Dropping her directly into his problem, Josuke rapidly explained the nightmare he was in, and instructed her to head immediately to the Ryoshu Temple bus station to investigate the discarded tooth. He let her know that it should probably still be wrapped in a soap bubble, but warned her with absolute urgency never to touch it. Once she had it, she needed to use Paisley Park on it to work out whose tooth it was. Josuke thought that through the medical records, if there were any, she should be able to find the enemy's stand before they got to him.
Without a moment of hesitation, Yasuho set off to help him.
Back in the city, Josuke looked around and found himself swallowed up by a massive, dense crowd of people. Panic started to set in. He listened as a dazed woman started stumbling in his direction, and a man slowly pointed at him as well. Josuke immediately dropped into a defensive posture, bracing for another attack, but his paranoia was playing tricks on him. Both of them were ordinary citizens, completely minding their own business and trying to find a store.
Ducking into a shoe store to get away from it all for a moment, and obviously picking up a new pair of shoes, Josuke wondered whether he was even more cornered than he had thought. He walked back out onto the street with no way of knowing who the enemy stand had infected. A suffocating paranoia set in as he looked out at the dense crowd surrounding him, and he guessed that coming into town had not been the best idea.
His thoughts were interrupted when a woman bumped into him from behind. Startled, he took a glance at her and saw a few drops of blood on her chest. In a flash she tried to strike him, but Josuke blocked her attack with his water bottle. Pushing past her guard, he made a few bubbles to protect his hand before uppercutting her jaw.
Seeing it do literally no damage to her, he realised his efforts were completely futile against a puppet with no sense of pain. Turning while questioning whether it was even possible to escape this ability, Josuke broke into a full sprint.
During the frantic chase, the infected woman mindlessly ploughed through several pedestrians before recklessly sprinting into traffic, where she was run over by a speeding motorcycle. The impact killed her on the spot, but the curse did not skip a beat. Blood sprayed onto a nearby man, who quickly became the next infected and started chasing after Josuke.
The jogger was dangerously fast, forcing Josuke to leap over a row of parked bicycles to create a makeshift barrier, but the crazed puppet pursued him with savage persistence. He even looped his hand inside the braking mechanism of one of the bikes and violently tore it apart as he forced his way through.
Just in front of him, Josuke flicked himself over a fence, and the man crashed into the mesh wiring directly behind him. He pressed his face so hard against the chain-link mesh that the metal sliced into him, spraying out a load of blood.
Instantly, Soft and Wet deployed a protective barrier around Josuke, shielding him from the contact. Sadly, though, when the bubble popped, the deflected blood sprayed outward, splashing directly onto the face of an innocent young child riding a bicycle. The kid instantly became the new host, and left with no choice, Josuke used his bubbles to lift the infected child into the air, stole his bicycle, and got out of the area, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the puppets.
After reaching what he thought was a safe distance, he knew they would eventually find him. They probably had an infinite range, and he had a bad feeling that they could keep up the tracking for days. Without finding the user, he knew there was frankly no way of winning. His only hope of survival rested on Yasuho finding out some information about the enemy stand user.
Meanwhile, Yasuho arrived at the Ryoshu Temple and successfully located the discarded tooth. Immediately, she summoned Paisley Park to investigate its origins. Surprisingly, it took her away from her initial plan of searching the dental records, and instinctively broke her into an extremely secure system. There, Paisley Park uncovered a string of highly suspicious reports involving the bizarre deaths of small animals in the area surrounding the Mutsukabe Shrine.
The prime suspect in the file was a thirty-nine-year-old man named Maji Dokoma, a man who had completely vanished, evading police capture, but whose dental records perfectly matched the tooth in question.
Having figured out who the stand user was, Yasuho still did not know his exact location. However, noticing a distinct layer of dirt caked onto the tooth, she quickly formulated a plan to track the specific composition of the soil and find out where Dokoma was hiding.
Before she could go anywhere, though, Speed King blindsided Yasuho from behind, instantly heating the bloodstream in her head to dangerous levels. Deprived of oxygen, Yasuho lost consciousness, collapsing silently over the nearby bushes.
Leaning over her, Jobin recognised her as Joshu's girlfriend. Figuring that she was also in cahoots with Norisuke and Josuke, he guessed it was probably best not to kill her, since they would start to get suspicious of him. Instead, he decided to simply clean up the evidence. He recovered the cursed tooth and stole Yasuho's mobile phone, ruthlessly tossing the tooth down into the sewers and crushing her phone to pieces as he walked away.
Bitter, he reflected on how clueless his father truly was, completely blind to the fact that the entire future of the Higashikata fruit company hinged on securing their Locacaca.
A while later, a groggy Yasuho woke up from her blackout. Her head was pounding, and the terrifying realisation hit her. Someone had blindsided her from the shadows. She looked around in an attempt to find her phone, only to see that every single piece of evidence she had was gone. Stricken with a wave of panic, her thoughts immediately flashed to Josuke, left completely defenceless against a relentless, faceless curse.
Meanwhile, Josuke had abandoned the bicycle and successfully hailed a taxi to put miles of distance between himself and his pursuers as quickly as possible. Inside the car, he desperately tried to ring Yasuho over and over again, but his calls went straight to voicemail. Growing more anxious by the second, he told the driver to pull over so that he could change tactics on foot.
But the moment he went to leave, a heavy thud echoed from the rear of the vehicle. Josuke sprang around, scanning the empty seat, and saw no one. Intrigued by the noise, the taxi driver stepped out of the car to investigate the trunk. And as he did, Josuke spotted a bit of blood oozing down the side of a rear window.
He screamed at the driver to stay back, but the man was more concerned with cleaning up his car. Peering outside, Josuke spotted the lifeless body of a bird crumpled on the pavement, and the reality of the situation hit him. The sound of the impact just now had been the bird being controlled towards him.
Before he could exit the cab as well, the taxi driver, having sadly got a few drops on him, was instantly possessed. His eyes rolled back as he mechanically tried to break his way through in order to reach his target. Reacting on pure instinct, Josuke delivered a heavy kick to the door, launching the driver flying backwards out onto the asphalt.
Watching the man lie there unmoving, Josuke noticed a few flies buzzing frantically around the fallen driver. Instantly, one of them detached from the cloud, charting a trajectory straight towards his face.