Stresshead Rin

Diary

Rin had drawn up seventeen contingency plans before he ever set foot in the gambling house, each one laminated, each one useless the moment the bandits mistook his nervous pacing for leadership and voted him warlord of their little dice-and-sake operation. He tried to run it like a proper campaign, checklists for cheating, backup plans for backup plans, a whole spreadsheet devoted to who owed what to whom, and somewhere between round four and the sixth cup of unlabeled liquor he noticed the rash creeping up his forearm like a red omen he had absolutely no laminated card for. Every fiber of the disciplined swordsman he used to be screamed to identify the pathogen, quarantine the wound, file an incident report to a dojo that no longer existed, but the degenerate currently wearing his face just pulled his sleeve down and went all in on a hand he could not win. He told himself it was heat rash, or bad karma, or the floor giving out beneath a bet that was always rugged from the start, anything but the truth that vigilance with nothing left to guard just curdles into bad decisions and worse skin. In the end he chose the oldest samurai technique still available to him: strategic, deliberate forgetting, filed neatly beside the seventeen plans he never got to use.