Chapter 22: Flame Stone

At this moment, the Fire Demon Leader looked just like a fire that had been doused with water—on the verge of dying. If it weren’t for the fact that its HP still showed 500/500, you’d really think it was about to drop dead.

Before activating the arrow tower to launch a full assault, Su You first checked the Fire Demon Leader’s status. Once she confirmed it was in a weakened state, she turned on the arrow tower’s attack.

[Weakened Fire Demon Leader]: The Fire Demon Leader’s power comes from fire. Water weakens its strength, greatly reducing its defense and attack. However, after the weakened state ends, the Fire Demon Leader will become even stronger. (Duration: 180 seconds. Cooldown: 24 hours.)

With a full understanding of the Fire Demon Leader’s stats, Su You could translate this in more detail—

After being splashed with water, the Fire Demon Leader will only deal 1 point of damage to enemies and its defense drops to zero for three minutes. However, this state can only be triggered once every 24 hours.

Also, if the Fire Demon Leader isn’t killed within those three minutes, it will gain a buff that makes it even stronger.

Just how strong that buff is remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure: if you can’t finish off the Fire Demon Leader within three minutes, your best bet is to run before the weakened state ends.

One more thing to note: the Fire Demon Leader can still summon minions while weakened. The summoning is slow, but it’s still possible.

And only the Fire Demon Leader is afraid of water—the regular Fire Demons aren’t. Water has no negative effect on them. That’s why Su You had to wait for the Fire Demon Leader to summon its minions first, then lure it here to finish it off.

As soon as she saw the Fire Demon Leader enter its weakened state, Su You immediately activated the arrow tower and joined in the attack herself with a stone knife.

Now that the Fire Demon Leader was weakened, its defense and dodge were both zero. That meant every arrow from the tower would hit and deal the full 15 points of damage.

There were 19 arrows in total, each dealing 15 damage, for a total of 285 points. But the Fire Demon Leader had 500 HP, so after all the arrows were used, it would still have 215 HP left.

Since she hadn’t prepared extra arrows and couldn’t retrieve the used ones until the boss was dead, Su You had no choice but to finish it off herself.

But the Fire Demon Leader was so weak now that it couldn’t dodge attacks from the arrow tower or Su You. And when it tried to attack her, it was so slow that she could easily dodge.

Even if she didn’t dodge, with its attack power reduced to just 1, even if it managed to scratch her, it would only deal 1 point of damage—and there was a good chance it wouldn’t hurt her at all.

In this state, the Fire Demon Leader was basically a punching bag—one that couldn’t fight back or even curse at her (not that Su You would understand it anyway).

-10

-15

-20 (Critical Hit)!

Seeing the critical hit, Su You paused for a moment, then continued attacking the Fire Demon Leader.

The stone knife dealt 10 damage per hit. Without any special equipment or buffs, a critical hit would double that to 20.

Critical hits partly depend on luck, but also on the gap between attack and defense—the bigger the gap, the higher the chance of a crit.

With the Fire Demon Leader’s defense at zero, it wasn’t surprising that Su You landed a critical hit after just two swings.

But even without crits, three minutes was more than enough for Su You to attack the Fire Demon Leader 22 times and drain its HP to zero. The critical hit was just icing on the cake.

...

In less than three minutes—actually, not even two—the Fire Demon Leader let out a final wail and collapsed, completely lifeless.

Maybe it was because lord players weren’t really cut out for combat, but even after beating up a punching bag (?), Su You still felt a bit exhausted.

Still, no matter how tired she was, the moment the Fire Demon Leader fell, Su You immediately opened the gate, used her stone knife to cut open its chest, and dug out a red stone about the size of her palm.

As she looked at the red stone in her hand, information about it appeared before her eyes.

[Flame Stone]

Category: Material

Quality: Green

Description: A material dropped by fire-type monsters. Can be used to craft items or build the City Core Fire... It’s said that the Flame Stone burns eternally, its flame never extinguished.

...

This red stone was the Flame Stone.

The reason the Fire Demon Leader always drops a Flame Stone is because its “heart” is a Flame Stone.

Regular Fire Demons are incomplete evolutions of fire-type monsters, so only a rare few, the so-called “chosen ones,” will drop a Flame Stone.

Unlike regular Fire Demons, whose bodies turn to smoke and vanish instantly upon death, the Fire Demon Leader’s corpse remains for a while.

This time is not just for players to collect the Flame Stone—it’s also a test of luck.

A test of luck...

Su You: Heh.

She tossed the Flame Stone into her backpack, then carefully examined the Fire Demon Leader’s corpse from top to bottom. For some reason, despite being a corpse, it didn’t look scary at all—probably because anything that needed to be censored had already been censored.

After looking it over for a while, Su You didn’t hesitate any longer and started searching the Fire Demon Leader’s body.

She had five minutes to search, but Su You only needed three to strip the Fire Demon Leader clean. In the end, she wasn’t sure if it was because there was nothing left to find, or if the system couldn’t stand the sight of a nearly “streaking” Fire Demon Leader polluting the land. Either way, not long after she stopped, the corpse disappeared.

The moment it vanished, Su You vaguely heard a familiar voice in her ear—

[Congratulations on successfully killing the Fire Demon Leader. After establishing your territory, please go to the quest hall to claim your first kill reward chest.]

Quest hall...

Reward chest...

Su You knew what the quest hall was, but... a reward chest?

What’s that?

At least, she’d never heard of getting a chest for killing a boss before.

Usually, when you kill a boss, aside from fixed drops like the Flame Stone, any other loot depends on what you collect from the body.

Any accessory, weapon, piece of equipment, or clothing on a boss could potentially be useful.

Whether it’s actually useful or not is pure luck.

Some people kill a boss and get a high-quality [Shining Gold Saber]. Others kill a boss and end up with a gray-quality [Chipped Kitchen Knife].

Yep, Su You was that “lucky” one who got the kitchen knife.

And it was a chipped kitchen knife at that—so bad that even the cooking NPCs would rather go on strike than use it."