Disclaimer: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure and all equally bizarre concepts and characters belong to Hirohiko Araki. Original characters and other concepts (as noted) are copyright of me.

Dio faced his adversary with the cold and cooling villainy that stopped the hearts of pure, mortal men and his opponent gave him no signs of flinching. Such twisted sanity resonated so clearly through this strange man's mind, the thoughts of judgment and eradication for the pure and the holy that an evil like Dio's did not surprise him, as its presence was one that he had seen in all that he had judged.

Dio attacked. He stepped forward, instantly awake, and threw his daggers. The man's Stand Creep shot itself up and blocked the rain of knives with a swipe of its semi-solid arm. The knives scattered about in the air, and just as Creep brought its arm down another one flew straight for the man's face. He blocked it away with a quick swipe of his scalpel and took a flying throat-high knee from a rushing Dio. Dio grinned madly as he pushed his way forward, hoping to pin his foe to the floor and crush his throat with the weight of his knee, but Creep's arms came winding up with no body attached but the floor, took him by the arms and threw him off. He flipped in the air and landed still facing his enemy, sliding on his feet and making a run as soon as he got back up.

His foe rolled to his front and pushed himself up, bringing Creep up to block. Dio stopped just short enough and summoned SoaD to make a sharp stab with its fingers. Creep leaned away and the bladed nails came within inches of the man's face. He retreated. SoaD tangled with Creep, retracting its claws and pumping its arms up, grabbing both of Creep's hands and delivering a spiking knee drive into the side of Creep's leg. The damage was transferred to the man who staggered at the pressure. Dio took out a knife, stepped around the fighting Stands and threw it, right into his arm.

"Gah!" the man grunted. He pulled the knife out and rounded a corner, summoning Creep down into the floor and back to him as he hid. Dio summoned SoaD to stand beside him as he huffed arrogantly.

"Is that the best you can do?" Dio shouted. "Hit and run? Shouldn't you have a more obvious advantage on this floor!?" But Dio wasn't staying arrogant or mocking long. He quickly began his own tactical retreat and searched for some ground he could call his own. He knew everything was played against his favor already. As long as I'm here he has a free reign over his Stand. I can't outdo him tactically. He can appear anywhere, anytime with nearly any form. So long as I'm on the 13th floor, I can't battle him evenly. I can't win... Dio stopped and brought his hand up to his face. He just looked at it, at the curves and the crevices that marked his destiny as drawn out in the stars in the sky.

"Of course I can beat him" Dio told himself. He clenched a fist and looked to the ceiling. "The question is how..." Just as he planned, Creep crawled through the ceiling above him and made a dive. Dio dashed back and let Creep fall into the floor which turned to liquid around it. Then the Stand slowly rose up, only its bust and its shoulders rising above the swampy mess, still dripping with the rotten horror that it made with every motion, and it hissed.

"The only question" the man said from behind "is for me to ask." Dio spun around and saw a syringe being thrust at him. He reacted with a godly speed and caught the attack with both his arms, forcing a stand-still with his opponent. He was quite physically matched and couldn't move him forward while the man continued to push, and he still had another hand to use. Dio summed SoaD to guard his back, just in time to catch the pouncing Creep and hold it in a body lock. "That question" he continued, reaching into the pocket of his coat, "is for God alone to answer." He pulled out a switchblade knife. Dio was startled. He tried to wrench himself away by twisting the man's arm but to little avail. The threat of freeing him up to inject whatever ungodly serum he had was oppressing him. SoaD, meanwhile, had to use all of its force to keep Creep at bay and to prevent it from simply dragging it and Dio down below the floor.

The man stepped in and stabbed, catching his knife in no vital area but still slicing cleanly through Dio's skin and into his side. The icy cold metal made its way in further and further, right to his tense muscles, and started splitting the fibrous strings against the sharp blade, plunging in deeper and deeper until the colder metal end of the hilt hit against Dio's skin. He felt it all at a crawling speed, that white-hot burning of an ice-cold blade piercing into his flesh and the warm trickle of blood that went down his side, but in reality the attack was so swift that it pushed him back. Dio stumbled backwards in the same slowed daze of crawling time that he lived through the cut with. His reactions and senses had been heightened through his pain, and now he was aware and ready for battle. SoaD threw Creep away, turned to kick the syringe from the man's wrist and then leaped back to catch Dio before he hit the ground and slowly push him up.

Dio was laughing, and past that laughing he was intermittently coughing in pain. But laughing or coughing he was smiling, and it was obvious just how he smiled by the white glare of teeth that shined out against the black shadow across his face. He finally got back up to the arches of his feet and stood with a hand cradling an elbow and five tense fingers across his face, framing his eyes to glare forth with their wicked red tinting the oceanic blue.

"How utterly childish of you" Dio said. "Who in the world brings a knife to a Stand fight?" Dio was deadly serious now. SoaD's wings were spread and its claws were bared and its voice was emitting an echoing, hollow roar and nothing could stop him now. This was Dio at his fullest potential, pushing the human envelope in an extreme circumstance. The threshold had been breached. Dio's madness worked itself up. A true evil awakened...

"A knife in God's hand" the man said "can slay an army of the faithless." He switched the blade back into the hilt and stood fast against Dio with his Stand coiling around his legs as a semi-liquid entity. What an evil aura he holds, and with such grace and purpose. It's as if he has taken the grips of Satan to his shoulders as a mantle of pride. He wears this despicable evil with such care and relaxation...could a man like this truly exist in God's world? A man so much darker than all others!?

"I am tired of questions" the man said suddenly. He snapped his fingers and sent his Stand into the floor. Dio grinned. The advantage was momentarily his. He moved with an elegance indescribable and reached into a pocket with his hand to throw a knife. The man blocked it and hopped to the side in an attempt to rush in. SoaD spat a knife at his feet, forcing him to misstep backwards while the hand in fornt of Dio's face brushed back threw his hair and brought forth another knife that he threw very casually. The man dodged it and let it sink into the wall behind him. "You are a wicked man. I shall see that divine punishment is brought to you!"

"Oh, fuck off..." Dio lowed. SoaD dashed forward and began stabbing and growling. Dio walked forward in a perfectly casual pace, chasing the man down with his Stand's attacks, unaware of the trap he wandered into until he already saw that he was caught. SoaD fell back to its master as Creep grabbed his ankles from below. "Kill it" Dio commanded. SoaD got on a knee and began stabbing rapidly into the floor with its long claws penetrating through to the ceiling of the floor below, stabbing miniscule holes all through the white ceiling tile while all the humans walked around and ignored it. Dio was being pulled further and further downward, into the space between the floors, struggling in vain with his Stand.

"In Purgatory" the man said "you will face yourself, your greatest foe, and die from the madness before you ever realize how to escape. It is there that a soul as fiercely evil as yours must be sent, with all the others." Dio glared at him through the shadow around his face. In his final act before disappearing he threw a dagger, one serrated and formed with rage, that sunk into the man's forearm and stunned him with pain.

"Don't throw that away" Dio warned as he sank through the floor. "I'll most certainly come back for it..." And with those final threatening words Dio vanished and the floor quelled itself. Now trapped inside the floor itself, bombarded by the hideous stench of countless rotted bodies, Dio curled himself up to fit his surroundings better and summoned the arm of his Stand to pull him forward. One arm he held to his nose and the other he used to cover his mouth in an attempt to filter the absolute rot from the air, and despite the pitch darkness around him he could still see the terrible lacerations on the face of a freshly-dead young woman that had done her in.

I just need to get there... Dio planned. Get there, SoaD, get me there so that I can kill that bastard!!!

While Dio traveled by the gracious hand of his own imagined power, the man and his Stand, the seeker of justice and the Creep, approached the unconscious Rosalisa to take from her her final thoughts.

"You wasted the rest of your blasphemous power" he noted, looking at the last page of her diary, "on an oddly good term. You wrote the name of your creator in your final moments, an act of repentance." The man saw her final worded command, which had freed Dio from the locked room, and mistook the heavenly name for that of the heavenly being. He was woefully wrong, but it couldn't be helped. He had creep take Rosalisa by the shoulders and prop her up against the wall. "You have accepted a greater force, submitted yourself to a higher being, and allowed a light to shine into your heart the likes of which most humans cannot see. You have earned a safe passage to heaven, but I cannot provide it. I am only a judge for the wicked, and an executioner for the unholy and demonic. Therefore, I shall sentence you to your Purgatory, until another can come and reclaim your body to be placed in the rightful hands of God..."

So Creep took Rosalisa's body and went down below, into the floor, into the crawl space between floors where the wires fed into all the walls and where the batteries powered the lights of the ceiling below, to place her in limbo until a greater force than he came to take her away. Creep was gentle with her body and placed it very softly amidst the bony remains of another long-forgotten corpse. Creep stopped for a moment and looked down at Rosalisa, a fallen flower, to breathe a sigh of sadness in her favor.

….............hhhhhhhh..... The darkness hissed at Creep. It hissed with the beckoning advent of dread and doom. Creep turned to it and hissed back.

Siiiiiileeeeence...... Creep hissed. The darkness didn't respond. Not audibly, but the darkness certainly began to move. Edging its way forward on its sharp claws, SoaD emerged as a tangible darkness and rushed in full force with its maw wide open and roaring.

WRAAAAAAAIIIIIII!!!!!! Creep braced itself for the attack as Dio and his Stand came sliding forward at full force!

The man, meanwhile, inspected the knife on a table while he carefully bandaged his white, leathery skin that was stained with the streaming blood from his wound. He watched the knife closely, believing it to somehow retain a sentient level of Dio's evil, as it was spawned from him, and judged it's every nasty curve constantly with his incredibly diligent, mad eyes.

"Just how could he take it" he wondered "unless he would somehow..." A terrible feeling overcame him suddenly. It was as if his throat was being crushed in the grip of some sinister hands. He felt for his windpipe and pushed his fingers over an indentation in the shape of a hand that was on his neck. He knew what it meant. A demon from hell was hurting him, clutching him from a world beyond, in an attempt to end his righteous duties as a judge for all the living and dead to pass through his holy realm.

Damn him! The man cursed. Creeper, return to me! Hurry! And so his fatal flaw was played...

As the ground near the edge of the room where Rosalisa had been taken down to the lower floors began to warp the man came running to meet with his Stand and usher off any demons that may be on it. Creeper's ability was in effect, surely, as the ground took on more viscous than solid properties, but the Stand itself wasn't presenting itself to its user. He metally summoned it again, and this time its arm came up and clawed for solid ground as it pulled the rest of its body upward. SoaD's black hand was wrapped around its neck and its fleshy wings formed as reigns that tied around its shoulders to pull it up. Attached to those wings and the source of that ethereal had was Dio, who was hoisted up with Rosalisa in his arm, recovered from Purgatory by the very Stand that sent him there.

Dio released the wings of SoaD from Creeper and let it crawl back into its master's mind. He let go of his girl and sent her to a wall with SoaD forming and carrying her so she was properly harmlessly leaned against the wall. She drifted down to the floor and curled herself up in a sub-conscious protective act, leaving Dio with his bleeding side and the man with his patched-up bleeding arm to face each other down once more.

"How did you do that...?" the man asked.

"Obviously" Dio said "you don't share a tight enough bond with your Stand. I just latched myself to it and knew you would recall it." The man was breathing hard and angrily now.

"How did you do it!?" he demanded in a rage. "No force but God can bring you back from Purgatory! Not even I have the capability of bringing back every soul that I send there! They are always ushered off to Hell before I get the chance to recover them! How are you alive!? Answer me!!!"

"I explained that already" Dio said, placing a hand on his hip. "You aren't smart...are you?" The man became furious and lost his control. He charged forward with a wound-up punch in his bandaged hand. Dio just smirked as he saw the attack come. Then the man punched, straight down, not close enough for a regular hit to connect, and planted his open palm on the floor. Dio retreated just as a fore-flip ax kick came his way and dodged it. The man was up again and calmly rushing this time. It was a straight-up fist-fight now. Dio blocked the best he could with his thick and solid forearms while the bandaged man made steep swinging hooks and sharp kicks to his legs to weaken him.

Shit. I didn't think he'd go for an all-out fight like this...Dio continued to relent and started throwing his own punches, but even his dulled, human eyes could see that they weren't fast enough to do any real damage if they connected. They were sluggish and inaccurate, an obvious side effect from the loss of blood and muscle control that his stab wound brought about. Dio decided to finish his fight and broke away. SoaD appeared with a lunge and a roar, grappling with the man and holding him in place, eventually applying all the pressure from Dio's manifested rage that he was down on his knees and struggling to stay off of his hands.

"Now, now" Dio said, "that won't do. Unless I get a proper bow from you, like a good worshiper, I won't let you up!"

"GAAAH!!!" the man shouted. Creep shot up from the floor, as the floor, and threw SoaD away. Dio was pushed back but managed to stay on one foot and steady himself again. He glared at his enemy, who was regaining his strength with each passing moment, and called his Stand back to defend him. Creep came to its full height stood imposing itself upon Dio and his Stand, its skeletal teeth shining murder at them, and suddenly it attack, springing forward and delivering a stern straight-fingered jab into SoaD's side, right where Dio was stabbed and bleeding. Dio was forced against the wall in a painful stagger and held his side as the blood redoubled itself. He pulled his hands away from the hot, leaking liquid and then clamped them back down. Even though he was in a hospital, he couldn't bring himself to search for the proper instruments to treat his vicious wound. No opportunities to search a room were present, as his manic judge was up and ready to kill.

"I believe" he began "that this is yours." He held up the serrate-edged knife and threw it to Dio's feet, directly in the ground. A thin line of blood had formed between the two points. Dio looked down, just now noticing the strangely thin line of blood, sure it was neither his nor his enemy's, then saw Creep holding up the freshly chopped finger of a young woman. It cackled in a hissing manner and dropped the finger to the floor where it sank down to the purgatory floor.

It drew it that fast? Dio realized. Is this guy just fucking with me after all? Isn't he taking this seriously at all!? Then Dio realized, with a Stand like that, he didn't have to, and finally a very foreign, human sense of defeat overwhelmed him. He felt like falling over, but propped against the wall all he would be able to do was slid in an embarrassing defeatist way. His pride was too great to allow that, so he just staggered forth and got mad, so mad that SoaD summoned itself against his own mental orders.

"That line" the man said "represents a sending point between worlds. Should you step both feet upon that line, at any time, the gate shall open and you shall die." Dio scoffed.

"What are you?" he asked. "Some twisted prophet?"

"No" the man said. He took a hand to the bandages of his face and ripped them off in a streaming storm of dirty white. His face was so hideously scarred that Dio had trouble connecting it to a human body. He lacked a nose entirely, his lips were torn apart with thick scars, his eyes were browless and lacked any lids, and all over his skin there were deep holes and crevices where some past burn or blunt force or laceration had left a permanent mark. And his head was smooth with those aged burns as well, as if his entire scalp had been once set ablaze, which would better explain his complete lack of ears. He looked like a cheaply fashioned, devilish monster mask, but he breathed and growled and glared a very human, very merciless glare.

"I am Justice" His words, so blunt and forceful, struck Dio right at his wound, adding an insult to injury that made him laugh through the pain.

Justice? Dio thought, unable to talk. You've got to be fucking kidding me...