Harry laser cutter

I brought my right hand out of my coat holding my blasting rod, and with a shouted word loosed a sledgehammer of searing power. It dipped down and then curled up an instant before it hit, landing a sorcerous uppercut on what passed for the centipede's chin. It flung the creature's head several yards up, and its entire body rippled in agony.
Which, in retrospect, probably shouldn't have caught me quite as off guard as it did.
The ground beneath my feet heaved and bucked, and I went flying, my arms whirling in a useless windmill. I landed in a sprawl amid ranks of primroses, which immediately began to move, lashing out with tiny stem-tendrils lined with wickedly sharp little thorns. Even as I struggled back to my feet, tearing them away from my wrists and ankles, I noticed that the flowers around me had begun to blush a deep bloodred.
"You know what, Harry!" Bob called. "I don't think this is a garden at all!"
"Genius," I muttered, as the centipede recovered its balance and began reorienting itself to attack. Its body flowed forward, following the motion of its head. I decided that all those legs hitting the earth like posthole diggers in steady sequence made the giant bug sound less like a locomotive than a big piece of farm equipment churning by.
I ran at it, focusing my will beneath me, planted my staff on the earth, and swung my legs up in a pole vaulter's leap. I unleashed my will beneath and behind me as I did, and flew over the thing's back as it continued surging forward. It let out a rumbling sound of displeasure as I went, the head twisting to follow me, forced to slow down enough to allow its own rearmost legs to get out of its way. It bought me only a few seconds.
Bigger doesn't mean better, especially in the Nevernever. One second was time enough to turn, focus another beam of fire into a far smaller area, and bring it down like an enormous cutting torch almost precisely across the middle of the big bug's body, an act of precision magic that I'd learned from Luccio, and which I was not at all confident I could have duplicated in the real world.
The beam, no bigger around than a couple of my fingers, sliced the creature in half as neatly and simply as if I'd used a paper cutter the size of a semi trailer.
It shrieked in pain, a brazen, bellowing sound that conveyed, even from such an alien thing, the depth of its physical agony. Its hindquarters just kept right on rolling forward, as if they hadn't noticed that the head was gone. The front half of the thing began to veer and waver wildly, its limited brain perhaps overloaded by the effort of sending nerve impulses to bits of its anatomy that no longer existed. It settled into a pattern of chasing its own retreating midsection, rolling in a great circle that crushed the ranks of primroses on either side of the trail.
"Booya!" I shouted in pure triumph, the adrenaline turning my manly baritone into a rather terrified-sounding shriek. "What have you got for fiery beam of death, huh? You got nothing for fiery beam of death! Might as well go back to Atari, bug-boy, 'cause you don't got game enough for me!"


Changes Chapter 12, Page 105-107