Fifty years after Jonathan Joestar died aboard a burning ship, the coffin he never rested in rises from the Atlantic floor. The world has changed. The Ripple still hums in a few bloodlines. And in New York City, a seventeen-year-old named Joseph Joestar is about to get dragged into a war that makes the Stone Mask look like a parlor trick.

Joseph is nothing like his grandfather. He is a brawler, a street punk, a con man in a pilot jacket who could talk his way out of a mafia execution and cheat the executioner at cards on his way out. His Hamon is untrained. His temper is volcanic. But when a family friend named Speedwagon goes missing at a Nazi excavation site in Mexico, Joseph follows the trail straight into a tomb sixty thousand years older than human history. What the Nazis pulled out of that rock was not a statue. It was a Pillar Man — Santana, a being from an ancient race that sleeps inside stone and eats vampires for breakfast. Santana is just a scout. Three more Pillar Men — Kars, Esidisi, and Wamuu — are waking in Rome, and their goal is singular: obtain the Red Stone of Aja, a gem that will complete the Stone Mask and transform them into the ultimate lifeforms, immune to the sun and unstoppable.

Joseph picks up allies the way he picks up insults: fast, loud, and without permission. Caesar Zeppeli, his grandfather's debt incarnate, fights with Hamon-infused soap bubbles and a hair-trigger pride. Lisa Lisa, the enigmatic Hamon master floating in the Venetian lagoon, teaches him that the Ripple kills only when you stop treating it like a hammer and start treating it like a current. Together, they race across Europe to stop the Pillar Men before Kars achieves his final form, and Joseph fights each battle backwards, sideways, and through sheer, unkillable, brilliant idiocy — always predicting his enemies' next line, and always one step behind a destiny he would rather crack a joke at than bow to.

Also known as: Battle Tendency, 戦闘潮流, Sentō Chōryū.