The collision with the car was a massive boom of shattering glass the and hood of the car buckling around his and his enemy's form. If anyone had been inside they would have been killed instantly as near three hundred pounds of bloody muscles sent glass scything through the air as every window in the car broke. Luckily, no one was outside near the falling bodies. However, their meteoric fall had been seen by the security guard at the front desk.<br/><br/>Eyes widening as the bodies laid there, he picked up the phone and punched in 911. Meanwhile, outside, a groan from Nero as he mentally assessed the damage. The sword through him remained there, grating painfully on his sternum. The amount of bones in his body broken outnumbered those not. When he opened his eyes, he stared at the unconscious face of his opponent, just a few inches from his own. Even mired in blood and the shattered remains of their bodies, she was beautiful. He would have reached over and touched those lips if he could move at all. He tried to laugh but a hacking cough of blood was the only thing he could produce as ribs in the lungs made that impossible.<br/><br/>Luckily, he was the first to knit back together. The first thing was feeling in his lower back told him his spine had repaired itself. Worming his way off the car, he screamed as the sword in his chest grated against the car as he slid over the side and fell on his ass next to the ruins of the vehicle. He looked up in time to see the security guard approaching. He stopped in his tracks when Nero looked up from the ground and gave the man a crazed smile. At that crimson specter suddenly in front of him, the security guard's eyes rolled to the back of his head and he passed out.<br/><br/>With legs working once more and arms returning to something resembling useful, he gripped the hilt of the sword in his chest and groaned as he slid it wetly out of his chest to drop it next to him. Fresh blood pumped from the wound as his damaged flesh tried desperately to seal that wound.<br/><br/>He groggily rose to his feet and stumbled down the sidewalk for a moment before he tripped over his feet and fell to his knees. He growled as he saw a shard of glass suddenly punched through his hand. He sat up on his knees and pulled out the offending object and tossed it. As he did, he grinned as he saw one of his swords but a foot away from his leg. He had assumed that they had remained on the penthouse floor above. Apparently, in their fall, they had kicked one of them over with them.<br/><br/>Blinking at his good fortune and feeling his body returning to something resembling capable of fuctioning, he glanced behind him to see that his foe was recovering as well, having sat up from the hood of the car, clearly intending to finish the fight they had started above their heads. He had no intention of that. He rose to his feet once more and half jogged down the sidewalk.<br/><br/>He needed time to finish healing, to get some new clothes, and get the Hell out. He was too old for this sort of thing anymore. He had grossly underestimated her and he had come within inches of dying. The next time they met he would make sure he had the upper hand but that meant being patient and training further. Luckily, in their last encounter, he had learned a few things about her fighting style from almost dying at her hand.<br/><br/>Luckily, he knew a clothing store near his building and it was this he headed for, taking alleys and back ways as often as he could as he heard sirens racing towards his building. No one spotted him at such a late hour and soon he reached the building's back lot. He knew the owner, a nice Italian immigrant that had become close friends of Nero since his arrival in the city.<br/><br/>Using the key he knew the man hid underneath the mat to the back door, he opened the door and let himself in. Immediately, he was assaulted by the smell of cotton, a dry soft smell that overwhelmed his olfactory senses. Sniffing, he moved through the shadows recesses of the story until he reached the front where the clothes were kept. Grabbing randomly at the clothes in his size, he retreated to a clothing stall and shed his ruined clothes and put on the new ones.<br/><br/>Relatively clean, he put his lone sword in a gym bag after wrapping it in his ruined shirt. With that finished, he left the faux safety of the clothing store and hit the streets once more. As he walked quickly head down with the hood of his jacket up, he thought he caught the tingle of his huntress a few times and the distant sound of a motorcycle but they had seemed to fade as he reached the docks.<br/><br/>The sky was turning a lighter shade of blue in the horizon as the Sun was close to breaking the boundary. Fortunately, the pier was empty, long and narrow and leading up to the<a class="link link--external" data-proxy-href="/proxy.php?link=https%3A%2F%2Fimgur.com%2F482eCbB&amp;hash=cc1246b35b7961d1f908b32a9ae10282" href="https://imgur.com/482eCbB" rel="nofollow ugc noopener" target="_blank">yacht</a>he owned. Normally, a pilot and a hired fisherman would be standing on the pier waiting for him but he knew how to pilot the vessel and it would give him time to recover fully before he met<i>her</i>again.<br/><br/>He was just about to toss the gym bag aboard and untie her her before a familiar voice spoke up from behind him and he stiffened..