kscans

Chapter 218 - # The Artisans 4. The Armorer (Part 1)

Yuri had thought his business was concluded after getting valuable information from the ornament artisan and the painter, but Kudol put a stop to that. The reason for the halt was armor.

"Rigbear hide... you mean?"

"Yeah, the one you showed us before we came to Laurenzen, you sold that off to the boss, Adon, but you said you had more. You've probably got that stashed in your Magic Bag, too. If you're going to live in a dangerous place like that, you should be wearing some proper armor."

Adon, standing next to him, nodded in agreement at Kudol's perfectly reasonable advice. Since they were in Laurenzen anyway, it wouldn't hurt to have a piece of armor or two custom-made. Weapons... he probably didn't need any more of those. And so... with the fundamentally cautious Yuri also agreeing, they changed their plans and decided to visit an armorer Kudol knew.

"A lot of shops won't take new orders this time of year since they're stocking up for the grand market. But you don't have to worry about that with the place we're going. The old man who runs it is an eccentric, he doesn't change his inventory just because it's the grand market."

Don't worry, his skill is top-notch, Kudol assured them as he led the way to a workshop tucked away from the main street.

"Hey, old man, you in?"

Kudol pushed open the door and entered without ceremony.

"...Can't you tell by looking? Need some armor repaired? Another mess to clean up?"

The surly response from the shopkeeper suggested he was quite a character himself. Well, one probably had to be, to deal with rough-and-tumble adventurers.

"Nah, I brought a customer today."

"...That kid over there?"

One might want to question why he treated the young Yuri as a customer while ignoring the full-grown adult Adon, but there was a good reason for it.

First, while Adon was an adult, he was already well along in years. Furthermore, his attire made it clear he was a wealthy resident. He was not a man who would have need of armor at this point.

So what about Yuri? If Kudol was introducing him, then this "customer" was likely an adventurer. He was certainly a child, but it wasn't unheard of for someone his age to register with the guild. In addition to that, the old shopkeeper had noticed one other thing.

(...He's wearing it so casually... but the material's no ordinary stuff... Yet the workmanship on it looks clumsy... With material this good, you'd normally take it to a proper artisan... ?)

What the old shopkeeper noticed, a habit of his trade, and what inwardly perplexed him, was the disparity between the material of Yuri's clothes and the skill of their construction.

Yuri had acquired a full set of crafting skills through his Rural Life Guide, but at present, they were only that, a "full set" of basic skills. He was still a far cry from what a professional artisan could produce. In contrast, the material was clearly from a magical beast, and of a rather high grade.

With material this good, it was normal to entrust it to a more decent craftsman, and he felt it should have been. The shopkeeper, never dreaming that the boy before him had made it himself, was inwardly bewildered by the inconsistency.

As for Yuri's attire that had so puzzled the old man, today he was wearing a long-sleeved cotton tunic under a leather jacket, with woolen trousers on the bottom.

The tunic was a secondhand cotton one he had bought in Laurenzen last year, but the other two items were Yuri's own handiwork. The leather jacket was tailored with the pelt turned inside out, a clever design where the animal fur served as a lining to increase its insulating effect. When Yuri had first attempted it, his only undergarments were made of coarse Mao cloth, so he had to abandon the project, worried the fur would poke through the fabric and stab his skin. But after buying a cotton tunic in Laurenzen and learning a technique with Dark Magic to soften the fur, this particular design had become possible. The material, incidentally, was the pelt of a wolf-type magical beast. Bear-type beasts provided good material for thread, and boar-type beasts had fur that was too stiff, so it had been chosen by a process of elimination. As for the trousers, they were made from cloth handwoven from thread spun from the hair of a bear-type magical beast. Specifically, it was Bicorn Bear wool. Though its quality was inferior to that of a Tyrantbot, it was still a fine piece of work, not something a normal child would wear.

Above all, the old shopkeeper was an armorer, and his appraisal naturally focused on defensive properties. Both the leather jacket and the woolen trousers, by virtue of their materials, possessed a level of defensive power that could not be dismissed, even if they were just clothes. Yuri hadn't paid it much mind, and Kudol and Adon hadn't noticed, but the old shopkeeper, perhaps due to his trade, had a sharp eye for such things and had spotted it.

(The materials alone for that getup would run you several gold coins.)

In reality, Yuri had simply made them himself using materials that were readily available to him.

(That's some high-grade material for a kid... but setting aside the workmanship, the fact that he's wearing something like that so casually means...)

Through that line of reasoning, he had deduced that Yuri was the customer.