Akuma

Diary

They called him Akuma in the war because the name fit the way he moved through men, and he never bothered correcting them, wearing the devil's name the way other soldiers wore scars. It was among the trees, of all places, that the demon met its reckoning, some unseen hand or branch or spirit copping a feel in the dark and knocking something loose in his skull that the wars never managed to shake free. He rose from that grove a changed man, or so he tells it, kneeling before Buddha with the same grim focus he once reserved for slitting throats, chanting sutras like they're battle formations. The trouble is enlightenment doesn't pay for the sake he still drinks at 4 AM or the bets he still places on cockfights behind the temple, and every morning he apologizes to the statue like it's his commanding officer before he goes and disappoints it again. Akuma finds this hilarious, in the way only a man who has made peace with being a joke to the universe can, bowing low, grinning wide, forever one groping ghost away from actual holiness.