Monday Morning

[ninja_coder]

 
Tomo and I have both been inventing new Jōgesen kata (and refinements to the sansetsukon itself), and of course, we have now come up with incompatible moves. I got to the castle this morning and found a message from Tomo to all the warriors, saying he had devised some upgrades to our sansetsukon. (Now the chain links move a bit more smoothly, which is good.) I took a new one from the armory, and promptly discovered that it makes hash of the latest moves I'd been developing on Friday.

*sigh* This is one of the perils of having more than one warrior using the same armory. (Of course, the drawbacks of having only one warrior are far, far worse.) Still, I must now spend part of my morning adjusting my new kata.

And I do not know what to do about Jīya, the new Nichiren abbess. I can tell that she is simply trying to motivate the warriors, and lift our spirits...

But.

It is rarely necessary to tell a good warrior when he has been doing a good job. We know already. Perhaps priests and monks need such constant encouragement, but as a warrior, I know that if my enemies are dying and I am surviving, I am doing well. By telling me that I am doing well, Jīya merely makes me wonder if she thought I had any doubt about it.

Perhaps this annoys me so much because, deep in my heart, I almost always do have doubt. Couldn't I be killing them faster, or more silently? Am I retaining enough awareness of the clan's larger plans? Could I be using better tactics and strategy if I had studied with a respected warriors' school? Am I still "the junior one" on our team? These are all the distractions of maya, but they still plague me.

I wish she would simply leave me in peace, and let me go kill enemies. I have seen her telling Jimon similar things, and he seemed no more comfortable than I.