As one might expect from a warrior daring to fight for his life in a duel such as this, Caius was strong.  He'd need more than raw force and intelligence against Lyra, however. As he'd soon come to discover, she could be a thorn in the side of even the mightiest beings.

A bullet detonated mid-flight, one projectile becoming a volley of buckshot to pepper a wide area.  Good thing, then, that Lyra had thought to make the hole in her Shroud-wall [i]large[/i], big enough for the distortion to be visible even across the wide edges of its stretched-out shape.  She'd left far more space than she'd needed for the bullet to pass through, and each individual shard of the shot would retain its forward velocity after the explosion, meaning they could only spread so far from their original trajectory before passing through their target.  One bullet or ten, she'd made the gap big enough for it not to matter.

If one or two of them did somehow travel far enough to clear the edge of the gap and hit the Shroud proper, or if Caius managed to pull some other trick out of them in the tiny interval before they flew by- well, they'd still miss, because Lyra was being [i]meticulous[/i].  Making the hole had shifted the edges of the Shroud-wall itself, a deliberately inefficient movement that involved adjusting the entire layer slightly.  However, the fact that she'd even twisted part of her cloud into such a disproportionate shape in the first place demonstrated her fine control over it.  If the hole wasn't quite large enough, she'd simply fold its edges back, widening it further as necessary before snapping it closed as planned. Less time to do so, to be sure, but she'd be moving far less mass than she had in creating the original opening.

To Caius, it would barely look any different than it might have if he'd just fired off the bullet and forgotten it. A hole in the Shroud, nothing behind it, there one moment and gone the next without so much as grazing what had passed through. Forethought to counter forethought, contingencies to counter contingencies.  She had more, if he tested her further.

As he'd be finding out that very moment, in his own little center of power.

For one thing, he'd been too slow to respond.  His defense- strange fields reminiscent of the most primitive forms of life -came only after she'd nudged her traveling stalks inward, and she'd only had to do so to keep them from flying away.  They'd [i]already[/i] been moving around Caius as a result of his own defense, and she'd unleashed her power from them as soon as they'd first entered his field.  By the time her opponent had even reacted, she had a hold in his domain, all the water within her initial reach frozen and that same reach constantly spreading.

When a response did come, Lyra smiled a little, finding that she liked it in a way.  An elegant use of power, both interesting and delightfully ironic.

His energy behaved like a predatory cell.  Hers behaved like a [i]virus[/i].

Isolating the sources of infection made for a solid idea in principle, but with this method Caius would find it as frustrating as trying to snatch a swarm of wasps out of the air with his bare hands.  Every crystal she'd infected could be maneuvered, controlled, and as bulky fields moved to enclose them they'd flow out and around, moving with or even fighting against the surrounding vector field to escape the oncoming prisons.  Many would be captured, and yet even [i]one[/i] loose fragment of ice could simply propagate anew, forming another cloud to be dealt with.

Therein lay the other problem for Caius.  The infection with the stalks hadn't been a one-off trick, other than the fact she'd framed them as a physical attack.  Her power over ice simply functioned that way: that which she froze she could control, and that which she controlled could be used to freeze.  Lyra's range was quite short- two feet - but she could project that range from any piece of ice she controlled.  Thus, when she froze indiscriminately, as she did now, her effective range could expand and expand and expand with the growing spread of ice, and Caius's psychic bubbles would be forced to do the same to keep up- which they couldn't for long without encompassing the man's own defense and letting her little pieces of ice where she wanted them regardless.  Anything he vaporized, she could freeze again just as quickly, so long as she still had crystals nearby.

Given how slow his reaction had been and how ineffective his defense, she'd have more than enough around to work with.

She'd started her assault with a swift volley of six arrow-like stalks.  A good number, but not all of those she'd first frozen behind the Shroud had been used.  Even as Caius tried and failed to counter her growing clouds, she'd pluck out a second wave and send them flying off towards him, not bothering to adorn them with spiked points this time.  Nor did she make any pretense that these were mere projectiles: their paths curved as they flew, so that each one would move in on Caius from a different angle, maximizing the spread of her power and reinforcing any areas where his encasements- improbable as it seemed -might have made a little progress.  One would come in from directly above him, simply to test Lyra's curiosity as to how his clockwise vector field would affect something approaching perpendicular to the clock.

In a sense, he'd let Lyra into his house, and she wasn't leaving any time soon.  If he chose to fire again amidst the mayhem he'd find a swarm of crystals shifting, intercepting his bullet and smashing themselves against it, deflecting its course towards the ground.  What happened to her individual ice crystals mattered little to Lyra, she simply needed to spread her power around him, all over him, until that black armor was coated with frost.

Given that he'd barely slowed her down so far, he'd have very little time left to stop her.