The moment Lyra's bloody spike flew into the faintly distorted region near the man in white, a series of thunderous flashes erupted around it, almost blotting out the red blur with their furious light. A spectacular show of power, glorious in its excess. The Shroud drank it up, while within the quiet dark Lyra focused on the flying red shard, waiting for the key moment she'd been planning for since she'd first entered the tomb.

The electrical barrage slammed into the makeshift arrow with relentless ferocity, each strike melting and shattering frozen blood where it hit. No ordinary shard of ice would have survived even the earliest strikes, and this one only made it so far as it did thanks to Lyra physically holding it together with her psychic power, freezing its outer surface almost as fast as her enemy's defenses could melt it.  Even so, by the time it reached the black wall that rose to block its path, only a ragged and battered remnant remained of the original projectile, hardly enough to even dent the obstruction. Rather than let it smash itself against the metal barrier, Lyra simply stopped sustaining it. Just a few inches away from that last obstacle, the spike could shatter, breaking apart into a shower of bloody, half-molten fragments.

At last, in its very last moment, that which lay within the frozen construct was revealed.

As one might expect from a warrior cloaked in darkness, Lyra favored deception and tactics over raw force. Back in the wheat fields she'd fought like a plague, striking and then [i]infecting[/i], making a seemingly simple attack that soon revealed itself to be a lethal trap.  Here, her goal remained the same. In a dry and dusty tomb, however, she didn't have so much water available to turn into ice, and though with every passing second more and more tiny ice crystals joined the swarm forming around her within the Shroud, she hadn't yet gathered enough for what she wanted.  So, faced with a drier environment, she'd adapted.  First by using her own blood to form the infection vector, and then by using something else entirely as the infection.

She'd frozen the blood-spike in the palm of her right hand, letting it rest there just a moment before setting it on its course. Why?

[i]Location[/i], of course. Her right hand, at the very beginning of the fight, had dipped into the pouch at her side, where she kept her bombs.  So that when the blood dripping down that very same arm froze into a weapon, it froze around a small egg-shaped stone primed for detonation. Thus, when the red spike shot into her enemy's defenses, it carried within it a nasty surprise, ready to be unleashed once it had moved in close to its target.

The frozen blood shattered and melted away harmlessly- and from where it had been, a thick green gas exploded outwards, devouring everything it touched.

Electrical bolts could melt or vaporize solid projectiles, but neither would hinder an attack in the form of a vapor. If the man in white's defensive field reacted to this new threat, the same bolts that had ruined that red arrow would only aid the insatiable green cloud, the heat from each strike exciting its particles and speeding up its devastating spread. As things stood, it had already detonated dangerously close to the man in white, and he'd be hard-pressed to escape the initial reach of the explosion.

This wasn't some mere poison, either. The man, his clothing, his weapons: the moment any of them so much as brushed against the edges of the emerald vapor it would tear away at them like a pack of piranhas, its ravenous appetite barely hindered by physical hardness or durability.  Not that any solid obstruction would slow it much- a metal barrier worked well against a spike, but a cloud could just spread around it in an instant. Not to mention, if the strange black sand was a solid then it, too, would be rapidly devoured.

The man in white moved fast, fast enough to get his shots off just before Lyra's trap broke loose. He'd have a hard time seeing what happened, though, for the verdant cloud would soon be obscuring his view of the midnight one.

Unlike the lightning, Lyra could see the shots coming, to some extent. The widened front of her Shroud gave her a huge field of view, and she had good enough reflexes to catch her enemy's movements as he turned and fired. Instinctively, she commanded her Shroud to respond.  The path her initial attack had taken meant that he hadn't aimed his counter at her directly, so she parted the shadowy folds in the gun's path, opening a wide hole that the first shot zipped through without so much as touching her cloud.

She hadn't, however, expected the [i]second[/i] shot, and the sheer speed of these bullets caught her somewhat off-guard, eliciting a brief grimace as she realized what he'd done. Though she'd foiled one shell, the other would strike the front surface of the Shroud, and be immediately enveloped by the black mist.

That last was intentional on Lyra's part. She'd aimed to keep his weapons from hitting the Shroud entirely and leave him guessing, but failing that, she'd quickly move to obfuscate and misdirect. If she'd simply let the shot land, the front portion of it would have been slowed first, leaving it momentarily hanging halfway into the darkness and giving her opponent a clear view of what had happened while its back side gradually slid into the black wall. Rather than let this occur, Lyra had the Shroud around the impact surge forwards the instant she felt the bullet make contact, swallowing it in a smothering void.

The front of the cloud dropped and buckled above the site of impact, as if collapsing from the force of the hit. In reality, this was just the thin layer at the front of the Shroud gathering to help oppose the source of motion, but she took care to exaggerate,using her own control of the smoky substance to supplement its natural motion. Where the Shroud had appeared as a massive, unbroken wall, a section about a foot in width had now shrank and twisted in on itself, appearing to be somehow wounded by the bullet.

Of course, the shot hadn't struck anywhere near her, and was slowed to the point of effective harmlessness as soon as it entered the reach of those eldritch particles. Why give that impression, however? Better to tell a story through each action, lead the attacker astray. [i]Behold, O crackling man: I am the Shroud, and your little stings can hurt me.[/i]

Let him chew on that, if he could still see, while she focused on killing him.

Now that her trap had been sprung, Lyra had little need to conceal her weapons. Holding her dagger close to her chest, she used the dregs of blood still running out of her arm to form two small rings, each one surrounding a bomb primed for detonation and carrying them away to her left. One would then zip out through the front of the Shroud, heading roughly towards the man in white, while the other would shoot upwards, lifting its lethal cargo to the higher reaches of the chamber. Three bombs remained untouched in her pouch, not yet needed for this assault.

These small maneuvers she made entirely by feel, while the Shroud fed her sensory information based on the light coming into contact with its outer edges. If her enemy fell to her first ambush, she'd have no choice but to watch as the gas tore him down to a ragged pile of flesh and bone, and then to nothing at all.

If he survived, she'd have no choice but to respond, and try to snatch his life away yet again.