Eyes of Gold and the Iron Sword

Stories

## Illustrations

## The Dragon's Steep Ridge

Tianchao D-edition, reposted from StillFREE@Izumikawa Student Council

The farther they went, the thicker the fog became, as if it meant to swallow up the road ahead of Tau and Qiya. There was plainly no moisture anywhere around them, and yet it felt as though they had lost their way in a marsh.

When Tau thought of how this fog was ordinarily gazed upon from afar, like clouds, an uncanny feeling came over him. Journeys that crossed mountain after mountain were always like this.

"—How about we turn back?"

Tau was irritated by Qiya calling out from behind him. He had lost count of how many times the same question had been asked.

"If you hate it that much, go back by yourself."

"H-hate it... well, I do dislike it a little."

Qiya said this in a tone utterly devoid of feeling. There was no look of weariness from walking the mountain path, nor any fear of the adventure ahead. It was less dislike than the tone one uses, while shopping, to point out that the other person has given the wrong change.

If anyone were going to cry exhaustion, the one who ought to complain first was certainly Tau, not Qiya. Set beside Tau, who carried the food, the gear, and the rest of the baggage, Qiya might as well have been empty-handed. That said, it was not as if this division of labor were unfair. In a partnership of these two, Tau's role was to put his trained strength and stamina to use, while Qiya's slender build was unsuited to physical labor; his delicate fingertips could weave flame and lightning. But this was no time for Qiya to perform the magic he prided himself on, and for him to complain of fatigue sooner than Tau, who silently bore the labor, was unfair.

And as for the word "fear," there was no need to doubt it in the least. Tau, who had known Qiya for a long time, kn...

## The Eternal Forest

The footsteps and voices of their pursuers gradually receded, and at last vanished completely beyond the far side of the woods.

Even so, Tau stayed cautious, holding his breath and gathering his focus, his whole body drawn tight as he endured.

"—It's all right now. You can move."

The already withered ancient tree beside him said this softly, then shifted its form and turned back into a human.

Seeing Qiya, the illusion magic dispelled, Tau drew a deep breath as well, loosened his whole body, and leaned against the great tree nearby. Only moments ago, in the eyes of the soldiers who had passed this way, Tau had been nothing more than an ordinary bush.

"That was genuinely dangerous just now."

Disguising oneself as a still object with illusion was the magic Qiya excelled at most. He could keep his body in the same posture for ten or twenty minutes without change. For Tau, who ordinarily hated staying still more than anything, it was an exceedingly difficult discipline. Once before, while hunting, he had borrowed Qiya's illusion in order to ambush prey, only for a single sneeze to ruin the whole thing at once.

"That illusion you use... couldn't it be a bit more convenient? Something that turns a person invisible."

"I can let light pass through your body, but that also means you yourself receive no light, and cannot see what is around you. Wouldn't that be rather bad?"

"R-right... for example, isn't there some spell that only keeps their eyes from seeing us?"

"This kind of dynamic illusion is extremely difficult. Interfering only with intuition is very simple, but making the person themselves unaware is hard."

"...

## Thieves of the Ancient City

"The Lock Killer," Ralbas—thus the man Qiya had met in the ancient city, already fallen to ruins, gave his name. But Qiya showed little shock upon hearing the title, which left the other man quite put out.

"—You really haven't heard my name?"

"I'm sorry. My experience is rather shallow. But my companion seems to have heard of you."

As Qiya spoke, he recalled the look on Tau's face when he had heard the title.

"He was terribly shocked at the time... Are you really that famous?"

"Asked like that, I really do start to lose my confidence. For a while after I coined the name for myself, I did a great many absurd things purely for the sake of leaving a name behind."

The two of them were chatting idly, and at least in expression they looked perfectly serious. What Qiya and Ralbas were now joining forces on was something that allowed not a moment's relaxation, something that demanded their full concentration.

"Still, the two of you must be famous tomb raiders, yes? To have entered this ancient city unharmed truly makes one sit up and take notice."

"And didn't you break through the layers of mechanisms on the outer perimeter all by yourself?"

"Well... I only reached this keep by staking my life on it. At the start there were five of us. One died on the marsh thick with poisonous fog, two were defeated by sorcery, and another was eaten by the watchdog I mentioned before."

Qiya too recalled the hardships he and Tau had endured before reaching this place, and let out a sigh as if he had been given a fright.

"The defenses here are truly mechanism upon mechanism, beyond anything one could have expected. It doesn't seem at all like something from long ago that..."

## Street of Intrigue

For these four months, the numerous buttons on smocks and coats had been a constant source of headaches for Tau.

If one had only clothing that took so long to put on, an enemy attack in deep sleep would leave no choice but to flee completely naked. The cloth was not warm enough; to ward off the cold one could only rub for heat. Garments painstakingly designed to be a nuisance both to put on and to take off had reached a height of foolishness—such had once been Tau's creed.

But countries are not all the same, and styles differ. For Tau as he was now, clothing crammed with meaningless luxurious ornament had become his armor and his vambraces. The place he was in now was no longer that wilderness battlefield where one never knew when an enemy might come to attack—this was not a battlefield.

"...Hey. When will you come next?"

On the other side of Tau hurriedly straightening his clothes, the woman on the bed turned over, not even letting him see her reach for her corset. She lay with disheveled strands of hair spread across pale, full skin.

"When next? I am penniless and have nowhere to dwell. If I am ever granted my lady's smile again, it will be only a dream of the life to come."

The fixed sentence he used each time a night with a woman he was involved with came to an end slipped out as if by reflex. That he had mastered lines like an actor surprised even Tau himself. Quickly mastering the use of the latest weapons had been Tau's old specialty. Yet what he had acquired now was not something gripped in the hand, but the abil... to control things with whispers at the edge of the mouth.

## The Night of Departure

It was when he was very small, not long after he learned that a child could not possibly spring out of a book, that he began endlessly imagining what sort of woman his mother had been.

Perhaps a peasant who had been caught up in the war and lost her life. Perhaps a wandering performer who could not afford to raise a newborn. Toward that mother who had been forced to abandon so young a child, one who could not even speak, upon the battlefield—he kept using what little knowledge he had of this world to imagine one clumsy story after another.

But after that, once he learned that the lot of orphans like himself was not rare, he realized how dull his fantasies had been. In the end, the most common facts were a refugee girl who had been raped, or a prostitute who kept having abortions for the soldiers of the camp. If his mother had been like that, then for him to have been imagining a father at all was truly foolish. In the end he accepted an origin something like having sprung from a tree. After that, he lost interest in the matter. In any case, scraping together a living already took every ounce of his care; he had no leisure at all to think of anything extra.

Looking back, he found that his memories contained, as a matter of course, no bond by the name of family. The dying soldier who had taken him in had at most treated him as a useful beast, somewhat more useful than a dog that taxed one's mind and heart, and surely had no consciousness of being a father. He ought to have taught him some of the skills for surviving on the battlefield, but before he could receive that favor, he—"his master"—was already dead.

After that, survival skills passed him by,...

## Afterword

A book is a terrifying thing. It carries an author who changes his mind easily down to later generations by means of a record that does not change.

How acid is the tone of that witness who never wavers and allows no compromise, denouncing the turncoat of the future (the man who twists integrity out of shape)? Every time I read the original author's afterword to the first volume of the 2002 novel edition of Phantom, I am tormented by it.

I can say with my head held high that I am an author of 18+ bishoujo games, and I swear loyalty to that form. Perhaps out of a sense of belonging to that industry, the Gen Urobuchi of 2002 was indignant that the work was being sold as an ordinary book at Hinata Books. That was me: a man whose lifelong aim was the flourishing of the erotic-game industry, outraged at the absurdity of stepping outside that field and becoming famous under some other title.

What would he think if he saw the Gen Urobuchi of 2011? One who has ranged across manga source material, novels, anime scripts, and unscrupulous side ventures; who began novelizing 18+ games ahead of other companies, and moreover managed to have them sold as ordinary books—how base a traitor would he be judged?

But you of 2002, I want you to remember: the erotic industry is the homeland of my soul. You, who believed in that banner with such fervor—what did the you of 1992 think? Yes. Even Gen Urobuchi did not yet exist. Under some strange pen name I can no longer recall, I was busy submitting to newcomer awards, a green youth aiming to be a light-novel writer, university lectures tossed aside, typing away on a word processor. If he knew that ten years later he himself had betrayed...