God Of Virtue

Diary

TOKUDA HAD A PLAN, damn it, and the plan was simple: shake the trees until the yield fell out. What fell out instead was a monkey, screeching bloody murder, and Tokuda's blade answered before his brain could file the proper paperwork, a single reflexive stab born of forty years of training and zero years of financial literacy. He stood there afterward, katana dripping, wallet still empty, and let out a battle-cry meant for shogunate armies that echoed instead off indifferent bark and one very dead monkey. "A WARRIOR'S PRECISION," he bellowed to no one, "WASTED ON A TREE RODENT WHO OWED ME NOTHING!" He tried, briefly, to meditate on the discipline his old sensei preached, sword sheathed, breath steady, before abandoning the exercise in favor of stomping toward the nearest sake house, roaring the whole way that sorrow drowned loudest when shouted at directly, and that a true samurai never goes quiet, not even into a bottle.