Two hours, two entire hours passed as Auan knelt to his waist in snow. His naked body blistered and beaten by the cold and buried now to his neck in freshly lain ice. His joints ached, his hands blistered and cracked, his entire body shivered and the striped skin of his body blended into a bright and painful red. The pain rocked him as he stood, totally toppling over into the packed snow and pushing it aside with the force of his fall. 

His fingers grasped at loose snow and scraped through it like a hand through water. It took him several minutes to recover and finally stand up, shaky as he was, he wobbled and hobbled towards the entrance or The Unstoppable. His thunderous footfalls echoing as each laborious step brought him forward six or seven feet at a time.

A trail of water evaporating behind him as he entered the heated building, the native radiation increasing the ambient heat to a tolerable level and dissipating the water to a thin fog. A trail of gas followed behind his body, like a body stepping out from a hot shower into a cold room.

The discomfort of his self inflicted punishment slowly fading away with each step, he groaned as the cold tightened muscles loosened up in the sweltering hallway. His skin faded back to the porcelain white and slate gray stripes, the red dissipating into freckles before disappearing entirely.

He knelt down and picked his armor up as a single heap into his arms, carrying it to the nearby desk and setting it down carefully. The small cracks in his fingers closing shut as he pulled his hand away from the desk, bringing his palm to his helmet and pressing the base of it. 

With a mechanical hiss it popped open and his hair flowed loose, drifting upwards in its nigh on weightlessness. The black strands of crystalline chains of carbon and silicon drifted in wild disarray as he lifted the helmet straight up and off. Taking a deep breath of the environmentally controlled antechamber.

Not even a day had passed, his angular face was still drawing thin lines of years down his cheeks. The gold irises of his eyes glistened through a screen of yet fallen tears, he looked across the antechamber and swept his gaze across the hundreds of faces and sealed chambers. Their content expressions gave him a subtle relief from his internal turmoil. So long as he was alive, they were safe.

His nudity was unobserved, these systems only allowed them to hear his thoughts as he directed them to them. Only the small voice caster let them interact with the world around them. They had no words, only silent mumbling of disquiet at the loss of their brothers and sisters. Discontent at their stasis in this time of crisis, where they still feel like they should be boots on the ground and actively seeking out solutions. 

The proximity alarm raised, flashing all the way through the spectrum of light through Infrared to Ultraviolet in a rapid cycling of colors and noncolors. Auan jerked around, crossing the room in a heartbeat and snatched up his suit. In a flash he'd rearmored and sealed his suit to his body with a mechanical hiss.

Like a scene from a science fiction film, he reached into thin air and view screens came up around him. Omnidirectional viewports gave him a 720 degree view of the sky, in the distance several small aircraft were approaching at supersonic speed. Blistering through the air leaving behind frigid contrails of water vapor, they traced an impressive line through the air. 

Earth must have gone through a few cycles, they were primitive but not unimpressive. Or perhaps his assumptions about the past have been incorrect.

As they blistered through the air, Auan opened up the vertical pathway and a powered lift rocketed him up to the top of the Unstoppable. In the suit, he breathed easy again, the frigid air leaving him untouched as it blew against his armored body. Flecks of snow caught in the crevices and joints, melting quickly to the residual warmth of the inside. 

The jets screamed towards him and Auan blasted upwards with his plasma pulses, bright blue and purple strands of energy pushed him into the sky and he slammed bodily into the nearest jet. The difference in weight caused the jet to fall out of its clean bombing run, five of the other jets breaking away to get to a safe engagement distance as the seventh aileron rolled to get behind the falling jet. 

Ballistics pinged off of his armor and punched holes into the fuselage of the hapless jet fighter he had mounted. The pilot, despite his fear, aimed his sidearm straight upwards to the goliath overhead, and opened fire. Small holes punched through the glass and ice cold air sucked into the cockpit, the tiny bullets ricocheted from him and harmlessly fell back to the ground. 

Auan, in this time, struggled to keep his grip as he dug his armored fingers into the fuselage and finally caught himself a solid hold. The bullets thumping against him made a grating and annoying metallic sound, his face twisted and he frowned. These primitives were frustrating and tiresome, if this was their best method of self defense they would not survive very long.

The cockpit was ripped wholesale from the fuselage, thrown straight down to the ground near the Unstoppable. The parachute wearing pilot barely managing to escape in the moment. The remainder of the jet itself slammed into the face of the gigantic machine, but Auan was nowhere to be seen. The jets scrambled away, completely having lost sight of the bogey. 

Figure eights of contrails began to paint the sky as they systematically searched for the skies for the gigantic gold bogey. The cloud of smoke suddenly broke apart and it emerged at subsonic speed, chased by a line of blistering hot plasma that exploded the air into pressure waves of differential heat changes. Auan held a gigantic electrified claymore over his head like an angel striking down from heaven upon the black stealth jets.

The first two were caught totally off guard, having flown to the pillar of jet fuel smoke. The jets were bisected completely at the point of connection of the cockpit, the engines dropped in arcs into the wall of the megastructure, exploding in the same way and the cockpits blew apart and the pilots dropped to the ground safely with their chutes deploying before they hit the ground.

Auan slammed to side of the building and clung with one hand and propping himself up with one foot and letting the giant claymore dangle in his free hand. His entire torso hung away from the wall and his eyes tracked the jets as they fled into the distance to regroup and rethink their strategy. Hopefully they would have the illusion that there were many bogeys and the obliteration was because of the confusion. Three jets had fallen and their pilots were fleeing on foot, attempting to follow the trails in the sky.

Auan dissipated the blade into nothingness and released his grip on the wall, dropping down to the ground in an explosive impact. Snow hills were blasted away from the point of impact and the slowest of the runners was buried in snow. The others drew their firearms and unloaded, one only managed a few rounds before his gun ran out. The other unloaded a full eighteen shots, standing his ground as the golden goliath pulled the buried man from the mound.

It was amusing how persistent he struggled against the hand almost the size of his entire upper body. The fingers interlaced under his arms and over his shoulder but he still attempted to stab between the plates in the armor, even though the painful twinge of his arm suddenly stopping ran through him with every attempt. Auan gave him a quick impersonal shake and the man dropped his knife in the moment, groaning in discomfort as his head began to spin.

The other two fell backwards, panic finally outstripping their training and survival instincts. Feet of snow that had slowed their every step and forced them to trudge was pushed aside effortlessly by this gold clad behemoth of a man. He threw the man gently to his comrades and stood there. Looming and menacing as a grotesque but statuesque figure of human figure but demonic presence and angellic visage. Its gold body shined in the perpetual daylight gleam of the north pole. 

"What do you want from us!?" 
"Oh god, oh god please no."
"Leave me alone!" 

They spoke his language, this seemed to make no sense from a logistical point of view. Somewhere along the line a universal language must have been established, evidently the root of this language was this very same one. They used some words that were unfamiliar to him in their pronunciation, but his mind pieced it together. [color=a6a7a8]"I offer you sanctuary. Please, listen."[/color] He materialized three small machines, each visually similar to a gas mask without the goggles. [color=a6a7a8]"The air within is unsafe, and the radiation inhospitable for you. These will let you enter unharmed."[/color]

The three cautiously reached out and grabbed the masks, pulling them onto their faces and taking slow breaths through the limited system. The masks extended an energetic barrier around them as soon as they had sealed to their faces, they panicked for a moment but relaxed when no harm had come to them. 

Auan spoke as gently as he could, despite his loud and predatory growl of a voice.[color=a6a7a8]"Come, let us speak within."[/color] The goliath turned around and beat a smooth path through the snow towards the entrance of the building, it would become evident to the survivors that Auan had systematically crashed them as close to the entrance as possible.

The three looked at eachother before following him inside.