Why Are You Making Noise All Day and Fighting All Night?
As the Claymores had sensed and expected, the enemies who arrived in the northern town of Pieta on that snowy, wind-whipped dusk—the Awakened beings—far exceeded their imaginations in the quality, quantity, and strength of their yoki, as well as in every other respect.
A full twenty-seven of them!
That was right!
Twenty-seven Awakened Ones, every last one of them—not ordinary Yoma!
Their number was astonishingly three greater than the total of twenty-four Claymores gathered in the town of Pieta!
The thing was, in a one-on-one fight, the vast majority of the twenty-four Claymores present would be slaughtered by an ordinary Awakened One!
So there was no doubt about it: the number was so great that the Claymores could only despair. They had no chance of winning easily!
And once again, it proved how correct and wise Miria, the Claymore commander, had been when she ordered all the residents of Pieta to evacuate before sunset!
But that didn't help!
The townspeople no longer had to worry about being harmed by the Awakened Ones or other Yoma, or caught in the fighting. But the Claymores still had to face those powerful enemies, whose numbers were terrifying!
And the crucial point was that no decision or order could change the difference in strength between the two sides or tip the scales of victory.
What was coming was an overwhelming battle that no one could imagine the Claymores winning. Of the twenty-four warriors, the number who might survive by sheer luck was an agonizing unknown.
But...
As the Awakened monsters arrived and the battle officially began, every Claymore already knew what fate might await her. Yet none of the warriors—including Miria, Clare, Jean, and Flora, whom Annie had only just met—retreated. They resolutely