All storage rings were secured with what was called Soul Bond by their owners. So the only way to access an owned storage ring was either by permission of the owner or make sure the owner was dead.
For an existence called magus, the death of the physical body was not real death as long as their spirit soul still existed. Hence, of the 11 storage rings the group had, only one could actually be opened as only one of the elf magus' souls was destroyed in the battle.
One way to open the rest of the storage rings was to destroy all the spirit souls the group had in their possession, which any sane person wouldn't recommend as it was frankly a foolish idea considering spirit souls of elf magus could be redeemed for rewards on any Magus Alliance headquarters.
Another way the group could do was to find a good formation master to break the soul bind. However, this choice was something that would be very costly to carry out, especially with these magus-level soul bindings.
