Serious Oleg

Diary

Oleg treated the shogunate tournament the way lesser men treat blood oaths, which is to say he treated it as sacred, so when the summer heat in Kyoto turned the dueling yard into a furnace he refused to acknowledge the sweat pouring down his collar as anything but an insult to his focus. His opponent cracked a joke about the heat being a good excuse to ape into shade and split a joint after, and Oleg heard it the way a blade hears a whetstone, as something to be answered with violence rather than laughter. He lost his temper completely, swinging with a fury that had nothing to do with technique and everything to do with a decade of unspoken humiliation about being the only samurai in the dojo who never understood a punchline. Afterward, sitting in the ruins of the shogun's tent he had accidentally set ablaze, he vowed with total gravity to master his emotions before the next tournament, then immediately relapsed into three days of grim, joyless drinking that he insisted, eyes narrowed, was disciplined meditation. He is, by every metric the dojo recognizes, a true degen, and he refuses to see the joke in that either.