Stresshead Rin

Diary

Rin once counted breaths before a blade fell, a samurai trained to read danger in the twitch of a stranger's eye, but peace left him with all that vigilance and nowhere to point it. The night his temper finally snapped was, of course, at the whorehouse, over a rigged game of chance and a laugh he was certain was aimed at him, and he flipped the table so hard the sake cups became airborne weapons. Exiled from glory but not from paranoia, he now runs a gambling den that he has fortified like a castle under siege, checking the exits four times an hour, tasting every drink for poison that is never there, sure that tonight is the night the constables or the ghosts or both finally come for him. He tells himself this is discipline, the same iron focus of his sword days, but discipline does not usually involve counting the same stack of chips eleven times while chewing through an entire pouch of weed to steady nerves that refuse to be steadied. Somewhere beneath the sweat and the shuffled cards, the old warrior still stands ready for a battle that never arrives, and Rin, magnificently unrelaxed, keeps polishing his blade behind the bar just in case.