such synchronicity. Then I had an idea, and asked Rohan about Tsukumojuku. If he found someone dead in his house he must have read them with Heaven's Door.

"Tsukumojuku? Of course I took a look, but there was nothing to learn. Once someone dies, their book becomes the kanji for 'death' repeated to infinity." Behind him, Nijimura Muryotaisu started shouting.

"Ah! What the hell are they doing? Jesus!" 212 I followed his gaze, looking up, and saw one of the fighter planes coming back...and firing a missile parallel to the earth's surface.

"Augh!" But the missile exploded in mid-air, the fire and shrapnel spreading out, flat on one side. Like the plane before it, the missile had hit the side of the invisible dome. They'd simply been verifying the existence of it. If the dome had not been there, the missile would have passed harmlessly through the air over Morioh. The plane that had fired the missile pulled up sharply, avoiding the dome, and flew away.

"Are we protected, then?" Muyrotaisuu asked.

"Who knows," Rohan said.

"But I don't think this dome is entirely beneficial to us. Look over there." He pointed down the hill, to Morioh Harbor. A chunk of the bay was being moved with the town itself, as part of the 'ship'. A great number of boats had set off from the harbor, headed for the edge of the 'ship.' "They're about to find that out," Rohan added. Rohan was right.