When Elo saw Gorden, he was shocked. Gorden was as pale as the skeletons they had fought, and the ground under his missing leg had already become muddy and red. He had fallen unconscious even before he was outside of the tunnel. Elo was about to go on his knees to heal him, but Lara had been faster, her hand already radiated a faint green light.
"I'm healing him, but that will take some time, we have to stop the blood flow. Otherwise, he will die before the healing is done."
Lara had a stressed look on her face, and she was about as pale as Gorden. She had most likely never seen a real wound in her entire life, so that wasn't very surprising. But even though she was shocked, she had been the first one to take action in a situation where time was the most valuable resource.
Elo knew what to do, he had helped others on the battlefield a lot of times. There was no time to make a fire, Gorden would die in a few minutes if he wouldn't get treated right away. Without the system's healing ability, he wounded have any chance to survive.
Elo hastily took off his t-shirt and put it around Gorden's leg to tie it off. Because the t-shirt was made out of very light cloth, it had been pretty easy to use it as a tie.
"Ok, this should be sufficient until the healing is done, how long is it gonna take?"
Elo hoped that the healing system could regrow the leg, but he didn't have too high hopes of something like that happening.
"It's going to take another 14 minutes. But the system said that the leg can't be regrown unless he would use his current level requirement of soul gems to do so, as soon as he awakes. But we don't have enough soul gems."
She was right, they didn't have 10 soul gems. Even though the rats had dropped one soul gem each, Elo still only had 6 of them. And even if Ella gave hers to Gorden too, he would still only have, which wasn't enough.
They would need two more soul gems, and Elo wasn't sure if his power stones would work too. Because the system had said that Gorden would need soul gems, he didn't want to rely on them.
He walked towards Ella, who had distanced herself from the rest of the group.
When she turned to face him, he started talking with a calming voice.
"You have heard Lara, we need 10 soul gems, but even if we give him all of ours, he would still not have enough. We need to go back into the dungeon to get more of them because there are no other sources of soul gems nearby.
The good thing is that the rats are not on the tunnel entrance anymore, so we should be able to hunt two of them down and safely get out of the dungeon again."
Elo could see that Ela really didn't like the idea. She had become pale as a ghost, and her eyelets were flickering nervously. She spat on the ground to try to get rid of the bad taste in her mouth.
"I don't know if I can do it. What if the rats choose to bite my leg of this time? Who would help me? I am just not…"
Before Ella could speak another word, Elo had already hugged her tightly. He could feel her heart racing, and he also suddenly felt something wet on his shirtless chest. Ella had started crying out of fear.
"You don't have to worry, I will make it easier for you to climb up and there won't be any rats while you climb up again. They only came because of the loud noises. And you are the best fighter in this entire group.
I swear that you won't get hurt."
Elo's embrace got a little bit stronger than he let go of her. When Ella looked at him, her reddened eyes seemed to glow.
"Ok, let's do this. If I even get one scratching, you will have to pay for this."
Even though her words sounded harsh, she smiled. Elo could feel that she had recovered. When they approached the dungeon entrance, Ella hugged him shortly and then started climbing down into the tunnel.
When she had disappeared into the darkness, a warm feeling remained in Elo's stomach. He hadn't lied, he wouldn't let anything hurt Ella.
With his promise in mind, he started working on the entrance.
First, he had to stomp down the loose dirt that was still overlapping on the edge of the hole. When the soil had fallen into the tunnel, the stick Ella had given him appeared in his hands, and he used it to dig out some more dirt from the edge of the hole.
With this method, he would elevate the ground and create a better wall to climb at the same time. If a rat would follow Ella, he didn't want her to have any problems while climbing the wall.
Because all the dirt was very loose, he was ready after a few minutes. The stick had just disappeared out of his hands when he could suddenly feel the earth trembling.
When Elo saw Ella running in his direction, he already knew something had gone wrong. He fell on his knees in front of the hole and reached into it as far as he could while still keeping his balance.
When Ella reached the wall under Elo, she jumped up with all of her remaining force. Because of that, Elo was immediately able to catch her hands and pull her out of the tunnel.
And just in time! As soon as Ella fully emerged out of the hole, a giant rat head appeared in the tunnel below. The rat was about twice as big as the other rats and had deep black fur and yellow eyes.
Ella had only been able to run away from it because it had problems fitting through the small tunnel.
"What is that thing? I am just happy that it can't come out of the dungeon."
What Elo said was right. The rat did really not nearly fit trough the hole over its head. The hole was way smaller than the tunnels, and the rat already had problems walking trough those.
Because it had no way to turn around, it slowly started walking backwards until it couldn't be seen from the surface anymore. Only then Ella answered.
"I really don't know, and I'm not sure if I want to. But it's not here anymore, so I don't care. We have to bring the soul gems to Gorden."
They walked over to Gorden, who was still getting healed by Lara and laid their soul gems in the dirt beside him. Since Elo had helped Ella out of the dungeon, she hadn't let go of his hand.
As Gorden slowly woke up again, she turned in Elo's direction and brought her lips near his ear.
"I got scratched by one of the rats I had to fight, so you're gonna have to think about how you can make it up to me", she whispered.