I DUCKED DOWN into a squat the instant the double pincers were half a foot from my throat.
Zeboul screamed in pain when his snappers found nothing to bite into but each other. I tucked and rolled, crushing a couple of torched apple trees in the process.
Yeah, when titans tangle, there’s going to be all sorts of collateral damage on the ground. In a way, it was good that the seven-day battle had left these Kansas plains a barren wasteland of shriveled and charred debris. Otherwise, we would have knocked it all down with our wrestling moves.
I remembered what Mel had said about the giant beast’s knees being its weak spot. They were nothing but a clanking collection of meatless bones. If I kicked it in its knobby knees I was certain the whole skeleton would come crashing down.
So I morphed my sneakers into steel-toed work boots, leaped up, and sent out a roundhouse kick straight at the gangly creature’s brittle legs.
Half a second before steel met kneecap, Zeboul clamped my ankle in the vise grip of a lobster claw.
Then it swung me around and around like I was a shotput and he was on the Giants’ Olympics Team, and hurled me up into the sky.
I was thrown halfway up to Alpar Nok and back. I came crashing back to Earth, traveling at twice the speed of light. So when I reentered the atmosphere and made impact with the hard Kansas prairie ground, my mind went blank.
I was so stunned, I let the big beast stomp on my head with its hook-toed raptor feet. Pumping its leg like a pile driver, Zeboul pummeled me a couple of miles down into the ground. Then, quickly extending the length of its bony arms, it reached down into my silo-sized wormhole and plucked me out.
It held me up in front of those hollow eyeholes and flicked its double tongues in and out of its slimy, sideways-opening mandibles.
I remembered the scorpion stingers at the tip of its tongues.
“Prepare for nothingness, Daniel. Now I will send you into the black void of nonexistence.”
Double stingers poked up out of the tongues.
I tried to imagine myself free from the beast’s grip.
I tried to imagine that I was the size of a tick.
I tried to imagine I had an Opus 24/24 aimed at its head.
But its mind read my mind and countered every one of my desperate ideas.
It was hopeless. This thing was too powerful.
There was absolutely no way for me to single-handedly defeat the raw, negative energy of pure unbridled evil.
My soul was about to be obliterated.