Stresshead Rin

Diary

Rin once commanded respect on real battlefields, but these days his only conquest is the twelve square feet of his own quarters, which he has declared shogun of roughly four hundred times and lost roughly four hundred times, mostly to a rogue sock and a candle he insists is plotting against him. Every morning he wakes at an ungodly hour, does forty pushups he counted twice out of paranoia, and swears today is the day he finally holds the floor, both the wooden kind and the crypto kind, since he has also convinced himself his bags are staging a coup while he sleeps. He checks the charts the way he used to check for ambushes, whispering worst-case scenarios to a room that has never once fought back, then loses his nerve, apes into something dumb out of sheer nervous energy, and gets rugged before his tea cools. By dusk he's back in his self-appointed throne room, re-declaring shogunhood over a pile of laundry he refuses to fold because folding feels like surrender. He relives the same tiny war daily, a great man still vigilant for a battle that packed up and left decades ago, forever bracing for an attack that is, at this point, just his own anxiety wearing armor.