Adamant Serpent's Skin descrption

He paused, looking at me expectantly, and I obliged him with a sigh.

“Gee,” I said. “And what’s this one do?”

“Well, Atlas created an overclocked version of how Hunters normally increase their strength, so the Prince decided the best solution would be to make a similarly advanced defensive technique. In the end, what the skill basically did was turn people’s skin into some sort of super-hard substance, making them vastly harder to hurt—imagine flexible, organic diamond where your skin would be. When used, it evened the playing field against the Atlesian forces, and often turned the tide against them.”

“But…?”

“But,” He said with a grin. “The skin only remains flexible while you’re flowing a large amount of Aura through it. After you ran out, it would quickly harden, with two possible results. If you couldn’t break out, you would basically be trapped in a statue until someone found you or, more likely, one of many, many things finally led to your death. If you were strong enough to escape, you could do that instead, ripping yourself out of your own skin in the process.”

Even I had to wince at that set of options.

“As you can imagine, most of the people who used the technique did so only once,” He continued. “It gave Mistral an edge in the conflict, though; while Sormr’s technique had a much higher chance of killing the user, it generally did so after the battle, while Atlas’s forces would destroy their own arms during the fighting. Prince Sormr, however, was different; he reportedly used the technique many times in order to avenger his brother; it’s believed that Sormr wasn’t his birth name, in fact, but that he renamed himself ‘Serpent’ because of how often he shed and regrew his skin.”