Arthur’s body was coated in necrotic blood. In his magically induced rage, it seemed he had chosen to let his blood flow profusely, so better to damage his enemies. It had the added benefit of camouflaging what he was doing. Arthur twisted his head to the side, internally wincing as he felt the knife lodged in his eye scrape the socket on its way out. The man who’d been trying to scramble Arthur’s brain started backwards, narrowly avoiding Arthur’s snarling teeth. So far, he was doing a perfect impression of a man gone crazy. The biomancer ordered his men to back up, and Arthur was bombarded with ranged magic; fire, lightning and telekinesis, striking him with enough force to make him bleed. Arthur welcomed the onslaught. It made his desperate plan a lot more feasible. Arthur formed a thin weave of rigid soul-stuff within his shadow cloak, ensuring it was perfectly concealed both visually and with cloaked blade. With all the magic flying through the air, any mistakes he made were impossible to see, and his enemies thought he was lost in the throes of narrative magic, certainly not capable of subterfuge of any kind. Complacency was a deadly poison, and these guards had been infected.Arthur had never tried to make his cloak into a shadow bomb before, but it was sure to have some explosive results. Arthur began to pour ether into his skill. It drank the energy like a desert did water, and he began to worry if his healthpool was big enough to push it past the critical point. He’d invested the equivalent of 150,000 ether into his cloak before it began showing any hints of strain. By that point, even the skill's nature as a stealth ability was struggling to hide the sheer amount of energy running through it. Arthur tried to cover things up by roaring dramatically and making all the available shadows in the room go haywire, but he wasn’t sure how successful his deception was.It was too late, though, his shadow cloak (...)