At the edge of the world, combat is accomplished on the edge of a knife. Death is to your right: six feet, off-center, keep your weak arm towards it. The strong arm, the armed arm, balances to the aft: keep it steady, straight, strong. Strong arm, sword arm. The weapon is an extension of yourself. Shift your weight, stay off-center, lean with the sword and lean away from death and always, always swing the sword away from the cliff. You keep the sword pointing towards safety.
Beak Point juts out into the ocean like its namesake. The waves ride high on the cliffs, and the roar is ferocious, and Miles has been visiting the crucible for six years. Miles rides to Beak Point on bicycle from his house in the Onett hills, every morning, and brings an aluminum bat with him. This is Miles's sword. This place is his training ground. In the early autumn, the sun rises a good deal before the school bell rings and this is when Miles enjoys his ritual most. This is when the impulse to train is strongest.
Miles isn't a big kid. He's a solid five-foot nine, weighs in at a stout one-forty, and is definitely more bone than muscle. Swinging an aluminum bat isn't exercise, it's ritual, and from the look of Miles you'd never knew he could swing anything at all. Miles isn't the kind of kid you'd expect to be so obsessive (he isn't loud, and he isn't quiet, so you can't say "it's always the quiet ones"), and for all intents and purposes his obsession is confined to a half-hour in the morning so it's really never been of any consequence. Miles wakes up, swings a bat around on Beak Point, and then goes to school and is a normal kid. Miles has never been different in anyone's eyes except his own.
"Haven't you ever felt," Miles tells himself soul-deep in the sea breeze, "that you were just meant to be a warrior? That you were supposed to wake up and do this, that you had to train for something?" Ever since he was first discovered and claimed a vandal, Miles has recited and rehearsed his ramifications; "Some of us are just born fighters", "Some of us are just meant to be heroes", "Some of us are just different". Anyone who sees Miles on the cliff in the morning tends to walk away smiling ever since Miles got his lines down pat: "He's just a kid," they tell themselves. "It's good to see kids are still so imaginative."
Miles Gravin is sixteen years-old and is a junior in high school. He has no explanation for his own habit save the explanation he gives others, which he's come to believe is the honest-to-God truth.
This is October 31st, not Halloween, and Miles Gravin is at Beak Point with his sword and dressed for Halloween which comes sometime after the sun rises. Miles counts the minutes, and his sword strikes, and how high the waves crash against the rocks and Miles counts his breaths and his heart beats when he's done and resting before the ride back to school. Miles is walking back to his bike, and Miles is too deep in his own chest listening to his heart to hear the rustling in the bush.
The rabid dog leaps and is on top of Miles before Miles can react. The dog snaps, barks, growls and tears ferociously, sinking its teeth into an escaping Miles's shirt and ripping a gash in the fabric as he grips his sword and wheels around to face the animal. The two square off. Miles is holding his bat, his sword, and the dog is baring his teeth. The two are unmoving. The dog stands, stares, and Miles is the first to strike with a massive swing of his bat that bashes the dog square on the head and pounds it to the ground. The dog howls ineffectually. Miles bashes again, and the dog is again unmoving.
This is the natural state of the dog, before it became rabid and runaway. The dog has returned to normal.
The dog is asleep.
Miles Gravin gets on his bike, and Miles Gravin idly tends to the tear on his shirt while he wants for early-morning traffic to pass. The blue-and-yellow striped shirt, horizontal, not vertical, is torn briefly along the grain of a stripe and Miles shrugs it off. His encounter with the dog is hanging in the back of his mind, and Miles's morning-mantras are knocking on the door of his mind but Miles refuses to give in. This is an obsession confined to thirty-minutes. Miles allows himself to train, but Miles will not allow himself to jump to conclusions. Miles gives up on the traffic, locks his bike to a sign, and begins plodding one-three-four on the sidewalk.
One-three-four is a remnant of Miles's morning mantras. You count one-three-four to keep yourself on your toes; the omission of a number is unnatural. If you're paying attention to the numbers, you're certainly not zoning out and certainly not going to mess up enough to take a misstep that'll place you several-hundred feet down in the ocean. So Miles steps one-three-four down the road, pulling his American Literature essay out of his backpack so he may revel in its glory.
Miles first conceived this essay many years ago, certainly before it was assigned and with some luck before Miles knew how to read or write. Miles conceived this essay when he first laid eyes on Donkey Kong, and a little switch flipped in the back of Miles's mind and he said to himself, "This is a metaphor for life." Miles's American Literature essay is a paralleling of life to the escapades of a broad-shouldered plumber with a penchant for princesses. In Miles's essay, this tedium of going to school is equivalent to climbing a ladder.
You can go up, or you can go down, but there's certainly no place else you can go. Sink or swim. Pass or fail. Ladders may be linear, but ladders are simple, and if you keep your direction in mind ladders are no problem to navigate. Ladders are the easiest way to get ahead in life. School is a ladder.
The morning is wearing on and Miles is closing in on his school. Miles is passing the Onett arcade, and in front of the arcade Miles spots something he never imagined he would see with his own eyes. There are seven kids amassed in front of the arcade, in black leather, bearing the characteristic faux-fins of the Sharks.
The Sharks are a legend in Onett. Onett has a lot of legends, the Sharks probably being the least of them, except for the fact the Sharks have an obscure tie-in to a legend about a boy named Ness that came into being just a few years ago. The Sharks are a figment of the past, just a legend, and here Miles sees seven Sharks assembled and Miles knows full-well the extent of the Sharks' malice.
There are seven Sharks in front of the arcade and there's one Shark in the alleyway lighting up a cigarette. Miles is standing at the only open end of the alleyway, and Miles has already unstrapped his bat from his backpack and a thousand heroic quotes are running through Miles's mind.
This is the sword. This is the bat. This is the spear, the lance, the rifle, the weapon of choice wielded by archetypical hero X.
This is the weapon that doles out justice.
Miles is taking slow steps because the density of thoughts running through Miles's mind have made Miles incredibly heavy. Miles takes crashing boom-bang steps that resonate through the alleyway, and somewhere in the confused face of the Shark Miles is able to pick out the abstract emotion of fear.
Miles raises the bat and Miles brings the bat down on a Shark that is only vaguely aware of the imminent peril she's faced with. She is immediately struck down, bleeding, some crumpled mass, and only after Miles has stripped every inch of leather from her body and removed the faux-fin on her head is Miles content to whisper to himself, "The Shark returned to normal," and walk out of the alleyway.
Flash forward.
There are seven Sharks chasing Miles down the street. There are more Sharks amassed here than Miles knows he can deal with at his level of proficiency, but Miles is still smiling because there's a bus coming and Miles is well-aware of the interconnecting legends of Eagleland and how to deal with this resurgence.
Rabid dogs and Sharks in Onett. Blue-and-yellow stripes, a bat. Miles adjusts his red baseball cap and hurriedly hops on the bus.
Miles can't run from the facts anymore. Miles recites his morning mantras, some very special mantras, and Miles is still counting one-three-four as he recites: "I am the ill omen. My birth is a sign of some ill times, the fact that I, a warrior, have been born is indication. I am indication something bad about to happen." Miles is talking slowly and softly and Miles appends his morning mantra, "I now see the meaning of these signs and the purpose of my birth. It's true, we haven't learned our lessons, and now history is doomed to repeat itself." The bus is headed to Twoson.