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Shou's 'sonar' would enlighten him as to the nature of his little maze.

Though he had been nearly everywhere throughout the fourth floor he had never found where it was that he was looking for. The stairs were at the center of the labyrinth just as they had always been, and the exit from the third floor that he had used had not budged an inch in all that time. It was only the pathways in between that betrayed him as he wandered aimlessly in the dark.

Without a single shake and without a single sound the walls had filled in behind him, and opened up beside him, creating dozens of new pathways while sealing off the old ones and the correct ones. If this had been an ordinary maze, it would have been easily solvable. This was not an ordinary maze... the man was cheating.

The walls cracked and crumbled before the half-golem's strength as he barreled through them on an unerring course towards the stairwell that lead him upwards. He would encounter little resistance, but find that even as he destroyed the barriers in his way the broken stone quickly pooled and flowed back to where it had come.

By the time he reached the spiral stairs that lead upwards from the devious maze, no trace of his passage had been left behind at all.

Above him, the stairs ascended without obstruction.

Shouyin would meet no more opposition as he ascended the stairs. The stairway spiraled upwards from the fourth floor through the entirety of the citadel until it abruptly stopped at the eleventh floor. The stairs ascended no further.

The man stood at the bank of a river running through the eleventh floor. The water flowed as effortlessly through the riverbed as it would have if it weren't made of stone, and all around them the leaves upon the trees fluttered lightly in the breeze that passed through the citadel's open windows.

Arms still folded against his chest, Dreager; the king of this tower; stood waiting for the half-golem youth with a calm expression and an unhurried demeanor.



Dreager turned to face the stairwell with a grin plastered across his face. The man raised his right hand to swipe through his hair, and a shower of sand hit the stone water behind him. It wasn't his hair that had caused it, though; it was his right arm that was rapidly degenerating into grains of colored sand and falling into the flowstone current.

The response Shouyin would receive from him would be a melting smirk upon Dreager's unimpressed face; his entire form beginning to turn grainy and undefined as torrents of colored sand fell away from him and disappeared into the riverbank like drops of rain into the ocean.

The right arm lashed out at the half-golem and as the skin and clothing that coated it disintegrated what was left behind was a pointed appendage of flawless steel that was veering in a hook towards Shouyin's left shoulder.

The sound of stone striking metal reverberated through the exchange as Shouyin's stoanarm knuckles buried themselves into the solid mass inside of all that sand. There was only the briefest pause as the steel arm slashed through air just above Shouyin's head, and as the force of impact was felt through the length of the half-golem's natural weapon; then the solid mass inside of the sand went careening sideways across the riverbed.

A rush of sand fell to decorate the banks without the body inside to support it. Flowstone threw up in waves as it skidded across the surface of the river. The delicate structure of a concrete rose shattered when the body rolled through the shrubbery. And a set of twin gashes was torn into the floor as a metalic replica of a man skidded to a halt several feet from the youth.

Polished, featureless body parts; cylinders, cones, and ball joints. The steel proxy was little more than a mannequin given life, and as it rose again with a fist-shaped indentation on it's right side the remnants of its disguise fell completely away at last.



The polygonal figure stepped into a fighting pose, raising conical hands in front of it ready to strike.

It seemed that Dreager's tests were not yet concluded.

The construct would advance on his position as soon as Shouyin leapt over the river. Digging conical legs into the below it as if it were as soft as loose dirt, the mannequin thrust its arms forwards with the pointed hands extended. The construct's aim was to catch the intruder while he was coming down, or before he could get up into a stance.

Though heavy, though metal, the guardian of this floor was not a slow-moving automaton but an extension of Dreager's will within this place... and Dreager willed Shouyin to take a swim.