Chapter 1: Prologue

─────Base sequence: Human Genome confirmed.

Chaldea exists to secure humanity’s future: constantly observing the past, preventing the emergence of Singularities, and safeguarding the Human Order of the future.

─────Spirit Origin Attribute: Good/Neutral confirmed.

A place where those deeply connected to Magecraft and those devoted to science alike work together for humanity’s future, without distinction.

Welcome to the archive that speaks of humanity’s future.

This is the Human Order Continuation Security Organization, [Chaldea].

And yet, in this place, there is one anomalous man who belongs nowhere.

Fingerprint authentication. Voice authentication. Genetic authentication cleared.

Even by Chaldea’s standards, which would hire an ordinary person if they possessed Master aptitude, he was an unusual man. There was exactly one person who had not even taken the normal route for the general Master recruitment process, but had walked all the way to Antarctica solely to enter Chaldea.

Measuring Magic Circuits... Unable to measure─

───

He truly came to Chaldea unable to use even a single spell, and with the meager scrap of Magical Energy he possessed and his aptitude as a Master, he had managed to obtain even the lowly position of "Reserve Master."

Past activities unknown. Personal details unknown. Magecraft school unknown. He was an unusual man who wielded unprecedented, bizarre abilities that could scarcely even be called Magecraft, and his name was shrouded in such mystery that people wondered whether he had erased his own past────

"Diego!

Did you secretly give Fou the Doctor’s snacks again?!"

"It was distribution according to need."

"Fou!"

Diego Joestar.

The name of a bizarre man with the fate of a star [Joestar], who entered Chaldea with nothing to his name for the sole purpose of seeing the stars.

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Long ago, there was a child born in a small rural town in the American West.

Even as an infant, he never cried and was quiet. He would look at people with calm, sunken eyes that revealed nothing of what he was thinking.

"...This child’s eyes are something special."

Those were the first words his father, Jonathan Joestar, spoke upon seeing the newly born Diego Joestar. The baby had inherited his father’s innocent-looking eyes and his mother Diona Brando’s high nose, making him so handsome that it was hard to believe he had just been born.

Yet even as he looked upon the child’s face, Jonathan could not take his eyes off the boy’s eyes.

[Conviction]

It was surely the power in the Joestar bloodline that drew people in. There was a steadfast, righteous light within them, one that would carry through their own justice no matter what happened.

Strangely enough, Jonathan saw an unwavering conviction, impossible to conceal and brilliantly radiant, in his newborn child’s wide-open eyes.

"It seems this child’s future may hold... events of an utterly extraordinary scale."

Recognizing Diego’s exceptional nature at a glance, his two parents raised him with every bit of their love and care.

"To exist in this world as a human being is itself sorrow. That is why we spend our lives seeking joy, or a reason to live."

His father Jonathan, a gentleman, taught him the way of the "Hymn to Humanity," the way his own teacher had once taught him for living as humanly as a person could.

"Remember, Diego. Those who stand alone in the world are the ones who possess not even the slightest [Fear]."

And his mother Diona Brando, who had been born on the streets and made herself after meeting Diego’s father, taught him how to master the "fear" that would never let him waver, whatever might happen.

"To walk the path you believe in is justice. And if walking the path of such justice is fate... then perhaps someday, Diego, you may reach it. The ultimate destination to which our family’s blood leads."

Perhaps their expectations had been right. At the mere age of eleven, this child of extraordinary birth lost both parents in a plane crash and was left alone in the world.

The inheritance left behind was only enough money and a house to get by, along with his parents’ teachings. Having been left alone at far too young an age, Diego was always wandering outside.

Was fate telling him to keep moving forward? As young Diego walked down the street, an accident caused him to awaken something.

"Aaaah!!! The bus is coming this way at an insane speed!!! At that speed, it can’t stop──!!"

"My child hasn’t crossed the crosswalk yet!! Damn it! Somebody help h—...!!"

One sunny day, a high-speed bus passing through downtown suddenly accelerated out of control. The driver, who had tried to slow it down as much as possible, had already passed out.

At this rate, the bus would hit the child on the crosswalk and overturn, killing the child crossing the street and every passenger aboard.

"......"

Yes. That was the fate that should have come to pass.

─────────!!!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!

An immense roar, followed by the sickening noise of metal striking asphalt. The strange smell of the burning vehicle.

Yet nowhere was there any sign that someone had died.

"H-huh? I was definitely in front of the crosswalk..."

"How... did we get off the bus...?"

"What... is this...?"

Had they said that walking the path of justice was fate? No matter whose judgment defined that justice, the deaths of those people must have been ordained by fate. But──

"There was no need for them to die. That’s all I thought."

Booom──────!!!!!!!!!!!

With his back to the bus, which finally exploded as the flames reached the fuel tank, a bizarre boy walked away. Diego Joestar had, by sheer coincidence, manifested the ability he needed most at the moment he needed it most.

A world that had transcended even the movement of the stars, as though it had stopped.

"[Star Platinum]... is it? What an absurd power."

Even within that halted, colorless world, he alone stood clear and vivid.

That was his world.

A world he possessed that no one could understand even if he explained it, and that no one else could see.

This was true power, neither Magecraft nor trickery. Something that took the form of what the public classified as magic or psychic powers: a [Stand].

"Well, well... it seems that I────"

The form of a golden, shining person. The instant he acknowledged its existence, Diego recognized beings from another dimension connected to his family’s blood. And as Diego recognized them──

"It seems I was born into a truly outrageous family."

They, too─ recognized Diego.

─────────────────────────

After awakening his power, Diego began seeking out all manner of information. In the end, he even laid hands upon the secrets of Mysteries that Magecraft and magi sought to conceal.

The depletion of Mysteries spread throughout the world. The concealment operations of magi concerned over it. The Root, the goal magi sought to reach. And even the Holy Grail, a wish-granting vessel, along with the Holy Grail War fought over it.

This world hid far too many secrets unknown to ordinary people, and Diego witnessed the countless atrocities magi committed to conceal all those secrets.

Groups that submerged people alive in formaldehyde under the pretext of sealing away beings outside the norm, and magi who viewed human life as something as insignificant as a fly. Diego saw the truth of it all, without exception.

It made him sick.

Things wearing human skin killed ignorant people who knew nothing, in the name of their grand ambitions. They even eliminated witnesses who lived quietly, fearing their Mysteries would be exposed and their power lost.

Even their own flesh and blood, they used and discarded like game pieces if it served their pursuit of the origin of Magecraft.

Within that world where the strong devoured the weak, Diego gradually grew into a righteous and upright man.

After growing through countless incidents too difficult to put into words, in the year he turned eighteen, Diego finally found the place he needed to go.

The final destination chosen by Diego, who had stepped deeper into the world of Magecraft. The place he found in search of his own justice was─

"...Is this, too, the pull of something orbiting around the star [Joestar]?"

Finis Chaldea, the Human Order Continuation Security Organization.

Closing a book that described the organization, which had existed for quite some time, Diego felt a bizarre pull circling his body. At once, he began walking blindly toward one place.

‘Can I find my justice there? Not justice borrowed from another, but justice that is truly mine alone.’

At that moment, a silhouette flickered into being around Diego. Was it a ghost?

That humanoid figure, tinged with golden light, remained by Diego’s side before vanishing like smoke along with him in an instant.

This was the story of the most enigmatic man shrouded in mystery since Chaldea’s founding, a man no one knew.

The story of how Diego Joestar came to enter Chaldea.

There were plenty of rough edges and not much proper explanation, but even so, a boy with a golden spirit most certainly exists here.

Then the story that begins after this will surely be──

"Diego! Did you take my sweets again without permission?! Try to understand how it feels when life’s little pleasures vanish in an instant!"

"Honestly... Da Vinci asked me to. It’s better for both of us if you accept it quietly."

"It’s not better for me!"

"Doctor, please calm down!"

"Kyuu! Fou-fou!"

──A story no one has ever seen before, unprecedented and uncharted.

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