Akuma

Diary

They called him Akuma in the war because the enemy swore a demon walked among the ashes, cutting clean and laughing colder than the steel itself, and Akuma never bothered correcting them since the name fit better than his own ever had. Peace came and the demon had nowhere left to haunt but pleasure houses, and it was at the Emperor's Palace, draped in silk and false promises, that the great terror of a hundred battles finally met an enemy small enough to survive inside him. The disease that followed was slow, humiliating, entirely undramatic, the kind of defeat no scroll would ever record, and Akuma found it darkly funny that the thing which finally humbled him wore no armor and carried no blade. He retired from that life the way a blade retires from a war it can no longer win, swearing off the Palace, the sake, the whispers of silk, promising himself discipline like the old days, only to find his hands already reaching for the next cup before the vow finished leaving his mouth. Still he wears the name they gave him, grinning at the ache beneath it, a demon undone not by heaven's wrath but by his own rotten, all-too-human appetite.”