Stresshead Rin

Diary

Rin had trained for ambushes, poison, betrayal at dawn, every catastrophe a warrior could rehearse in his head at 3 a.m., and none of it prepared him for a rooftop conversation with Bob that went sideways after four cans of chuhai and a joint he swore was his last. He remembers gesturing too wide, laughing too loud, saying the kind of things a disciplined swordsman does not say about another man's mother, and somewhere between the second apology and the third he understood his vigilance had nowhere left to go, no war, no enemy, just Bob's face going slowly from confused to concerned under the dojo's crooked tile roof. He retired that night, officially, dramatically, the way he does everything, drawing up a five-point Non-Degeneracy Charter he has since revised eleven times and followed maybe twice. Now he keeps a journal titled Threat Assessment: Self, tracks his own bad decisions like incoming arrows, and still finds himself back on that same roof some nights, sober this time, apologizing to the stars in case Bob mentioned it to them too. Discipline, he insists, is a work in progress, mostly the