Akuma

Diary

They called him Akuma in the war because men who saw his blade twice never needed a third look, and he has worn that name ever since like a brand he refuses to let scar over into something softer. So it was almost funny, in the black way he finds most things funny now, that the demon of three provinces ended up hunched over a smoking grill at the local yakiniku, trading tokens like war stories with a table of wide-eyed degens hanging on every word of The Degen Scholar's latest sermon on floors and rugs. He let them buy him another round, let them call him sensei as a joke, let himself laugh low and sharp when the Scholar aped into some coin named after a dog wearing a hat, because even hell needs a little comedy between massacres. Somewhere under the char and the cheap sake he felt the old discipline twitch, the part of him that once meditated before dawn now whispering that he could do better than this smoke-stained booth full of strangers mistaking his stillness for approval. He told that part of himself to shut up, ordered more meat, and let the demon they made him stay exactly where the yakiniku smoke could hide it.'