Free Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II by Sean Williams Page B

creature so large. He slashed at it, but although his blades parted the red-black skin, he couldn’t cut deep enough to do any real damage.
    He was going to have to fight the Gorog some other way.
    “You’re a Jedi!” said Kota from his memory. “Size means nothing to you!”
    The Gorog’s heavy, domed head swung to its left, looking for the general. Starkiller drew its gaze back to him, pushing through the Force at its nearest foot. It barely moved, but the effort didn’t go unnoticed. Keeping its center of gravity low and stable probably took much of the creature’s resting energy, so the last thing it would want was to be nudged off balance in the middle of a fight. Whether it reasoned consciously or simply reacted by instinct, Starkiller didn’t care. He definitely had its attention now.
    Both fists came for him, converging with enough force to crack a moon in two. He stood his ground, adding his defiant shout to the creature’s angry roaring. The fists came together, making Starkiller’s world shake, but he went unharmed behind the strongest Force barrier he could muster. When the fists lifted, he found himself buried almost a meter deep in a gravel pit of shattered rock.
    The Gorog stared down at him in slow-witted surprise. He took the opportunity to leap onto one of its arms and run along it all the way up to its mountainous right shoulder.
    It swiveled from side to side, trying to track him, and scratched blindly at its back. The heavy chains clanked and rattled. Starkiller leapt onto one of the anchors that bit deep into the creature’s flesh and braced himself against the filth-stained metal. His arms could barely reach from one side to the other. Starkiller took a moment to concentrate, and then poured a powerful stream of lightning through the thick metal teeth, directly into the rippling muscle tissue.
    The Gorog flailed and roared. It rose up and up until the surface Starkiller was clinging to became very nearly vertical. He ceased shocking it and climbed from anchor to anchor, heading for its head. Its hands groped blindly, swinging the chains from side to side. He dodged claws longer than his entire body and leapt, finally, onto the great bald skull. A metal plate sealed shut a massive rent in its skull, where some genetic defect or wound had left its brain exposed.
    He didn’t know if it could feel him yet, but he didn’t doubt that it would soon. Raising both lightsabers blade-down, he stabbed deep into the metal plate and ran forward, melting a double line downward, toward its hideous face. At the same time, he shocked it with lightning, using the plate and his lightsabers to conduct the electricity directly to the creature’s giant neurons.
    The Gorog’s fury doubled. The head whipped from side to side with a great grinding of vertebrae and sinew. Huge ropes of spittle splashed from its slavering mouth. The sound of its roars was deafening at such close range.
    Starkiller leapt onto one of its thick, plated eyebrows and clung tight to a branch-like hair with one hand. The other pointed down into the creature’s nearest eye, ready to send a shock along its optic nerve, right into its brain.
    The eye rolled, fixed him in its black stare. The pupil tightened. It had seen him. Before Starkiller could move, one mighty hand came from behind him and, with the force of a mass-drive cannon, swept him from his precarious perch.
    For a moment he was both weightless and stunned. The world turned around him, and he thought he heard Juno saying, “Have you done this before?” and himself responding, “Trust me. I’m doing the right thing, for both of us. “
    Then he hit the stadium, and only a Force-barrier reflex honed by thousands of hours of punishing training stopped him from breaking every bone in his body.
    His senses only slowly returned. Holograms flickered and sparked around him as he climbed groggily to his feet.
    He was halfway up the side of the arena, surrounded by spectators from