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.
Jojo was trapped! The insane and nefarious Sue had him encased in quicksand!! Though he struggled to escape and keep his mouth clear of the flowing water from the Stand Cash, Jojo knew that he fought a losing battle. His feet still couldn't find a bottom to touch and kicked more and more furiously as the mud surrounded him and made it harder and harder for his body to move. In his desperation to survive, Jojo summoned The World to reach up and grab Cash's sponge-like hand.
"Hueee" Sue gleefully moaned. On contact, Jojo could feel his own hand beginning to dry, and The World drew away quickly. "You can't touch me now! You can't do anything!"
"Can't I!?" Jojo exclaimed. He took in a calming breath and activated the Sun Ripple. His body became hot as the healing energy went through him. The chill of the cold mud subsided to the hotness within him which coursed out through his own skin and started heating the mud that sealed him in. The mud dried and formed a protective shell of thickened dirt around him to keep the rest of the moist, cold mud at bay. "The World!" he summoned. The Stand came out swinging at the dry edges of the hole he was trapped in. It dug a tunnel under Sue with its fists and reached out as far as its range would allow it. Then, The World collapsed its own tunnel by punching at its ceiling, and a hole suddenly opened up underneath Sue, sinking him down to Jojo's level.
"Now we're on equal ground" Jojo said, his head and neck still out of the mud and soaking wet. "Listen to me! MUSE is evil! There's no way to justify a genocide, even if she is a Stand user! I won't allow such a thing to happen!"
"You don't have a choice" Sue said with his mouth half in mud. "It's going to happen. The gears are already turning." The World came and quickly punched at Sue's face. Cash was faster to block, however, and was totally drained of its moisture, looking now dark-brown and like a lanky robot with coral armor and raisin-like head. Jojo wrenched his arm around, turning and flexing to part the hard mud encased around it to try and move it up. The mud around him that his Ripple hadn't reached yet was still wet and churning, keeping him down.
"It's no good!" Sue exclaimed. "Cash!!!" Cash came out in full, hovering above Jojo, with its arms wound back and fists clenched. Jojo looked up and braced himself for the attack, summoning The World to defend himself. The World moved up and started blocking with open palms catching the fists and its thick, awesome arms blocking the blows that went past them. Jojo's arms were frozen from the motion of his Stand, and so his arm was stayed as the mud started to close around it again.
My Sun Ripple has died down? He thought. The Ghost Ripple and Sun Ripple must be canceling each other out! If I stop breathing it, then, would The World be more powerful? Jojo took the second to experiment. Once he stopped breathing in his almost natural, enhanced way The World's arms managed to speed up and freed Jojo's arms to act as he willed them to. Jojo powered an uppercut up through the mud and hooked it straight into Sue's jaw. Once his concentration was jarred, along with his brain, Cash suffered from the lagging and was given a myriad of open-palm blows from The World as it kept up its offensive defense. With one arm free, Jojo reached up for the edge of the pit, but it was too far away. Jojo began sinking back down again, the mud now moistened and semi-liquid again.
What's happening? He thought. The mud around my body was dry just a second ago, now it's like quicksand again! This shouldn't happen! It shouldn't have broken down and gotten saturated that quickly after I had dried it to harden!
"Uhhhhhhhh" Sue groaned, throaty and dry. Jojo looked down at the man, as his own head slowly continued to sink down into the mud, and saw that Sue's own body had become cracked and pale with dryness. His wet hair had become stringy and dry, his eyes were pasty and shriveled, and his mouth hung open expelling a current of water that churned with the mud.
"Stop!" Jojo shouted. "Are you insane!? You'll kill yourself!"
"What point is it?" Sue asked. "I'm just a useless boy....after all."
"STOP!" Jojo shouted. He knew after that the boy wouldn't listen, and he turned his focus upward. Cash was dissolving away, breaking down and the parts that broke away broke even more until they vanished entirely into thin air. Jojo knew Sue was dying, as shown by the state of his Stand, but it also meant that his mind was less focused on anything but the expenditure of his final breaths of energy. Jojo reached up and tried to grip at the sides of the pit, but it was too sheer and wet to find a grip. He tried to dig his fingers in, but past the coat of mud was pure, dried rock. His face was barely above the surface and his breathing turned to panic.
Calm down Jojo thought. I have to calm down. If I at least harden the mud around me now, I can survive. With that in mind, Jojo reengaged his Ripple breathing and the mud around his body hardened into a shell of hard, compact dirt. He kept breathing until he saw the mud around him stop moving, a sign that his process was indeed working, and when he felt that his precautions had been met to safely stay afloat he began planning around his Stand. The World, get me out of here! Grab onto my hand and pull me up! I'll stop breathing for just a second to give you power, but that's all I'll be able to spare! The World summoned itself and Jojo's body froze. It extended up as high as it could go, staying within a short distance of Jojo so that its power wasn't reduced, and grabbed hold of the edge of the pit.
Jojo held his breath, The World pulled him up out of the thick muck, and Jojo grabbed onto the sides of the pit to pull himself up, dismissing The World in the last moment. Just as he had reached a safe point, covered in mud in the open, dry air, he felt something trying to pull at his leg. He looked down at Sue's hand, which had reached up to grip at his pantleg in the final stretch of the insane boy's life. His face was aghast and shallow, all his skin cracking and flaking off in dryness.
"Waaaaaaterrrrrrr" he groaned. Jojo shook his hand off and let it drop down into the mud. The moisture began to suck into the fingertips of the boy, absorbed by what was left of Cash's form, and his life started to very slowly regain. Jojo looked down as Sue regained his breath and sighed.
"How much longer will you intend to fight me?" Jojo asked.
"Until....I win" Sue groaned.
"That isn't going to happen" Jojo said. "You may have a great power in your Stand, but you misuse it. You'll never manage to defeat me, Sue. It'd be better if you just let yourself lie down and admit your loss. You know there's nothing for you to gain by trying to kill me."
"No" Sue groaned. "It's not possible! You're not right!" Sue activated his power out of absolute fury and absorbed all of the water in the pit of sloshing, quicksand mud in an instant. His body was swollen up with water and his fragile skin started to burst and leak with pure water from every crack. "I'll kill you even if I have to die!!!" Jojo retreated. Just as soon as he was clear of the barren, dried ground he heard an explosion, and then the ground beneath him started to heave up. He was jarred and lost his balance, but caught a tree and turned around before he fell. The ground around the point of the explosion was buckled upward and cracked all over, but that was the whole extent of the damage. There was no righteous clearing or massive damage, just the ground sundered from the sudden boom of water that had spread out far. Jojo realized painfully well what had happened and shook the moisture from his hair. There were bits of flesh and bloody spots everywhere in the clearing. Sue had blown himself up in a last attempt to kill Jojo, like a human water balloon.
"This has to stop" Jojo said adamantly. "If these kind of people keep gathering around her.....how many deaths will she be responsible for before this is over...!?"
REO, meanwhile, continued his flight stealthily through the trees and under the cover of the brush with the dying soldier over his shoulders. When the ground began to tremor and the sounds of unrelenting war had begun, REO started his commando tactics of stealthy recovery and didn't stop despite the sudden current silence. It just made him that much more reflexive and aware of things, that much more defensively paranoid. He raced to a nearby shaded lot of trees with out-of-place bushes and took cover in them.
"Hold" REO whispered. "N-teen Echo Server Movement!" His urgent hush prompted the soldiers he commanded to come out of their hiding and encircle him. He handed off the soldier to the team medic who checked his vitals and overall condition at a glance. "He had a bad run in with a Stand user. His body's been drained of moisture, so he's most likely dangerously dehydrated. Get him some water ASAP."
"Yes sir" the medic said. "We sill have that, at least."
"Shh!" another soldier hushed.
"Quiet it with the 'shh' shit! Those sounds are the loudest when you whisper!" REO raged in a whisper. "Now, what's the status?"
"Uh, well" a soldier began, "currently, there's nothing wrong, but our rightmost flank fell to an unknown enemy."
"It could be Dio's troops" REO said. "Did you get a visual?"
"We got a constant in the last minute" one man said, his eyes in a panic and his voice picking up unconsciously from a great sense of urgency. "It's a 'constant visual', to the rightmost flank!"
"Get low, kid" REO said. "You VA too loud. Now, what about a vid?" His jargon had taken a new tone, eliminating hard sounds for the sake that the enemy may in fact be nearby.
"Guy heard 'em going here and around in nega-one" the soldier said, communicating that the panicked soldier saw them less than a minute or so ago.
"They hanging?" REO asked.
"Vultures" the soldier said. "Like a demon army."
".....Where?" REO asked, aloud. Suddenly, from the tree branches above and some of the fake bushes he knew were decoys that his own men must have set up, the black and Goth-appareled Frozen Night troops sprung up with REO's company guns in their hands. "Fuck" REO cursed.
"Just stand up, Speedwagon" one of the gas-masked men said. "We've got no intention of hurting you."
"And we didn't kill anyone yet" another fearsome, masked man said. "We're saving all our bullets for MUSE." REO stood up with his arms raised, looked around, and saw himself surrounded. Looking past the troops and his own soldiers he saw even more moving in the darkness, men in black with coats flowing behind them like liquid shadows, all with some nefarious aura of murder about them. Their arms were great in quantity, but from such a range REO couldn't make out a quality, though he knew from the explosions earlier that they were doubtlessly great.
"That's all you're here for?" REO asked. "To kill that chick?"
"We're here to soften her up" the man said. "The more a user uses their Stand in a short amount of time, the more tired they get. So, by making her use her Stand to block deadly blows, we're helping Lord Dio to come in later and kill her outright."
"'S that so?" REO said with a smirk. "Dio can't even take care of her alone? He needs to rely on a bunch of guys who look like post-apocalyptic freaks to fight the first half of his battle for him? I thought he was some kind of king to you guys!"
"Well, you're right" the man said as REO smiled with a trolling face. "Lord Dio is powerful, but MUSE is outright Godlike in comparison. We've been told that if we kill her it's a battle won, and that she has to die no matter what." REO's face sank back to a cautious state, and he lowered his face so that his bowler derby hat brim cast a precarious shadow just over his eyes.
This shit's getting serious, eh? REO thought. Even Dio is letting himself be vulnerable to help in this case. Still, he isn't asking for any help, either, so he's the same old egoist in the end. "You really need help with this? To the point where you stole my own guns? Then why not let me and Jojo fight with you? We're Stand users, and we have a whole group of them backing us up to boot!"
"Lord Dio has refused to accept your help" the man said. "However, if you choose to be philanthropic and help us mere humans avoid a perpetual harm in the course of the fighting, we'd be grateful and Dio would just assume that you're being your usual, obnoxiously chivalrous selves."
"That's a funny way of asking for help" REO said as he lowered his arms. "But, I guess it does a good job describing us. Especially Jojo. Where is the fight right now?"
"Right over there" the man said, pointing with the barrel of the gun toward the bridge. REO saw a huge cloud of dust, still clearing, and held out his hand for binoculars. His soldiers kept those, as they couldn't easily kill men with guns should they resist initially. He looked through the far-seeing goggles and saw a flaring whip of energy, something huge and grotesque like a tentacle growing up out of the dust and then immediately settling back in.
"Looks like there's a fight indeed" REO said. "I guess it's a good idea to maintain this distance but-wait! What's that on the bridge!?"
"Something on the bridge?" the gas-masked man exclaimed. "Now what, another Stand user!?"
"No" REO said with clenched teeth, "but it definitely looks like some evil bullshit!" He saw through his scopes a man sitting atop a mound of some kind swinging a meat cleaver in his hand, looking down over the center of the cloud of dust and settling smoke. The mound, in truth, and through a higher resolution scanning, was a pile of bodies freshly chopped up, all of them wearing the same style of armor with the emblem of REO's coat of arms. "Fuck! This means war!!" he seethed, seeing all his knights piled up so haughtily by the enemy, now made his enemy as well, and by proxy Dio his ally....
Already, the battle was well on its way. Rosalisa's Evanescence hovered behind her as she held a notebook in her hand with a pen in the other, already half a page of commands written down. MUSE stood arrogant in the middle of a crater of destruction with her hands at her hips and an evil smirk on her face.
"What can you do" MUSE began "with those flimsy fingers of yours?" MUSE pointed forward, commanding the writhing tentacle mass that her Stand had become to attack. A thick cluster of tentacles shot forth and Rosalisa wrote the text of her command. Evanescence hovered down in front of her and uncoiled its fingers into ten paper-width binding sheets. Five of them gathered together in a spiral and formed a shield shaped on the sides like rose petals. The other five snaked to the side and made a reach for MUSE's body. The tentacles around MUSE suddenly reformed, all gathering together and reforming the humanoid shape of her Stand with its mouth open from joint to joint of its jaw. It grabbed all five of the paper-thin reaches from the air and clutched them together while MUSE stared out beyond its still extended tentacle arm.
Rosalisa's right hand froze up as her Stand's fingers had been immobilized. Her pen was still held in them, however, so she wrote as quick as her arm would allow itself to move and scrawled another short string of commands. Evanescence jerked its arm back and managed to get three of its fingers out of MUSE's grip. Then it used those three fingers to attack the Stand's hand and force it to let go of the other two. The Stand, however, took the blow and had a noxious green spray of blood shoot from its fingers upon contact. Rosalisa felt her fingertips get chilled as the blood dripped from the three loose fingers of her Stand. Following the commands, the Stand's fingers returned, the pinky and ring still lost to MUSE's grip.
"It will take much more than a papercut to make me flinch" MUSE said. Her Stand, with its mouth still menacingly wide, dug its feet into the ground and its immaculate body was suddenly thickened and tense with wide, sinuous muscles. It jerked on the fingers and ripped them, like the paper they were, clean off. Rosalisa's fingertips, likewise, were yanked and the tops of them ripped off. Her mind was so shaken with pain that her defense nearly fell, but she endured. She bit hard into her black-painted lip and clutched her bleeding fingers into her palm as she continued to write. "What's the matter?" MUSE called out. "Have you broken a precious nail?" The sarcasm was sickening. Rosalisa immediately relented and had her shield wall before her dismantled with a spiraling blast. The tentacles of the Stand were blasted back, and in place of the shield was a drill. Rosalisa ran forward with her Stand out in front and attacked MUSE head-on with a paper-drill attack.
"Hmph" MUSE huffed. Her Stand's am retracted. She and it crouched down, then she and it made a quick jump clear over Rosalisa's head to land behind her, on top of a piece of paper. Rosalisa stopped suddenly and reached back. The paper extended all the way from her untorn middle fingertip and into the fingertip of her Stand, a consistent but thinned finger of her Stand with the same manipulating powers. "Clever girl" MUSE said. The thin paper coiled up and latched itself to her lower spine, the furthest up it could reach. Rosalisa stopped, as did Evanescence's paper drill, and all the fingers but that one returned.
"And now what, you ask?" Rosalisa said, having turned the tables of sarcasm. "That single strand is latched directly into your spinal column between your vertebrae. If it is jarred in any way you'll be, at the very least, paralyzed for life from there down."
"You say that like it's supposed to scare me" MUSE said. "It will cut me redargless of what I do, won't it? If it breaks or if you break it yourself."
"That's right" Rosalisa said, holding out her hand. The blood from her torn nails and the stretched skin around them was still painfully evident, and seeing it just made her mind recognize the pain even more. "If anything more happens to this hand, you can consider this fight, and all others, completely over."
"You think I even need my legs to kill you?" MUSE said. Her Stand came out, pulsed up in an instant with thick muscles all over, even so much so that the muscles of its brows had grown over its eyes, giving its head an eyeless, serpent-mouthed sort of appearance, all of it frightening as hell to behold. "With or without my legs, my fate is unchanged. You can do whatever you want to me, and you'll still end up losing."
"Whether I win or not is irrelevant as well" Rosalisa said. "What I do is only a prelude to the battle that will truly kill you. I only do this now to stall you for Lord Dio's sake."
"That boy?" MUSE said. "So, he's really going to face me, is he? I commend him for his courage. I'll be sure to send what's left of him to his dearest relatives, and while I'm at it, I'll just snuff out the very existence of his geneology from this planet so no more blond-haired idiots can try to meddle in my plans." Her Stand attacked, punching its arm forward with great strength, letting fly a number of tentacles from its own body with the force and speed of its punch. Rosalisa took her pen in her hand and managed to expertly write with it between her thumb and forefinger in one hand, scrawling a quick line across her notebook paper that Evanescence followed instantly. It came out in front and blocked with nine fingers wound tightly together in a rose-petal formation. She had it tied off at its end for protection, as the tentacles were already unwinding and burrowing into the paper-like fingers to get to the center and pierce through to harm Rosalisa on the other side.
Once Rosalisa knew enough of the Stand's body was within her grasp she returned all but one of the fingers to her Stand and commanded it to slice. With the one remaining finger, Evanescence straightened out a length of razor-thin paper and started making quick movements with its arm, slicing through the air. The tentacles swerved and wriggled in all directions to avoid it, but the paper lost its straightness mid-swing, curving and warping and even lengthening within each powerful stroke it made to work past the obvious defense of the tentacles. Once the attack was done the tentacles retreated and reformed into a thick, muscled arm on the Stand which bled noxious green more and more onto the ground. On the side of that one finger, Rosalisa again felt some strange chill as earlier, and looked at her hand. The area of that finger that was splashed with the blood seemed to be irritated, her skin suddenly breaking into a rash of some kind. It was the same for her other fingertips, though she managed to ignore it.
"Hmmhmmhmm" MUSE laughed in a mocking hum. She stepped out from behind her Stand, which stood perfectly still, like an evil, Gothic statue. Perhaps even something more disturbing, more like an alien Adonis sculpture, or some other unfathomable construct of unknown space. "Take a look, you silly girl" MUSE said. She held up her arm in plain sight for Rosalisa to see. While her Stand's arm was bleeding and covered with the marks and cuts that her Stand's razor blade had made against its skin, her arm had absolutely no signs of pain or wear or tear at all. It was untouched and smooth as marble.
"That can't be possible" Rosalisa said. "The injuries of a Stand are reflected onto its user. Is this some kind of ability of yours?"
"This Stand is a part of me" MUSE said "and yet, it is not. As long as it exists it does so as a greater extension of my subconscious mind, of my own unspoken wants and desires, my uncontrolled id. This Stand of mine fits within a categorical variety of Stands known as 'The World', and in being such a Stand, is naturally at a peak of power, and can be surpassed by nothing! It commands a power that commands dominion over all other things, natural and unnatural! It is the strongest Stand type! And mine is certainly the strongest, for its ability cannot be rivaled. Along with the power to manipulate its own body to my will and stretch as far as I can see in the form of a continuous length of tentacles, my Stand also has the ability to devour things...." MUSE's Stand snapped open its mouth and let pour out the tentacles that it held within as tongues. They slithered through the air and closed in on Rosalisa. She began running away, into what remained of the dust cloud and back out again while the tongues continued trailing her. She made a quick entry in her note and then threw the pen away. Her Stand sliced at the tongues, cutting the pen in half but not touching the reflexively evasive tendrils.
"What a pointless gesture" MUSE said. Suddenly, some sparks started to light up in the air and a sudden explosion came from the pen. The sparks made of metal touching metal ignited the ink which was super-explosive, a secret weapon that Rosalisa carried as a master scribe. The explosion didn't hurt the tongues, being part of a Stand, but MUSE became defensive as a reaction and the tongues were called back. Then she heard a clatter of metal nearby. From behind, Rosalisa had thrown and cut apart several pens, all of which were gearing to explode. MUSE braced herself with her arms in front of her face. When the first pen flashed with sparks it sent the others into a chain-reaction, and they were all blown up in a great flash of a fireball that quickly faded off into wispy smoke.
Rosalisa fell to a knee in the grass and quickly bandaged her hurt writing hand up.
"Must I repeat myself!?" MUSE shouted. Rosalisa looked back with her Stand ready and saw the woman covered in organic armor, a disgusting extension of her own mind warped around her and constantly moving as a nebulous, disconnected yet continuous whole. All green and slithering and evil, like a legion of snakes without heads. "My Stand is absolute! It has the power to devour! Matter, energy, and everything else! My Stand takes it all away!!!" MUSE rose her arms up to the sky and let the coils around them unwind. They flew forward, aimed at Rosalisa, and gathered into two hands with intent to grip the breath from her very throat....
I can still do something Rosalisa thought. She looked down at her finger which still held the thin paper attached to MUSE's spine. She made the motion to pull it and deliver the killing blow, but something was amiss. She pulled back her whole arm but she saw no reaction out of haughty and upright MUSE. Then she looked down at her hand, which one of the hideous hands had overlapped, and found to her horror that it was gone. A bloody stump of a wrist was all that was left by the hand of MUSE's power, which still dripped her blood as it devoured the last inch of flesh of her own right hand.....
