The Sun

The travelers arrive in the oil-wealthy United Arab Emirates, where Joseph splurges on a costly car and then swaps it for camels at a village. His scheme is to cut across a stretch of the Arabian Desert, reach Yarpline, and pick up a Cessna for the flight over Araby. Boasting that he can handle the animals, he humiliates himself failing to make one sit, finally admitting his entire knowledge comes from watching Lawrence of Arabia.

Once the group finally departs, Jotaro and Kakyoin sense unseen eyes on them yet spot no pursuer. They then notice something impossible: the sun hangs overhead at eight in the evening as the temperature keeps climbing. An enemy Stand called Sun is copying the heat of the actual star. When Kakyoin dispatches Hierophant Green to probe it, blasts of light rain down, slaughter the camels, wreck their drinking water, and drive everyone beneath a rock for cover.

Although the operator has to be within range, the party sees nothing but flat sand and a handful of scattered stones. The relentless heat begins gnawing at their minds, and Joseph fears his companions have gone delirious when they suddenly break into laughter. Kakyoin instead points out their find: one rock mirrors another exactly. Jotaro hurls a stone toward it, a fracture splits the sky, and Sun collapses, bringing the night back. At the crack they discover the user, Arabia Fats, knocked out behind a mirrored hunting blind that had kept him invisible.

Joseph trades his newly bought vehicle for camels and reveals his plan to reach Yarpline for a small aircraft. The Stand Sun makes its debut, torching the camels and the water reserves while blinding the group with false daylight. Kakyoin cracks the illusion by noticing two identical rocks, and Jotaro's thrown stone shatters the effect. Arabia Fats, hidden inside a mirror-clad duck blind, is exposed and beaten.

The anime opens with an added prologue that accounts for how the group obtained its car and camels. A closing line from Polnareff about pleasant dreams sets up the arc that follows. In his commentary, writer Naokatsu Tsuda explained that stretching a single confrontation across the whole runtime was a deliberate choice to convey the smothering heat, and he credited the hand-drawn sun animation and the spinning, distorted visuals used to sell the characters' unraveling sanity.