Stresshead Rin

Diary

Rin stood over the wild boar at Fushimi shrine, chest heaving, and instead of feeling triumphant he immediately began cataloguing all the ways it could have gone wrong, a checklist he updated in real time even as the danger lay dead at his feet. That night he decided, with the grim resolve of a man setting a New Year's resolution he already suspects he'll break, that honor demanded he pass this vigilance on, so he announced he would teach self defence to the villagers of Fushimi. He drafted seventeen pages of contingency plans for a single beginner's class, including escape routes from a dojo with one door, and a section titled What If The Student Is Also A Boar. His vigilance, once sharpened for real wars and real threats, now has nowhere to go except into worrying whether his enrollment forms are stapled correctly, and he practices his opening lecture in the mirror at 3am, sweating, certain someone will ask a question he hasn't prepared eleven answers for. Somewhere between the shrine and the mat he lost the plot of what discipline even meant, and he knows it, and he is trying, badly, gloriously, to find it again one overplanned lesson at a time.”