"And look at his face, he's still laughing, showing no remorse whatsoever, it's simply infuriating!" Victor's eyebrows twitched with anger.
"Then there's him! Our Mr. Bruce Wayne..." At this point, Batman's mouth moved slightly in the ice sculpture. Victor took a deep breath and said, "Fine, Batman, our Mr. Batman!"
"He stormed into my lab in the middle of the night to fight with this Lex! I knew he wasn't a good student, but I never expected him to stoop this low!!!"
Shiller patted Victor's shoulder, calming his emotions first. A gray mist then emanated from him, covering the whole room. He turned to Victor and said, "First, unfreeze them. I want to hear their side of the story..."
"Are you planning to be a judge here?!" Victor's voice rose, "To me, we should take this directly to the teachers in the faculty office, punish them severely! Or just make them withdraw from school, these lawless brats!!!"
"Calm down, Victor, remember they're all under 20, were we not the same at that age?"
"In my teens, I was an exemplary student!" Victor retorted, his eyes tersely sweeping over the two individuals.
"Alright, alright, Victor, but you have to allow for some mischief in this world. Calm down, let's unfreeze them first, I assure you they won't manage to escape..."
Shiller walked between the two ice sculptures, glanced at each of them and said, "You two need to promise me, once unfrozen, you won't attempt any funny business or you will genuinely be expelled."
Batman blinked first. When Lex caught sight of Shiller, he sobered up and followed suit.
Victor scoffed, lifted his Freeze Gun again and fired two rays. Ice shattered and the pair stood motionless on the spot.
"See, I told you, both of them are quite good at showing remorse." Shiller turned around to pat Victor's shoulder.
Just then, Joker Lex instinctively wanted to burst out laughing. Batman stepped forward quickly to cover his mouth.
"Shut up! I for one do not want to be expelled!" Batman said in a low voice.
At this point, Lex seemed to regain some rationality. Previously, to fight Batman, he had used a considerable amount of freezing mist. The raw material of this mist was a blue liquid stored in his body.
As the blue liquid depleted, the Dionysus Factor combating it stopped working so intensely. As a result, the Joker's crazed side gradually faded away, and Lex slowly regained his sanity, only then realizing he seemed to have stirred up huge trouble.
Looking around at the state of the lab, he knew that if he didn't admit his fault right away, his college life would come to an end.
Even though this was the Gotham Grand Stage, where the duels of Batman and the Joker caused quite a spectacle, fighting and wrecking research equipment inside the lab was something that could get you expelled.
"Alright, tell me what happened. What caused the two of you to start fighting?" Shiller asked, genuinely in the dark. He had come to the lab to find Victor.
Shiller had tried to call Victor's dorm but got no response. Assuming Victor was pulling an all-nighter in the lab, he decided to drop by. He didn't expect to catch Batman and Joker, who were in the midst of a fight.
When asked about what had happened, both Batman and Lex turned their heads to look at Thomas who was lying amid the wreckage of the fluid storage device.
Each pointing fingers at the other, they both explained their version of events. Coupled with the information Shiller previously gathered from Hugo and Teige, the truth of the several murders became clearer.
To secure the resources needed to establish himself in Gotham, Hugo targeted the Elliott Family, which only had one heir, Thomas. He manipulated Thomas's emotions, leading him to want to kill his own parents.
But Thomas did not want to risk prison for murder, so Hugo provided him with a plan to evade punishment: Get incarcerated for Doris's murder first, fabricating an alibi, then Hugo would orchestrate another murder, linking the two cases to appear as serial killings.
Since Thomas was already imprisoned but the incidents were still happening, he would have an excuse to claim that he was not responsible for the first case, thereby providing a way for Thomas to escape punishment.
To achieve this, Hugo killed the second victim in the gym's locker room. The reason he was able to do this undetected was that it wasn't him who carried out the deed, but other students under his hypnosis.
The students who committed the act were very familiar with the gym layout and could easily blend into the crowd afterward, making it hard for the police to find them.
Prior to all this, Hugo contacted the Mad Hatter, Teige, seemingly trying to draw him into this plan or strike some other deal with him. But Teige was angered by Thomas's murder of Doris; being delusional, Teige saw his assistant's girlfriend as his love interest.