336 A Painful Torture

Fifteen!

This time it wasn’t sixteen anymore; only fifteen Water Elementals were summoned.

It seemed like they hadn’t killed the Water Elemental for nothing – if they killed a Water Elemental, fewer would be summoned on the next round.

Since this was the case, everyone knew that they had to kill the Water Elementals without Lu Li’s reminder.

They focused on one Water Elemental first and then a second one. Although Thaelrid was strong, he didn’t take orders from players, so it wasn’t possible to make him focus on a particular target. However, there was a solution around this – everyone attacked the Water Elemental that he attacked.

They managed to kill two Water Elementals this time before Bathiel absorbed the rest.

It seemed as though the Water Elementals gave their defense to the Boss. Everyone noticed that the second round of Water Elementals seemed to be weaker – there was no way that Lu Li and the others would be able to kill a second one otherwise.

Three of the sixteen Water Elementals had been slain.

By this point, Bathiel had grown even stronger, and was now at the standard strength for a level 25 boss.

However, since he failed to absorb as many Water Elementals, he became frustrated and began to use his second spell.

This was a real ultimate skill – icicles started forming in the air and began to rain down on everyone.

Remnant Dream was hit by one of them and lost around 400 HP.

Although she was dumb, her reactions weren’t slow. She immediately began to run around when Lu Li asked her to. Icicles landed on her every now and then, but she wasn’t being hit constantly.

All this dodging heavily affected the battle, but no one had a choice. The icicles continually pelted them from above and dealt high damage, so no one was able to stand still and tank the hits.

As for Thaelrid, he had a lot of health and strong defense, so he didn’t care about this tiny amount of damage.

"The three damage dealers on each team should go and help Thaelrid kill his Water Elemental."

Lu Li started assigning tasks; his goal this time was to kill at least three Water Elementals.

The first team included Azure Sea Breeze, March Rain, Remnant Dream, Sakura Memories and Moonlight. This team combination, in addition to the NPC, would be more than enough to kill a single Water Elemental.

"March, Breeze, you guys help Wandering with his Water Elemental. Flower, go and help too. Rice Ball, we’ll aim to kill a third Water Elemental together. Attack the same Water Elemental as me later.

As soon as the Water Elementals were summoned, Lu Li pounced on one of them.

After being absorbed twice, the defense of the Water Elementals was much lower. At least, when Lu Li attacked to them, he no longer dealt 40-50 points of damage. His damage had now returned to his original standard of around 100-200 points.

Everyone tried their best and the mission was accomplished successfully. The team that helped the NPC even had time to help the others.

This was a rinse and repeat process. On the third time, the team killed three Elementals and on the fourth time, they improved this to four.

After the fourth round of summoning, the Attack and Defense attributes of the Boss had reached an incredible level. This was especially the case for his Attack – each strike dealt 500-600 damage to Azure Sea Breeze.

If it wasn’t for the fact that Azure Sea Breeze had good gear with a lot of damage reduction skills, the team would have already been wiped.

Despite this, there were still a few times when he was on extremely low on health and was almost killed by the Boss.

Bathiel was now insanely powerful; he was the strongest boss that Lu Li and his team had encountered up to this point of the game. Lu Li and his team were also the top players in the game in terms of gear and level.

The boss began to cast his skill and icicles fell from the sky again.

As these icicles rained down, not only did they deal physical damage, but they also dealt mental damage.

Remnant Dream and Hachi Chan latched onto Lu Li and bowed their heads as they ran behind him. Only a player of Lu Li’s standard would be able to deal damage while he dragged two players behind him.

Remnant Dream couldn’t die – the team still needed her +10% attack group buff. If she died, it would be unfortunate for everyone. Her tiger also dealt a fair amount of damage and together with her pet, she was still a strong damage dealer.

Hachi Chan couldn’t die either – she was a healer and also had a resurrection skill that allowed her to revive players during battle. It was better to be safe than sorry.

"Everyone look out. There’s no need to rush to deal damage. Safety first."

Lu Li saw that Lonesome Flower had taken a few icicles while he tried to deal a little extra damage.

Goodness, does he want to die?

Losing a team member meant that they weren’t far from a team wipe, so it was better for them to spend more time than to recklessly rush through things. This wasn’t specific to the fight with Bathiel; it was important to play it safe in any boss battle. There was no guarantee that the next hit wouldn’t be a critical strike.

After her participation in the Shadow Cup, March Rain had improved greatly with her positioning and mana control. Otherwise, she probably wouldn’t have been able to sustain in the fight either. Unfortunately, Hachi Chan still hadn’t learned "Innervate". If she had this skill, March Rain would essentially have an extra bar of mana.

In his previous life, Lu Li had read a description for a particular quest that had a certain chance to reward the skill book for "Innervate". This skill was quite essential for a Druid, but unfortunately, the quest was also fairly challenging. Otherwise, it would have been easier to let Hachi Chan to do the quest herself.

On the fifth round of summoning, six Water Elementals appeared.

If any Water Elementals survived after this round, it was guaranteed that the team would start losing members after the boss gained more strength.

Everyone was aware that emerging victorious or defeated would be dependent on this round, so their attitude to this battle was very serious.

As soon as the Water Elementals appeared, Lu Li ran towards one with Sprint and began to frantically attack it.

A mere seven seconds!

He was the first to kill a Water Elemental and had used everything he had in these seven seconds to do it, including any special effects that were available.

After he killed the Water Elemental, he ran to help Moonlight while some of his special effects still lingered. Although Moonlight had the most people on his team, most of his teammates weren’t of much use.

Thaelrid was the second one to kill another Water Elemental. Lu Li praised himself again for his wise decision to coerce the NPC into doing the dungeon with him.

Lonesome Flower was the third; Dawn had always been lenient with Mages.

Although his gear wasn’t as great as Lu Li’s, his skills were strong, so his damage output wasn’t weak either.

Water Elementals took about ten seconds to reach the boss. There were still three of them that slowly inched closer and closer to the boss.

Everyone went crazy and used anything that they could – Azure Sea Breeze even tossed out his shield, but it missed the boss and poor Wandering was left with two bumps on his head instead.

"Last one. Was it killed?" Azure Sea Breeze asked with uncertainty after an eerie silence.

"It was killed. The boss’ health didn’t recover – it’s still on fifty thousand. Pay attention now; we’ve passed the hardest stage, so don’t make a silly mistake here," Lu Li reminded everyone.

Fortunately, the Xin Xin Mercenary Group had already been through a lot in the past. Everyone was calm and executed their jobs perfectly.

Once the Water Elementals were wiped out, nothing too crazy happened in the remainder of the fight. After battling the boss for around forty minutes, his health bar that seemed as if it contained 90,000 HP, but actually only contained 20,000-30,000 HP, had finally been emptied.