"...Joker!"
"Joker!"
"Joker—"
Cheers and screams erupted at the scene. The people of Ibiza waved their arms frantically at their spiritual leader, their eyes tinged with madness.
Amidst their frenzied cheers, even more people from Ibiza began to converge on the location.
The surrounding crazed crowd and their roars stimulated the soldiers trapped in the center.
Trembling, they loaded their guns with gunpowder and fired bullets repeatedly at the figure in the air, but it was to no avail.
Although the Joker was bleeding profusely, there wasn't a hint of pain on her face; even her clothes didn't have a single hole. The scene looked eerie and bloody.
"Kill her! Hurry! Kill her now!" Joseph, the Factory Owner surrounded in the very center, let out a desperate roar.
"I'll give 100 currency to whoever kills her... no, 1000 currency!"
Even for a Factory Owner, 1000 currency was definitely a large sum, but right now, saving his life was clearly more important.
Although their muskets didn't kill the Joker, their actions acted like a spark, igniting the people of Ibiza present.
The Undead Joker hanging upside down in the air was like an accelerant, providing the people of Ibiza below with a continuous stream of courage.
They rushed forward in a rage, almost in two-on-one or three-on-one fashion, forcibly seizing the firearms from the soldiers' hands.
"Who gave you permission to shoot at Lady Joker!"
"Bastards, they actually dared to fire!"
"Take all their guns!"
"Hang that Factory Owner!"
The angry crowd instantly dispersed the guard unit. The empty firearms in their hands were like mere decorations, failing to withstand the tide-like crowd in the slightest.
At this moment, two figures were standing at the entrance of an alley.
They looked in shock at the Joker hanging upside down in the air and the crowd that had suddenly turned violent; neither of them could react in time.
"Quick! Call for reinforcements! The target has appeared!" a figure wearing a deerstalker hat quickly instructed the person beside him. "Don't use 'Shining Spiritual Light'; that thing will also alert her. You go call for help, I'll stall her."
"Yes..." The other figure ran toward the depths of the alley, trembling, even tripping over some rubble in the alleyway halfway through, looking extremely flustered.
"Coward!" The figure remaining in place spat on the ground, then took a pipe from his coat pocket and put it in his mouth.
However, his hands, which had been shaking while he took the pipe, also betrayed his inner panic and unease.
Fortunately, after biting the pipe, his mood finally calmed down a bit.
"Tony... Tony..." He mumbled with the pipe in his mouth, "You're a veteran... been around for so long... it's time to step up..."
After saying that, Tony seemed to have made a decision. His hand quickly pulled a piece of bone fragment emitting an evil aura from inside his trench coat, and he began chanting an incantation under his breath.
"What a terrifying scene... it's almost like a Deus Ex Machina... no, it is a Deus Ex Machina..." Tony laughed self-mockingly, "Though it's more like an Evil God descending."
Deus Ex Machina, as the name suggests, in ancient drama, when the plot reached a stalemate and the predicament was difficult to resolve, a god with powerful strength would suddenly appear to solve the problem and wrap up the story. This is called Deus Ex Machina.
Tony felt that no scene was more suitable to be called Deus Ex Machina than this one.
"Anyway, as long as I can keep her here..." The bone fragment in Tony's hand gradually began to emit a purple light.
As he squeezed the bone fragment with his right hand, it pierced his palm, and a stream of blood shimmering with purple light flowed out.
Instantly, the purple blood transformed into thousands of silken threads, surging out of the alley and flying toward the figure in mid-air.
Other ordinary people noticed nothing, as this was a skill that could only be seen by those who had activated Spiritual Sight or had high enough perception.
The Joker, hanging upside down in mid-air, also seemed to notice the purple threads surging toward her, and she frowned slightly.
"Someone's there?"
Just as the Joker was about to take defensive action, a ghostly figure appeared even faster than her in front of the net formed by the purple blood threads.
"I won't let anyone harm Mentor..."
Fina, in mid-air, spread her arms.
At some point, her arms had become covered with black vines that seemed almost solid. Looking closely at the flower buds on the vines, every petal was imprinted with a terrified human face.
One of the flower buds suddenly bloomed, and an illusory figure blocked the way.
The surging purple blood threads, as if seeing something incredible, all came to a halt and then quickly retracted back into the caster.
"Fa... Father?!"
A man with a face full of stubble rushed out from the Dark Alley. He looked at the illusory figure before him, his eyes filled with disbelief.
"Found you." A smile curled on Fina's lips. She pointed a finger, and the phantom took a pipe from its coat and put it in its mouth.
Then, it whispered an incantation, and a phantom fireball composed of blue spiritual light smashed toward the stubbled man.
"Damn it... damn it! So you're a Transcendent who enslaves souls?!"
The man quickly rolled to the side, dodging the eerie fireball. When he looked up again, the single pale blue figure had turned into countless phantoms of different appearances, floating in the sky, silently watching him.
"Grandfather... Father... Uncle Jack... Is this an illusion?" The man looked at the sky full of phantoms, feeling somewhat powerless.
If he could barely deal with the phantom that had just mimicked his father, he had no way at all to resist the current sky full of souls.
This was an overwhelming display of power.
Just as the Investigator was about to fall into despair, the figure hanging upside down in mid-air said with a smile:
"Fina, we should go."
On the ground, the soldiers had been stripped of their weapons and were left aside with their hands and feet tied with clothes.
Several Foremen were stoned to death by the angry crowd after being accused of certain crimes.
The remaining few Factory Owners were tied with their hands behind their backs and hung from a streetlamp together.
The streetlamp was already struggling to support the weight of these people and began to teeter.
Meanwhile, people were constantly piling firewood, trash, and some even brought charcoal under the streetlamp.
As a fire rose, the Factory Owners being roasted by the flames on the streetlamp began to let out tragic cries for help and howls.
Their skin gradually melted and festered from the heat of the fire. Finally, when the nylon rope was burned through, the several people tied together fell into the bonfire.
Swallowed by the flames, the screams of the Factory Owners ceased forever.