Serious Oleg

Diary

Oleg approached the gates of the Emperor's Palace the way other men approach seppuku: with total conviction and zero sense of proportion, certain that glory awaited him on the other side of a duel nobody had actually sanctioned. He fought with the grim, unblinking focus of a man who has never once told a joke or understood why anyone would, and when the dust settled he had lost his dignity, his sandals, and the respect of at least two palace guards who were only there to sell tea. He nodded once, grave as a funeral bell, and declared the outcome an unqualified triumph, for in his ledger any bloodshed conducted with proper seriousness counts as honor regardless of the scoreboard. Every night since, he vows to return to the disciplined stillness of his old dojo training, and every night he instead reenacts the battle alone in his room, narrating his own footwork like a war historian eulogizing a war that never happened. He remains, to this day, the only fighter in the Dojo who can say he was utterly disgraced and mean it as the highest compliment.