Was Night City Evening Bell difficult?
Without a doubt, it was very difficult.
Its difficulty differed from Golden Country and Nereid. It was not a high-difficulty combat stage, but a mechanics-based stage.
It was much like the Echo Library: heavy on mechanics, light on combat.
For stages like this, as long as one could crack their mechanics, one could pass through unimpeded.
Take the Echo Library, for instance. If one possessed abundant knowledge, and happened to know something the demon god's divine thought did not, clearing that stage was only a matter of time.
In other words, "knowledge" was the key to breaking the Echo Library's mechanics.
As for Night City Evening Bell, its greatest challenge lay in handling those nearly boundless "ghosts," which also possessed banishment and invisibility mechanics.
For the Red Mud Team and other ordinary teams, even if they knew the ghosts' mechanics in advance, they would still be utterly unable to deal with them. Thus, the difficulty and danger here were undeniably high for them.
But for the Rabbit Hole Team, it was different.
All the mechanics the ghosts had displayed so far were completely countered by Rabbit Hole.
For example, the ghosts' banishment mechanic required them to first find someone. But the Phantom Concealment effect created by the Nightmare Illusion Node prevented the ghosts from discovering them, allowing them to explore freely. If they could not even find them, how could they banish them?
Then there was the ghosts' invisibility mechanic, which was almost utterly defeated against Gray Porcelain's Danger Sense. Combined with Phantom Concealment, the Rabbit Hole Team could even spend the entire time avoiding the ghosts.
Taking ten thousand steps back, even if they truly had to face an attack from boundless ghosts in the end, they still had a devastating weapon... Gabriel.