The Ascendant One

Joseph's apparent win, and his arm, count for nothing once Kars endures the volcano by sheathing himself in a shell full of air bubbles. A flashback lays out his origins as one of an ancient underground people who, hungry to rise beyond their limits, forged the Stone Masks and drained the surrounding life to grow stronger. When his own kind turned on him, he slaughtered nearly all of them and departed with Esidisi and two infants. Back in the present, Kars crushes Joseph's leg with a Ripple a hundred times mightier than his own, melting it away.

As Kars readies the killing blow, Joseph instinctively raises the Red Stone of Aja, and the island erupts, blasting both of them skyward. Struck by Joseph's severed arm and then flung higher by volcanic debris, Kars is driven past the reach of Earth's gravity, while Joseph comes to rest on a chunk of rock. Stroheim, watching in dread, grasps what has happened and eight hours later reports it to Speedwagon. On the twenty eighth of February, 1939, Joseph Joestar is declared dead. Kars, unable to fall back to Earth, freezes into stone and drifts through the cosmos as a thing both living and mineral, unable to move or die until at last he stops thinking altogether.

At Joseph's April funeral, Smokey, Speedwagon, Lisa Lisa, Messina, and Erina gather to mourn, only for Joseph himself to stroll in grumbling that nobody met him at the airport, now fitted with a prosthetic arm from Stroheim. The shock deepens when Suzi Q appears showing off a wedding ring, revealing the two are married. Joseph explains the rock he rode became a life raft that carried him near Venice, where Suzi Q nursed him back to health, though she simply forgot to wire word that he had survived.

An epilogue traces the years that follow. Joseph discovers Lisa Lisa is his mother, Elizabeth, and the group relocates to America, where she weds a Hollywood screenwriter. Erina teaches schoolchildren until her death at eighty one in 1950, Speedwagon pours his fortune into medicine and science before dying of a heart attack in 1952, and Smokey becomes the first Black mayor of his Georgia hometown, while Stroheim falls honorably at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. The story then jumps to 1987, showing a sixty seven year old Joseph snapping at a tourist, a coffin marked DIO raised from the Atlantic, and a teenage Jotaro Kujo sitting in a Tokyo cell.