Chapter 149

Empress (4), originally Battle Apprentice! in the WSJ release, is the one hundred forty-ninth chapter of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure manga. It is also the thirty-sixth chapter of Part III: Stardust Crusaders.

Summary
Joseph Joestar searches for the user of the Empress, but doesn't see anyone. The Stand, still mockingly calling him its father, tells him he should let his child have some freedom and starts eating the rest of Joseph's arm. Now even bigger than before, the stand tries to reach Joseph's artery to finish him off and a fight between them ensues, with Joseph knocking out everything on his path, including incense dust. He runs past Jean Pierre Polnareff and Nena again, but the woman fakes being in love with Polnareff to distract him once more.

Empress mocks Joseph for running in the opposite direction of his group, only for him to reveal he wanted to soak it in tar. To sever Joseph's artery, Empress stabs his neck with a nail it picked up in their fight and laughs at his thought that a stand could be suffocated. As it asks Joseph about his fighting experience, the Stand realizes too late that the tar was supposed to solidify it, not suffocate. Joseph reveals he used his stand Hermit Purple on the incense dust dropped earlier to visualize a map of Varanashi and where he could find tar. Alluding to Empress's earlier taunts, Joseph tells him that kids shouldn't rely on their parents forever and it needs to take care of itself now that it's grown up.

Joseph wraps Empress into a window with Hermit Purple and pushes it, completely destroying the stand. Meanwhile, Polnareff prepares to kiss Nena when suddenly an ugly woman bursts out from within the young woman. Joseph arrives and tells Polnareff that Nena was the user of the Empress Stand that just attacked him. Nena's true form was that of the ugly woman: she used her Stand to assimilate people and take on their appearance, so she posed as a beautiful girl. Polnareff is left in shock as Nena collapses to the floor, dead.