Joanne stood across from the assassin, rope still wrapped around her legs and right arm. She kept a hand on the guardrail to keep herself from falling over.
"Nero Forte?" she asked, relatively unimpressed. "I assume that's what your Stand is called?"
The assassin spread his left hand out in front of himself, the palm face up, then slammed his right fist down on it. It was in a thumbs-up.
"That…" he announced. "Is correct! Nero Forte is indeed the name of my Stand!"
He then shifted his right hand, turning it so that his thumb was facing sideways.
"What's incorrect," he said, "is your nonchalance about this. You do realize that I've just almost completely restrained you in only a couple seconds, right?"
Joanne laughed.
"'Completely restrained me'?" she said. "Look again, asshole."
The ropes fell away from her body, dropping to the ground. The knots holding them around her had been cut.
"How did you do that?" the assassin said, surprise evident in his voice.
"I just had Scorpion Queen cut the ropes with its free hand," Joanne replied. "It's got a pretty good arm. And you're an amateur knot-tier anyway, so I'd have had those off without using my Stand in a few more seconds."
The assassin growled, stepping forward.
"Things would have been easier for both of us if you could've just let me tie you up and use you as a hostage," he said, dropping his left hand to his side and keeping his thumb sideways. "I'd probably have just let you go after killing Giorno. I'm not the kind of guy who usually kills people I don't have to in order to accomplish my goals. But if you're not going to cooperate…"
He turned his right hand upside down, doing a thumbs down gesture and quickly tilting his arm down a few inches.
"Then I won't feel too bad about just getting rid of you instead. I may not prefer killing people who don't get in my way, but I'm not a very patient guy, either. After all, it's the perfect time right now to get in there and take Giorno out, even without an excuse or a hostage. Almost all of his bodyguards are elsewhere, so this should be a cakewalk!"
"Aren't you forgetting something?" Joanne asked, balling her hands into fists and holding them up, entering a fighting stance. "You've gotta deal with me first. I'm not letting you kill anybody, asshole!"
The man tossed his head back and cackled again, dropping his right arm to his side as well.
"Oh, that's good," he laughed. "Yes, I'm sure some kid off the streets can defeat a professional assassin. I mean, I've already won our little 'fight', if you can even call it that."
"What do you mean you've already-" Joanne started to say, then cried out as she felt a piercing pain in the back of her left leg. She twisted and looked down to see the blade of a knife sticking out of the wall, jabbed into her. The knife slid away, into the wall, and in the reflective brass, she saw the assassin grinning at her. Another blade began to emerge behind her, this time aimed at her right ankle.
"MUDA!" Scorpion Queen shouted. It punched down at the blade, knocking it down so it stabbed into the floor instead. It retracted back into the wall again. "Be careful, Joanne! Remember that we don't yet know what this man can-"
The Stand was cut off by another blade stabbing into its arm. A cut appeared on Joanne's arm as well, blood spurting out of it. Another knife stabbed into Scorpion Queen's side, just below where the brass part of the wall started, causing a red stain to appear on Joanne's lavender shirt. Joanne lost her grip on the railing of the elevator for a second and fell to the ground.
"That's perfect!" the assassin said, holding his hands out like he was framing a photo. "A photo finish! As a matter of fact, I think I'll take a photo right as I finish!"
A large camera emerged from the wall, the lens dilating as it prepared to take a photo. A rope emerged from behind Joanne's head, wrapping around her neck and pulling back, slamming her into the wall.
"Strangling is my favorite way to kill people, you know," the assassin said, bending down. As he crouched, the camera suddenly pulled back into the wall, then reemerged lower down a moment later, right overtop of where the side of his maniacally grinning face was reflected. "It lets me look them right in the eye, and know that they know it was me who did them in without a shadow of a doubt."
Joanne opened her mouth, gasping for breath. Beside her, Scorpion Queen had also fallen to the ground, the knife still stuck in its side. It reached for the rope, trying to pull it off of its user's neck, but couldn't quite get to it.
"Did you know," the assassin asked, "that there are actually two different ways strangulation can kill you? Depending on the positioning of that rope on your neck, soon you'll be experiencing one or more of them. First of all, there's cerebral ischemia, which is a loss of sufficient blood flow to the brain. I don't think you're going to have to worry about that one, since the rope doesn't seem to be pressing down on your carotid artery."
He leaned in even closer, looking Joanne right in the eye.
"What you do have to worry about," he continued, "is asphyxiation. I'm sure you know what that is. It's when you can't get enough oxygen due to your trachea- that's your windpipe, if you didn't know- being blocked. There's also a third thing, dangerously low heart rate and blood pressure, caused by the stimulation of the carotid sinus reflex, but that's not as fatal by itself, and once again, I don't think you'll have to worry about that due to your positioning."
Joanne moved her mouth, saying something that the assassin couldn't make out due to her larynx being pressed down by the rope. He leaned in closer, cupping his left hand around his ear.
"Say that again?" he cackled. "I didn't quite hear you."
"Scorpion… Queen…" Joanne rasped. Her Stand jerked its arm, swinging a loose punch at the assassin, but its hand slipped open and it fell to the ground before the punch could connect.
"Ha! That's it?" the assassin said, grinning. "Really? Well, it's been fun, but-"
Suddenly, he heard a dinging sound as the light above the elevator panel lit up and the doors began to slide open. He turned to look as the elevator opened, seeing a few people staring in through the opening. The reason they were staring was that the elevator was misaligned- it had started opening between floors, and was still rising as the doors continued to slide.
Shit! the assassin thought. Why'd the doors open? This is bad! If those people see me obviously killing someone in the elevator like this, they'll call security for sure, and then Giorno and his bodyguards are bound to find out that I'm here and come after me! And even if I release the rope now, they'll see the girl on the floor and assume the worst!
"What did you do?!" he shouted, angrily turning to look down at Joanne. "It must have been you! This is no ordinary elevator malfunction! Was this your Stand?!"
"Hell yeah, it was," Joanne said in a slightly raspy tone of voice. She was standing upright, the rope cut away from her neck. In her hands was a knife.
"Where did you get that knife?!" the assassin asked, then recognition flashed across his black-dyed eyes. "Wait, that looks like-"
"The knife you stabbed me in the side with?" Scorpion Queen said from right next to Joanne. "That's because it is. Not pulling it out of my wound while you had the chance was a big mistake. Thanks to that, all I needed to do was use a 'trigger' that I created back on the ground floor to open the elevator-"
"And I was able to grab it and cut myself free!" Joanne finished, forming fists with both hands.
She swung at the assassin several times, punching him in the face and chest as the elevator aligned with the entrance to the floor.
"MUDAMUDAMUDAMUDAMUDAMUDA!" she shouted, and then kneed him in the gut, sending him staggering backward.
The people looking in scattered in all directions as he fell out of the still-moving elevator and bounced two times across the floor, landing in the middle of the hallway. The assassin leaned up on one shoulder, glaring at Joanne as the elevator continued moving upward. Joanne crouched low to the ground, pressing the side of her face to the floor to continue giving him a smug, catlike smirk as she vanished from his sight. She put her left hand next to her head in a peace sign just as the elevator door moved fully out of view.
"You wanna kill this Giorno guy so bad?" she taunted. "I'll race ya, asshole."
The assassin climbed to his feet and leaned into the elevator shaft, glaring up after the metal box as it ascended. Then he moved away, backing out into the center of the hallway.
"This is just a temporary setback," he said confidently to himself. "And that kid just jumped up to second place on my hit list… right below Giorno Giovanna, of course."