The Shroud expanded outward, like a ship's sail filled by an unseen wind. Caius watched the expanding plane of darkness encroach on the horizon; although he remained outwardly calm, the sudden display sparked his enhanced syanpses into forcing a psionic reaction, picked out from the myriad of combat routines and techniques encoded directly into the multiversal mercenary's mind. The psychic energy of his spherical shield thickened, both like and unlike the Shroud: it grew, but rather than shifting outward, it began to churn and whorl, rotating in a vortex centered around Caius's armored form. The increased presence of psychic energy made the shield more visible than prior; a [i]fata morgana[/i] mirage whipped and whirled around Caius, marking the expanded border of his barrier at approximately two meters from its center.

Behind the featureless casque of his helmet, Caius was impressed by what he saw -- at least, he was certainly impressed by the Shroud's ability to manifest in a large area with a certain sort of celerity. Both the micro-computer fused into the back of his skull and Caius's mind began to spool information together from the Shroud's outward behaviors and properties -- both those evident to his sight, and those that came to him from his preternatural senses. He began to form a dim picture of the Shroud in his mind:

First, it absorbed certain ambient energies; Caius's dynamic senses saw the way that it leached the local heat and light from its immediate area. 

Second, and more importantly, the Shroud [i]was not his enemy[/i]. Rather, it was a tool his opponent manipulated: when the Shroud expanded, the sapient mind he sensed did not expand with it, and more, it moved [i]within[/i] the expanded phenomena. A definite target, then.

Of course Caius knew full well that he could be entirely wrong, and the thin inkling of understanding he possessed regarding the Shroud could be entirely false. It required due experimentation, then, to see whether or not his suppositions rang true or false. 

Caius mirrored Lyra's movements, moving to his left as she moved to her right, keeping their paths parallel and maintaining the fifty-feet distance between them. Out came the six-fold burst of polar-iced projectiles, but Caius's newly-upgraded reflex shield dealt with them well enough:  the rotating bubble of psionic energy acted as a vector field that rotated clock-wise around the psion. The vector of the rotation grew stronger the closer to Caius it was, so that the psionic energy worked ever-more strongly on projectiles that sought to mark him as their target.

Lyra's grain stalks, aimed squarely at Caius,  came into the vector-field head-on and had their paths shifted aside, seeming to veer [i]around[/i] the man in his stygian-black armor. Particulates of psionic energy, sheared and shredded by the redirection of the missiles, created iridescent motes around Caius; a miniscule cost considering the fact that redirection proved more energy-efficient than laying down a redoubt of psychic-energy armor for Caius.

Unflinching and unceasing in his matching-movements, Caius drew up his right-hand pistol, the Orochi seventy-five caliber pistol keyed to his telekinetic signature. A smooth feathering of the trigger with his index finger hurtled a hypersonic round towards his target: not Lyra, but the Shroud. Indeed, Caius specifically avoided aiming for the weight of sapience he felt in the Shroud, not wanting to draw attention to the fact that he was aware of her position. The entire sequence -- striding leftward, raising and discharging his pistol -- was a series of autonomous actions, dictated by the combat protocols encoded into his synapses.

Meanwhile, Caius's thought processes split apart into two strands: one reactive and combat oriented, the other fixed solely on the composing and enacting of complex psionic phenomena. He needn't utilize the technique to pursue both paths, but he found it much easier to do so, as the competing needs of each pursuit could be met without crowding over one another to get his conscious or subsconscious attentions.

The combative strand of Caius's thoughts and actions fixed itself on the interactions between he, his weapons, and his foe -- namely, how the Shroud would respond to being shot by a munition that could easily blow off a man's limb. The psionic-focused strand of his mind began to pool energy into one of the nodes on his armor, shaping and molding it to his whims in the way that a man might create a sculpture.. or a machine.

And so, outwardly, Caius's actions were simple: striding and shooting, seemingly casting aside his foe's attack with an unseen force. Inwardly, however, Caius's mind was a-churn with a multitude of mental maneuvers, a psionic engine running on all cylinders.

[hider=Errata]Telekinetic Magazine: 11/12
Hyperkinetic Magazine: 12/12
Tulpas: 0
Barriers: 1[/hider]