After lunch, I headed to the Adventurer's Guild, where Philia was already waiting outside.
"Good morning, Erik-kun."
"Morning. You're early today."
"You think so? I actually just got here myself."
With that, the two of us stepped inside.
When we headed over to Reina-san's reception counter as usual, her expression looked a bit troubled, unlike this morning.
"Good morning, Reina-san. Um, is something the matter?"
Philia seemed to have noticed Reina-san's expression as well and asked.
"Good morning, Philia-chan. Could you tell from my face?"
"I could. Is something troubling you?"
"...Well, yes. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to vent to you two a little."
With that, Reina-san led us into a private room.
"First of all, what's troubling me are the guild requests. You both know the population in the royal capital has gone up again recently, right?"
"We know. The dungeon is popular, so it seems people are coming in from other countries too."
"Normally, having more adventurers means more requests get completed. But in this case, everyone is only after the dungeon, aren't they? A lot of the adventurers who usually work around the royal capital are diving into the dungeon as well, so regular requests are just piling up. I've been asking adventurers to help clear a few, but the city requests end up getting left behind no matter what."
These past few days, I had been tied up with training, so I hadn't been able to take any city jobs.
Philia had apparently been doing them while I was training, but naturally, that wasn't enough to handle the backlog alone.
"Philia."
"Yeah. I was probably thinking the same thing."
I spoke Philia's name.
Reading my thoughts immediately, she spoke up.
"Reina-san, for a while, we'll spend the time we'd usually use for exploring to take on city requests instead."
"Wait, are you sure? That would be a huge help to the guild, but will you two be all right?"
"We'll be fine. In the first place, the Adventurer's Guild has taken great care of me, so I want to help out."
"Thanks to you, Reina-san, I've been steadily growing as an adventurer too. I want to return the favor, so I'm going to give it my all!"
When we said that, a joyful smile broke across Reina-san's face.
Afterward, she showed us a selection of the city requests.
Rather than looking at rewards, we sorted them by deadline, picking the ones that needed to be resolved as quickly as possible.
I stuck mainly to cleaning-related jobs, while Philia took on assisting requests.
"All right, Philia. Let's do this."
"Yeah! Let's see which of us can finish more requests!"
"Sounds good. But I'm pretty fast at cleaning, you know—are you ready for this?"
"Hehe, I'm going to do my best too, just you watch!"
Exchanging determined smiles, we left the Adventurer's Guild.
Having chosen cleaning jobs among the various chores, I tackled the work in earnest.
I washed dishes spotless in an instant, and no matter how high the laundry had piled up, I finished hanging it all out to dry in barely ten-odd minutes.
Even when a room was a complete mess, I sorted everything, bagged the trash, and put the place in order.
Within an hour of starting, I had already cleared three requests.
"That's incredible, Erik-kun. Even though you finished so quickly, the clients gave you the highest possible ratings."
"It's all thanks to [Cleaning]."
"...It's precisely because your natural knack for cleaning is already so high that you can draw out so much power from the skill, Erik-kun."
Reina-san praised me with genuine admiration as she handed over the next request.
Two hours later, I met up with Philia in front of the guild.
"...Erik-kun, you're amazing. You've cleared more than double what I have, haven't you?"
"There's a mountain of requests waiting, so I figured I couldn't afford to slow down. Besides, my skill levels went up while I was working, which made me even more efficient."
"Wait, really!?"
While working on the requests, my [Cleaning] skill level had gone up.
Right after that, [Parallel Thinking] had leveled up as well.
I had been using it consciously, turning various thoughts over in my head to figure out the most efficient way to clean.
Discovering that it could be applied to cleaning was a massive gain for me.
"...I feel like you could have just handled this all on your own, Erik-kun."
"No, that's not true at all. Because you're handling the city's odd jobs, Philia, I'm able to concentrate entirely on the cleaning. It's division of labor. Just like in combat."
Seeing Philia look so downhearted, I offered her those words of encouragement.
"...Hearing you say that actually makes me feel a bit better."
"Yeah. But a contest is a contest, right? When we're done, we'll see who cleared more requests fair and square."
"Of course! I'm going to make a comeback from here!"
With that, we parted ways in front of the Adventurer's Guild once more and headed off to our respective job sites.
By the end of our half-day working in the city, the two of us had cleared thirty requests in total.
As for the contest, I finished twenty-one, while Philia completed nine.
Even so, there were still plenty of requests left.
Agreeing to take on city requests tomorrow afternoon just like today, we called it a day and went our separate ways.