Unfortunately for Lyra, she gave up another piece of information in the continued manifestation of her offense: that she shared the dubious honor with Caius of being, like he, a being of psionic power -- and one of no small means, it seemed. Caius not only registered the abrupt drop in temperature, but he also sensed the presence of another mind behind the downward shift as it expanded the cold outward from the stalks of grain. The same mind, it turned out, that he registered within the dark depths of the Shroud.

Caius understood, in theory, a great many things. He understood weapons, languages, the multitudes of myriad species and races that abounded the multiverse, the various forms of sorcery and esoteric energy manifestations. These he understood, on some level. But being a psychic, exerting one's mind to project their will onto reality; that Caius [i]knew[/i], inside and out. He knew it as he knew his own hands, and it was easier to kill a kindred spirit than a foreign one thanks to that intrinsic, fundamental familiarity.

As soon as she nudged her missiles in to avoid having them cast aside like chaff, Caius reacted. A portion of the outermost vectors of the swirling psionic energy collapsed inward, sealing the grains and their growing frost crystals within an encasement of energy. While some crystals did form, the amorphous nature of the psionic energy simply enveloped them with preternatural swiftness, like an amoeba grasping and surrounding a meal with its psuedopod. While Lyra could freeze all of the water vapor that might have been trapped with the grain-stalks and ice crystals, there wouldn't be enough expansion to matter -- she was apparently a manipulator, but not a generator, and so she could only work with what Mother Nature, in her capricious and fickle nature, saw fit to provide. Even if Lyra could flash-freeze an enormous breadth of the space around her, Caius's sphere of psychic energy and influence could simply expand as needed to encapsulate and isolate.

Each encasement peeled off of the vector field and collapsed once more in a bright, momenary flash of localized heat that evaporated any water or ice and left the grain-stalks as little more than ash.  While Lyra's attack did little to trouble Caius, it did slow down the strand of his thoughts dedicated to psionic pursuits, as he was forced momentarily to deal with her trap. In another time and another place, Caius would have given a fellow psion high praise for that sort of inventiveness. However, that farmland was neither the proper time nor place, and Caius had no praise to offer.

The splitting of Caius's mind allowed him to deal with the defense while still projecting his own offense in the form of the discharged bullet. Caius's martially-minded strange of thought triggered the telekinetic energy sheathing the munition and with a secondary crack of gunfire, the seventy-five caliber round shattered into a dozen shards, flechetting the Shroud's surface, rather than flying through the hole spread open for its passing. What that would do to the Shroud was a question only Lyra could answer for Caius's curiosity.

Having dealt with the momentary surge of frost that Lyra tried to manifest, Caius's other strand of thought quickly returned to manipulating and manifesting a tulpa in one of the ten nodes on his armor. The tulpa's programming was relatively simple: draw ambient energy from the environment and from incoming attacks -- kinetic energy, heat, light, the like -- and translate that energy into psionic energy to fuel Caius's shield. The tulpa acted as little more than a simple circuit, a conduit through which energy passed, parsed, and was re-purposed. A simple thing, but useful.

Assuming Lyra hadn't acted once more, Caius would discharge another round from his Telekinetically-keyed Orochi -- this time, squarely at Lyra.

[hider="Errata"]Telekinetic Rounds: 10/12
Hyperkinetic Rounds: 12/12
Barriers: 1
Tulpas: 1[/hider]