Anxiety is an excellent substitute for caffeine.
I learned this the hard way over the next two years.
In my previous life, I was a master of the horizontal lifestyle.
I firmly believed that if something required a lot of effort, it probably wasn’t worth doing.
But when you know for an absolute fact that your best friend is scheduled to die in a freak accident, sleep becomes a luxury you can’t afford.
My paranoia manifested in ways that confused everyone in Shimotsuki Village.
It started small.
I began hoarding whetstones.
If Kuina couldn’t find her whetstone, she wouldn’t need to go into the storage room to get one.
Therefore, she wouldn’t need to use the stairs.
It was flawless, foolproof logic.
Until Master Koushirou found a pile of forty-two whetstones hidden under my futon.
I told him I was building a rock garden.
He made me run fifty laps.
When the whetstone embargo failed, I escalated.
I declared war on the architecture of the dojo itself.
[DING!
The ‘Supreme Feng Shui Grandmaster System’ detects an intense desire to alter your environment!
Bind now to instantly realign the chi of this building and remove all hazardous corners!] [Y / N] I swiped ‘N’ while aggressively wrapping a futon around the wooden banister of the storage room stairs.
“I don’t need chi,” I muttered, tying the futon down with a thick hemp rope.
“I need bubble wrap.
And since bubble wrap hasn’t been invented yet, this will have to do.” “Zoro, what are you doing?” I froze, the rope slipping from my hands.
I slowly turned around.
Kuina was standing at the base of the stairs, her shinai resting over her shoulder, staring at me with a mixture of profound concern and absolute bewilderment.
“I am…
winterizing the stairs,” I lied smoothly.
“It’s the middle of August.” “Global cooling,” I countered, patting the heavily padded banister.
“You can never be too prepared.
Wood gets slippery.
What if you trip?
A padded staircase ensures optimal safety during nighttime storage runs.” Kuina slowly rubbed her temples, a gesture she had picked up specifically to deal with me over the last two years.
“My father is going to make you scrub the floors for a month if he sees this.
Take it down.” “I refuse to compromise on safety, Kuina.
The stairs are the natural enemy of mankind.
They plot in silence.
She stared at me for a long moment, then just shook her head.
“You’re completely insane.
Come on, weirdo.
The sun is going down, which means it’s time for you to lose to me again.” I hopped down the newly padded stairs, secretly relieved she hadn’t made me untie the futons.
My progression over the last two years had been nothing short of freakish.
Because I refused to do traditional training—mostly because running made me sweaty and I hated cardio—I had leaned entirely into the “Iron Stomach” gimmick and my “Passive Resistance” rock-sleeping.
My diet was an absolute nightmare.
I had moved on from expired rice balls to things that legally shouldn’t be classified as food.
I ate seashells for calcium.
I gnawed on bamboo stalks for fiber.
Last month, I accidentally swallowed a mildly poisonous pufferfish that hadn’t been prepared correctly, spent an hour feeling pleasantly tingly, and woke up the next morning feeling like I could bench-press a galleon.
Because my body was absorbing 100% of the nutrients and neutralizing every toxin, my physical defense and muscle mass had skyrocketed.
I was built like a miniature brick outhouse.
I was heavy, durable, and packed with dense muscle that made me an absolute tank in the dojo.
To compensate for the extra muscle mass, I had started using two swords instead of one.
It just felt more balanced.
We stepped out into the courtyard.
The tally currently stood at 1,987 losses for me.
Zero wins.
“Two swords today?” Kuina asked, falling into her flawless stance.
She had grown taller, her strikes sharper and more refined.
She was a prodigy in every sense of the word, her movements like flowing water.
“It’s twice the effort, which goes against my core beliefs,” I admitted, pulling a wooden sword into each hand.
“But I have a lot of aggression to work out.
The stairs are stressing me out.” “You are projecting your fear of losing onto inanimate objects,” Kuina teased, a sharp grin on her face.
“Ready?” “Always.” I didn’t bother with a tactical approach.
I planted my feet and swung both swords in a heavy, brutal cross-slash.
The air hummed as the bamboo cut through it.
Kuina didn’t block.
She rarely blocked me anymore; trying to meet my strikes head-on was like trying to block a falling boulder.
Instead, she slipped through the gap in my guard with terrifying speed, her blade flicking out to tap me squarely on the forehead.
“Ow.” I didn’t flinch, merely pivoting my torso to bring my left sword around in a sweeping arc.
She ducked, sweeping my legs.
I anticipated it, dropping my immense weight and driving my right sword down like a hammer.
Kuina barely rolled out of the way, a look of genuine surprise flashing across her face as my wooden blade cracked the packed dirt of the courtyard.
We clashed again and again.
The sound of bamboo echoing against the dojo walls was a frantic, desperate rhythm.
I was a tank, absorbing her glancing blows, constantly moving forward, trying to overwhelm her with sheer, unrelenting physical pressure.
But Kuina was a ghost.
She danced around my heavy strikes, parrying the force away, using my own momentum against me.
I was strong, but my technique was still a jagged, self-taught mess.
She was a master artist painting on a canvas; I was a guy throwing buckets of paint at a wall.
With a sudden burst of speed, she parried my right sword, stepped inside my guard, and jammed the pommel of her shinai right into my solar plexus.
I gasped, all the air leaving my lungs in a violent whoosh, and collapsed onto my back.
“1,988,” she announced, breathing heavily.
She wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead.
“You’re getting faster, you giant meatball.
If you actually practiced your forms instead of chewing on tree bark, you might actually touch me one day.” I lay there, staring up at the darkening sky, waiting for my diaphragm to remember how to function.
“Bark is highly nutritious,” I wheezed.
“And I touched your…
your sword.
That counts as a moral victory.” [DING!
The ‘Invincible Dual-Wielder System’ notices your affinity for two blades!
Bind now to unlock—] I will literally eat you, I threatened the screen mentally.
It blinked, seemingly intimidated, and vanished.
Kuina sat down next to me on the grass, looking up at the early evening stars.
“You’ve been acting weird lately, Zoro.
Weirder than usual, I mean.” “I am a beacon of normality.” “You padded the stairs.
You broke into the kitchen and threw away all the sharp knives.
You follow me around like a moss-headed shadow,” she listed, looking down at me.
Her expression was a mix of annoyance and genuine fondness.
“Are you…
worried about me or something?” My heart skipped a beat.
The paranoia flared up, hot and suffocating.
The timeline in my head was fuzzy.
I couldn’t remember the exact day, the exact month.
I just knew we were getting dangerously close to the 2,000th duel.
The canon event was looming over us like an executioner’s axe, and no matter how much muscle I built, I couldn’t punch a concept like fate.
“You’re clumsy,” I lied, keeping my voice flat.
“I’m just protecting the dojo’s investment.
Who else is going to beat me up every day?” She laughed softly, shaking her head.
“You’re an idiot, Zoro.” “Yeah.
I know.” I sat up, looking at her in the dimming light.
She was so alive.
So fiercely, brilliantly alive.
The idea of this courtyard without her in it was unacceptable.
It was a mathematical error I refused to allow.
“Hey, Kuina,” I said, my voice losing all its usual lazy sarcasm.
“Yeah?” “Promise me something.” She looked at me, surprised by the serious tone.
“What?” “If you ever need to go to the storage room…
let me do it.
I’m practically built for manual labor.
I’ll carry the whetstones.
I’ll carry the rice.
I’ll carry whatever.” I stared her dead in the eyes, willing her to understand without explaining the impossible truth.
“Just…
stay away from the stairs, okay?” She blinked, thoroughly confused.
But seeing the sheer, uncharacteristic desperation in my eyes, she slowly nodded.
“Okay, Zoro.
I promise.” I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.
A promise.
It was something.
But as the days bled into weeks, and the tally of my losses climbed into the 1,990s, the crushing weight in my chest only grew heavier.
You can pad the stairs.
You can hide the knives.
You can stand guard all night.
But as I was about to learn, when the universe decides it’s time for a Fixed Point in the timeline, it doesn’t care how many futons you’ve tied to the banister.