To the woman surrounded by darkness, it seemed appropriate that her opponent should arrive in a glorious blaze of light.  The Shroud eagerly drank up every photon that reached it, instantly relaying the information to Lyra and saving her the trouble of having to cover her eyes against the flash.  As the gleam disappeared, she and her cloud kept on watching, waiting to see if the cause of that strange illumination would show itself.

It came out of the barn a moment later.  Hard and black and plated, wearing the skin of an insect but moving like a man.  That carapace had to be armor, then, laden with silver and small lights, weapons at the hip ready to spit iron arrows at the twitch of a finger.  Strange devices, crafted by smiths hundreds or thousands of years more advanced than Lyra's own people, to adorn this man- who, for all she knew, could be some ticking, sparking creation of an engineer himself.  She'd find out soon enough.

Reaching out with her left hand, she brushed her fingers gently through the tips of the wheat next to her, sensing them by feel rather than sight.  They froze at her touch, dying in a split second as their stalks locked in place, cold and hard as polar ice. 

The insect man spoke.  Quiet, and still some distance away, but the Shroud caught it.  A challenge, perhaps?  She could meet that.

As Caius finished his last syllable, the Shroud exploded outwards, swelling to monstrous proportions with terrifying speed.  It didn't move any closer to him, but rather spread upwards and to either side, replacing the golden fields before him with a lightless, gaping maw. Where it had been a room-sized lump, it now loomed fifty feet tall, a hundred feet from one end to the other, dwarfing the tiny man before it.

Or at least, that was how it [i]looked[/i] from his side.

In reality, the Shroud had not grown, only changed its shape.  The rough clump that Lyra crouched inside still existed, just a foot shorter than it had been: she'd moved one-seventh of its mass forwards and spread it into a layer only a sixth of an inch thick.  A slightly curved screen between her and the enemy, a facade that made her cloud appear far greater than it really was.  Its [i]concentration[/i] remained the same, however. The individual particles clustered together and devoured light and sound as effectively as before, and the thin layer remained as completely, crushingly black as ever.

At the same time as her Shroud flared up, Lyra began moving rightward, treading especially lightly so as to minimize disturbances in the wheat and vibrations in the earth around her.

That, however, she could do practically by instinct.  The center of her focus was on the frozen stalks of wheat, six of which she plucked from their places and ushered into the air, moving them up about twenty feet and slightly to the left behind the cover of the Shroud.

Once in position, they shot out from behind it, flying like arrows straight towards the armored insect-man and his oily power.  She'd reshaped them slightly, drawing out water from within the stems to create vicious spikes at the ends, so the comparison was especially apt- though a common bowman would be hard-pressed to match the speed and striking power of even one of these projectiles, let alone six at once.

If and when they struck, they would do so almost simultaneously, and the Shroud's expanded form let Lyra watch the action from a huge range of angles all at once.  When the moment came she'd observe carefully, while also keeping her eyes (or rather, her towering cloud of shadows) peeled for any kind of response.