After a few minutes of resting atop the corpse of the bear, three of the party members came running to find him.
He heard gasps from them as they approached and slowly turned his head to look in their direction.
The archer, Danny, and the sorceress had come searching for him. From the looks of it, they were quite hurt as well, but not nearly as bad as Jax was.
Their eyes were now looking at him, each one wide like saucers.
"Hey guys…" Jax said weakly. "I was going to come back, but I… I don't think I can walk anymore."
All his adrenaline had run out at some point, so Jax could barely speak as it was. The pain in his body was quite extreme too, to the point that Gemma was surprised he hadn't fainted yet.
A regular person would have fainted by now.
Apparently, he really was of a species other than a human.
While the other two were stunned by the situation, the sorceress ran to him immediately. She climbed onto the bear's corpse and placed her palm mere inches away from the horrible wound on his chest.
Then, she used her spell.
A brilliant bright yellow light blossomed from her palm, its energy flowing into Jax's wound. Jax felt his pain subside a little after she was done. He felt himself becoming drowsy for some reason, as if the lack of pain placed his fatigue above all else.
The sorceress quickly brought out something that Jax couldn't see at a quick glance and pressed it against his lips. "Drink!"
Jax wasn't sure what she was feeding him, but Gemma seemed to think it was a good thing, so Jax drank without hesitation.
A rather horrible-tasting concoction entered his mouth, making him want to throw it all up, but the sorceress shut his lips tight. "Don't let it out. Drink it all."
Jax struggled, but he swallowed it in the end. The fluid went down his gullet, leaving a rather horrible aftertaste lingering on his tongue.
Jax couldn't imagine why he had to drink such a thing, but the answer became apparent a second later. A warmth emerged in his stomach, followed by it spreading to every part of his body. Before he realized it, the warm energy was lessening the pain in his chest.
The sorceress let go of his mouth, and he finally got to speak. "What was that?"
"You can speak freely? Then you won't die," she said. "It was a potion. One that heals and numbs pain. I'm sorry I only have this one. The proper healing potions cost too much."
Jax slowly got up, no longer feeling any pain, and looked down at his own chest. "How's the wound? Is it less than before?"
The sorceress was about to answer when she realized he wasn't talking to her.
"Hard to tell," Gemma said. "The blood makes it difficult. How do you feel?"
"Good, but that might be because of the numbing pain," he said and turned toward the sorceress. "May I ask how much Navi you have? Could you continue to heal me slowly?"
"I intend to do that, don't worry. I'm waiting to be able to use it again. It has an annoyingly long cooldown," she said. "For now, could you tell me how you managed to defeat this bear?"
"I got lucky," Jax said slowly. "It turned out that the bear was behind the bush there. When the moth was halfway through killing me, the bear attacked it. The bear killed the moth, but the moth managed to tie it up before it died."
"The moth is dead?" the sorceress asked.
"Yeah, its corpse is there," Jax pointed toward the tree far away and turned to look at it himself, only to realize that the corpse was not there. "Oh, the forest took away the corpse."
Jax wondered why he lied. For some reason, whenever he had something good happen to him that others might be jealous of him for, he had an instinct to keep it a secret.
Why had that become an instinct?
"And you killed the bear?"
"Yeah, stabbed it right through the eye," Jax said, pointing to the spot where the bear's brain and blood flowed out of its eye socket. "Wait, you're not going to ask me for the stones, are you? I killed this bear myself."
The sorceress laughed. "No, I'm not going to ask you for it," she said and used her healing spell on him again. "We should leave now. Can you guys carry him?"
Danny and the archer agreed, but Jax spoke up before they arrived.
"That's alright, I think I can walk," he said and slowly got down from the corpse. "I'm lucky nothing happened to my legs."
"Jax, you can't move like this," Danny quickly said. "You are too wounded. You need to rest."
"Uhh… alright, just give me a shoulder. I really can walk on my own."
They made their way back to where the other three were. The male sorcerer was holding his arm weirdly, as if it had been hurt. The spearman stood on constant watch, while Loma was busy butchering the corpse of the elite bear they had killed.
Loma turned around as they arrived. "Woah! You're alive? How are you still alive?" he asked in pure surprise.
"Did you want me to die?" Jax asked with an astonished look.
"What? No, that's not what I meant. You just… you were chased by a bloody silk moth. Look at you, it got you too. How did you live?"
"I got lucky," Jax said.
"He's underselling it. A damn bear came and attacked the moth, and then he killed the bear after the moth wrapped it in its threads," Danny said. "While we were busy killing a single monster, he had killed two."
Those words came as quite a bit of a surprise to many.
Jax simply grinned. "How is the loot from the elite? Anything good?" he asked.
"Better than good. We got 12 stones, and its eyes and heart are perfectly intact. They will sell for a lot. Not to mention, the hide will make such high-quality armor."
Jax raised an eyebrow with pleasant surprise.
"Do you need any help?"