He only had a few moments of mostly-suppressed panic before gunshots rang out. A brief thrill of fear-fueled adrenaline flowed through him before his human brain smashed his lizard brain's automatic responses to the situation and he processed that the shot came from very far off. In fact, he could pinpoint its location to exactly where he'd seen the blurry figure from before. Judging by the fact that it was followed by two more, and One had just gone down in a cloud of arterial spray, that was Noel. Mostly on time, he supposed - if she'd been any slower, he probably wouldn't be just paralyzed and instead fully dead.

More shots went off. By the time the dust cleared, four more of the soldiers were down. One was bleeding out while the another was dead from a messy head shot; the third's body armor had eventually given in and a bullet had made its way through. The fourth had been hit in the leg, and he'd stumbled towards Ambrose, who'd gritted his teeth through the pain and lunged at the man. In a manner befitting a crocodile more than a human, Ambrose had taken the soldier down by sinking his sharpened teeth into his leg and dragging the man down, before snapping his neck. He scrambled for the downed man's gun, and managed to get a single hand on it before a boot caught him squarely in the jaw. Ow. In retaliation, when he flipped over onto his back, he aimed the pistol at his attacker's face and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

He frowned and looked at the gun, scrambling rapidly to try to find a switch or button or something (he really didn't know guns) that would make it work. In the meantime, the soldier tried to shoot him in the leg to make him stop fumbling with the weapon. That didn't work, considering Ambrose couldn't feel it. He wasn't sure what he did, but the gun went off, startling him and his attacker both. He immediately pointed the gun at the general area of the man's face, but it still took him two or three shots before he actually hit him. After that, he rolled as best he could behind a building. All five occupants of the square were dead, but there were seven left - and from the shouting he could hear, they were congregating back to this location.

Ambrose gritted his teeth and scooted over more away from the open area. He was going to leave this to Noel. He didn't know if she had realized that he was kind of paralyzed from the waist down yet, but considering his main form of transportation had been rolling for the past sixty seconds, she'd hopefully figured it out by now.

One or two shots pinged off the roof lip above her head while Noel breathed and prayed that she wasn't getting Panu's adoptive father murdered. This had seemed like a good idea some minutes ago. Less so now. She heard activity but the return fire had died down so Noel chanced a look. The square had mostly cleared. No great targets. There was scattered shooting, but she could no longer see Ambrose.

Frick.

The door to the roof banged open and it was more reflex than anything else that had Noel shooting the first man than anything else. And training, Hades' or the terrorist's, that had her going over the roof ledge and finding her feet on some kind of brick architectural decoration that was maybe a centimeter wide. She slipped and dropped her gun so that it fell to the strap's full length. That left her hands free enough to scrabble at the uneven texture of the wall, breaking nails in her desperation.

Her feet caught on a window which slowed her enough so that she was able to grab the window frame. Her feet hit and bounced off the window at first. The men above had made it to the edge of the roof now, their caution after the first one up had bought her some time, at least.

Noel swung herself out, put her feet together, and barreled through the window high heels first, back into the room with the terrified family as more bullets started to fly.

They were the good guys here. The good guys, she reminded herself, sometimes had to do things that didn't feel all that great.

Her gun was back in her hands as soon as her feet were on the floor. They'd left one behind to cover the family and she was already squeezing the trigger to end him. She had to pull the trigger for each bullet, even if the fire rate was insanely fast. So it was her fault when she went wide. Her fault for firing from the hip. Her fault that she shot the skeptical, angry looking grandma first and the terrorist second, third, and fourth.

It didn't always feel good to be a good guy.

She did hesitate for a moment before she stepped in to pull the weapon from the body. Noel didn't understand the words the family was saying at her, at grandma. But there were other things to do like find a position behind the kitchen table and sight on the rooftop access doorway.

The door burst open seconds later and it took nothing for Noel to pop the men in the face one after another. It felt like nothing. She should really start counting to make sure they got them all.

She got a parting gift of spit on her cheek as she passed the family again on her way to the street access door.

That didn't feel like anything either.

1... 2... She mentally readied herself, gun at her shoulder, and kicked the door open when her inner voice got to 3. Noel wasn't sure where her confidence in heels came from either. Maybe she was just too pissed to break an ankle.

"Ambrose!" She swept and scanned, more than ready to shoot anything that moved.

...oh, wait. He had another gun.

Ambrose fumbled at the waistband of his pants, only vaguely aware of the tingling sensation that was supposed to be the handle of a gun jabbing so hard into his lower back that it would definitely leave a bruise. He finally got it into his hands, and narrowed his eyes at it, glancing back and forth between the two guns he was now holding.

...they looked exactly the same, but when he tried to figure out how to reload the one he knew would shoot with the bullets from the other, he realized that the bullets looked totally different. Okay. That meant different ammo; he knew that much. So basically, he'd have to use two guns.

He tucked the fully loaded one in at his right hip for easier access.

He heard shots coming from a building across the square - the building Noel had been in, he was sure. The sounds of bullets hitting flesh were familiar, and as he peered around the corner, he watched as she smashed through a window after hopping off the roof. Nice. That had been smooth.

Unfortunately, the sounds that followed were a lot less smooth. Ambrose didn't speak Montenegrin - their language, a somewhat bastardized form of Serbian - fluently, but he could still understand their tone of voice, and that tone of voice sounded a whole lot like "holy crap you shot grandma." (He understood the Serbian for grandma. There was no specific tone of voice for "grandma.") The next three shots sounded different, as they punched through body armor instead of flesh. That must've been an enemy. He could see other armed soldiers on the roof still, now shouting about going down, and then Noel burst out of the house.

"Ambrose!" she shouted, and he briefly contemplated shouting back before realizing that he'd give his position away, and that he was not in a great position right now to be exposed to even more attackers.

But then she might not realize that he was still alive, and that was sub-optimal because he was kind of relying on her to get him out right now.

His right leg suddenly seized up with a burst of pain, and then he didn't really have a choice in that matter because he made a strangled sound so loud he was pretty sure the soldiers storming down the building's stairs were able to hear. He'd gotten a lot worse about quietly working his way through pain, lately - previously, he'd dislocated and relocated his shoulder without a sound - and now, something as pathetic as getting shot in a place that was immediately deadened to all feeling got a reaction out of him. He wasn't sure who to blame about this, but he was confident he'd find someone. He was good at finding people to blame.

To be fair, though, the pain in his leg was a lot worse than he'd expected it to be - and he had, in fact, expected no pain at all. That leg was supposed to be paralyzed. His left leg had decided to follow the laws of biology and was obediently numb, but his right leg throbbed with pain. It took him a moment before he figured out that it was the leg he'd gotten shot in, and he allowed himself another moment to wonder how in the world he could feel that leg. It was probably his healing factor - the only explanation that he could come up with was that the majority of the nerves had regenerated already, because the damage hadn't been so bad to begin with, before he decided that it was actually probably better this way and the how or why didn't really matter. He could at least move partially on his own, now; had he not had at least one working leg, Noel would've had to carry him, and he had no doubt that she wouldn't've been able to make all six hundred plus pounds of compressed dragon even budge.

...maybe budge, if he was being nice. But full-on movement would've been impossible.

He stood up. His right leg, as expected, held his weight, but just barely. His left leg was useless as ever, so maybe that wasn't too much of a difference from what he was used to.

He didn't bother calling out to her. He could hear their attackers coming out of the building she'd left from, so he didn't want to risk it. If she heard him, great; if she didn't, he was just gonna hole up here until it was a bit safer to inform her that he was still alive.

Well, if they'd had any doubt about who he was or if there had been any doubts that the gunwoman was there accompanying him, those doubts dissipated as soon as his name had passed her lips.

She shot, more to tell them that she was willing to than in actual aim, and having not seen Ambrose in her scan pulled back to a better defensible location.

There were a few reasons that Noel could think of for why Ambrose Jaager wouldn't, or couldn't, answer her. None of them were particularly wonderful. She just hoped that the actual reason was not a permanent reason. It was terribly inconvenient for her not-a-date to get murdered.

Because she didn't know the language. Because they would probably murder her next. Because she wasn't sure how to get back to the car or how to drive on the wrong side of the road. But most of all, because she was imagining Panu's face. Ambrose was not a piñata: hit him and money falls out. Otherwise, these terrorists would be rich already. He had to be alive to sign checks and dole out fatherly advice. (That was assuming he had fatherly advice in him somewhere.)

And maybe, just maybe, because he'd worn a stupid suit. Nobody deserved to die in something so foppish.

Noel backed away and tried to be hyper alert. It was harder now that there were fewer of them. They could be biding their time. They could be setting up a perimeter. They could be doing a heck of a lot of things that would be bad for her continued desire to breathe. It was like capture the flag and Ambrose was the prize. She let out a little yelp as she backed into something cold and hard. And big.

The white van.

A bullet hole and chips of wall magically appeared in the brick façade nearest her head and Noel ducked behind what she assumed was the passenger's side the vehicle. She just wasn't used to visiting abroad.

The driver's door opened and she took an unexpected fist to an already sore eye. He went for her gun. She went for the eyes. They were in too close of quarters for the weapon to be as useful as her bloodied nails. He swapped his tactic to try and free up the pressure from his eyes.

The window in the open driver's side door shattered from another shot.

It wasn't that Noel was stronger. It was a matter of positioning and leverage. It was a matter of her being more desperate and brutal. She wanted it more. She was willing to do worse things to win here.

Noel wrenched the man downward, out of his half-way-in half-way-out footing, and slammed his face into her bald knee. One, twice, until he stopped fighting so hard. Then she pushed him down and used him as a step to help get herself up into the driver's seat. She forced the door closed and turned the ignition key.

One eye was swelling shut. Her hands were a bloody mess only some of which was hers. There was glass in her plunging neckline and someone else's bloody faceprints on her exposed leg.

Time to go capture the flag.

Bulletholes peppered the front hood and spread up the windshield as Noel peeled sloppily into the square.

C'mon Ambrose. Where are you?

Thump. A surprised yelp sounded from the direction of the courtyard. Ambrose peered around the corner again to see Noel backed up against the white van their attackers had presumably arrived in. The vehicle's side exploded in a hail of bullets and metal shards, and she ducked behind the van, to the side closer to Ambrose. He saw very clearly as the door flew open unexpectedly and a fist landed squarely in her eye.

Ambrose looked at his weapon, wondering if he should try to provide backup, because the chance of him hitting her was just as great as the chance that he'd hit the bad guy.

He gritted his teeth, swung the gun up, squinted, and fired.

The van window next to the two exploded in a burst of glass. On the bright side, he hadn't hit Noel. On the less bright side, he hadn't hit the other guy, either. In fact, he'd missed them both by, like, a solid two or three feet. That was terrible. He'd definitely have to ask somebody for help eventually, once he figured out how to word it in a way that made it seem like he was doing them the favor.

It seemed his help was unneeded, though, because she took him down and then used the body to hop into the van. Ambrose took aim again, squeezing off a few shots at the figure scrambling to get up. One of his shots got really lucky, because it actually managed to hit the enemy soldier in something that seemed to be vital, because the body jerked once, and then went limp. Was that... improvement? Maybe. He'd take that.

The van started, and Noel tore off, straight at Ambrose's general location. He didn't really want to call out to her, though. It seemed... sort of damsel-in-distress-y. Ambrose disliked the idea of being a damsel in distress, or even a dragon in distress. He didn't get distressed. He was the leader of a terrorist anarchy group, for Christ's sakes. He did the distressing.

But she looked like she was going to drive right past him, so he sucked it up and called out.

"Noel!" he half-snarled, half-hissed, but definitely did not call plaintively out. He was still leaning against the wall, doing his best to stay both conscious and upright. It was a struggle. As the van tore by, inches away from both the wall and Ambrose's face, he lunged forward and dug his claws into a bullet-ridden side. The wheels screeched as the van noticeably slowed, rubber spinning helplessly against asphalt for a moment, before the metal tore and Ambrose lost his grip, falling back onto the wall.

There. That better have had gotten her attention.

Okay. So driving on the wrong side of the car meant her perception of where to drive in relation to the walls was a guess at best. It didn't help that this was not really a cluster of buildings meant to be driven through. Quaint, uneven cobble stones and water features crowded the driveable space. So, while it was surprising that she heard Ambrose and even more surprising that he latched onto the van for a bit, it was not all that surprising that she preeeetty much scraped him off the side of the vehicle by driving too close to a building.

Like gum off the bottom of a shoe. "Oh good." Well, it would be once he got in anyway.

She slammed on the brakes and leaned all the way across the vehicle in order to open the passenger-side door. Noel would have preferred that he drive, but the bad guys weren't about to give them time to play chinese fire drill. Bullets continued to pepper the front of the vehicle, mostly making the front window into a giant spiderweb that was difficult to see through.

While he flopped himself in, Noel took the time to put her seat belt on. One could never be too careful.

Once he had a majority of limbs inside, she put the gas pedal to the metal. It was also rather difficult to regulate one's speed while driving in heels, for the record.

The back wheels spun out and the entire van jumped forward like a frightened animal. She swerved toward a man that had been approaching the driver's side door and he only just avoided getting mowed down. The van bounced over a drainage dip and scraped off Noel's side-view mirror, paint, and back tail light before she rectified the situation. "Sorry! Sorry."

So. This was nice.

"Which way?" Noel treated the water feature like a roundabout and turned back toward the narrow space between buildings. It was their speed that that took them up on two wheels for a second. She was trying her best, white-knuckled and reckless. Noel really didn't drive much, to be honest.

The van screeched to a halt, and the passenger door was flung open as Ambrose hobbled over to the door, wincing as he rubbed a blooming bruise on his jaw from where the van had thrown him into the brick wall. It was a struggle - there was less hobbling, more dragging, because he was definitely using the van's side to support himself, by digging his claws into it. He knew this because the jagged edges of the metal were digging into the flesh of his fingers, so his hands and the van's side were covered in black blood. He was also pretty sure that the cuts went straight through scales and right down to bone, so wasn't that pleasant. It wasn't difficult to try very hard not to think about that.

He finally got to the door and did his best to get into the van. Noel was unhelpful during his painful ascent - she was carefully buckling up, in fact, as Ambrose used every muscle that he owned to compensate for the lack of working leg. He could almost feel his other leg sputtering out occasionally, like a light with a damaged cord, which was equal parts worrying and fascinating. For now, he had the one leg, so he only had to worry about that.

Noel hit the gas when Ambrose was only partially in the seat. He just barely managed to slam the door shut in time before he went flying, and buckled himself in as she shot off. That was more difficult than anticipated, too - blood was everywhere, staining the seats and the seatbelt like oil, and it made it rather hard to get a solid grip on anything. As she sped down the street, bullets tearing up the cobblestones around them, Ambrose took the time to rapidly shrug off his coat - unsalvageable at this point, unfortunately, but it could still do some good - and tear it into strips, bandaging the most immediate problems. Multiple large strips went around his leg, and smaller ones around the individual fingers of his hands so Ambrose would stop lubricating everything he tried to touch with his own blood.

They hit a ditch at some point. Ambrose buckled himself in after that.

"Which way?" Noel asked at some point, using a water feature in a way that no one ever had intended. Then they went up on two wheels, and Ambrose had a moment to briefly ponder his mortality before they were back on the ground, and he instead pondered whether he'd be safer with the terrorists instead.

"Um, out?" Ambrose said, unhelpfully, as he wrapped long strips of cloth around his waist to stop the bleeding from the shot to his spine. A shard of glass tumbled from the shot-up dashboard in front of him and scraped Ambrose's now-bared stomach, but he brushed it off. "Update, by the way - I've lost the ability to use one my legs, and the other one is unreliable at best. Paralysis, you might say. Basically, I can't walk."

Well, that was certainly a cheery update. Where could they go, anyway? They were both foreigners, and while Ambrose knew where "our of the city" was, he only knew how to get to the airfield - their exit plan, he presumed - along a very specific route, which they were in no way on. Well. He might be able to figure out their location, if -

"Go over there," Ambrose said, pointing at the denser part of the city. He knew his way around the casinos downtown, so if he could find one, they'd be back on track in no time. "I can get us back to the airfield, but I need to figure out where we are first. Look for casinos." And suddenly, a very unpleasant thought struck him. "You said our trigger-happy friends came in a single van, correct, of thirteen assailants? And there's absolutely no way there might be multiple single vans of thirteen assailants?" Because if there was. Uh oh.

Ambrose's unhelpful sarcasm had Noel ready to tell him off. She turned, mouth open all ready to unleash some scathing wit. Except she hadn't actually stopped to look at him yet. Out of the corner of her eye, she'd assumed the guy had fallen into an oil slick or maybe they'd started to tar and feather him, but didn't quite get to the feathers. Now, she was noticing that the black stuff was actively pumping out of his body.

My boss is a demon.

One who casually mentioned how paralyzed he'd become lately.

"What!?" Okay, no. She actually had to pay attention to the driving again because she'd taken a turn too tight and now they'd probably just lost their back bumper. The small and already difficult to see out from back window sprouted a fresh web of cracks.

"You're incredibly casual for— Are you dying?" That came out a little more accusatory than she'd meant for it to.

> "Go over there,"

Over there, over here. It didn't really matter at this point if she'd let him get broken beyond repair. Noel let up on the accelerator. Without a side view mirror, a great way to see out the back, or an entirely serviceable front window, it was impossible to tell if they were being followed so it was better, now, to be safer. Her eye throbbed at her, but she didn't dare complain to the cripple.

He inhaled with sudden realization. Or maybe a ruptured spleen.

> "You said our trigger-happy friends came in a single van, correct, of thirteen assailants?"

"Yes." That she could know with complete confidence. Noel ducked to get a better view of an upcoming intersection. Were those neon lights up ahead? Hard to say since they didn't glow in the day time.

> "And there's absolutely no way there might be multiple single vans of thirteen assailants?"

"Uh." The light changed to green and she pulled out into the intersection as nonchalantly as a bullet and brick battered vehicle could manage. Noel's eye that was closest to the door was the one that was nearly swollen shut. "That man was only in one van." But she hadn't taken the time to listen to all the planning. There hadn't been time for that.

A second white van, perfectly matched to theirs except for the wear and tear, barreled through a stop light and toward Noel's glass-less window.

Ambrose had never had anyone ask - well, demand to know - if he was dying in such an aggressive way before. Or in a such an accusatory way, for that matter. If he could feel bad, he probably would've felt bad for being crippled. It was that kind of "are you dying."

But then he didn't really get to think about that anymore, because Noel was saying, "That man was only in one van," just as Ambrose saw another van, through the window and past Noel's face, flying right at them.

Reacting faster than any human being could've, Ambrose lunged for the gas pedal. He would've used his leg, but, well, that was out of commission. His face swiped against Noel's thigh, which would probably seem way creepy until she realized what he was doing, but he couldn't really bring himself to care because he was going to be a dragon pancake if he didn't move, and getting stabbed in the face with heels was an infinitely better option than death. He left a smear of oily black blood on her leg as he hit the gas, accelerating the van forward. So instead of impact flattening him and Noel, the other van hit the back end of their bullet-ridden box on wheels, spinning them out until they were pointed in the very direction the other van had come from.

Ambrose jerked back up to avoid any violent retaliation, and also to peer out Noel's window and check on their attacker. The other van had stopped and was already backing up, and he could see what looked like a gun peeking out of one of their windows.

"Paralysis heals," Ambrose said absentmindedly as he stared at the van with a sort of apathetic horror, not quite realizing yet that paralysis was a bit more permanent for most people, "but death does not, so I would advise moving. Now."

There was the sound of an automatic weapon spraying a burst of bullets into their poor van's side. If Ambrose's warning wasn't sufficient motivation to move, that probably was.

As it turned out, yes. Ambrose was dying. He keeled over immediately in his seat until he smacked his bloodied face into Noel's leg. The impact hurt and the van, again, jumped forward as he both applied pressure to her gas pedalling leg and depressed the pedal manually with his hand.

Wait. Dead guys didn't hit the gas, normally.

They fishtailed which cost them a moment too much. The van jerked into a jack knife, a perfect 90 degree turn, from unexpected impact. Noel felt it in her seat belt. It was good she had it on, but that too would leave its mark.

Had they hit someone? Had someone hit them? Her foot came off the gas. Noel felt like she was moving just a hair too slow. Just a mite too tensely. It was a miracle their vehicle was still able to chug forward at all.

He was back up then, remarkably undead. Maybe even a little surprised himself?

Y-yeah. Apparently paralysis healed. Noel's good eye flicked toward the way they were already rolling. She pointed toward Ambrose's window. "Casino was that way." Bullet fire hit their van. Again. So she retaliated through extreme acceleration. Again.

Their tires screeeeeeeeched when Noel hung a hard right to try to get back on track to going to the casino. It was good to have goals. Actually yes. Ambrose was not dead and getting not deader by the minute so she would deliver him to the street that he knew so that they could get back to the plane and some semblance of sanity.

"Didn't know you healed." Not that it was a bad attribute to have...

"Casino was that way," Noel said. Ambrose nodded - he was starting to recognize the area.

"Hang a right when you hit the waterfront, and then keep following the shoreline," Ambrose said.

Noel accelerated away from the gunfire and towards the casinos, and Ambrose winced as the back of the chair dug into the exit wound around the base of his spine. Oh, good, actually. He hadn't registered that there'd even been an exit wound, but that was good. One less thing to worry about - lead poisoning or whatever it was bullets did (he didn't really try too hard to inform himself on the medical specifications of the various injuries he'd obtained over the years).

They took a sharp right turn and Ambrose slammed into his door, even with the seatbelt. Ow. This woman could not drive, at all.

"Didn't know you healed."

What? Oh, right. Paralysis.

"Well, I don't really make it a point to show that off," Ambrose said, through gritted teeth, because he was pretty sure his shoulder was bruising too. "I usually wait until after the first date." He gave her a roguish smile as he turned around to check behind them - okay, dammit, adrenaline was making him flirtatious, apparently? - and he could just see, through the windows at the back of the van, the other car pursuing them. He only got a few seconds to check before a spray of bullets broke the glass, piercing through the front window as well. Miraculously, none hit flesh. He would've heard, and it would've been gross.

Then, he did a double-take and looked back at the contents of the van behind him.

"Um, Noel?" he said, almost turned fully around in his seat.

There were guns. Lots of guns. Apparently, they'd taken the backup arsenal, because Ambrose was pretty sure he saw, like, a flamethrower or something (it was an RPG launcher, but he couldn't tell the difference). Body armor, too, but it looked like it was definitely for somebody larger than Noel, and maybe for someone larger than Ambrose, even with his extra body mass. That looked... useful?

"I might be able to get back there and shoot back," Ambrose said, pointing backwards, at the general direction of the now glass-less windows. "But there's probably an equivalent chance that I'll die from blood loss or something on the way there." He meant that as a halfhearted attempt at a joke. He realized too late she probably would take it seriously.

Oops.

If she was frowning before, she was extra frowning now. This. Was not. A date.

> "Um, Noel?"

She thought at first he was responding to that frown. Or maybe he'd noticed that they were swerving an extra bunch. Noel was almost certain they'd lost a tire to gunfire somewhere back, but she was trying to drive this boat to the best of her ability so he could just stuff it.

But the prolonged few seconds silence didn't seem to indicate either of those things. In fact, it seemed to indicate that he wanted her to turn around and take her eyes off the already atrocious roads to look at something.

"What?" She cringed as there was a metallic screeching as they bumped over something. A low wall? Another drainage something? God, there was too much architecture in the freaking streets. Europe was terrible like that.

She opened her mouth to ask if he was crazy, but Ambrose already had an answer ready for that. No. He wasn't crazy. He was just distracting an already nerve-frayed driver. "Fine then switch me. You know where we're going better anyway. Or. Can you not... the legs...?" Yeah okay.

The engine coughed and their entire rig slowed a fraction. Oh. Oh no. "C'mon, baby. You can make it."