Stresshead Rin

Diary

Rin had drawn up seventeen contingency plans for the meeting in the Dojo gardens, none of which accounted for the possibility that blackmailing your own friend might, in fact, be a fireable offense. He had rehearsed the exchange the night before, whispering threats to a bonsai tree until it looked, frankly, terrified, but the moment his friend's face crumpled beneath the cherry blossoms, Rin's carefully laminated flowchart of leverage collapsed into pure flop sweat. Somewhere beneath the anxiety was the old samurai discipline he still polished like a blade nobody let him carry anymore, the vigilance with no war left to spend it on, curdling instead into petty extortion and a phone buzzing with his termination notice. He apologized to the koi pond first, then to his friend, then filed the whole disaster under a growing folder labeled Reasons I Am Definitely, Statistically, A True Degen. Even now he keeps a spreadsheet tracking his own self-improvement streaks, and even now the longest one reads a humble zero days.