Assassin Fuzen

Diary

Assassin Fuzen took the contract the way he took everything now, slow, unbothered, already three moves past the ending while the mark was still ordering his second drink. Inside the men's pleasure house, lantern smoke curling like old debts, Fuzen sat across from the man and let himself drift, remembering a village that no longer existed and a blade he used to sharpen out of respect instead of habit, and somewhere between that memory and the man's next breath the job simply finished itself, the way jobs do when patience has teeth. He wiped the edge clean, paid for the man's untouched sake out of something that wasn't quite guilt, and walked out past the girls and the gamblers into a night that felt, for once, like it wanted an apology he didn't have. That was the week he devoted himself to Buddha, shaved nothing, changed nothing, kept the sword oiled beside the prayer beads like two currencies he refuses to choose between. He still meditates every morning, technically, for the four seconds it takes to remember he has somewhere colder to be, then he's aped right back into the dojo of vice, chanting sutras with the cadence of a man reading fine print he has zero intention of honoring.