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The Messerschmitt Bf 109 clawed through the air, its engines starting to feel the effects of depleting fuel as the precious fuel-air mixture feeding them drifted out of alignment. The propellers ever so slightly varied their perfectionist rhythm, the deep-set swimming stroke that actually allowed the fighter plane’s cannons to fire between the chopping of the props. With the stuttering they were doing, pilot Heinrich Oberman felt little assurance in pulling the trigger.

Not that he had before. He’d watched the drachen cut through his entire squadron faster than the Hammer of Hell himself could’ve done, mangling wings, ripping loose propellers, shrugging off machine gun and cannon fire as if they were as native to her as the hellfire from the depths she had surely been spewed from, the she-devil…!

Now she pursued him, and though he pushed his Me 109, he did not think he could beat her back to his own airfield and the safety… if even they could save him… of its AA guns. She was worse than a devil. She was an Amerikanisch devil!

Heinrich tried his radio again. There was nothing else to do, no more speed he could eke from his beleaguered engines. “Achtung! This is Lieutenant Heinrich Oberman, wing commander of the 213th Squadron! My men have been lost! I need reinforcement! Can anyone hear me? Can someone hear me?”

“I can hear you, Lieutenant,” came the fraulein’s voice, crisp and clear and loud even compared to the whistle of the air outside, loud in a way a woman’s voice should never be. “And I’m going to hear a lot more.”

She forced open the canopy. Her hands encircled his neck, and try as he might, he could not free himself. It was impossible, being overpowered when he could bench-press two hundred pounds easily, but the woman flying alongside his plane, flying through his squadron like a giant bullet… that was impossible as well.

Heinrich laughed hysterically. She was impossibly beautiful as well. He understood his fellow airmen’s name for her. Die Walküre. And he understood her American name as well.

Wonder Woman.

“Where’s the Baroness? Where is Paula von Gunther?” She wrung his neck, swinging him so hard his head nearly clipped the rim of his cockpit. “I would just follow you back to your base, but it looks to me as if you have no chance of getting there. So you tell me where it is and I’ll take you with me when I come in for a landing. Otherwise…”

They both watched as the engine coughed and sputtered, greasy black smoke pithing just short of the grinding propellers.

“You can catch your own ride.”

“Nein!” Heinrich shrieked. “Nein, nein, nein, nein--!

“Nine-nine-nine-nine-nine… are these map coordinates? Latitude or longitude?” Despite everything, the Wonder Woman smiled briefly. “Perhaps you could just point it out to me. We are high enough.”

He would tell her. He had to tell her. She wouldn’t even need the verdammt lasso to know. And she hadn’t used it, either. Because she respected him as a warrior, perhaps. Perhaps because she knew she wouldn’t need it. Perhaps because he just wasn’t worthy to feel the power of the Gods themselves.

Heinrich would never know. His reinforcements picked then to arrive. Three Me 109s like his, but fully armed and fully fueled, screaming down from the sky. Diana would’ve dealt with them as she had the prior squadron, but this one went into battle with a stratagem devised by the Baroness herself. They fired, not at Wonder Woman, but at the aircraft she kept pace with.

It still had enough fuel left in its tanks for the explosion to be quite spectacular.

As resilient as she was, Diana was rocked by the explosion. Plucked from the sky by it, falling so quickly that terminal velocity quickly eclipsed the momentum she had taken from the blast. She had just enough time to realize she would hit, then she centered herself, went limp, and was hitting a forest of larch trees in rapid succession, wham-wham-wham-wham-wham. One after another, branches breaking, trunks smashed into splinters, leaves shooting away like buckshot. Until she stopped, footing regained, her red boots digging into the ground to slow her meteoric descent into a grinding stop.

The three Me 109s still bore down on her, tainted with the smoke of the comrade they had executed. Their 7.92 mm MG 17 machine guns blazed, raking the already disturbed forest with a stampede of lead. This, Diana not only blocked, but dodged. Fire from an airplane would task even her invincibility, and she’d be hard-pressed to block the barrage even with two gauntlets.

Why oh why? Diana asked herself, didn’t I let Phillipus go to Man’s World?