Shroud (comics) - Powers and Abilities

Powers and Abilities

Exposure to bombardment of the Red Skull's hypno-ray triggered a latent power over darkness in the Shroud. The Shroud possesses the mystical ability to create an aperture into Darkforce Dimension and to project the thick, inky gas-like substance of the Darkforce Dimension into Earth's dimension for his own use. This darkness is not simply the absence of light, but the negation of it. No illumination can penetrate it. It is unknown how much of this darkness the Shroud can summon at once. He can blanket a small auditorium in darkness within several seconds. The darkness he projects does not fill a volume instantly: it is possible to see its hazy boundary move like thick, black smoke in the air. There appears to be no limit to the length of time the Shroud can maintain the darkness. However, loss of concentration can disrupt his power to summon and control darkness, and if the Shroud is rendered unconscious the darkness seems to be naturally drawn through the portal from whence it came.

The Shroud has control over the darkness so as to create hazy-edged, featureless black shapes with it, the complexity of which is limited only by his imagination. For example, he once created two discs that covered Captain America's eyes, preventing him from seeing anything or becoming hypnotized, yet so small that they were indistinguishable from the pupils of his eyes. He frequently forms the darkness into his own shadow in order to serve as a decoy. Unlike Darkstar's Darkforce, the darkness possesses no mass, and unlike Cloak, the Shroud is unable to travel into and out of the dimension from which he draws his darkness. He eventually learned to give his darkness enough mass to serve as a low-level thruster; together with the properties of his cape this allows him to fly at least at walking speed.

The Shroud was blinded in a mystic ceremony by the Cult of Kali. As a result of this ceremony, he possesses a mystical sense of extrasensory perception enabling him to "see" through walls and even through his own mantle of darkness. This mystical sense gives him psychic impressions of his environment within a radius of about 100 feet (30 m). Not unlike Daredevil, the Shroud can receive non-visual sensory impressions through solid objects. Thus, he can perceive people and objects in the room next to him with the ease that he can perceive the contents of the room he is in. His mystic senses can even enable him to detect the internal hardware components of a computer.

The Shroud is an Olympic level athlete with extensive training in several fields of Oriental martial arts, and is adept at acrobatics and infiltration. He possesses a college degree in law and criminology. The Shroud carries explosive "bombarangs" as weapons, and flies in a personal one-man aircraft.