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Abbas Saqqaf didn't even know what he was seeing. He didn't get much time to mull it over, either, because Bloodeye's now massive jaw lurched toward him. He pulled back at the last second, but the teeth still found his left shoulder and crunched through the suit's armor.

The bite was solid. It didn't take his arm off, but that was arguably worse, because now he couldn't even get away. He felt the teeth dig into his flesh and even pierce bone before Worwal numbed the pain entirely.

He called on the shock shield again. Electricity blasted out of the suit in fractured bursts, sparking badly around the broken shoulder.

But it worked.

Bloodeye spasmed and loosened his grip on him, allowing Abbas to grab him by his neck and twist with all the might that the suit and undead strength combined could provide.

A sickening crack arrived, but that was all. Abbas had wanted to tear his head clean off, but that didn't happen. The man's neck merely kept twisting and cracking, and Abbas could see in his crimson eyes that he was regaining his faculties, despite the shock shield still remaining active.

Abbas growled with frustration and flung him straight down to the ground, just wanting to give himself a moment to breathe. To think. To reassess what the hell had just happened.

Bloodeye sailed into solid rock with meteoric force, leaving a crater the size of a house behind and a cloud of dust to accompany it.

What sense did that transformation make? An illusion? No, Abbas had been able to feel the change. The weight differential. The thrashing, twitching movement.

A hallucination, then? Had some aerosolized drug made it past the suit's filters and even the system alerts?

Everything else seemed perfectly normal. He still felt clear-headed.