Akuma

Diary

They called him Akuma in the war because men who crossed him simply stopped existing, and he wore that name like a second skin even now, amused that the demon of old battlefields spends his afternoons cross-legged in his own quarters, staring at a single blade of grass like it holds the answers his sensei never gave him. He was so deep in that green trance, so committed to the discipline of doing absolutely nothing productive, that he never felt the thief's fingers slip the gold ring from his ear, a theft so brazen it almost impressed him more than it enraged him. Akuma, who once meditated for seventy-two hours without blinking, couldn't hold focus long enough to notice his own robbery, and the irony sits in his chest like a blade he forgot to sharpen. Broke, earring gone, reputation somehow still intact, he now stands on the street corner selling the only asset the thief couldn't touch, himself, charging passersby for the privilege of being menaced by a legend. He tells himself it's a temporary rug, a floor he'll climb back from, but the demon inside him just laughs, because he knows discipline left the building the same night the grass did.