A multitude of blood vessels traced the inside of the bulging eyes and some type of secretion lined the corners. Bits of food dotted both the mouth and beard. Bolaer's disheveled state resulted from having been awake late at night going through records of the various parties to estimate how many had set out for that region of the forest and were late in returning. He had ended up sending a messenger bird to the nearest city requesting a subjugation group on his authority.

The party had stopped by the guildhall to check in with Bolaer after breakfast and caught him reading the response to his letter.

"...So, you're expecting them to arrive tomorrow evening?" Rem asked.

Bolaer scratched his chin and responded "That is what the return message said. This means they will probably need you to head out with them to the summoning circle the following morning."

After a moment, he continued "If you don't mind another person in your party, I'd also like to send someone with you. He's an experienced adventurer and I've known him for some time now; I'd like his take on whatever you find at the summoning circle. He should be available tomorrow morning if you're all ok with meeting him then?"

Having elicited nods from each of them in turn, he muttered "Good, good." then continued "One more item for your consideration; the gentleman at that table has been waiting for you."

The blond man sitting at the table Bolaer gestured to was dressed in a dark blue robe with gold trim. Pouches lined belts running around his waist and diagonally to his shoulder. It had escaped Rem's attention that this man had been watching him with a sly smile on his face for some time now. At the party's notice, he stood and walked to their gathering.

Bowing slightly, the man purred "Good day lady and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Edward, although you're free to simply call me 'Ed' if you'd prefer. I'm a level 9 mage and my understanding is that your party is accepting applications?"

With a moment of eye contact between them, Rem responded on behalf of the party "Yes Ed, we are; nice to meet you."

After running through their names and classes, Rem asked "We were going to hunt to the southwest today- would you like to join us? I think the monsters may be a little on the weak side for you but we could get some practice working together as a team."

"Brilliant!" Edward beamed.

...

With Anira and Niviem having returned to their encampment to gear up for the day, Rem waited in the guildhall with Edward for their return. He somewhat regretted waking them up early but was glad he had a chance to speak with them over breakfast. They had patiently listened without exhibiting any doubt regarding his dream and having a couple of people who also seemed to understand the urgency of finding this girl did ease Rem's mind a little.

Looking up across the table to Edward, he could see the man still faintly smiling and waiting for him to finish assigning skill points. Quickly focusing back to his status screen to apply his level gains, he decided to advance his dimensional storage skill and intelligence first. It appeared increasing the storage skill helped with skill mana efficiency and speed, which would be needed when dealing with very large objects. Increasing intelligence would increase his maximum mana pool allowing storage of larger items and better use of his haste skill. With two additional points in intelligence and at level 3, his resource pools had all increased significantly:

[

Health: 25 -> 42

Mana: 22 -> 34

Stamina: 23 -> 35

]

Some quick testing revealed that he was able to leave the haste skill activated now and still have 9 mana usable for other things such as using an arcane bolt. Closing his display, Rem turned to Edward and started running through the various skills each of the party members had.

Edward asked, "...The element creation skill; are you capable of generating earth?"

Rem nodded, then used his skill to create a spherical blob of stone which he handed over. Examining it carefully Edward whispered "...aaannd it's persistent. One can only hope a micro gravitational singularity isn't being formed somewhere to offset this..."

Edward then cleared his throat and asked "May I keep it?"

"Sure, it's... a rock." Rem replied with a furrowed brow which prompted Edward to carefully store it in his backpack.

Confused, Rem started asking what those earlier terms meant but was interrupted by Edward regaining enough focus to ask another question with a gleam in his eye "Would you show me your dimensional storage skill please?"

Rem pulled out a piece of dried beef from storage and tossed it to Edward, at which Edward laughed "...of course, let us simply yank open a door to another blasted dimension to get nibbles." then added, "...by the way, I got my first look at this when you were pulling out the Thorn Lizards at the back of the guild yesterday, but I still haven't wrapped my brain around it."

"You also have skills that produce magical effects, right? The spells I've seen mages perform seem very impressive to me as well." Rem replied.

Edward thought for a moment then said "Don't misunderstand; I enjoy shooting lasers... er, beams of light from my hand as much as the next bloke, but everything I can do, can also be done with tools where I'm from. The stuff you're doing? Creating matter or energy from nothing?- I think not, dimensional portals?- ludicrous, haste?- what in blazes is that even? A temporal distortion field? Wait, never mind- my brain hurts from thinking about this, and we can explore it later. First let me explain my current abilities."

Among the skills Edward had access to, there were focused attacks that could burn a small hole through objects using concentrated light, fire a sizable chunk of stone at high velocity, or launch a sharp blade of water a couple of paces wide. For wide-area spells, he could obscure space in darkness, manifest a gale pressing outwards in a cone, or rain down some fire of moderate intensity.

His most often used and the most mana-efficient spell was an arcane dagger he could fire quickly. Its speed and trajectory were similar to a regularly thrown dagger, but it inflicted additional magical damage and continued to push into the target after impact until the spell had run its course a few seconds later. Finally, he was able to passively sense mana which could help in detecting obscured or otherwise invisible objects.

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Rem thought Edward was more than a little strange but appreciated his curiosity as well as the methodical approach he used to explore things. He and Edward spent the rest of the time awaiting Anira and Niviem's return chatting about different ways of potentially using their skills.

...

Rem slowly stored the corpse of the Carrion Rat as he caught his breath and kept an eye on the approaches to his location. Despite looking hideous and smelling even worse, the guild paid more for these than their last quarry. Rem silently hoped that this wasn't what he had eaten at the inn a couple of nights ago.

They had traveled to the edge of the wastes a few hours out of Ilona in the opposite direction they had taken the previous day. The terrain around him was made up of boulders and paths leading into small canyons; not quite as dangerous as the forest in terms of opportunities for concealment but still not anywhere he felt safe dropping his guard.

These monsters were slightly larger than the Thorn Lizards and moved much more quickly with the primary threat being large claws at the end of their extended limbs. They were on the outskirts of a colony of Carrion Rats and expected a large number to be in the area. Despite having formed a proper party and splitting experience gains, these monsters were also higher in level and Rem noticed he had been gaining experience at a steady pace after a few were defeated.

Anira and Edward were positioned on top of a ridge about the height of a house with a very steep slope, and Niviem was just behind them keeping a watch on their surroundings. Rem didn't have a means of keeping a monster fixed in place, so the plan had been for him to find a monster, attack it from range and then immediately run back to the group. Positioning himself in relation to the monster so its flank was exposed to his party, and limiting any sudden forward movement on his part had all worked very well in allowing his party to rain down attacks from safety.

As Rem stood back up to find another rat, Anira interjected and pointed "Hold Rem, something large is heading this way from over there."

Nodding in response, Rem quickly ran forward and started pressing himself up against the wall next to where he expected the monster to emerge even as Anira's first arrow flew past. An angry scream signaled that her arrow had struck true and a second later, a large grey monster several times more massive than a human lumbered past Rem. The monster identified as a Waste Ogre was tall enough to reach up to the edge of the ridge the rest of the party was perched on and had dropped the club it was carrying in an attempt to clamber up to them.

Edward began peppering the ogre at close range with arcane daggers and somewhere in the opening moments, Anira had driven an arrow into its left eye. Rushing from behind, Rem hacked at the back of the ogre's ankle once, then again until he heard the ogre's agonized cry. Moving out of range of its grasp and watching it slide back down clutching its leg, he heard Anira exclaim then saw her pointing behind him.

Dodging to the side as he turned, Rem prepared to block. Another ogre was nearly upon him, charging forward with its club overhead. Thinking better of blocking, Rem leaped further to the side as the club came down in a resounding crash where he had been.

'There is no way I can attempt to block that and survive.' Rem thought.

As the ogre brought its club back up and advanced on him again, Rem tried a feint lunging forward in the hopes he could pull back and then strike immediately afterward in the opening when the ogre had just completed its swing. That was a mistake. The ogre wasn't a precision fighter and instead had simply closed the gap further until it was very close.

Rem fired an arcane bolt at the ogre's face as a diversion and attempted to dodge forward and to the side to evade the next downward blow. That was another mistake. The slow-starting speed of the arcane bolt combined with the ogre bending forward as it struck caused the resulting early explosion to also clip Rem as he dodged past. If he hadn't had his haste effect active, he may have caught even more of the blast.

From their vantage point on the ridge, the party could see Rem was in trouble. Anira began launching arrows at the ogre, but without any vital points visible from that angle and seemingly massive amounts of health, her options were limited.

Edward switched to launching stone projectiles; they were expensive to cast but this didn't look like it was going to be a battle of attrition. The stones were a little larger than a human head and flew almost as fast as an arrow. Against an opponent that was small and light, these might have ended up missing or potentially expending only part of the force on knocking back limbs before continuing to sail past. The ogres instead were large, slow-moving targets, and all the kinetic energy in the projectiles was fully transferred into their massive, stationary bulk.

Three earthen projectiles were fired in quick succession and all violently impacted the ogre. The first landed squarely on the side of the ogre's head which to Rem's amazement, only seemed to partially daze the ogre. The second landed with a sharp crack in the ogre's ribs and the final projectile shattered against the ogre's knee mid-step.

The ogre tripped and crashed forward while still swiping at Rem. It managed to clip his shins as it fell and Rem subsequently toppled on top of the ogre's arms and head. Rem couldn't afford to let the ogre grab him and had to extricate himself as soon as possible, but it was also unlikely he would be able to get near the ogre's head again.

Quickly grabbing the ogre's eyes and the back of its neck, he conjured the darkness element to obscure its vision and set fire to its neck, then rolled away. Howling in pain, the ogre immediately flipped onto its back to put out the fire but found no relief from the flames. Rem suspected the fire would continue until the flesh he had imbued had burned away completely, and the darkness should be in place for hours.

Rem quietly moved clear of the convulsing ogre and the party turned their focus to the ogre at the base of the ridge which had been hobbled. Continuously firing down ranged attacks on this ogre, they were eventually able to dispatch it followed by the second blinded ogre.

...

Collecting proof of the kills, the party retreated back into the plains for a short distance to rest. Rem was lying on his back, exhausted and staring up at the late afternoon sky while checking his system information. Between the higher-level rats and ogres, he had jumped up to level 7.

"It looks like I'm level seven now; did anyone else see something similar for experience gains?" Rem posed to the group.

"Level nine here." Anira called out.

Niviem responded with "Eight for me."

Edward grinned "Level eleven! I've picked my second class but give me a chance to test things out and assign skill points before demonstrating please."

"Congratulations Ed! I need to get a second class as soon as I can too- I don't think I would have fared very well if an ogre had landed a solid hit." replied Rem.

"You'll get there soon I'm sure." answered Edward, then after a moment continued "By the way, what do you call yourselves?"

"Call ourselves?" Niviem asked with a confused expression.

"Our party name? I've only heard of party names for famous bands of adventurers. We never came up with one since it was only Niviem and I until recently." Anira answered.

Standing up, Edward said "In that case, I'd like to make an assertion and a proposal. I believe this party will do great things, and my proposal for a name would be something that starts with 'Dust'. Dust Adventurers? Dust Rangers? Mmm..."

"Why 'Dust'?" asked Niviem.

Edward pondered for a moment then replied "Where I'm from the term 'Dust' had been used to unjustly label a group of people as being without worth. Considering our party makeup of people who have either been marginalized or are otherwise misfits, I fancy the prospect of people being reminded of this when we're legendary adventurers."

"I actually like that word for another reason, but I doubt many would relate to it. Anyway, in the spirit of what you're suggesting, how about 'Company'? You would normally hear that in the context of something prestigious such as some lord's company of knights" Rem suggested.

Edward radiated happiness and asked, "'Dust Company' - is that name agreeable to all?"