Tusk

Johnny's Stand behaves much like Echoes from Part 4: it comes in a set of numbered shapes, the ACTs, and once he unlocks each he can flip between them at will. Every version draws on the Spin, the strange rotational force baked into the world of the series. The debut form, ACT1, holds a mind of its own apart from Johnny; it serves as protector of the severed left arm that belongs to the Saint's Corpse and chooses on its own when to surface and lend a hand, chirping its trademark chumimi-in. Modeled on an axolotl, it looks like a tiny, baby-faced creature with a head as big as its body and long mammal-like ears.

Each later ACT edges closer to a human silhouette. ACT2 sports a compact, solid trunk hung with barrel-like pieces, deliberately blurred between beast and machine; ACT3 is more manlike yet keeps its head sunk into its torso, bristling with toe and hand spikes and a Mohawk-like ridge; and ACT4, the final stage, is a broad, blocky humanoid with fully jointed limbs, a head set in its chest, a horseshoe on its brow to match Johnny, and a hollow, curtain-like drape of vertical ellipses. In every incarnation Tusk stays mostly pink.

In its first form the Stand lets Johnny pour the Spin into his fingernails and fire them off like rounds, reaching roughly ten meters. Those projectiles bite hard enough to shear rock, lop off limbs, or whittle wood into shape, though metal stops them cold, and a spent nail takes a while to return. Left in place and pressed to the floor, the whirling nails can also drag him across the ground or serve as little blades. ACT2 arrives with Johnny's grasp of the Golden Rectangle, and now the nails spin about his fingers like small axes, gaining a drilling bite that hugely amplifies each shot, enough to blow open a wide patch of ground. The trade is slower regrowth, so he rations his ammunition and speeds recovery by chewing herbs or sipping teas such as mint and chamomile. A landed shot vanishes and leaves behind a hole, and those holes hunt down whatever target Johnny marks, striking it as though a bullet had, before shrinking away.

ACT3 shares every trait of ACT2 but turns the holes into transport. Firing a spinning nail into himself, Johnny is pulled inside the hole, whose infinitely tiny rotating tip opens a wormhole through space that admits him alone while slicing anything else. Shifting a hole while he rides within it, he pops out at unforeseen angles and flings enemy blows back through the far mouth, all bounded by how long a hole can last. ACT4, the summit of Tusk, springs from the Golden Spin: when Johnny's horse runs naturally it throws off rotational force cast in the shape of the Golden Rectangle, and married to the Stand this produces rotation without end. A Steel Ball can force the effect in a pinch.

Immensely strong yet hard to bring out, ACT4 punches through the walls of Love Train, ignores gravity, and can even stir during frozen time. Anything it strikes is flooded with a spin that reaches down to each cell, warping the victim and finally tearing them apart, banished, Diego says, to some other dimension with not a shred of soul remaining. That rotation refuses to fade, hauling its victim back to the spot where the hit landed no matter how many bodies or worlds they flee through, and only a counter-spin from Johnny can undo it.

Johnny Joestar alone commands Tusk. ACT1 stirs to life during the race after the Saint's Corpse fuses one of its pieces, the left arm, onto him unnoticed within a Devil's Palm, letting him beat the Boom Boom Family. Gyro's teaching on the Golden Rectangle unlocks ACT2, a vision of Jesus that restores his will brings ACT3, and ACT4 follows Gyro's fifth lesson and his death. At first Johnny can only sustain the Stand while he holds a Corpse Part, but he eventually grows it past that need. Its name nods to the Fleetwood Mac record, and its kanji is now and then written to read as nail rather than fang, echoing the way it launches nails; Araki also conceived ACT1 as the mascot of Part 7.