My 【Repair】Skill Became an Almighty Cheat Skill, So I Thought I’d Open Up a Weapon Shop

(TL: There are…… a lot of these…… long pauses……in this chapter.)

From the next day forward, I added teaching Noire about the job to my list of work.

Things will get even busier for a while, but it’s necessary to put in that extra work when hiring someone.

Nagi and Melissa, the two adventurers I’d hired at the beginning, picked up the job easily because they had worked at a weapon shop before.

Naturally, not everyone starts out excelling at their job.

That’s common, whether you work at a weapon shop or as an adventurer.

「Alright, let’s have you try restocking the shelves.」

「O-okay……」

–In the early morning, when there weren’t many customers, I asked Noire to try restocking the shelves.

I gave her a wooden box full of wide blade knives. Not only do adventurers who explore 『Sundial Forest』 use them, there’s quite the demand from Greenhollow Town residents for them too.

We were, after all, in a town in the middle of the mountains. Just by leaving town, you could find trees and grass growing all over.

「……Mm……!」

Noire tried to lift up the wooden box on top of the counter, but the most she could do was drag it a little.

「…………」

「…………」

She tried again with all her might, but she couldn’t lift it up.

「……Is it too heavy?」

「I……I’m fine……! See, if I do this……!」

Noire opened the wooden box, grabbed a few knives in their scabbards, and scurried over to the shelf to display them. Then, she came back and repeated the process.

As I watched her move around in a hurry, I ended up thinking to myself, 「So she does know how to move quickly……」But that was something I couldn’t say out loud.

— Once it was past noon time, there were more customers, so I got Noire to try being a cashier.

Up until now, I’ve only used one of the cash counters, so today as a test, I opened up both of them.

Now two people could handle the payments at once.

Although all you have to do is to charge the customer for the amount based on the written prices, give them change and hand over the products, once a queue starts up, it gets pretty stressful.

「If somebody asks for a discount or the customer’s hard to deal with, call me or Garnet. If a customer tells you they want to buy a mithril product, I’ll deal with it since the purchase process is a pain.」

「O-okay……」

Since I already knew Noire wasn’t good with being pressured, I instructed her to call for somebody else if she thinks it’s beyond her powers.

To begin with, we rarely get troublesome customers.

Some of the high-ranking adventurers who were exploring『Territory of the Demon King』 only gathered here because I called for them.

They were well-known among other adventurers, and people have heard about the Black Sword Mountain and the Golden Fang Knights ordering their weapons from here.

Not many adventurers would think of causing trouble at such a place.

「……Welcome……」

Noire worked with an indifferent expression.

Although she didn’t look like she was panicking, she looked so unwelcoming that it was shocking.

Forget about smiles, she didn’t even look the customers in the eye.

To begin with, it wasn’t like this shop sold amiability, and while both Garnet and Noire weren’t exactly friendly, I thought it’d be better to fix something that could still be saved.

「Hey Noire, I think you’re doing pretty good, but maybe… you could try smiling?」

I waited until there weren’t any customers waiting in line, and threw that request at Noire.

「S-smile……Like, this……?」

…I cringed at Noire’s unfortunate attempt.

「Um……I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you to do that.」

「You don’t have to, um, apologize……I should……」

I see, so that happens when Noire tries to force herself to smile. I learned something about her for the first time.

— Before long, it was the evening, and there were less customers in the shop.

I left the shop to Garnet and the short-term hire, and brought Noire to the room I used as an office.

The only jobs I could assign to the adventurers I hired for short-term work were things that involved the shop front.

One of the reasons was because there wasn’t enough time to teach them anything complicated. Most importantly, I couldn’t let them deal with the administrative side of things.

For example, they weren’t allowed to place orders or handle financial paperwork.

That type of work cannot be assigned to a short-term hire, no matter their field.

I’ve been doing it myself this entire time, so now that I hired a proper employee, I thought about distributing some of the work.

「I…… Should I be doing, something like this……?」

「It’s hard for me to do all of this by myself. Of course, I’m still going to do the final check, but if I can have someone else work on it first, then that’ll be great.」

「……But you have Garnet. For me, to do this is……」

「I always leave the other jobs to Garnet, so I can’t exactly give him more tasks. Anyway, just try.」

Perhaps because Noire was working for me to atone, she showed that she didn’t want to be in charge of such an important task, but I decided to make her try.

Noire picked up the pen with a troubled expression, and spread out the sample paperwork and the blank papers across the table. Then, the pen went to work at an incredible speed.

She wrote up a purchase order to the adventurer guild in less than half the time it took me to write one.

「……I did it, I think……」

「Wow… This is perfect. I’m surprised. How come you can do it so quickly?」

Not only did she complete it quickly, her writing was neat and legible, the ink wasn’t smudged anywhere, and there weren’t any spelling mistakes.

With this, our work was going to become more efficient than before.

I wasn’t expecting to get such a big catch.

「I have skills……that help me, that’s why……」

Noire looked embarrassed and began explaining her rapid writing bit by bit.

「I study magic… As a magician, just having skills alone won’t do…You need to be able to read grimoires…… Or create copies of important books… You also need to write about your research… In any case, having 【Speed Reading】 and 【Speed Writing】 is beneficial…」

「I see… I’m not familiar with the magician world, but they do have the image of being surrounded by huge volumes of books and documents.」

Books don’t mean much to me, but I’ve often seen grimoires displayed on storefronts for a high price.

「In any case, I didn’t know you handwrote grimoires… I’ve heard that the city started offering printing services, but I guess you don’t use those.」

「W-we can’t do that…!」

It was unusual for Noire to raise her voice like that.

「If the writer doesn’t put their mana into the grimoire as they write it, there’s no meaning……! Just having the ink on those pages physically makes it easy for an outsider to tamper with it. Not only will the information from the words not be transmitted properly, the dual or triple effects that are produced from the mana won’t be transmitted either… Ahhh! The despair I felt when I saw the printed version of the Chronicles of the Rosecross Road Sorcerers just resurfaced into my memory……! The categorized mana wavelengths that were bestowed with the artistic penmanship were scraped off…… That was blasphemy, cruelty. It was an atrocity committed against magic……」

「I, I get it, I get it. Just, calm down. Please.」

I tried to calm down Noire, who suddenly had a look of despair and trembled all over, rapidly talking about something I had no idea about.

For her to talk that fast, it was like she’d accidentally casted a bard’s speed boosting skill on herself.

–In any case, I learned two things that were beneficial.

The first one was that Noire was highly suitable for administrative work due to her magician skills.

The second one was that Noire had a strong fixation on certain stuff that I didn’t realize until now, and that she had a switch which I should never trigger.