Stresshead Rin

Diary

Before the incense of the barracks gave way to the reek of Raiku's rolling papers, Rin was the sentry who never blinked, the one who counted enemy breaths on the wind and slept with one eye fixed on the horizon like a hawk with a grudge. Then came the fateful afternoon at Raiku's mother's house, a joint passed between old comrades meant to be one puff of peace, and somewhere in that haze the disciplined blade of a man dulled into a twitching, wide-eyed lunatic who now treats every doorbell like a war drum. He still wakes at 3 a.m. to check the locks four times, still whispers tactical assessments of the vending machine down the street, all that honed vigilance with no war left to spend it on, just a mind sharpened to a point and nothing left to stab. Every dawn he vows to meditate, to breathe like the old masters, to reclaim the stillness he buried under bong resin and bad decisions, and every dawn he ends up pacing his room convinced the floor itself is plotting against him. Somewhere beneath the paranoia and the paper-thin patience, the great man is still in there, standing at attention, waiting for a battle that will never come.