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He looked a bit stiff, if anything- you might get the image of the hard-assed military man used to cold, hard, composure and zero displays of affection suddenly freezing up and panicking in his head when some little thing glomped him. You know the one, the look.

Kael wasn't quite so bad as that, but it was about the same reaction, to a lesser degree.

"Alright," he looked down at her and blinked, taking up an expression of mild confusion and surprise mixed.

"So, I'll keep on the look out.

"You ready to, ah... y'know..." he looked away around the room, but he was going to hold onto her at least until she let go of him and the shaking wasn't too violent for her to handle standing and moving about on her own.

"Uh, these? Tch..."

He grinned just a little and stepped back, meeting her eyes just as long as he had to before a moment of sort of looking anywhere in her direction that wasn't at her, before he finally made it to turning around and starting off deeper into the room.

"These are just beauty marks."

He was a bit distracted, slow on the quips himself.

"Help me check for registers and books back here real quick? Anything that'll help give us an exact date on when this all happened."

He was a little shaky and spacey, but for that he wasn't regaining his composure slowly. Some men just lived for work. Work helped Kael live at least, if not that. Having something to do was a lot more confidence inspiring than having some strange woman clinging to you when you weren't exactly searching the market for that kind of thing. Might just have been his tendency to overemphasize his responsibilities mentally, though. Owle probably wouldn't have minded him comforting some scared woman, reflection coming a bit later noted, but it didn't mean he was comfy with it.

"Yeah, but it'd be nice to be able to place exactly how far before-"

He froze- not because he had a handful of parts of receipts with eight days ago listed on them. Not because he was in shock about something. Infact, he took her observations very calmly, registered that it did seem a bit less warm, and there wasn't quite that same tickle as before, even if he still had some kind of strange feeling. That was probably paranoia about the magic that was supposedly coating this place.

"...but... if it..."

Frostschild was normally a warm place, heated from within. All the time, this magic was constant.

He stuffed the receipts in his pocket, turned around, and started walking quickly out of the building.

"Sam, get out a phone or something. I need you to establish communication with someone outside the city. Anyone, just do it quickly. C'mon. Let's get outside the walls A-sap."

He spoke with a calmed urgency, walking quickly toward the exit of the building, taking his phone out of one pocket and dialing it while he hit the talk button on his radio transmitter.

"Brown, hey, something just happened and I'm getting a real s**t feeling in my gut. I need you to open active communication with anyone outside the city you can and keep it active. You might want to try and get outside the city too."

He kept on walking, as long as Sam was following, stopping for nothing as he hit the door and started outside, only to continue his fast walk for the nearest edge of the city, from what he could make out past the buildings.

"...I've got a hunch that we are going to want to get outside of Frostschild and watch the place for a while."

Stop.

Look around.

"Sam?"

s**t.

Kael turned around and moved back inside. This time he didn't walk. He ran.

"SAM!!!" He burst in the door, hints of panic beginning.

Running quickly to her, the swordsman would grab her wrist and pull her along, shouting about how "This might be what happened before the people who lived here disappeared! We want to be outside, just in case, to wait it out a while."

Except all in one quick rush, voice raised a bit. And that if she didn't start running with him, he'd pick her up and carry her.

"We gotta get to the woods. From there we can go back to where we left the snow mobiles, and get a bit of distance."

Throughout the city, the people of Frostschild were coming home. Men, women, and children, knocked out of reality by a magical punch no one saw coming, were being nudged back into existence by the very same force. Eating, sleeping, shopping, working, they had been going about their lives, and to them no time had passed at all. Still, something was not right.

They were changed.

Metal. Jagged. Screaming and shrieking with inhuman voices, they returned skeletons of their former selves, grim visages of decayed bodies animated through the fusion of magic and robotics. They would go about their daily lives, clumsy brutal mockeries of what they once were, but lacking in human comprehension or understanding.

That is, until they saw someone alive, someone unchanged, someone who was still human. They turned on these people, watched them. Approached slowly, cautiously, sizing up the strange being. They would clang their metal teeth together threateningly, stretch out their claw-like fingers, and then...

...they would attack.

The soldier reloaded the rifle on the run, this time with his tungsten rounds and grinned.

No amount of psychic energy could stop those rounds, no barrier, no nothing.

That was why he brought them along. And he continue shoot after Chen, sprinting faster and faster as he did so. The distance between the two was closing.

Spooky was an immortal, 2,000 ********' years old.

He was the peak hunter.

No one was going to outrun this man. Spooky continued to shooting at the officer.

Keep running b***h, you aren't getting away.

Echo Woods.