"Of course," he said, sighing as he stood up from the desk he'd been seated behind, writing in his journal about the many and varied upheavals that he had found himself facing in the weeks and months that he had rejoined Alice and her people in Rome to face off with the threat posed by a great many of the Pillar Men.

He'd no way of knowing if he would ever be able to return to this room of his, or to finish the latest journal that he had begun once he had once again run out of room in the last that he had been using. Sighing as he made his way down the stairs and out to the motor pool where all of their forces were beginning to assemble, Jonathan gathered his Hamon, flushing it through his body to purge the remaining aches from the tension that had been pressing down so hard upon him for so long. There was little he could say or do, now that it Alice and her forces – alongside those of Speedwagon's self-named foundation, and even a sprinkling of Nazis that Stroheim had clearly been able to convince to come along with them by some means or another – had assembled and were clearly about to begin moving out in earnest.

There was Caesar, giving last-minute orders and instructions to a unit of riflemen who had been armed with the same kind of long-range UV-rifles that Jonathan had seen so many times before; there was Joseph, hitching up the straps of a large, sturdy tank of water that would provide his grandson with all of the weaponry he would need during the confrontation to come, or at least Jonathan found himself hoping that it would; there was Stroheim, along with a small knot of Nazi soldiers, and also those robotic dinosaurs that his forces and Alice's people had collaborated upon; there was Straizo, Dio, and Alice herself, all wearing the armor that Alice had so diligently created and worked to improve over the half-century that she had lived as a vampire. Making his own way over to the trucks that would take them to their present destination – Kars had, as expected, taken Alice's challenge and then issued one of his own – Jonathan flushed his body with Hamon in order to clear it of the few lingering aches that always seemed to build up when one was resting for too long in even the most comfortable of chairs, and then made himself as comfortable as he could in the front seat of one of the two lead trucks.

He'd little enough hope of knowing just what mad scheme Kars had had in mind when he had issued his challenge to Alice in the first place, but even seeing the phrasing that the Pillar Man had used had not helped so much as he would have wished; all he knew, in the end, was that Kars had hatched some mad idea of pitting his own creations against those he seemed determined to think of as Alice's.

Jonathan himself was not fond of the idea – that Kars still thought of the men and women who had set themselves forward to serve as a part of Alice's guard forces to be little more than the creations of his and Dio's sister – and he knew from the expression on her face that Alice herself disapproved of the idea nearly as much as he did, but Kars had long since proved himself far too set in his ways – far too dangerous – to be allowed to live freely in the world that Alice had worked for so long to create. Sighing as he found himself jolted by the sudden lurch of the truck as it started up, Jonathan looked out onto the passing landscape as it blazed by. Kars had chosen the site of their battle, and while he'd often heard that one should not fight on ground chosen by one's enemies, Jonathan felt that the Pillar Man's own arrogance would keep him from preparing the grounds to any true extent.

The ground they were going to be fighting upon was that which stood outside the Coliseum in Rome, and Jonathan could not help but find himself wondering what they would be facing when they all arrived. He knew that it was likely to be at least a small army of vampires, if not a large one, since Kars had proven himself all too adept at creating armies for himself. However, unlike Alice, Kars seemed to favor humans in place of the ancient creatures that his and Dio's sister had revived to fill out the ranks of her own forces.

A select few of them were being brought to this confrontation, but as Kars did tend to favor vampires as the bulk of his forces, the ancient zombies that made up Alice's heavy cavalry had for the most part been left behind at the facilities that Speedwagon and his people had created and maintained for them to inhabit.

=BT=

Narrowing his eyes as he beheld the approach of his pet and her entourage, Kars grinned as Wired Beck made his way up to him.

"I still can't believe that you haven't punished that terrible woman for being so rude when we met," the vampire mewled, a thoroughly discontented expression on his face.

Scoffing, even as he began to see the graceful form of his pet in the lead transport, Kars found himself grinning as he beheld his clever little pet dressed for war the way she was. True, there was little chance that she and her human pets would be able to triumph over the power and experience that such a long existence as his had granted to him, but watching as she herself realized such a thing would be quite amusing in and of itself. Still, all of that would have to wait for the end of the battle; until he'd utterly crushed the last of his clever pet's toys and brought the few worthy members of her forces into his fold.

Signaling to his vampire forces to hold, Kars made his way forward even as the large transport that had carried his pet – as well as that aggravating male counterpart of hers, and the other who seemed to function as a sort of right hand to her – stopped, and the doors to either side slammed open in order to allow the three vampires inside the chance to present themselves before him.

"I'm glad to see you were able to make it out this far on such short notice, pet," he said, as his vampire made her way up to him, adorable expression of quiet defiance upon her lovely face; her male counterpart hissed at him, and was as amusingly infuriated as ever when Kars flicked his eyes over the creature and dismissed it just as simply as such a one deserved.

"Well, I could hardly let you and your fellows continue this pointless little rampage of yours," she said, narrowing her lovely eyes in an expression that would let all of those beneath her know just how little regard she held for them; the fact that she thought she could look at him in such a fashion…

Well it had become more than clear, after all of their previous encounters, that after he caged this clever little hawk of his, he was going to need to train her properly.

=BT=

When Kars gave the signal to his vampire forces – an army that would have been fairly daunting to anyone without the proper weapons and training to cope with the abilities even a newborn vampire could bring to the table – Alice had long since been prepared to give the order to her own. When the units of rifle-armed men and women piled out of the transports that had brought them to this battleground in the first place – with Caesar naturally in the lead – none of the vampires present seemed to know how to react. Pleasantly enough, that vampire with the annoying voice that Kars had been so unutterably rude as to dump on her – on top of the way he'd invaded one of her summer homes and forced her to destroy such a large portion of it when she'd made a break for freedom again – was the first one to take a shot full in the face.

Clearly, someone had either forgotten the fact that she'd armed her people with long-range UV rifles, or was hoping that she'd forget to bring them for some reason or other.

Well, either way, Kars had clearly been disabused of such a stupid notion in one of the most permanent ways possible, and was now looking quite a bit more wary of any other unpleasant surprises that she might have waiting in the wings to spring on him. It was gratifying, in a way, to know that Kars was going to take her more seriously from now on. On the other hand, having more of his attention would inevitably cause complications in the future.

The remaining vampires that Kars had brought with him to this confrontation that the pair of them had arranged – each in their own ways, of course – all pressed forward, once they had borne witness to the death of the vampire with the annoying voice. A firm tap on the right side of her helmet caused the spring mechanism to snap shut once more, folding out neatly around her head and so serving to protect her from any of stray UV light that she might have otherwise had the misfortune to end up on the wrong end of during the kind of chaotic fracas that these kinds of battles had entirely too much potential to devolve into.

Narrowing her eyes as she heard Elizabeth's light tread coming up behind her, and then the familiar crackling of Hamon as her niece-in-law obligingly filled the synthetic Aja Stones that she'd so carefully set into the back of her armor, charging them up so that Alice would be able to at least make some use of the energies that had proved to be such a double-edged boon in the past. And would likely prove so in the future, considering what the energy actually was, in the end.

The vampires surrounding them all surged forward at the order from Kars, and Alice whipped the Hamon-conducting scarf that she'd added to her armor-set – once she'd managed to craft a working Hamon-storage medium rather than simply a means of deflecting the energy that would have otherwise caused her the same kind of problems that William Zeppeli and his intractable stubbornness had caused her in the past – over her head and swept it through the ranks of vampires crowding around her and Elizabeth. The vampires around them fought like a mob: completely undisciplined, with only the sheer weight of their numbers posing a danger to those they were facing. Of course it was those same numbers, that when filled with Hamon and tossed back in among the flailing masses of undead bodies pressing in all around them, that made such good short-order bombs.

Really, all Kars had done when he'd sent this pack of brainless, low-grade cannon-fodder at them was to provide her forces with a thoroughly target-rich environment.

=BT=

"Useless, useless, useless!" he, Dio, laughed as he wielded the sword of cloth that Jojo's Hamon had given him the ability to use against the worthless vampires that that equally worthless Pillar Man had thought to send against his sweet sister and the illustrious, well-trained forces that she had gathered about herself during the course of their company's existence.

"Dio, are you doing well?" Jojo called back, Hamon-charged fists slamming into the ranks of imbecilic vampires that Kars had been so foolish as to set against them, the same fussiness that he, Dio, had heard from him so many times in the past suffusing his tone.

"Well enough, Jojo," he said, chuckling softly as he jammed his silken sword through the head of a vampire attempting to leap at him once more. "How are you managing, hmm?"

"Better, now that I know you're all right," Jojo said, just as he, Dio, would have expected.

Grinning as he turned back to his own work, Dio felt the tell-tale subtle crackling as Jojo obligingly fed more Hamon into the ingenious energy-storage array that his sweet sister had designed for this second-generation armor of hers. Laughing wildly as he, Dio, whipped the Hamon-conducting cloth up and over his head and into the ranks of the lesser vampires that miserable bastard Kars had seen fit to sic upon them all, he watched with glee as they dissolved into screaming heaps of ash. Grinning, Dio turned to the next group that had so obligingly presented themselves before him.

They staggered around like fools, snapping like dumb beasts and stumbling like the mindless rabble they had clearly been even before Kars had recreated them as vampires; his sweet sister's forces would have no trouble from them.

=BT=

"There seems to be no end to these vampires," Stroheim groused, and Caesar smirked under the breathing-mask that would allow him to employ his Hamon even under the chaotic conditions of the battlefield they were all currently standing on.

"You should know that the Boss has a saying just for times like this," he said, bringing his rapid-firing UV rifle up to his shoulder and sweeping it through the rabble of vampires that were possessed of such suicidal determination to reach the transport truck where he and Stroheim were standing, even in spite of the massive numbers that had already perished in the attempt.

"And what would that be?" Stroheim asked.

Caesar grinned, hearing the rising hum of his ally's own UV rifle. "We're not outnumbered; this is simply a target-rich environment!"

Even more of the enemy vampires fell, either to his own UV rifle, or to the robotic dinosaurs that the Boss had collaborated with the Nazi and some of his people on, and Caesar allowed himself to relax slightly; their struggle might have been over, but at least there was the promise that it would be, soon enough.

=BT=

Narrowing his eyes as he watched the steady destruction of the forces that he had brought to this battle with him, Kars found that he couldn't quite manage to keep a smirk from pulling at his lips as he watched his pet work. It seemed that she was even more brilliant than he'd been led to expect; seeing the artificial Red Stones – they had to have been manufactured through some means, because there had never been a single Stone of the size, clarity, and purity of the ones that he'd seen adorning the back of her armor – under that Hamon-conducting cloth that he'd only had the opportunity to see on such a rare number of occasions that he'd been honestly surprised to see his pet and a select few of her forces draped in lengths of the cloth. Surprised, of course, until he remembered the sheer brilliance that his clever pet had demonstrated on so many occasions.

Truly, if she was able to manufacture Red Stones to her exacting specifications, then a simple piece of cloth – no matter its other properties – would doubtless prove no more trouble than that; likely less, in fact.

Narrowing his eyes as he adjusted them once again, Kars sought for and found his clever pet among the ranks of her forces. True, she was fighting alongside one of the meaningless, interchangeable humans who she allowed to hang off of her like clinging vines that some careless gardener had neglected to prune away, but that was simply one of the flaws that he would make a point to correct once he finally managed to cage that little hawk of his. Still, for the moment there was the matter of her remaining forces.

This farce of a battle, while it was meant to bring him ultimate victory, wasn't a thing that would be won by the forces he'd created; no, that would be for him, and him alone.

Grinning as he made his way through the battlefield, the screams and shrieks of dying vampires echoing all around him, Kars made for the line of transports that had brought his clever pet and her forces to this place. Even if one of those humans had attempted to persuade her to bring it into battle with her, Kars knew that his little hawk would have been too clever to allow herself to be convinced of something that foolish. Still, anyone who had taken the time to learn as much about his clever pet as he had could not help but notice the way she coddled the humans who flocked around her; one of those transports had to be the hiding place for the Red Stone that he had sought for so long.

With the vampires that he had brought with him into this killing ground that his clever hawk had made for them as cover for his own activities, Kars moved closer to the transports.

=BT=

Breathing deeply and rhythmically to keep her Hamon flowing, Elizabeth charged the faltering storage matrix in her Aunt-in-law's armor, before returning her attention to the vampires all around them. She didn't know what Kars' ultimate goal was, since anyone with any sense at all would know that a vampire with access to the knowledge and resources that Alice Brando possessed as a matter of course would have so little trouble dealing with even this large an amount of them that it was all but guaranteed to be an exercise in futility to send them in the first place. Of course, given what she'd heard about Kars – most of it from Alice, since Dio firmly despised even the mention of the Pillar Man – there could very well be more to this than any of them currently knew. Still, all of that could wait for later.

For the moment, there was still the matter of the vampires crowding in around them; not a one of them seemed to possess the sense to retreat in the face of the clearly overwhelming odds they had been set against by the Pillar Man that had created them, and for the most fleeting of moments Elizabeth almost pitied them. She knew from the reports she'd read – both from the Speedwagon Foundation, and Alice's own Brando International's Paranormal Science Initiative – that vampires could just as easily be created from unwilling humans as those who had chosen to take up the Stone Mask for their own purposes. There might very well have been people who wished nothing more than to live untroubled lives, in among those who had given themselves over to Kars and his mad ambitions for their own, fleeting taste of power.

It's not a pleasant thought, but Elizabeth keeps it in the back of her mind; it's also one more reason that Kars needs to be destroyed, considering all that he had proven himself willing to do in pursuit of whatever aims that such a man would possess.

And so Elizabeth returned her attention to the vampires surrounding her, and the thought that some of them might very well have been little more than slaves tossed in as cannon-fodder before them only made her resolve that much sharper; her Hamon that much stronger, and her reactions that much swifter. Not a single one of Kars' vampires make it through the impenetrable ring of death that she and Alice make of this part of their battlefield. Even when the Hamon that she'd lent to her vampire Aunt-in-law inevitably ran out, Alice simply pulled an ice-crafted pair of vicious looking trench knives from the very air around them; the first of the vampires to launch an attack on her after that finds those same knives imbedded in its head, torn in half in from the force of her leap, before she lands on the next one with the sheer power of a truck collision.

=BT=

Glaring at the pair of humans – one of those annoying Hamon users, as well as that one he'd seen in the company of his clever pet but never taken notice of before this point – standing atop the middle transport, each of them facing one of the ways that he would have needed to approach from in order to search for where the Red Stone must have been hidden when one of those fool humans had managed to convince his clever but soft-hearted pet to bring it along with them, Kars growled softly. This was a complication that he hadn't foreseen, but perhaps he should have, all the same. After all, while his pet did allow those humans of hers far more latitude than she should have, she was far from stupid.

Truly, he should have been expecting the transports to be guarded.

Smirking as he turned back to the vampires that he'd employed to distract her attention while he made his move, Kars found himself almost involuntarily raising an eyebrow as one of those lumbering creatures – dressed on fitted armor that seemed designed to shield them from the bursts of ultraviolet light fired from those odd weapons that a great many of his pet's human forces had been equipped with. Clearly, they were some manner of zombies raised by his pet.

Not one of them was the Tyrant Lizard that her irritating male counterpart had ridden into battle with him, so that was pleasing, at least.

=BT=

Narrowing his eyes as yet another of Kars' vampires collapsed into dust before him, Jonathan searched for the Pillar Man himself. He'd not seen hide nor hair of the terrible creature – a being that could devour the vampiric members of his family with but a touch, and had used such an ability to do unforgivable things to Dio – since Alice had met him before the commencement of their battle. It was not what he had been expecting from such a terrible creature as Kars, and Jonathan could not help the horrible thought that there was more to this battle than any of them had been led to believe. It was what Alice would have done – what Joseph would have done, as well, if he'd been the kind to plan and execute grand battles such as this one – presented her opponent with something large and obvious, in order to conceal the more subtle objectives that she had in mind.

It was plainly obvious when one considered how many of her personal properties had been riddled with secret doors and concealed passages, and how unnervingly good she'd become at giving meaningless concessions in order to gain prizes that would otherwise remain beyond her.

He didn't like thinking about it, but there had been something in Kars' eyes that reminded him of Alice; it reminded him of those during the American Civil War, times when they would discover a new atrocity perpetuated by those who still held their fellow men in bondage, or else one of the armies that had been fighting in the conflict that had inevitably erupted between those who had desired to continue such depraved acts, and those who had seen the cruelty of a system that shattered families apart and subjected their fellow men to such conditions that no humane person would have forced upon even a beast of burden. There had been no kindness in his and Dio's sister's eyes when she would receive reports of either a new atrocity, or else a slave encampment that had not been liberated by the Union soldiers on their march into the South. And yes, Jonathan himself felt little in the way of softer feelings for the men who'd been involved in such a horrid trade.

Still, what they had been made to face, once Alice had inevitably brought her own forces into the conflict…