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~~Thanksgiving Special (Page 4 of 4)~~
In a blink, the worms were amassing, already the size of a school bus and still growing.

No swatting that one away.

He needed to think bigger. In fact, what was he doing? He should’ve already been thinking bigger to begin with. He dropped to one knee and slammed his palm against the ground.

An iron plateau filled the entire road before him. He’d given it a slope, too, so it sent every single worm in his line of sight flying away from him, even the big one.

Yeah. That was more like it. There was no need to feel intimidated, he realized. Even if he couldn’t put them down for good, he didn’t have to.

They were still coming, of course, slithering over the top of his iron, but that wasn’t a problem. Rinse and repeat. He annihilated his work, letting the worms drop, and then remade it, launching them even farther into the distance. When they came still another time, they had combined to about the size of the one that had brought down the train.

So what? Hector sent that one flying, too.

That bought him a significant amount of time to breathe, and he looked over to see how the others were doing. Zeff and Diego were doing just fine, unsurprisingly, but Manuel seemed to be having a rough time, so Hector helped him out and flung a few clusters of worms away for him. The man spared him a nod.

Hector saw his own worm returning, again bigger than before and this time barreling toward the group at the speed of a freight train.

All that momentum could prove difficult to simply launch backward, he felt. He was considering creating a ramp for it instead when Robert Sheridan stepped into his line of vision.

Apparently, the man had finally finished building his gun. And the thing was massive. More like a cannon than anything, Mr. Sheridan had it mounted on his shoulder as he took aim. The man pulled the trigger, and a volley of projectiles launched in rapid succession, leaving a visibly hot trail in their wake.

The first projectiles didn’t explode--at least not immediately; instead, they dug into the beast’s bulk. Then the rest of the projectiles hit, and triggered a chain of explosions--but not through combustion, as Hector had expected. Instead, the explosions were all lasers, and for a couple seconds, the worm looked like it was at the center of some kind of deadly disco ball, getting diced into thousands of tiny pieces.

And then Mr. Sheridan shot a volley of more conventional explosives, too. In the end, the beast was reduced to a smear on the road.

A bit awestruck, Hector heard the man laughing that same crazed laugh again. But when he saw Mr. Sheridan reload the cannon and point it at the feldeath, Hector coated the trigger in iron and grabbed his arm.

“Do NOT shoot the feldeath!” Hector shouted over the noise of the swarm around them.