THE FALL OF ACRE

1.

It is always snowing in the North.

With the sound of her teammates' steps flying off the walls, Number Seven "Five-Swing" Eva is choking, gasping for air. The world has, unexpectedly, turned a powerless white and for a short, brief interval she does not know where she is. As the dead weight in her arms materializes – it is her sword! – she stumbles around and sees brick – snow – brick – snow. She strokes the surface as if touching something solid will kick-start her sanity

It doesn't. Instead wherever her hand goes, a silvery crimson dash marks its wake.

As her vision solidifies, she can make out the clumped splashes of snow from the blurred mirages her mind conjures. Is this absence of colour an instinctive response to being injured, or a preventive measure against being further wounded? She clamps her eyelids down as tight as she can, and when everything painlessly goes dark, she hopes darkness will give way to something more than just black, white and red.

"Captain! CAPTAIN!"

At the sound of a human tongue thrashing in a human's throat her eyelids stammer in disbelief. A warm, disaffected figure, crisp with exertion and spotted with snowflakes bounds itself into her face. They came back for me? Stupid idiots, she wants to say.

A slippery, mushy object fastens itself to the underside of her arm; immediately she has a vision of a creature with scales and a sword-tipped tongue, and she tries to swat the pressure on her arm away. But it hangs on even tighter, and its force is so secure it dangles her in the air and plants her on her feet. Something is breathing into her face – and friction bursts from her cheeks – like a lover's desperate, last embrace – and a thumb-shaped blockade screens the light from her eyes.

"Captain Eva – No – it's me – it's Lucia –"

When the light returns, she is inhaling the reeking stench of unwashed armour and the sweaty body underneath it. Lucia? There's some other scent curling unconsciously to batter her senses: a filthy, bestial, odour –

"I thought I told you to leave –" she tries to say with professional non-commitment, but it ends up sounding as if there were something stuck in her nose.

"Shut up and walk, Captain!"

The response hurls into her like a cuff in the chin, and when her teammates releases the grip on her arm, Eva sees Lucia's face properly for the first time: oily, her complexion as pale as chalk, the bright flower of a wound like an eyepatch over her left eye, the drilled-down brows which, Eva thinks, would be a turn-on for her any other day, but today – because today is really a bad day.

Her feet start to follow Lucia. And then the entire cellar crumbles to an orchestra of a thousand monsters singing.

2.

"Do you know why an Awakened Being hunt requires four warriors?"

She asks this every time she is deployed to go on a hunt. More because as the only single-digit among the hunters she has the experience, privilege and right to ask questions and demand answers. And, this hunt (now, she can think of it as a hunt gone wrong) had not been an exception. Eva had sat at their rendezvous – a cattle ranch just beyond the obscurely-named mountain range which ran like a snowy beard along the border of the northern lands of Alphonse – in lotus position, her blade stacked at a perfect right angle to the ground, one hand resting on her thigh.

"Two warriors to hold the monster down. One to slice its throat. And the last one to run off and get help if the other three fail."

Her teammates waited, the drowsy protests of bulls and cows being led into the shed for slaughter, and performed the mandatory introductions. All had been on at least one Awakened Being hunt. All had, in her finely-honed opinion, a reasonable attitude to their being here, even though they had no choice. None, however, were like her, having had the tragic personal history of growing up in the North.

Lucia, Kate, Dana. She did not like names – there were too many names cluttered in her memory of teammates who never made it past their first Awakened Being hunt in the North. So she had no intention of remembering them, at least for now.

"I just have one rule for hunts," she said. Her back arched and her hands on her lap, sage-like, she looked down on them with the wisdom of crawling through snow to breathe for air and of days without any hope of light. "You will follow my orders down to the every syllable I say. Obey me and you live. Otherwise, I will make sure you will never go on another hunt like this ever."

"Understood?"

When neither of them said a word, she nodded at the imagined consent. She shouldered her Claymore and stalked on their trail towards the mountains entrenched in fog and snow.

Eva poles her hand upright. A viscous hailstorm of stone and snow creeps up towards her fingers but stops short of burying her entire hand. She thinks: lying here in the rubble is like the perfect sleep I have yet to have after all these years.

But the roar of the monsters outside thuds into her ears, and she smashes her other hand through the wreckage. On her first time standing without help after the ambush her back creaks like a rusted sword coming out of its sheath.

"We need to get into cover!" someone, one of her team members, shouts back.

Eva sees the Awakened Being dart from the rooftops down at her, its face feline, eyes ablaze. In the empty square of the destroyed building, there is no way for her to run. But, then again, at last there is space to swing her Claymore –

She hits the Awakened Being right in the side of its forehead. Its partially severed temple splays across the snow. Five swings and it's all over. She doesn't need even three. The Claymore whirls in her hand. Her wrist strains like a stringed instrument, muscles tenses; the blade strikes the monster's face, splintering it into pieces.

But when Eva looks up, she sees ten more Awakened Beings roosting on the rooftops. Three more have crowded the snow-slipped alley. They all charge at once. She thinks: there's no space in the street to fight.

Their encampment had been nothing spectacular. At the bare edge of the mountain pass which led into Alphonse, with a glacier leaking like an untended wound from the hills to their south, they finally stopped after almost two days' of traveling. Eva had taken the first watch, and ordered her team to rest for the final leg of their journey.

At the third watch of the night, one of the warriors – Lucia, was it? – broke cover and joined her out of the ledge overlooking the glacier.

"Captain," she acknowledged her. Eva saw the warrior had her ponytail loose, the pockets of unshaved hair lining her sideburns, her armour missing.

"I thought I ordered you to rest," Eva said.

"The other members of your team are not following your orders, either."

Eva regained her footing and stuck her head out into the slit of a cave. In the cloistered darkness of a half-dead fire, she could make out the murky forms of one of the warriors – Dana, was it? – her downturned face over her teammate's shiny frame, as if taking a deep drink from a well. Eva could see, in spite of the dark, their bare hands and arms tangled like overgrown bramble.

She allowed herself a sigh, then returned to her position.

She nodded to Lucia: "I do not interfere with the lives of my team members,"

Lucia betrayed a half-laugh. "Yes, Captain."

Eva was not in the mood to contend with a cocky double-digit warrior. Multiple encounters had taught her they were the most flamboyant, had the most erratic attitude and were not worth their weight in words on the field of battle. She hunkered down deeper in her cloak, letting the wind bash her only on her face.

A full blown silence had passed between them before Lucia's voice, slightly less confident and half-eaten by the wind, started again:

"They say you're the strategist in the top ten," she had mouthed silence. "How much of what they say back in Staff is true, Captain?"

"There are two things you need to understand about the hunt," Eva made herself clear before they set off the following morning. "Engagements in urban areas are different from your usual scream and slash fights –"

It had not been told to her, but she had anticipated it anyway: the town had not been evacuated, the headman of the town put under the assumption they were dealing with yoma. All that indicated there were problems within the town was the plain of disturbed earth on the town's outskirts, the snow disrupted and fresh earth showing like rotten skin beneath badly cut wooden crosses.

As with all cities haunted by monsters, the square had been deserted and the gates unmanned. People had been so afraid to come out of their houses that their doors were buried in a metre of snowfall. Feral dogs with ribcages showing like teeth on their bodies roamed the streets. The mayor sat in his home and spoke with them through the window, his voice indistinguishable from the croaking hum of wind blasting through the empty streets.

Still, the town itself was a congested stack of stone buildings built under the shadow of a mighty ledge. Its southern edge ended in a quarry-like outcrop of granite. The town had been built into the mountain, they were told, so much so that from afar, it looked as if a chunk of rock had been blown out of from side of the mountain and scattered into small pieces all over the valley.

The streets were awkwardly narrow, houses were built at irrationally sharp angles to the street and an entire network of smaller alley used for rubbish disposal branched out from each street like veins on a person's arm.

"– And the second thing you should realise is in a town is: you prepare for an ambush at every turn."

It had been relatively easy to locate the Awakened Being, or at least isolate its hostile, exposed signature. Eva decided it was best to start their mission immediately, since she had suspected a storm was coming. Asked how she knew, she replied northerners simply can sense these things.

They had tracked down the fluctuating signal to the edge of town, where the houses were so tightly packed they appeared to be huddled in a conspiracy against them. At the stone archway built like a gate to the underworld, Eva halted their hunting party.

Seeking for traces of yoki hiding deep within towns was an ability she had developed during her years posted to the north, so she felt overly sensitive to even the faintest differences in yoki amongst her own team. At this very moment, their Claymores drawn, she herself feeling a hot syringe of adrenaline pushing itself past her own yoki, she collected the feelings of her team – Dana the only one alert and waiting – Kate's eyes flitting between the dark entrance into the street and Dana – and finally, Lucia, nervously fingering her blade while trying to look as though she had the benefit of experience.

"Last thing – keep the fight under a roof –"

"We play to our strengths. We play to our environment –"

Sure enough, Eva predicted it correctly: an Awakened Being, hiding behind a wall within one of the houses, waiting to ambush them. So Eva ordered Lucia and Dana to charge the building, while she and Kate hacked down the wall. The monster, stunned that its moves had been successfully read, attempted to knock the entire house down.

"If anything fails, the Awakened Being will try to do the thing it only knows how to do: take away our cover and try to kill some of us in the wreckage –"

As the house crumbled under its release of almost a hundred scythes from its fingers, Eva and Kate went to head it off directly, while Lucia and Dana took cover in a nearby house. Feigning defeat, they took to retreating into the rigged building, down a cellar and into a corridor open to the sky. As the Awakened Being followed them down, it found itself surrounded on both sides by thick stone walls meant to keep wine cool in the winter, and hemmed in from above by two levels of wooden flooring.

At the signal, they ambushed the creature: Lucia and Dana from the top, Eva and Kate rushing down from either side of the corridor.

"Follow my plan down to the word and we all survive –"

As Lucia dealt the killing blow, it seemed so simple.

And then the entire house came crashing down.

"I'm not a strategist in the sense of the word."

"Are you trying to give me a lecture in vocabulary, Captain?"

She had sighed, pulling down her cloak to reveal her full face. "You should stop acting as if you're going to become a single digit. Kill an Awakened Being first –"

"Whatever you say – but I want to know why everyone says you're so strong –"

As she blunders into a wall, her shoulder clocks itself out of place. She falls face first into the snow again and her senses are burned into a whiteness so repulsive she is on her feet again as soon as she can shake the white away. The Awakened Being advancing on me raises its tail – from where she stands it looks like a flat palm laced with spines – and as it comes down, Eva recovers just in time to return a strike.

But she retreats before the monster turns to meet her again, fumbling into the sharp, upturned surfaces of chunks of rubble. She races into another alley, her huge blade slapping at the ground as her hands punch forward with a repetitive precision. There, at the end, Dana is dragging Kate away from where Lucia is single-handedly battling an Awakened Being.

Judging by the flesh and blood scattered in a halo around Lucia, Eva can tell she has at least slaughtered two Awakened Beings – perhaps something the absence of such feral desperation would not have allowed her to do. She feels a sting of pride for the girl she had labeled prude earlier. But, no, now is not the time – the monsters closing in behind her, Eva seizes Dana's shattered shoulder and forces her aside –

"You know every warrior develops her own technique, right?"

"Yeah."

"There's a reason why I'm called Five-Swing," Eva had chosen to pause. She felt blowing her own trumpet was idiotic without a willing or at least convinced listener.

"Go on Captain. Tell me."

"I have this – technique – that's a kind of close-range move to get me out of bad situations –"

To make sure Dana stays down, Eva jabs her with the hilt of her Claymore, briefly muttering "sorry" before she yells at Lucia to duck.

She lets her wrist vibrate, the yoki flooding it making her muscle flex, curl and then the pain begins to drive her sword into release. Lucia takes a moment to see this; in her moment of distraction, the Awakened Being claps her in the face with an uppercut. Eva sees her fall back into the stop, her nose bent at an impossibly obtuse angle.

By now her right wrist is beginning to tremble so much she thinks she will divulge her own fingernails to the force. Fastening her second hand to the hilt she pushes the sword at the Awakened beings coming up at her from behind. Her first swing almost carries her with her sword, but she cuts through everything: flesh, bone, carapace. And she makes it two, three, four –

At the fifth swing, the buildings around her release their stones and glass, and their wood and everything that makes them solid floats to the over-swing of her Claymore in a whirlwind of debris. The surrounding chorus of Awakened Beings falling to her swing rise and then fall, plunging to a post-destruction silence, nothing but the wind supplying the only sound.

Eva collapses, sweat clouding her vision, the cold rapidly burning at it. She throws a glance across to Dana, who is standing, a longitudinal bruise sloping down her face where she had been hit. Beyond her, is Lucia, walking, her face incredulous, the recipient of miraculous conversion from her disbelief –

"Why don't we have a short spar and you show it to me now?" she had asked me.

And Eva, tempted as she was to silence Lucia once and for all, had taken her Claymore, still sheathed, and laid it astride her reclining form:

"You give me an Awakened's head first."

"Captain, you must be joking – I've never even been able to fight one on equal terms –"

"Then shut it and let me sleep."

She is not sure what she should do next, but now she is running. They need to get as far away from the accursed town as far as possible – that is the new mission – and she needs to tell her handler that the Awakened Beings are acting like a hunting party, hunting Claymores –

When the pressure of the yoki becomes too unbearable, she finally relents: she stops the weary troupe of wounded to stare back at where the town was. A horizon of restless yoma energy arches her view of the town like a sunset against a backdrop stone-grey mountains. She cannot see what is coming, so she draws her blade, and –

"Kate is down!" Lucia shouts.

The girl has bled out, a carpet of lush crimson wrapping her body as snowflakes provide the ornamental décor. But what, Eva thinks, can she do now, with the sun about the set over the plains so wrecked with snow?

A flush of yoki. And something hits Lucia through the throat –

"Lucia!" her own voice is hoarse with pain.

What was it? She thinks. Over the rim of Lucia's sprawled form, she sees a scene so breathless she is herself paralyzed: scenery whitened by the shroud of wind-tossed snow, the frame for Awakened Beings as far as the eye can see.

When she finally turns her eyes away from the scenery, she struggles to leave Lucia and Kate behind. Dana is calling out to her, but the voice is disembodied, as if transmitted through water, more a fragment of noise rather than anything audible. Eva turns to where the plain line of the horizon is not littered with monsters, and she walks towards it, turning her back on a battle she knows is impossible to win.

Dana is shouting something; now she really wants to make her shut up, even though the wind is diluting the younger warrior's voice. She concentrates on the distant stars just above the absolute white of the land – and as she does so, the horizon inverts – just for a second – and corrects itself, her view of the sky now more prominent – she feels her chin getting cold –

What is she doing on the ground? She asks herself. Dana's voice is like an animal's now, no longer human, but screeching in a single tone that goes on and on –

Eva tries to see why she is yelling so inhumanely, and in the snow she sees what looks like a pair of legs badly scraped off at the thighs lying a few feet away. Do they belong to Dana? Eva pities the girl, but when she moves her hands to try to stabilize herself and get to her feet she understands that – coincidentally – she, too, is missing a pair of thighs, knees and feet. She reasons that this is not happening, and even if it is, she tells herself to keep calm – she lifts the awesome meaty stump of her hamstring slowly to stop the bleeding. It did not hurt yet, she thinks – but – ah, yes, now it does –

In the meantime she feels that maybe it isn't so bad at all, this lack of legs – she can finally rest from battle, breathe easy through the blank scent of snow and the copper-iron odour of her own blood. Even though it's getting cold – even though she can feel the yoma inside her thrashing for a last encore – even though the world is at last narrowing to a crushing pulse of dirty yoki she has never felt before –

But yes, she thinks as her own vision is absorbed into dusty twilight, this is comfortable (at last Dana has quieted down) – and the day is fading into a reasonable darkness, the sound of the wind a closing song –

And the devious eyes bubbling above her signal a fitful goodbye.

Completed: 01.09.09

NOTES:

On The Fall of Acre: took some liberty on mixing timelines. And also had to come up with an identity for Eva, the most underrepresented Claymore in the top 10.

It took a year, but finally the collection comes to an end!

These 10 stories have at least 13 characters in Claymore between them, been read by a total of at least 3 beta-editors & have been submitted twice to 2 short story workshops. Most of all, I'm glad I finished this personal challenge. And I'm glad for all those who've read (even if you didn't review), because this project was born out a whim & has at least met with some purpose.

For the remaining Claymore short stories which I didn't put in this project, I'll be slowly uploading them onto as one-shots.

And, if you want to collaborate with me on another project like this, please email me. I need something to keep my writing going :)

And, lastly, to those who've helped me write better by commenting on these 10 stories: T35, Yosei, Hell, Fenrir, Tenken, NobodyMan, Mikke, Bishou, Dreamreaper, MisterJB, Shiek & Useful Oxymoron.