"Suspected intelligent life from another world eliminated over a thousand people without giving them any chance to react or fight back. Unknown whether it was advanced technology or sothing else."
"Definitely not one of us — everyone's being rational right now. There's no incentive to attack a small nation."
"It seems the new world does contain intelligent life after all."
"We'll need to station substantial military forces. This is more complicated than expected."
"We can contribute a naval carrier group."
"We can deploy ground forces."
"We're also willing to—"
"..."
Watching the faces on the video call, the middle-aged man with golden hair let out a barely audible cold laugh. His gaze moved across the room — and paused on the small number of people who had said nothing at all. His expression tightened slightly.
Those were the ones he actually worried about. In any relevant dinsion, they were his equals. Everyone else was background.
Funny Valentine — that was the golden-haired man's na. The man who had occupied the center seat at the conference. The final decision-maker of the largest nation in the JoJo fan world.
When the room had finished talking, Valentine rapped the table three tis.
The room's attention shifted.
"Sothing capable of sending a thousand ard people to their deaths without a single one of them raising a weapon," he said, expression flat. "That's either advanced technology, or sothing else entirely. For instance — Stands."
"Ordinary people can operate weapons of mass destruction. But so things can only be handled by Stand users. And I trust that each of you maintains a roster of them."
Stand users were not public knowledge. To civilians, the concept didn't exist. To the people in this room, it was entirely ordinary.
Valentine himself was a Stand user.
"Stand abilities are extraordinarily varied. So allow movent at near-light speed under specific conditions. So grant unlimited external healing. So control fire. Their utility in certain situations cannot be overstated."
"For reconnaissance, Stand users are ideal — high capability, small footprint. Equip them with satellite-capable recording devices and have them transmit live footage. We find out whether we're dealing with beings from another world, and what we're actually up against."
Valentine leaned back slightly. "Thoughts?"
"Seconded."
"Agreed."
"No objection."
"Fine."
"..."
Stand users were genuinely unusual in this world — their abilities wildly varied, not always destructive, but reliably strange. Raw damage output wasn't always the point. The point was the specificity.
Valentine's own Stand ability, for instance: compress an object between the right surfaces, and it gets expelled into an adjacent parallel world. He also had the ability to redirect attacks and bad luck landing on him onto random bystanders. Anything short of an attack that pierced the dinsional wall couldn't harm him.
That said, Stands had one decisive, universal vulnerability: the Stand user's own reaction speed.
If soone could kill you before you noticed the threat, no Stand ability in existence saved you. The Stand died with its user. This was exactly why Valentine, with his formidable ability, still traveled with extensive bodyguards and armored vehicles. A clean long-range kill bypassed all of it.
There were narrow exceptions — Stands worn as armor, or the rare Stand with autonomous protective instinct — but those were exactly that: narrow exceptions.
JoJo Stand abilities were, by design, each broken in their own specific way. Find the weakness, and most of them collapsed.
Near the spatial passage, Ryū sat with a laptop balanced in his hands — wolf-claw logo on the back panel.
He watched the video feed and listened to every word.
"Funny Valentine... that na rings a bell. Can't place it. Doesn't matter. One at a ti or in groups, sa result either way."
"Stand users, though. Now that's interesting."
He'd caught every word of their exchange, and had a clear look at every face in that call.
His assessnt was calm.
Stand users were annoying to deal with in theory. In practice, most of that annoyance lived in the Stand itself — the users were often the weak link. Kill the user and the Stand went with them.
And there was one additional factor nobody in that room had considered.
The rule that Stand attacks only worked against other Stand users was a rule of the JoJo world. Ryū, Whitebeard, Kizaru, Tatsumaki — none of them were from this JoJo fan world. The world's rules didn't govern them.
Ryū had used Armant Haki on the Nine-Tails in the Naruto world. Tatsumaki had crushed Zōken's worm hand with telekinesis in the Fate world. They didn't ask the local ruleset for permission.
Ying Zheng had already confird it empirically. One of the captives had turned out to be a Stand user — and when Ying Zheng's fighters attacked him, the Stand had provided exactly no protection. The man had been knocked unconscious without difficulty.
"Now we just wait for the main force to arrive. Take them out decisively. Remove whoever's been driving this. Create enough of a deterrent effect that the rest of the world gets the ssage. Then build the Qin special zone in their world."
"Sha about the slot limit. Two or three more participants and we could take the fight to them directly."
Ryū watched the feed for a few more minutes, then closed it and tapped a ga icon.
He produced headphones and a mouse from sowhere.
And waited.
☆☆☆
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