The man in white moved with incredible swiftness to escape his gruesome fate, a natural response for one threatened by such a voracious attack. Unfortunately for him, Lyra's follow-up came faster still.
Anyone with working eyes and a basic understanding of physics could deduce that her Shroud absorbed light. All black objects did, in some manner, so why should this one be any different? The answer to that lay in what happened with all that energy it gathered. The strange cloud didn't just devour light, it stored it with great efficiency, and had been doing so since Lyra had entered the tomb. The location wasn't particularly bright, but the man in white had quickly made up for that with his blinding flash of lightning and similarly incandescent defenses. The Shroud drank up every photon that reached it, along with much of the sound from the lightning bolt and gunshots, and gathered it all, waiting for the moment Lyra decided to unleash it.
She did so now, hitting Mazono right at the end of his sudden movement.
No strike was guaranteed to land against an opponent of unknown capabilities, but Lyra felt confident that if her current enemy were capable of moving at the speed of light, he'd have finished her off already. A tightly concentrated beam speared out from her Shroud, sweeping across her opponent's eyes, there and gone in an instant. To an outside observer, it would appear as a blazing line in the air, made visible by the small portion of photons deflected from their intended course by Rayleigh scattering. To its target, it would appear as simple, overwhelming brilliance.
Lyra assumed that the man in white had eyesight good enough to avoid being blinded by his own attacks and defenses, and perhaps even packing every flash of the fight so far into a single instant wouldn't have been enough to rid him of vision for long. The Shroud's laser, however, was far, far more dangerous than that. When Lyra had spread out her cloud's front face, she had done so for more than mere obfuscation: the widened shape had hugely increased the effective surface area with which the Shroud could absorb light. Its front surface alone was hundreds of thousands of times larger than the area of a fully expanded human pupil, and all of it could suck up photons with incredible efficiency.
Thus, what actually hit the man's eyes at that moment would be orders of magnitude brighter than anything he'd experience in normal combat, a sudden injection of energy powerful enough to leave him with severe retinal burns. Even discounting those, the sheer intensity of the light would almost certainly activate every single photoreceptor cell in his eyes at once, leaving him blind for several seconds and plagued by constant afterimages for a good while after that.
The shattering burst of sound that followed would be somewhat more dispersed, but still enough to wreak similar havoc as it exploded into his ears, hitting the source of his hearing and balance alike. An unnaturally concentrated cacophony, the noise aimed and channeled towards his head rather than widely spread as any other sound would have been.
He might still be able to make his shot if he chose to attempt it, though he'd likely find it far more difficult to properly aim. Nevertheless, the expanded face of the Shroud wasn't a difficult target, and if he managed to keep enough composure to fire immediately, he stood a decent chance of hitting it with his new projectile.
Should he do so, the dark cloud would seemingly split in two as the round slammed into it- part of the black fog darting away to the right to form a tall, tower-like shape, while the other part remained hanging in midair, curling around into a shape that looked roughly like an eight-foot wide hemisphere.
What actually transpired in the instant the cannon shot hit the Shroud was even more complex than it appeared. Rather than the shot itself, the first thing to impact against the black cloud would be the protective field surrounding it, which behaved similarly to a solid barrier against objects unable to penetrate it. The Shroud, bearing little kinetic energy or piercing power of its own, could not do so, but it could resist the movement of energy just as easily as it did with matter. Thus, it immediately began to slow down the field, drawing more of itself towards the area of impact to resist the foreign incursion.
Lyra, however, wasn't having that. Based on the pattern of her opponent's attacks so far, he seemed to be aiming at the Shroud rather than her, and the impact of this strange new weapon wouldn't be close enough to threaten her personally. The sheer size and speed of the projectile's field, however, meant that the Shroud would pull significant quantities of its mass aside to oppose the foreign movement. A waste of her defense, and one she could not allow. Thus, the moment the field hit, she began to pull the bulk of the Shroud away, moving rightwards and bringing most of the cloud with her. She couldn't simply order the Shroud to stop self-concentrating around a source of movement, but she could drag most of it aside, keeping it from concentrating too much of itself together to oppose an attack that didn't threaten her. By the end, she'd be left with the main clump of her Shroud and about a third of the thin facade she'd erected at its front, with the rest of the front layer having been gathered to oppose the man's attack.
As for the attack itself, it consisted of more than just the field. The cannon shell would soon slam into the Shroud as well, and, quite unexpectedly, punch through.
It would emerge somewhat slower. The Shroud wasn't simply going to let it pass, after all. However, even while being decelerated, it was still quick enough to make it through such a thin layer of Shroud before it could be brought to a near-halt. Normally the alien cloud would have self-concentrated to prevent this, and indeed it tried to do so. In this case, though, its ongoing opposition of the protective field and Lyra's withdrawal of its main source of reinforcement left this part of the Shroud unable to gather enough to fully slow the projectile before it passed through. Most of the blueish field would remain behind, slowly passing through the thin black cloud, though some fragments of it would likely be pulled through the weakened edges of the Shroud fragment. As for the shell itself, it would likely end up slamming into the southern wall of the chamber a moment later, hitting somewhere near the entrance.
No doubt Lyra's opponent would have been watching these strange goings-on with interest, but in this case she doubted he'd have much left to watch with. Hard to study something that actively resisted studying.
Of course, she wasn't going to give the man any time to recover or adapt after her initial moves. The bombs she'd released just a moment ago hadn't detonated just yet, one now hitting the ramp between the two opponents and the other flying high over the man in white's head, but she could be very efficient with her gas when she needed to.
Left on its own, the bursts of heat from her enemy's defensive field would have eventually dispersed the cloud her first bomb had released. Lyra, however, put an end to this with a single thought. Her mind called out, to the old and dusty air trapped in this forgotten chamber for countless years, reminding it of what it was and what it could be, giving it the strength it needed to burst from stillness into renewed life, a hurricane-force gust bursting to life and funneling the gas towards the man in white, pushing the cloud to envelop him once more. At only ten feet away, he'd have less than a tenth of a second to do anything before the corrosive gas slammed into him and surrounded him entirely, quickly eating him away to nothing.
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